When Jobs unveiled the NeXT computer in 1988, there was a burst of excitement. That fizzled when the computer finally went on sale the following year. Jobs"s ability to dazzle, intimidate, and spin the press began to fail him, and there was a series of stories on the company"s woes. "NeXT is incompatible with other computers at a time when the industry is moving toward interchangeable systems," Bart Ziegler of a.s.sociated Press reported. "Because relatively little software exists to run on NeXT, it has a hard time attracting customers."
NeXT tried to reposition itself as the leader in a new category, personal workstations, for people who wanted the power of a workstation and the friendliness of a personal computer. But those customers were by now buying them from fast-growing Sun Microsystems. Revenues for NeXT in 1990 were $28 million; Sun made $2.5 billion that year. IBM abandoned its deal to license the NeXT software, so Jobs was forced to do something against his nature: Despite his ingrained belief that hardware and software should be integrally linked, he agreed in January 1992 to license the NeXTSTEP operating system to run on other computers.
One surprising defender of Jobs was Jean-Louis Ga.s.see, who had b.u.mped elbows with Jobs when he replaced him at Apple and subsequently been ousted himself. He wrote an article extolling the creativity of NeXT products. "NeXT might not be Apple," Ga.s.see argued, "but Steve is still Steve." A few days later his wife answered a knock on the door and went running upstairs to tell him that Jobs was standing there. He thanked Ga.s.see for the article and invited him to an event where Intel"s Andy Grove would join Jobs in announcing that NeXTSTEP would be ported to the IBM/Intel platform. "I sat next to Steve"s father, Paul Jobs, a movingly dignified individual," Ga.s.see recalled. "He raised a difficult son, but he was proud and happy to see him onstage with Andy Grove."
A year later Jobs took the inevitable subsequent step: He gave up making the hardware altogether. This was a painful decision, just as it had been when he gave up making hardware at Pixar. He cared about all aspects of his products, but the hardware was a particular pa.s.sion. He was energized by great design, obsessed over manufacturing details, and would spend hours watching his robots make his perfect machines. But now he had to lay off more than half his workforce, sell his beloved factory to Canon (which auctioned off the fancy furniture), and satisfy himself with a company that tried to license an operating system to manufacturers of uninspired machines.
By the mid-1990s Jobs was finding some pleasure in his new family life and his astonishing triumph in the movie business, but he despaired about the personal computer industry. "Innovation has virtually ceased," he told Gary Wolf of Wired at the end of 1995. "Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages."
He was also gloomy in an interview with T ony Perkins and the editors of Red Herring. First, he displayed the "Bad Steve" side of his personality.
Soon after Perkins and his colleagues arrived, Jobs slipped out the back door "for a walk," and he didn"t return for forty-five minutes. When the magazine"s photographer began taking pictures, he snapped at her sarcastically and made her stop. Perkins later noted, "Manipulation, selfishness, or downright rudeness, we couldn"t figure out the motivation behind his madness." When he finally settled down for the interview, he said that even the advent of the web would do little to stop Microsoft"s domination. "Windows has won," he said. "I t beat the Mac, unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2. An inferior product won."
Apple Falling.
For a few years after Jobs was ousted, Apple was able to coast comfortably with a high profit margin based on its temporary dominance in desktop publishing. Feeling like a genius back in 1987, John Sculley had made a series of proclamations that nowadays sound embarra.s.sing.
Jobs wanted Apple "to become a wonderful consumer products company," Sculley wrote. "This was a lunatic plan. . . . Apple would never be a consumer products company... . We couldn"t bend reality to all our dreams of changing the world... . High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product."
Jobs was appalled, and he became angry and contemptuous as Sculley presided over a steady decline in market share for Apple in the early 1990s. "Sculley destroyed Apple by bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values," Jobs later lamented. "They cared about making money-for themselves mainly, and also for Apple-rather than making great products." He felt that Sculley"s drive for profits came at the expense of gainingmarket share. "Macintosh lost to Microsoft because Sculley insisted on milking all the profits he could get rather than improving the product and making it affordable." As a result, the profits eventually disappeared.
I t had taken Microsoft a few years to replicate Macintosh"s graphical user interface, but by 1990 it had come out with Windows 3.0, which began the company"s march to dominance in the desktop market. Windows 95, which was released in 1995, became the most successful operating system ever, and Macintosh sales began to collapse. "Microsoft simply ripped off what other people did," Jobs later said. "Apple deserved it. After I left, it didn"t invent anything new. The Mac hardly improved. I t was a sitting duck for Microsoft."
His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, F3 ... function keys. "I "m changing the world one keyboard at a time," he deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.
During his 1995 Christmas vacation in Kona Village, Hawaii, Jobs went walking along the beach with his friend Larry Ellison, the irrepressible Oracle chairman. They discussed making a takeover bid for Apple and restoring Jobs as its head. Ellison said he could line up $3 billion in financing: "I will buy Apple, you will get 25% of it right away for being CEO, and we can restore it to its past glory." But Jobs demurred. "I decided I "m not a hostile-takeover kind of guy," he explained. "I f they had asked me to come back, it might have been different."
By 1996 Apple"s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple"s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.
Amelio was not a fan of Jobs. Their first meeting had been in 1994, just after Amelio was elected to the Apple board. Jobs had called him and announced, "I want to come over and see you." Amelio invited him over to his office at National Semiconductor, and he later recalled watching through the gla.s.s wall of his office as Jobs arrived. He looked "rather like a boxer, aggressive and elusively graceful, or like an elegant jungle cat ready to spring at its prey." After a few minutes of pleasantries-far more than Jobs usually engaged in-he abruptly announced the reason for his visit. He wanted Amelio to help him return to Apple as the CEO. "There"s only one person who can rally the Apple troops," Jobs said, "only one person who can straighten out the company." The Macintosh era had pa.s.sed, Jobs argued, and it was now time for Apple to create something new that was just as innovative.
"I f the Mac is dead, what"s going to replace it?" Amelio asked. Jobs"s reply didn"t impress him. "Steve didn"t seem to have a clear answer,"
Amelio later said. "He seemed to have a set of one-liners." Amelio felt he was witnessing Jobs"s reality distortion field and was proud to be immune to it. He shooed Jobs unceremoniously out of his office.
By the summer of 1996 Amelio realized that he had a serious problem. Apple was pinning its hopes on creating a new operating system, called Copland, but Amelio had discovered soon after becoming CEO that it was a bloated piece of vaporware that would not solve Apple"s needs for better networking and memory protection, nor would it be ready to ship as scheduled in 1997. He publicly promised that he would quickly find an alternative. His problem was that he didn"t have one.
So Apple needed a partner, one that could make a stable operating system, preferably one that was UNIX-like and had an object-oriented application layer. There was one company that could obviously supply such software-NeXT-but it would take a while for Apple to focus on it.
Apple first homed in on a company that had been started by Jean-Louis Ga.s.see, called Be. Ga.s.see began negotiating the sale of Be to Apple, but in August 1996 he overplayed his hand at a meeting with Amelio in Hawaii. He said he wanted to bring his fifty-person team to Apple, and he asked for 15% of the company, worth about $500 million. Amelio was stunned. Apple calculated that Be was worth about $50 million. After a few offers and counteroffers, Ga.s.see refused to budge from demanding at least $275 million. He thought that Apple had no alternatives. I t got back to Amelio that Ga.s.see said, "I "ve got them by the b.a.l.l.s, and I "m going to squeeze until it hurts." This did not please Amelio.
Apple"s chief technology officer, Ellen Hanc.o.c.k, argued for going with Sun"s UNIX-based Solaris operating system, even though it did not yet have a friendly user interface. Amelio began to favor using, of all things, Microsoft"s Windows NT , which he felt could be rejiggered on the surface to look and feel just like a Mac while being compatible with the wide range of software available to Windows users. Bill Gates, eager to make a deal, began personally calling Amelio.
There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier Macw orld magazine columnist (and former Apple software evangelist) Guy Kawasaki had published a parody press release joking that Apple was buying NeXT and making Jobs its CEO. In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?" Jobs responded, "Because I "m now a father, I needed a steadier source of income." The release noted that "because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring a newfound sense of humility back to Apple." I t also quoted Bill Gates as saying there would now be more innovations from Jobs that Microsoft could copy. Everything in the press release was meant as a joke, of course. But reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire.
Slouching tow ard Cupertino.
"Does anyone know Steve well enough to call him on this?" Amelio asked his staff. Because his encounter with Jobs two years earlier had ended badly, Amelio didn"t want to make the call himself. But as it turned out, he didn"t need to. Apple was already getting incoming pings from NeXT . A midlevel product marketer at NeXT , Garrett Rice, had simply picked up the phone and, without consulting Jobs, called Ellen Hanc.o.c.k to see if she might be interested in taking a look at its software. She sent someone to meet with him.
By Thanksgiving of 1996 the two companies had begun midlevel talks, and Jobs picked up the phone to call Amelio directly. "I "m on my way to j.a.pan, but I "ll be back in a week and I "d like to see you as soon as I return," he said. "Don"t make any decision until we can get together." Amelio, despite his earlier experience with Jobs, was thrilled to hear from him and entranced by the possibility of working with him. "For me, the phone call with Steve was like inhaling the flavors of a great bottle of vintage wine," he recalled. He gave his a.s.surance he would make no deal with Be or anyone else before they got together.
For Jobs, the contest against Be was both professional and personal. NeXT was failing, and the prospect of being bought by Apple was a tantalizing lifeline. In addition, Jobs held grudges, sometimes pa.s.sionately, and Ga.s.see was near the top of his list, despite the fact that they had seemed to reconcile when Jobs was at NeXT . "Ga.s.see is one of the few people in my life I would say is truly horrible," Jobs later insisted, unfairly.
"He knifed me in the back in 1985." Sculley, to his credit, had at least been gentlemanly enough to knife Jobs in the front.
On December 2, 1996, Steve Jobs set foot on Apple"s Cupertino campus for the first time since his ouster eleven years earlier. In the executive conference room, he met Amelio and Hanc.o.c.k to make the pitch for NeXT . Once again he was scribbling on the whiteboard there, this time giving his lecture about the four waves of computer systems that had culminated, at least in his telling, with the launch of NeXT . He was at his mostseductive, despite the fact that he was speaking to two people he didn"t respect. He was particularly adroit at feigning modesty. "I t"s probably a totally crazy idea," he said, but if they found it appealing, "I "ll structure any kind of deal you want-license the software, sell you the company, whatever." He was, in fact, eager to sell everything, and he pushed that approach. "When you take a close look, you"ll decide you want more than my software," he told them. "You"ll want to buy the whole company and take all the people."
A few weeks later Jobs and his family went to Hawaii for Christmas vacation. Larry Ellison was also there, as he had been the year before. "You know, Larry, I think I "ve found a way for me to get back into Apple and get control of it without you having to buy it," Jobs said as they walked along the sh.o.r.e. Ellison recalled, "He explained his strategy, which was getting Apple to buy NeXT , then he would go on the board and be one step away from being CEO." Ellison thought that Jobs was missing a key point. "But Steve, there"s one thing I don"t understand," he said. "I f we don"t buy the company, how can we make any money?" I t was a reminder of how different their desires were. Jobs put his hand on Ellison"s left shoulder, pulled him so close that their noses almost touched, and said, "Larry, this is why it"s really important that I "m your friend. You don"t need any more money."
Ellison recalled that his own answer was almost a whine: "Well, I may not need the money, but why should some fund manager at Fidelity get the money? Why should someone else get it? Why shouldn"t it be us?"
"I think if I went back to Apple, and I didn"t own any of Apple, and you didn"t own any of Apple, I "d have the moral high ground," Jobs replied.
"Steve, that"s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground," said Ellison. "Look, Steve, you"re my best friend, and Apple is your company.
I "ll do whatever you want." Although Jobs later said that he was not plotting to take over Apple at the time, Ellison thought it was inevitable. "Anyone who spent more than a half hour with Amelio would realize that he couldn"t do anything but self-destruct," he later said.
The big bakeoff between NeXT and Be was held at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto on December 10, in front of Amelio, Hanc.o.c.k, and six other Apple executives. NeXT went first, with Avie T evanian demonstrating the software while Jobs displayed his hypnotizing salesmanship. They showed how the software could play four video clips on the screen at once, create multimedia, and link to the Internet. "Steve"s sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. "He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Olivier as Macbeth."
Ga.s.see came in afterward, but he acted as if he had the deal in his hand. He provided no new presentation. He simply said that the Apple team knew the capabilities of the Be OS and asked if they had any further questions. I t was a short session. While Ga.s.see was presenting, Jobs and T evanian walked the streets of Palo Alto. After a while they b.u.mped into one of the Apple executives who had been at the meetings. "You"re going to win this," he told them.
T evanian later said that this was no surprise: "We had better technology, we had a solution that was complete, and we had Steve." Amelio knew that bringing Jobs back into the fold would be a double-edged sword, but the same was true of bringing Ga.s.see back. Larry T esler, one of the Macintosh veterans from the old days, recommended to Amelio that he choose NeXT , but added, "Whatever company you choose, you"ll get someone who will take your job away, Steve or Jean-Louis."
Amelio opted for Jobs. He called Jobs to say that he planned to propose to the Apple board that he be authorized to negotiate a purchase of NeXT . Would he like to be at the meeting? Jobs said he would. When he walked in, there was an emotional moment when he saw Mike Markkula.
They had not spoken since Markkula, once his mentor and father figure, had sided with Sculley there back in 1985. Jobs walked over and shook his hand.
Jobs invited Amelio to come to his house in Palo Alto so they could negotiate in a friendly setting. When Amelio arrived in his cla.s.sic 1973 Mercedes, Jobs was impressed; he liked the car. In the kitchen, which had finally been renovated, Jobs put a kettle on for tea, and then they sat at the wooden table in front of the open-hearth pizza oven. The financial part of the negotiations went smoothly; Jobs was eager not to make Ga.s.see"s mistake of overreaching. He suggested that Apple pay $12 a share for NeXT . That would amount to about $500 million. Amelio said that was too high. He countered with $10 a share, or just over $400 million. Unlike Be, NeXT had an actual product, real revenues, and a great team, but Jobs was nevertheless pleasantly surprised at that counteroffer. He accepted immediately.
One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to "have skin in the game" and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year. Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Jobs would take $120 million in cash and $37 million in stock, and he pledged to hold the stock for at least six months.
As usual Jobs wanted to have some of their conversation while taking a walk. While they ambled around Palo Alto, he made a pitch to be put on Apple"s board. Amelio tried to deflect it, saying there was too much history to do something like that too quickly. "Gil, that really hurts," Jobs said.
"This was my company. I "ve been left out since that horrible day with Sculley." Amelio said he understood, but he was not sure what the board would want. When he was about to begin his negotiations with Jobs, he had made a mental note to "move ahead with logic as my drill sergeant" and "sidestep the charisma." But during the walk he, like so many others, was caught in Jobs"s force field. "I was hooked in by Steve"s energy and enthusiasm," he recalled.
After circling the long blocks a couple of times, they returned to the house just as Laurene and the kids were arriving home. They all celebrated the easy negotiations, then Amelio rode off in his Mercedes. "He made me feel like a lifelong friend," Amelio recalled. Jobs indeed had a way of doing that. Later, after Jobs had engineered his ouster, Amelio would look back on Jobs"s friendliness that day and note wistfully, "As I would painfully discover, it was merely one facet of an extremely complex personality."
After informing Ga.s.see that Apple was buying NeXT , Amelio had what turned out to be an even more uncomfortable task: telling Bill Gates. "He went into orbit," Amelio recalled. Gates found it ridiculous, but perhaps not surprising, that Jobs had pulled off this coup. "Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there?" Gates asked Amelio. "I know his technology, it"s nothing but a warmed-over UNIX, and you"ll never be able to make it work on your machines." Gates, like Jobs, had a way of working himself up, and he did so now: "Don"t you understand that Steve doesn"t know anything about technology? He"s just a super salesman. I can"t believe you"re making such a stupid decision... . He doesn"t know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong. What the h.e.l.l are you buying that garbage for?"
Years later, when I raised it with him, Gates did not recall being that upset. The purchase of NeXT , he argued, did not really give Apple a new operating system. "Amelio paid a lot for NeXT , and let"s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used." Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie T evanian, who could help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology.
Gates knew that the deal was destined to bring Jobs back to power. "But that was a twist of fate," he said. "What they ended up buying was a guy who most people would not have predicted would be a great CEO, because he didn"t have much experience at it, but he was a brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO."
Despite what both Ellison and Gates believed, Jobs had deeply conflicted feelings about whether he wanted to return to an active role at Apple, at least while Amelio was there. A few days before the NeXT purchase was due to be announced, Amelio asked Jobs to rejoin Apple full-time and take charge of operating system development. Jobs, however, kept deflecting Amelio"s request.Finally, on the day that he was scheduled to make the big announcement, Amelio called Jobs in. He needed an answer. "Steve, do you just want to take your money and leave?" Amelio asked. "I t"s okay if that"s what you want." Jobs did not answer; he just stared. "Do you want to be on the payroll? An advisor?" Again Jobs stayed silent. Amelio went out and grabbed Jobs"s lawyer, Larry Sonsini, and asked what he thought Jobs wanted. "Beats me," Sonsini said. So Amelio went back behind closed doors with Jobs and gave it one more try. "Steve, what"s on your mind?
What are you feeling? Please, I need a decision now."
"I didn"t get any sleep last night," Jobs replied.
"Why? What"s the problem?"
"I was thinking about all the things that need to be done and about the deal we"re making, and it"s all running together for me. I "m really tired now and not thinking clearly. I just don"t want to be asked any more questions."
Amelio said that wasn"t possible. He needed to say something.
Finally Jobs answered, "Look, if you have to tell them something, just say advisor to the chairman." And that is what Amelio did.
The announcement was made that evening-December 20, 1996-in front of 250 cheering employees at Apple headquarters. Amelio did as Jobs had requested and described his new role as merely that of a part-time advisor. Instead of appearing from the wings of the stage, Jobs walked in from the rear of the auditorium and ambled down the aisle. Amelio had told the gathering that Jobs would be too tired to say anything, but by then he had been energized by the applause. "I "m very excited," Jobs said. "I "m looking forward to get to reknow some old colleagues." Louise Kehoe of the Financial Times came up to the stage afterward and asked Jobs, sounding almost accusatory, whether he was going to end up taking over Apple. "Oh no, Louise," he said. "There are a lot of other things going on in my life now. I have a family. I am involved at Pixar. My time is limited, but I hope I can share some ideas."
The next day Jobs drove to Pixar. He had fallen increasingly in love with the place, and he wanted to let the crew there know he was still going to be president and deeply involved. But the Pixar people were happy to see him go back to Apple part-time; a little less of Jobs"s focus would be a good thing. He was useful when there were big negotiations, but he could be dangerous when he had too much time on his hands. When he arrived at Pixar that day, he went to La.s.seter"s office and explained that even just being an advisor at Apple would take up a lot of his time. He said he wanted La.s.seter"s blessing. "I keep thinking about all the time away from my family this will cause, and the time away from the other family at Pixar,"
Jobs said. "But the only reason I want to do it is that the world will be a better place with Apple in it."
La.s.seter smiled gently. "You have my blessing," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
THE RESTORATION.
The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win.
Hovering Backstage.
"I t"s rare that you see an artist in his thirties or forties able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty.
That held true for Jobs in his thirties, during the decade that began with his ouster from Apple in 1985. But after turning forty in 1995, he flourished. Toy Story was released that year, and the following year Apple"s purchase of NeXT offered him reentry into the company he had founded. In returning to Apple, Jobs would show that even people over forty could be great innovators. Having transformed personal computers in his twenties, he would now help to do the same for music players, the recording industry"s business model, mobile phones, apps, tablet computers, books, and journalism.
He had told Larry Ellison that his return strategy was to sell NeXT to Apple, get appointed to the board, and be there ready when CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison"s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates"s philanthropic impulses nor the compet.i.tive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get.
Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom.
And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy.
He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He began to a.s.sert himself in some personnel areas, especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT . But in most other ways he was unusually pa.s.sive. The decision not to ask him to join the board offended him, and he felt demeaned by the suggestion that he run the company"s operating system division. Amelio was thus able to create a situation in which Jobs was both inside the tent and outside the tent, which was not a prescription for tranquillity. Jobs later recalled: Gil didn"t want me around. And I thought he was a bozo. I knew that before I sold him the company. I thought I was just going to be trotted out now and then for events like Macworld, mainly for show. That was fine, because I was working at Pixar. I rented an office in downtown Palo Alto where I could work a few days a week, and I drove up to Pixar for one or two days. I t was a nice life. I could slow down, spend time with my family.
Jobs was, in fact, trotted out for Macworld right at the beginning of January, and this reaffirmed his opinion that Amelio was a bozo. Close to four thousand of the faithful fought for seats in the ballroom of the San Francisco Marriott to hear Amelio"s keynote address. He was introduced by the actor Jeff Goldblum. "I play an expert in chaos theory in The Lost World: Jura.s.sic Park," he said. "I figure that will qualify me to speak at an Apple event." He then turned it over to Amelio, who came onstage wearing a flashy sports jacket and a banded-collar shirt b.u.t.toned tight at the neck, "looking like a Vegas comic," the Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton noted, or in the words of the technology writer Michael Malone, "looking exactly like your newly divorced uncle on his first date."
The bigger problem was that Amelio had gone on vacation, gotten into a nasty tussle with his speechwriters, and refused to rehea.r.s.e. When Jobs arrived backstage, he was upset by the chaos, and he seethed as Amelio stood on the podium b.u.mbling through a disjointed and endless presentation. Amelio was unfamiliar with the talking points that popped up on his teleprompter and soon was trying to wing his presentation.
Repeatedly he lost his train of thought. After more than an hour, the audience was aghast. There were a few welcome breaks, such as when he brought out the singer Peter Gabriel to demonstrate a new music program. He also pointed out Muhammad Ali in the first row; the champ was supposed to come onstage to promote a website about Parkinson"s disease, but Amelio never invited him up or explained why he was there.
Amelio rambled for more than two hours before he finally called onstage the person everyone was waiting to cheer. "Jobs, exuding confidence, style, and sheer magnetism, was the ant.i.thesis of the fumbling Amelio as he strode onstage," Carlton wrote. "The return of Elvis would not have provoked a bigger sensation." The crowd jumped to its feet and gave him a raucous ovation for more than a minute. The wilderness decade wasover. Finally Jobs waved for silence and cut to the heart of the challenge. "We"ve got to get the spark back," he said. "The Mac didn"t progress much in ten years. So Windows caught up. So we have to come up with an OS that"s even better."
Jobs"s pep talk could have been a redeeming finale to Amelio"s frightening performance. Unfortunately Amelio came back onstage and resumed his ramblings for another hour. Finally, more than three hours after the show began, Amelio brought it to a close by calling Jobs back onstage and then, in a surprise, bringing up Steve Wozniak as well. Again there was pandemonium. But Jobs was clearly annoyed. He avoided engaging in a triumphant trio scene, arms in the air. Instead he slowly edged offstage. "He ruthlessly ruined the closing moment I had planned," Amelio later complained. "His own feelings were more important than good press for Apple." I t was only seven days into the new year for Apple, and already it was clear that the center would not hold.
Jobs immediately put people he trusted into the top ranks at Apple. "I wanted to make sure the really good people who came in from NeXT didn"t get knifed in the back by the less competent people who were then in senior jobs at Apple," he recalled. Ellen Hanc.o.c.k, who had favored choosing Sun"s Solaris over NeXT , was on the top of his bozo list, especially when she continued to want to use the kernel of Solaris in the new Apple operating system. In response to a reporter"s question about the role Jobs would play in making that decision, she answered curtly, "None." She was wrong. Jobs"s first move was to make sure that two of his friends from NeXT took over her duties.
T o head software engineering, he tapped his buddy Avie T evanian. T o run the hardware side, he called on Jon Rubinstein, who had done the same at NeXT back when it had a hardware division. Rubinstein was vacationing on the Isle of Skye when Jobs called him. "Apple needs some help," he said. "Do you want to come aboard?" Rubinstein did. He got back in time to attend Macworld and see Amelio bomb onstage. Things were worse than he expected. He and T evanian would exchange glances at meetings as if they had stumbled into an insane asylum, with people making deluded a.s.sertions while Amelio sat at the end of the table in a seeming stupor.
Jobs did not come into the office regularly, but he was on the phone to Amelio often. Once he had succeeded in making sure that T evanian, Rubinstein, and others he trusted were given top positions, he turned his focus onto the sprawling product line. One of his pet peeves was Newton, the handheld personal digital a.s.sistant that boasted handwriting recognition capability. I t was not quite as bad as the jokes and Doonesbury comic strip made it seem, but Jobs hated it. He disdained the idea of having a stylus or pen for writing on a screen. "G.o.d gave us ten styluses," he would say, waving his fingers. "Let"s not invent another." In addition, he viewed Newton as John Sculley"s one major innovation, his pet project. That alone doomed it in Jobs"s eyes.
"You ought to kill Newton," he told Amelio one day by phone.
I t was a suggestion out of the blue, and Amelio pushed back. "What do you mean, kill it?" he said. "Steve, do you have any idea how expensive that would be?"
"Shut it down, write it off, get rid of it," said Jobs. "I t doesn"t matter what it costs. People will cheer you if you got rid of it."
"I "ve looked into Newton and it"s going to be a moneymaker," Amelio declared. "I don"t support getting rid of it." By May, however, he announced plans to spin off the Newton division, the beginning of its yearlong stutter-step march to the grave.
T evanian and Rubinstein would come by Jobs"s house to keep him informed, and soon much of Silicon Valley knew that Jobs was quietly wresting power from Amelio. I t was not so much a Machiavellian power play as it was Jobs being Jobs. Wanting control was ingrained in his nature.
Louise Kehoe, the Financial Times reporter who had foreseen this when she questioned Jobs and Amelio at the December announcement, was the first with the story. "Mr. Jobs has become the power behind the throne," she reported at the end of February. "He is said to be directing decisions on which parts of Apple"s operations should be cut. Mr. Jobs has urged a number of former Apple colleagues to return to the company, hinting strongly that he plans to take charge, they said. According to one of Mr. Jobs" confidantes, he has decided that Mr. Amelio and his appointees are unlikely to succeed in reviving Apple, and he is intent upon replacing them to ensure the survival of "his company.""
That month Amelio had to face the annual stockholders meeting and explain why the results for the final quarter of 1996 showed a 30% plummet in sales from the year before. Shareholders lined up at the microphones to vent their anger. Amelio was clueless about how poorly he handled the meeting. "The presentation was regarded as one of the best I had ever given," he later wrote. But Ed Woolard, the former CEO of DuPont who was now the chair of the Apple board (Markkula had been demoted to vice chair), was appalled. "This is a disaster," his wife whispered to him in the midst of the session. Woolard agreed. "Gil came dressed real cool, but he looked and sounded silly," he recalled. "He couldn"t answer the questions, didn"t know what he was talking about, and didn"t inspire any confidence."
Woolard picked up the phone and called Jobs, whom he"d never met. The pretext was to invite him to Delaware to speak to DuPont executives.
Jobs declined, but as Woolard recalled, "the request was a ruse in order to talk to him about Gil." He steered the phone call in that direction and asked Jobs point-blank what his impression of Amelio was. Woolard remembers Jobs being somewhat circ.u.mspect, saying that Amelio was not in the right job. Jobs recalled being more blunt: I thought to myself, I either tell him the truth, that Gil is a bozo, or I lie by omission. He"s on the board of Apple, I have a duty to tell him what I think; on the other hand, if I tell him, he will tell Gil, in which case Gil will never listen to me again, and he"ll f.u.c.k the people I brought into Apple.
All of this took place in my head in less than thirty seconds. I finally decided that I owed this guy the truth. I cared deeply about Apple. So I just let him have it. I said this guy is the worst CEO I "ve ever seen, I think if you needed a license to be a CEO he wouldn"t get one. When I hung up the phone, I thought, I probably just did a really stupid thing.