Steve Jobs

Jobs looked shattered. "I guess I know where things stand," he said, and bolted out of the room. No one followed.

He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and started to cry. He would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started to walk out the door, Debi Coleman restrained him. She and the others urged him to settle down and not do anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup. Perhaps there was a way to prevent the company from being torn apart.

Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a wounded warrior, he retreated to Eisenstat"s office and asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they got into Eisenstat"s Porsche, Sculley lamented, "I don"t know whether I can go through with this." When Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, "I think I "m going to resign."

"You can"t," Eisenstat protested. "Apple will fall apart."

"I "m going to resign," Sculley declared. "I don"t think I "m right for the company."

"I think you"re copping out," Eisenstat replied. "You"ve got to stand up to him." Then he drove Sculley home.

Sculley"s wife was surprised to see him back in the middle of the day. "I "ve failed," he said to her forlornly. She was a volatile woman who had never liked Jobs or appreciated her husband"s infatuation with him. So when she heard what had happened, she jumped into her car and sped over to Jobs"s office. Informed that he had gone to the Good Earth restaurant, she marched over there and confronted him in the parking lot as he was coming out with loyalists on his Macintosh team.

"Steve, can I talk to you?" she said. His jaw dropped. "Do you have any idea what a privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?" she demanded. He averted his gaze. "Can"t you look me in the eyes when I "m talking to you?" she asked. But when Jobs did so-giving her his practiced, unblinking stare-she recoiled. "Never mind, don"t look at me," she said. "When I look into most people"s eyes, I see a soul.

When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone." Then she walked away.

Sat.u.r.day, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobs"s house in Woodside to offer some advice: He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary, starting AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked up the telephone and surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon, Jobs asked, and take a walk together in the hills above Stanford University. They had walked there in the past, in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could work things out.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn"t matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

I f Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn"t show in the choice of movie he wanted to see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the never-surrender general. But he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren"t there, and he didn"t have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or windows, and finally gave up. The video store didn"t have a copy of Patton in stock, so in the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter"s Betrayal.

Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. I t won"t work, he kept saying. Sculley urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere "figurehead." Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up control of the entire company to him. "Why don"t you become chairman and I "ll become president and chief executive officer?" he suggested. Sculley was struck by how earnest he seemed.

"Steve, that doesn"t make any sense," Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. "One person has got to run the company," he replied. "I "ve got the support and you don"t."

On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula"s house. He wasn"t there, so Jobs left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.

Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalists-Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville-got to Jobs"s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculley"s offer to be a product visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.

When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. "I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion," he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the spa.r.s.ely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. "I said I wouldn"t support his plan, and that was the end of that," Markkula recalled. "Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt, but that"s not how you do things."Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs"s office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula"s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing.

When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.

At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Ga.s.see would take over control of Jobs"s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run.

Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the t.i.tle of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational duties. But by this point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no longer on the table.

I t finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke down in tears and started making phone calls-to Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray, and others. Murray"s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the operator broke in saying it was an emergency. I t better be important, she told the operator. "I t is," she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying.

"I t"s over," he said. Then he hung up.

Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he called back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the door when he knocked, so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the bedroom.

Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished room. He let Murray in and they talked until almost dawn.

Wednesday, May 29: Jobs finally got hold of a tape of Patton, which he watched Wednesday evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another battle. Instead he urged Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley"s announcement of the reorganization plan. There was no option left other than to play the good soldier rather than the renegade commander.

Like a Rolling Stone.

Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the troops the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways glances, but few people acknowledged him and none came over to provide public displays of affection. He stared without blinking at Sculley, who would remember "Steve"s look of contempt" years later. "I t"s unyielding," Sculley recalled, "like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where you"re soft and destructibly mortal." For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, to visit Jobs"s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, "All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him." Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs"s company away from him.

As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Ga.s.see as the new head of a combined Macintosh and Apple I I product group. On the chart was a small box labeled "chairman" with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley briefly noted that in that role, Jobs would play the part of "global visionary." But he didn"t acknowledge Jobs"s presence. There was a smattering of awkward applause.

Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on, seeing only his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing his Bob Dylan tapes, especially "The Times They Are a-Changin."" He had recited the second verse the day he unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended nicely: "For the loser now / Will be later to win... ."

A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock, and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with any furniture. With Redse"s help, he served some vegetarian food he had ordered. "So what really happened?" Hertzfeld asked. "Is it really as bad as it looks?"

"No, it"s worse." Jobs grimaced. "I t"s much worse than you can imagine." He blamed Sculley for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage without him. His role as chairman, he complained, was completely ceremonial. He was being ejected from his Bandley 3 office to a small and almost empty building he nicknamed "Siberia." Hertzfeld turned the topic to happier days, and they began to reminisce about the past.

Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new alb.u.m, Empire Burlesque, and Hertzfeld brought a copy that they played on Jobs"s high-tech turntable. The most notable track, "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky," with its apocalyptic message, seemed appropriate for the evening, but Jobs didn"t like it. I t sounded almost disco, and he gloomily argued that Dylan had been going downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the alb.u.m, "Dark Eyes," which was a simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica.

I t was slow and mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved. But Jobs didn"t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the alb.u.m.

Jobs"s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him. "I t gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age," his friend and lawyer George Riley later said.

"I t"s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to himself who he is." Jobs recalled years later, "I felt like I "d been punched, the air knocked out of me and I couldn"t breathe."

Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. "Arthur had been like a father to me," Jobs said. "He took me under his wing." Rock had taught him about opera, and he and his wife, T oni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. "I remember driving into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, "G.o.d, that Bank of America building is ugly," and he said, "No, it"s the best," and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of course." Years later Jobs"s eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: "He chose Sculley over me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me."

Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he considered a bozo. "The board felt that I couldn"t run a company, and that was their decision to make," he said. "But they made one mistake. They should have separated the decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired Sculley, even if they didn"t think I was ready to run Apple." Even as his personal gloom slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his feeling of betrayal, deepened.

The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of a.n.a.lysts that he considered Jobs irrelevant to the company, despite his t.i.tle as chairman.

"From an operations standpoint, there is no role either today or in the future for Steve Jobs," he said. "I don"t know what he"ll do." The blunt comment shocked the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.

Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris, where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H. W. Bush. From there he went to I taly, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and bought a bike so he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the architecture of the city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable were the paving stones, which came from I l Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. They were a calming bluish gray.

Twenty years later he would decide that the floors of most major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.

The Apple I I was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problemgetting Washington"s approval for some of the required export licenses, they visited the commercial attache at the American emba.s.sy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against sharing technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice President Bush had encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to "foment revolution from below." Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish kebab, Jobs continued his rant. "How could you suggest this violates American law when it so obviously benefits our interests?" he asked Merwin. "By putting Macs in the hands of Russians, they could print all their newspapers."

Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered a.s.sa.s.sinated by Stalin. At one point the KGB agent a.s.signed to him suggested he tone down his fervor. "You don"t want to talk about Trotsky," he said. "Our historians have studied the situation, and we don"t believe he"s a great man anymore." That didn"t help. When they got to the state university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs could identify with.

Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American emba.s.sy, and in his thank-you letter to Amba.s.sador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs planned to pursue Apple"s ventures in Russia more vigorously in the coming year. "We are tentatively planning on returning to Moscow in September." For a moment it looked as if Sculley"s hope that Jobs would turn into a "global visionary" for the company might come to pa.s.s. But it was not to be. Something much different was in store for September.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

NEXT.

Prometheus Unbound.

The Pirates Abandon Ship.

Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while he was casting about for what to do next, Jobs called the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. "Why don"t you simulate them on a computer?" Jobs asked. Berg replied that computers with such capacities were too expensive for university labs. "Suddenly, he was excited about the possibilities," Berg recalled. "He had it in his mind to start a new company. He was young and rich, and had to find something to do with the rest of his life."

Jobs had already been canva.s.sing academics to ask what their workstation needs were. I t was something he had been interested in since 1983, when he had visited the computer science department at Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be told that it would take a far more powerful machine to do anything useful in a university lab. The dream of academic researchers was to have a workstation that was both powerful and personal. As head of the Macintosh division, Jobs had launched a project to build such a machine, which was dubbed the Big Mac. I t would have a UNIX operating system but with the friendly Macintosh interface. But after Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh division, his replacement, Jean- Louis Ga.s.see, canceled the Big Mac.

When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call from Rich Page, who had been engineering the Big Mac"s chip set. I t was the latest in a series of conversations that Jobs was having with disgruntled Apple employees urging him to start a new company and rescue them. Plans to do so began to jell over Labor Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud Tribble, the original Macintosh software chief, and floated the idea of starting a company to build a powerful but personal workstation. He also enlisted two other Macintosh division employees who had been talking about leaving, the engineer George Crow and the controller Susan Barnes.

That left one key vacancy on the team: a person who could market the new product to universities. The obvious candidate was Dan"l Lewin, who at Apple had organized a consortium of universities to buy Macintosh computers in bulk. Besides missing two letters in his first name, Lewin had the chiseled good looks of Clark Kent and a Princetonian"s polish. He and Jobs shared a bond: Lewin had written a Princeton thesis on Bob Dylan and charismatic leadership, and Jobs knew something about both of those topics.

Lewin"s university consortium had been a G.o.dsend to the Macintosh group, but he had become frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had reorganized marketing in a way that reduced the role of direct sales to universities. He had been meaning to call Jobs when, that Labor Day weekend, Jobs called first. He drove to Jobs"s unfurnished mansion, and they walked the grounds while discussing the possibility of creating a new company. Lewin was excited, but not ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell the following week, and he wanted to wait until then to decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He was in. The news came just in time for the September 13 Apple board meeting.

Although Jobs was still nominally the board"s chairman, he had not been to any meetings since he lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to attend, and asked that an item be added to the end of the agenda for a "chairman"s report." He didn"t say what it was about, and Sculley a.s.sumed it would be a criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead, when his turn came to speak, Jobs described to the board his plans to start a new company. "I "ve been thinking a lot, and it"s time for me to get on with my life," he began. "I t"s obvious that I "ve got to do something. I "m thirty years old." Then he referred to some prepared notes to describe his plan to create a computer for the higher education market. The new company would not be compet.i.tive with Apple, he promised, and he would take with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He offered to resign as chairman of Apple, but he expressed hope that they could work together. Perhaps Apple would want to buy the distribution rights to his product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to it.

Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs would hire anyone from Apple. "Why would you take anyone at all?" he asked.

"Don"t get upset," Jobs a.s.sured him and the rest of the board. "These are very low-level people that you won"t miss, and they will be leaving anyway."

The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs well in his venture. After a private discussion, the directors even proposed that Apple take a 10% stake in the new company and that Jobs remain on the board.

That night Jobs and his five renegades met again at his house for dinner. He was in favor of taking the Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was unwise. They also agreed that it would be best if they resigned all at once, right away. Then they could make a clean break.

So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the names of the five who would be leaving, signed it in his spidery lowercase signature, and drove to Apple the next morning to hand it to him before his 7:30 staff meeting.

"Steve, these are not low-level people," Sculley said.

"Well, these people were going to resign anyway," Jobs replied. "They are going to be handing in their resignations by nine this morning."

From Jobs"s perspective, he had been honest. The five were not division managers or members of Sculley"s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact, by the company"s new organization. But from Sculley"s perspective, these were important players; Page was an Apple Fellow, and Lewin was a key to the higher education market. In addition, they knew about the plans for Big Mac; even though it had been shelved, this was still proprietary information. Nevertheless Sculley was sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he asked Jobs to remain on the board. Jobs replied that he would think about it.

But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff meeting and told his top lieutenants who was leaving, there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had breached his duties as chairman and displayed stunning disloyalty to the company. "We should expose him for the fraud that he is so that people here stop regarding him as a messiah," Campbell shouted, according to Sculley.

Campbell admitted that, although he later became a great Jobs defender and supportive board member, he was ballistic that morning. "I was f.u.c.king furious, especially about him taking Dan"l Lewin," he recalled. "Dan"l had built the relationships with the universities. He was always muttering about how hard it was to work with Steve, and then he left." Campbell was so angry that he walked out of the meeting to call Lewin at home. When his wife said he was in the shower, Campbell said, "I "ll wait." A few minutes later, when she said he was still in the shower, Campbell again said, "I "ll wait." When Lewin finally came on the phone, Campbell asked him if it was true. Lewin acknowledged it was. Campbell hung upwithout saying another word.

After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley surveyed the members of the board. They likewise felt that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he would not raid important employees. Arthur Rock was especially angry. Even though he had sided with Sculley during the Memorial Day showdown, he had been able to repair his paternal relationship with Jobs. Just the week before, he had invited Jobs to bring his girlfriend up to San Francisco so that he and his wife could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in Rock"s Pacific Heights home. Jobs had not mentioned the new company he was forming, so Rock felt betrayed when he heard about it from Sculley. "He came to the board and lied to us," Rock growled later. "He told us he was thinking of forming a company when in fact he had already formed it. He said he was going to take a few middle-level people. I t turned out to be five senior people." Markkula, in his subdued way, was also offended. "He took some top executives he had secretly lined up before he left. That"s not the way you do things. I t was ungentlemanly."

Over the weekend both the board and the executive staff convinced Sculley that Apple would have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a formal statement accusing Jobs of acting "in direct contradiction to his statements that he wouldn"t recruit any key Apple personnel for his company." He added ominously, "We are evaluating what possible actions should be taken." Campbell was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he "was stunned and shocked" by Jobs"s behavior.

Jobs had left his meeting with Sculley thinking that things might proceed smoothly, so he had kept quiet. But after reading the newspapers, he felt that he had to respond. He phoned a few favored reporters and invited them to his home for private briefings the next day. Then he called Andy Cunningham, who had handled his publicity at Regis McKenna. "I went over to his unfurnished mansiony place in Woodside," she recalled, "and I found him huddled in the kitchen with his five colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside on the lawn." Jobs told her that he was going to do a full-fledged press conference and started spewing some of the derogatory things he was going to say. Cunningham was appalled. "This is going to reflect badly on you," she told him. Finally he backed down. He decided that he would give the reporters a copy of the resignation letter and limit any on-the-record comments to a few bland statements.

Jobs had considered just mailing in his letter of resignation, but Susan Barnes convinced him that this would be too contemptuous. Instead he drove it to Markkula"s house, where he also found Al Eisenstat. There was a tense conversation for about fifteen minutes; then Barnes, who had been waiting outside, came to the door to retrieve him before he said anything he would regret. He left behind the letter, which he had composed on a Macintosh and printed on the new LaserWriter: September 17, 1985 Dear Mike: This morning"s papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as Chairman. I don" t know the source of these reports but they are both misleading to the public and unfair to me.

You w ill recall that at last Thursday"s Board meeting I stated I had decided to start a new venture and I tendered my resignation as Chairman.

The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a w eek. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered w ith regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple w ould invest in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley w ho w ould be joining me, he confirmed Apple"s w illingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration betw een Apple and my new venture.

Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture tow ard me and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of my resignation... .

As you know , the company"s recent reorganization left me w ith no w ork to do and no access even to regular management reports. I am but 30 and w ant still to contribute and achieve.

After w hat w e have accomplished together, I w ould w ish our parting to be both amicable and dignified.

Yours sincerely, steven p. jobs

When a guy from the facilities team went to Jobs"s office to pack up his belongings, he saw a picture frame on the floor. I t contained a photograph of Jobs and Sculley in warm conversation, with an inscription from seven months earlier: "Here"s to Great Ideas, Great Experiences, and a Great Friendship! John." The gla.s.s frame was shattered. Jobs had hurled it across the room before leaving. From that day, he never spoke to Sculley again.

Apple"s stock went up a full point, or almost 7%, when Jobs"s resignation was announced. "East Coast stockholders always worried about California flakes running the company," explained the editor of a tech stock newsletter. "Now with both Wozniak and Jobs out, those shareholders are relieved." But Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder who had been an amused mentor ten years earlier, told Time that Jobs would be badly missed.

"Where is Apple"s inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?"

After a few days of failed efforts to reach a settlement with Jobs, Sculley and the Apple board decided to sue him "for breaches of fiduciary obligations." The suit spelled out his alleged transgressions: Notwithstanding his fiduciary obligations to Apple, Jobs, while serving as the Chairman of Apple"s Board of Directors and an officer of Apple and pretending loyalty to the interests of Apple ...

(a) secretly planned the formation of an enterprise to compete with Apple; (b) secretly schemed that his competing enterprise would wrongfully take advantage of and utilize Apple"s plan to design, develop and market the Next Generation Product ...

(c) secretly lured away key employees of Apple.

At the time, Jobs owned 6.5 million shares of Apple stock, 11% of the company, worth more than $100 million. He began to sell his shares, and within five months had dumped them all, retaining only one share so he could attend shareholder meetings if he wanted. He was furious, and that was reflected in his pa.s.sion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a rival company. "He was angry at Apple," said Joanna Hoffman, who briefly went to work for the new company. "Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was strong, was simply Steve being vengeful. He was doing it for revenge."

Jobs, of course, didn"t see it that way. "I haven"t got any sort of odd chip on my shoulder," he told New sw eek. Once again he invited his favoritereporters over to his Woodside home, and this time he did not have Andy Cunningham there urging him to be circ.u.mspect. He dismissed the allegation that he had improperly lured the five colleagues from Apple. "These people all called me," he told the gaggle of journalists who were milling around in his unfurnished living room. "They were thinking of leaving the company. Apple has a way of neglecting people."

He decided to cooperate with a New sw eek cover in order to get his version of the story out, and the interview he gave was revealing. "What I "m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them," he told the magazine. He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. "I "ll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he"s fallen in love with." But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. "When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond." Apple"s threat to sue him was outrageous. I t was also sad. I t showed that Apple was no longer a confident, rebellious company. "I t"s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 employees couldn"t compete with six people in blue jeans."

T o try to counter Jobs"s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak out. "Steve can be an insulting and hurtful guy," he told Time that week. He revealed that Jobs had asked him to join his new firm-it would have been a sly way to land another blow against Apple"s current management-but he wanted no part of such games and had not returned Jobs"s phone call. T o the San Francisco Chronicle, he recounted how Jobs had blocked frogdesign from working on his remote control under the pretense that it might compete with Apple products. "I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust," Wozniak said.

To Be on Your Own.

"The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost," Arthur Rock later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and more mature. But it"s not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops.

This was the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act I I I was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act I I .

The first instinct that he indulged was his pa.s.sion for design. The name he chose for his new company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it more distinctive, he decided he needed a world-cla.s.s logo. So he courted the dean of corporate logos, Paul Rand. At seventy-one, the Brooklyn-born graphic designer had already created some of the best-known logos in business, including those of Esquire, IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, and UPS. He was under contract to IBM, and his supervisors there said that it would obviously be a conflict for him to create a logo for another computer company. So Jobs picked up the phone and called IBM"s CEO, John Akers. Akers was out of town, but Jobs was so persistent that he was finally put through to Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo. After two days, Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist Jobs, and he gave permission for Rand to do the work.