Inside Steve's Brain E-Book

Leander Kahney

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Steve Jobs was an American visionary who immeasurably altered the way the world uses technology. From the Apple II to minimalist iMacs and from the foundation of Pixar to the invention of the iPad, Jobs' products and ideas confounded expectations perpetually redefined markets to make Apple the most successful technology company on the planet. Inside Steve's Brain is a unique and revealing look at one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the internet age. Part biography, part leadership manual, Kahney's book is a rich and insightful examination of a man who was at once a business poineer, and a cultural icon.

Leseprobe

InsideSteve’sBrain

Leander Kahney is news editor for Wired.com and primary author of its popular Cult of Mac blog. He is also the author of two acclaimed books,The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. As a reporter and editor, Kahney has covered Apple for more than a dozen years.

Copyright

First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Leander Kahney, 2008

The moral right of Leander Kahney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN: 978-1-848-87784-9

First eBook Edition: January 2010

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my children, Nadine, Milo, Olin, and Lyle; my wife, Traci;

my mother, Pauline; and my brothers, Alex and Chris. And Hank,

my dear old dad, who was a big Steve Jobs fan.

Contents

Cover

Inside Steve’s Brain

Copyright

Introduction

1. Focus: How Saying “No” Saved Apple

2. Despotism: Apple’s One-Man Focus Group

3. Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence

4. Elitism: Hire OnlyAPlayers, Fire the Bozos

5. Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe

6. Inventive Spirit: Where Does the Innovation Come From?

7. Case Study: How It All Came Together with the iPod

8. Total Control: The Whole Widget

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

“Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could—I’m searching for the right word—could, could die.”

—Steve Jobs on his return to Apple as interim CEO, in Time, August 18, 1997

Steve Jobs gives almost as much thought to the cardboard boxes his gadgets come in as the products themselves. This is not for reasons of taste or elegance—though that’s part of it. To Jobs, the act of pulling a product from its box is an important part of the user experience, and like everything else he does, it’s very carefully thought out.

Jobs sees product packaging as a helpful way to introduce new, unfamiliar technology to consumers. Take the original Mac, which shipped in 1984. Nobody at the time had seen anything like it. It was controlled by this weird pointing thing—a mouse—not a keyboard like other early PCs. To familiarize new users with the mouse, Jobs made sure it was packaged separately in its own compartment. Forcing the user to unpack the mouse—to pick it up and plug it in—would make it a little less alien when they had to use it for the first time. In the years since, Jobs has carefully designed this “unpacking routine” for each and every Apple product. The iMac packaging was designed to make it obvious how to get the machine on the Internet, and included a polystyrene insert specially designed to double as a prop for the slim instruction manual.

As well as the packaging, Jobs controls every other aspect of the customer experience—from the TV ads that stimulate desire for Apple’s products, to the museum-like retail stores where customers buy them; from the easy-to-use software that runs the iPhone, to the online iTunes music store that fills it with songs and videos.

Jobs is a control freak extraordinaire. He’s also a perfectionist, an elitist, and a taskmaster to employees. By most accounts, Jobs is a borderline loony. He is portrayed as a basket case who fires people in elevators, manipulates partners, and takes credit for others’ achievements.1 Recent biographies paint an unflattering portrait of a sociopath motivated by the basest desires— to control, to abuse, to dominate. Most books about Jobs are depressing reads. They’re dismissive, little more than catalogs of tantrums and abuse. No wonder he’s called them “hatchet jobs.” Where’s the genius?

Clearly he’s doing something right. Jobs pulled Apple from the brink of bankruptcy, and in ten years he’s made the company bigger and healthier than it’s ever been. He’s tripled Apple’s annual sales, doubled the Mac’s market share, and increased Apple’s stock 1,300 percent. Apple is making more money and shipping more computers than ever before, thanks to a string of hit products—and one giant blockbuster.

Introduced in October 2001, the iPod transformed Apple. And just as Apple has been transformed from a struggling also-ran into a global powerhouse, so has the iPod been transformed from an expensive geek luxury into a diverse and important product category. Jobs quickly turned the iPod from an expensive, Mac-only music player that many people dismissed into a global, multibillion-dollar industry that supports hundreds of accessory companies and supporting players.

Quickly and ruthlessly, Jobs updated the iPod with ever newer and better models, adding an online store, Windows compatibility, and then video. The result: more than 100 million sold by April 2007, which accounts for just under half of Apple’s ballooning revenues. The iPhone, an iPod that makes phone calls and surfs the Net, looks set to become another monster hit. Launched in June 2006, the iPhone is already radically transforming the massive cell phone business, which pundits are saying has already divided into two eras: preiPhone and post-iPhone.

Consider a few numbers. At the time of this writing (November 2007) Apple had sold a whopping 100 million iPods, and is on track to ship more than 200 million iPods by the end of 2008 and 300 million by the close of 2009. Some analysts think the iPod could sell 500 million units before the market is saturated. All of which would make the iPod a contender for the biggest consumer electronics hit of all time. The current record holder, Sony’s Walkman, sold 350 million units during its fifteen-year reign in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Apple has a Microsoft-like monopoly on the MP3 player market. In the United States, the iPod has nearly 90 percent market share: nine out of ten of all music players sold is an iPod.2 Three quarters of all 2007 model year cars have iPod connectivity. Not MP3 connectivity, iPod connectivity. Apple has distributed 600 million copies of its iTunes jukebox software, and the iTunes online store has sold three billion songs. “We’re pretty amazed at this,” said Jobs at a press event in August 2007, where he cited these numbers. The iTunes music store sells five million songs a day—80 percent of all digital music sold online. It’s the third largest music retailer in the United States, just behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy. By the time you read this, these numbers will probably have doubled. The iPod has become an unstoppable juggernaut that not even Microsoft can compete with.

And then there’s Pixar. In 1995, Jobs’s private little movie studio made the first fully computer-animated movie, Toy Story. It was the first in a string of blockbusters that were released once a year, every year, regular and dependable as clockwork. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for a whopping $7.4 billion. Most important, it made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder and the most important nerd in Hollywood. “He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era,”3 said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.

What a remarkable career Jobs has had. He’s making an immense impact on computers, on culture, and, naturally, on Apple. Oh, and he’s a self-made billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. “Within this class of computers we call personals he may have been, and continues to be, the most influential innovator,” says Gordon Bell, the legendary computer scientist and a preeminent computer historian.4

But Jobs should have disappeared years ago—in 1985, to be precise—when he was forced out of Apple after a failed power struggle to run the company.

Born in San Francisco in February 1955 to a pair of unmarried graduate students, Steve was put up for adoption within a week of his birth. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue-collar couple who soon after moved to Mountain View, California, a rural town full of fruit orchards that didn’t stay rural very long—Silicon Valley grew up around it.

At school, Steven Paul Jobs, named after his adoptive father, a machinist, was a borderline delinquent. He says his fourth-grade teacher saved him as a student by bribing him with money and candy. “I would absolutely have ended up in jail,” he said. A neighbor down the street introduced him to the wonders of electronics, giving him Heathkits (hobbyist electronics kits), which taught him about the inner workings of products. Even complex things like TVs were no longer enigmatic. “These things were not mysteries anymore,” he said. “[It] became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things.”5

Jobs’s birth parents had made attending college a condition of his adoption, but he dropped out of Reed College in Oregon after the first semester, although he continued to unofficially attend classes in subjects that interested him, like calligraphy. Penniless, he recycled Coke bottles, slept on friends’ floors, and ate for free at the local Hare Krishna temple. He experimented with an all-apple diet, which he thought might allow him to stop bathing. It didn’t.

Jobs returned to California and briefly took a job at Atari, one of the first games companies, to save money for a trip to India. He soon quit and headed out with a childhood friend in search of enlightenment.

On his return he started hanging around with another friend, Steve Wozniak, an electronics genius who’d built his own personal computer for fun but had little interest in selling it. Jobs had different ideas. Together they cofounded Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs’s bedroom and soon they were assembling computers by hand in his parents’ garage with some teenage friends. To fund their business, Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus. Wozniak sold his calculator. Jobs was twenty-one; Wozniak, twenty-six.

Catching the tail of the early PC revolution, Apple took off like a rocket. It went public in 1980 with the biggest public offering since Ford Motor Company in 1956, making instant multimillionaires of those employees with stock options. In 1983, Apple entered the Fortune 500 at number 411, the fastest ascent of any company in business history. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money,” Jobs said.

Wozniak was the hardware genius, the chip-head engineer, but Jobs understood the whole package. Thanks to Jobs’s ideas about design and advertising, the Apple II became the first successful mass-market computer for ordinary consumers—and turned Apple into the Microsoft of the early eighties. Bored, Jobs moved on to the Mac, the first commercial implementation of the revolutionary graphical user interface developed in computer research labs. Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface that is used on almost every computer today, including millions of Bill Gates’s Windows machines, but he brought it to the masses. This has been Jobs’s stated goal from the very beginning: to create easy-to-use technology for the widest possible audience.

In 1985, Jobs was effectively kicked out of Apple for being unproductive and uncontrollable. After a failed power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs quit before he could be fired. With dreams of revenge, he founded NeXT with the purpose of selling advanced computers to schools and putting Apple out of business. He also picked up a struggling computer graphics company for $10 million from Star Wars director George Lucas, who needed cash for a divorce. Renamed Pixar, Jobs propped up the struggling company for a decade with $60 million of his own money, only to see it eventually produce a string of block-busters and turn into Hollywood’s premiere animation studio.

NeXT, on the other hand, never took off. In eight years it sold only 50,000 computers and had to exit the hardware business, concentrating on selling software to niche customers like the CIA. This is where Jobs could have disappeared from public life. With NeXT failing, Jobs might have written his memoirs or become a venture capitalist like many before him. But in hindsight, NeXT was a stunning success. NeXT’s software was the impetus for Jobs’s return to Apple, and it became the foundation of several key Apple technologies, especially Apple’s highly regarded and influential Mac OS X.

Jobs’s return to the company in 1996—the first time he set foot on the Cupertino campus in eleven years—has turned out to be the greatest comeback in business history. “Apple is engaged in probably the most remarkable second act ever seen in technology,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told Time magazine. “Its resurgence is simply phenomenal and extremely impressive.”6

Jobs has made one savvy move after another. The iPod is a smash and the iPhone looks like one, too. Even the Mac, once written off as an expensive toy for a niche audience, is staging a roaring comeback. The Mac, like Apple itself, is now thoroughly mainstream. In ten years Jobs has hardly made a single mis-step, except one big one: he overlooked Napster and the digital music revolution in 2000. When customers wanted CD burners, Apple was making iMacs with DVD drives and promoting them as video editing machines. “I felt like a dope,” he told Fortune magazine.7

Of course, it’s not all been savvy planning. Jobs has been lucky. Early one morning in 2004, a scan revealed a cancerous tumor on his pancreas: a death sentence. Pancreatic cancer is a sure and quick killer. “My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die,” Jobs said. “It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.” But later that evening, a biopsy revealed that the tumor was an extremely rare form of cancer that is treatable with surgery. Jobs had the operation.8

Now in his early fifties, Jobs lives quietly, privately, with his wife and four kids in a large, unostentatious house in suburban Palo Alto. A Buddhist and a pescadarian (a vegetarian who eats fish), he often walks barefoot to the local Whole Foods for fruit or a smoothie. He works a lot, taking the occasional vacation in Hawaii. He draws $1 in salary from Apple but is getting rich (and ever richer) from share options—the same options that almost got him into trouble with the SEC—and he flies in a personal $90 million Gulfstream V jet granted to him by Apple’s board.

These days, Jobs is in the zone. Apple is firing on all cylinders, but its business model is thirty years out of date. Apple is an anomaly in an industry that long ago standardized on Microsoft. Apple should have gone to the big swap meet in the sky, like Osborne, Amiga, and a hundred other early computer companies that stuck to their own proprietary technology. But for the first time in a couple of decades, Apple is in a position to become a big, powerful, commercial presence— opening up new markets that are potentially much bigger than the computer industry it pioneered in the 1970s. There’s a new frontier in technology: digital entertainment and communication.

The workplace was long ago revolutionized by computers, and Microsoft owns it. There’s no way Apple is going to wrest control. But the home is a different matter. Entertainment and communication are going digital. People are communicating by cell phone, instant message, and e-mail, while music and movies are increasingly delivered online. Jobs is in a good position to sweep up. All the traits, all the instincts that made him a bad fit for the business world are perfect for the world of consumer devices. The obsession with industrial design, the mastery of advertising, and insistence on crafting seamless user experiences are key when selling high-tech to the masses.

Apple has become the perfect vehicle to realize Jobs’s long-held dreams: developing easy-to-use technology for individuals. He’s made—and remade—Apple in his own image. “Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives,” Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist, told me.9 Few corporations are such close mirror images of their founders. “Apple had always reflected the best and worst of Steve’s character,” said Gil Amelio, the CEO that Jobs replaced. “[Former CEOs] John Sculley, Michael Spindler, and I kept the place going but did not significantly alter the identity of the company. Though I have a lot to be angry about in my relationship with Steve Jobs, I recognize that much about the Apple I loved is tuned to his personality.”10

Jobs runs Apple with a unique blend of uncompromising artistry and superb business chops. He’s more of an artist than a businessman, but has the brilliant ability to capitalize on his creations. In some ways he’s like Edwin Land, the scientist-industrialist who invented the Polaroid instant camera. Land is one of Jobs’s heroes. Land made business decisions based on what was right as a scientist and as a supporter of civil and feminist rights, rather than a hardheaded businessman. Jobs also has in himself a bit of Henry Ford, another hero. Ford was a technology democratizer whose mass-production techniques brought automobiles to the masses. There’s a streak of a modern-day Medici, a patron of the arts whose sponsorship of Jonathan Ive has ushered in a Renaissance for industrial design.

Jobs has taken his interests and personality traits—obsessiveness, narcissism, perfectionism—and turned them into the hallmarks of his career.

He’s an elitist who thinks most people are bozos. But he makes gadgets so easy to use that a bozo can master them.

He’s a mercurial obsessive with a filthy temper who has forged a string of productive partnerships with creative, world-class collaborators: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, and Pixar director John Lasseter.

He’s a cultural elitist who makes animated movies for kids; an aesthete and anti-materialist who pumps mass-market products out of Asian factories. He promotes them with an un-rivaled mastery of the crassest medium, advertising.

He’s an autocrat who has remade a big, dysfunctional corporation into a tight, disciplined ship that executes on his demanding product schedules.

Jobs has used his natural gifts and talents to remake Apple. He has fused high technology with design, branding, and fashion. Apple is less like a nerdy computer company than a brand-driven multinational like Nike or Sony: a unique blend of technology, design, and marketing.

His desire to craft complete customer experiences ensures Apple controls the hardware, the software, online services, and everything else. But it produces products that work seamlessly together and infrequently break down (even Microsoft, the epitome of the opposite approach, the open licensing model, is adopting the same modus operandi when selling Xbox game consoles and Zune music players to consumers).

Jobs’s charm and charisma produce the best product introductions in the industry, a unique blend of theater and infomercial. His magnetic personality has also enabled him to negotiate superb contracts with Disney, the record labels, and AT&T—no pussycats when it comes to making deals. Disney gave him total creative freedom and a huge cut of profits at Pixar. The music labels helped turn the iTunes music store from an experiment into a threat. And AT&T signed up for the iPhone without even laying eyes on a prototype.

But where some see control freakery, others see a desire to craft a seamless, end-to-end user experience. Instead of perfectionism, there’s the pursuit of excellence. And instead of screaming abuse, there’s the passion to make a dent in the universe.

Here’s someone who has turned his personality traits into a business philosophy.

Here’s how he does it.

Chapter 1

Focus: How Saying “No” Saved Apple

“I’m looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that ‘vision thing’ and I’m not afraid to start from the beginning.”

—Steve Jobs’s résumé at Apple’s .Mac website

One bright July morning in 1997, Steve Jobs returned to the company he had cofounded twenty years before in his bedroom.

Apple was in a death spiral. The company was six months from bankruptcy. In just a couple of years, Apple had declined from one of the biggest computer companies in the world to an also-ran. It was bleeding cash and market share. No one was buying its computers, the stock was in the toilet, and the press was predicting its imminent passing.

Apple’s top staff were summoned to an early-morning meeting at company HQ. In shuffled the then-current CEO, Gilbert Amelio, who’d been in charge for about eighteen months. He had patched up the company but had failed to re-ignite its inventive soul. “It’s time for me to go,” he said, and quietly left the room. Before anyone could react, Steve Jobs entered the room, looking like a bum. He was wearing shorts and sneakers and several days’ worth of stubble. He plonked himself into a chair and slowly started to spin. “Tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said. Before anyone could reply, he burst out: “It’s the products. The products SUCK! There’s no sex in them anymore.”1

The Fall of Apple

Apple’s fall was quick and dramatic. In 1994, Apple commanded nearly 10 percent of the worldwide multibillion-dollar market for personal computers. It was the second biggest computer manufacturer in the world after the giant IBM.2 In 1995, Apple shipped the most computers it had ever sold—4.7 million Macs worldwide—but it wanted more. It wanted to be like Microsoft. It licensed the Macintosh operating system to several computer makers, including Power Computing, Motorola, Umax, and others. Apple’s management reasoned that these “clone” machines would grow the overall Mac market. But it didn’t work. The Mac market remained relatively flat, and the clone makers simply took sales away from Apple.

In the first quarter of 1996, Apple reported a loss of $69 million and laid off 1,300 staff. In February, the board fired CEO Michael Spindler and appointed in his place Gil Amelio, a veteran of the chip industry with a reputation as a turnaround artist. But in the eighteen months that Amelio was on the job, he proved ineffectual and unpopular. Apple lost $1.6 billion, its market share plummeted from 10 percent to 3 percent, and the stock collapsed. Amelio laid off thousands of workers, but he was raking in about $7 million in salary and benefits, and was sitting on $26 million in stock, according to the New York Times. He lavishly refurbished Apple’s executive offices and, it was soon revealed, negotiated a golden parachute worth about $7 million. The New York Times called Amelio’s Apple a “kleptocracy.”3

But Amelio did several things right. He canceled a raft of money-losing projects and products, and trimmed the company to stem the losses. Most important, he bought Jobs’s company, NeXT, hoping that its modern and robust operating system could replace the Macintosh operating system, which was becoming very creaky and old.

The NeXT purchase came about by accident. Amelio was interested in buying the BeOS, a fledgling operating system built by a former Apple executive, Jean Louis Gassée. But while they were haggling, Garret L. Rice, a NeXT salesman, called Apple out of the blue, suggesting they take a look. Apple’s engineers hadn’t even considered NeXT.

His interest piqued, Amelio asked Jobs to pitch the NeXT operating system.

In December 1996, Jobs gave Amelio an impressive demonstration of NeXT. Unlike the BeOS, NeXT was finished. Jobs had customers, developers, and hardware partners. NeXT also had a full suite of advanced and very highly regarded programming tools, which made it very easy for other companies to write software for it. “His people had spent a lot of time thinking about key issues like networking and the world of the internet—much more so than anything else around. Better than anything Apple had done, better than NT, and potentially better than what Sun had,” Amelio wrote.4

During negotiations, Jobs was very low key. He didn’t over-sell. It was “a refreshingly honest approach, especially for Steve Jobs,” Amelio said.5 “I was relieved he wasn’t coming on like a high-speed train. There were places in the presentation to think and question and discuss.”

The pair hammered out the deal over a cup of tea in Jobs’s kitchen at his house in Palo Alto. The first question was the price, which was based on the stock price. The second question concerned the stock options held by his NeXT employees. Amelio was impressed that he was watching out for his staff. Stock options have traditionally been one of the most important forms of compensation in Silicon Valley, and Jobs has used them many times to recruit and retain key staff, as discussed later in Chapter 5. But in November 2006, the SEC launched a probe into more than 130 companies, including Apple, that embroiled Jobs in accusations of improperly backdating options to inflate their worth. Jobs denied knowingly breaking the law, and the SEC investigation is still ongoing.

Jobs suggested they go for a walk, a surprise to Amelio but a standard Jobs tactic.

“I was hooked in by Steve’s energy and enthusiasm,” Amelio said. “I do remember how animated he is on his feet, how his full mental abilities materialize when he’s up and moving, how he becomes more expressive. We headed back for the house with a deal wrapped up.”6

Two weeks later, on December 20, 1996, Amelio announced that Apple was buying NeXT for $427 million. Jobs returned to Apple as a “special advisor” to Amelio, to help with the transition. It was the first time Jobs had been at the Apple campus in almost eleven years. Jobs had left Apple in 1985 after a failed power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley. Jobs had quit before he could be fired, and he had set up NeXT as a direct rival to Apple, hoping to run Apple out of business. Now he thought it might be too late to save Apple.

Enter the iCEO

At first Jobs was reluctant to take on a role at Apple. He was already CEO of another company—Pixar, which was just starting to take off with the enormous success of its first movie, Toy Story. With his success in Hollywood, Jobs was reluctant to get back into the technology business at Apple. Jobs was tiring of cranking out technology products that were quickly obsolete. He wanted to make things that were longer lasting. A good movie, for example. Good storytelling lasts for decades. In 1997, Jobs told Time:

“I don’t think you’ll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years. [But] Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it’s a 60-year-old production. People don’t read Herodotus or Homer to their kids anymore, but everybody watches movies. These are our myths today. Disney puts those myths into our culture, and hopefully Pixar will, too.”7

Perhaps more important, Jobs was skeptical that Apple could stage a comeback. He was so skeptical, in fact, that in June 1997 he had sold the 1.5 million shares he’d received for the NeXT purchase at rock-bottom prices—all except for a single symbolic share. He didn’t think Apple had a future worth more than one share.

But in early July 1997, Apple’s board asked Amelio to resign following a string of terrible quarterly financial results, including one that resulted in a loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars, the biggest loss ever for a Silicon Valley company.8

The common perception is that Jobs ousted Amelio after backstabbing him in a carefully engineered boardroom coup. But there’s no evidence to suggest that Jobs planned to take over the company. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Several people interviewed for this book said Jobs initially had no interest whatsoever in returning to Apple—he was too busy with Pixar, and he had little confidence that Apple could be saved.

Even Amelio’s own autobiography makes it clear that Jobs had no interest in taking the helm at Apple, if you ignore Amelio’s assertions to the contrary. “He had never intended that the deal would include his giving Apple any more than some portion of his attention,”9 Amelio wrote. Earlier in his book, Amelio noted that Jobs wanted to be paid in cash for the purchase of NeXT; he didn’t want any Apple stock. But Amelio insisted on paying a large portion in shares because he didn’t want Jobs walking away. He wanted Jobs committed to Apple, to have “some skin in the game,” as he put it.10

Amelio does accuse Jobs several times of engineering his dismissal so that he, Jobs, could take over, but presents no direct evidence. It’s more comforting for Amelio to blame his dismissal on maneuvering by Jobs than on the more straightforward explanation that Apple’s board had lost confidence in him.

After firing Amelio, Apple’s board had no one else to turn to. Jobs had already been dispensing advice to the company in his role as special advisor to Amelio (nothing particularly Machiavellian about that). The board asked Jobs to take over. He agreed to—temporarily. After six months, Jobs adopted the title of interim CEO, or iCEO, as he was jokingly referred to inside Apple. In August, Apple’s board officially made Jobs the interim CEO while it continued to look for a permanent replacement. Wags noted that instead of Apple acquiring Jobs when it purchased NeXT, Jobs had acquired Apple but had cleverly arranged it so that Apple paid him.

When Jobs took over, Apple sold about forty different products—everything from inkjet printers to the Newton handheld. Few of them were market leaders. The lineup of computers was particularly baffling. There were several major lines—Quadras, Power Macs, Performas, and PowerBooks— each with a dozen different models. But there was little to distinguish between the models except their confusing product names—the Perfoma 5200CD, Perfoma 5210CD, Perfoma 5215CD, and Perfoma 5220CD.

“What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products,” Jobs would later say. “It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. If I couldn’t figure this out . . . how could our customers figure this out?”11

One engineer I interviewed who worked at Apple in the mid-1990s remembers seeing a poster-cum-flow-chart pinned to a wall at Apple’s HQ. The poster was titled How to Choose Your Mac and was supposed to guide customers through the thicket of choices. But it merely illustrated how confused Apple’s product strategy was. “You know something is wrong when you need a poster to choose your Mac,” the engineer said.

Apple’s organizational structure was in similar disarray. Apple had grown into a big, bloated Fortune 500 company with thousands of engineers and even more managers. “Apple, pre Jobs, was brilliant, energetic, chaotic, and nonfunctional,” recalled Don Norman, who was in charge of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group when Jobs took over. Known as the ATG, the group was Apple’s storied R&D division and had pioneered several important technologies.

“When I joined Apple in 1993 it was wonderful,” he said to me in a telephone interview. “You could do creative, innovative things. But it was chaotic. You can’t do that in an organization. You need a few creative people, and the rest get the work done.”12 According to Norman, Apple’s engineers were rewarded for being imaginative and inventive, not for the difficult job of knuckling down and making things work. They would invent all day, but rarely did what they were told. As an executive, this would drive Norman crazy. Orders would be handed down, but incredibly, six months later nothing had happened. “It was ridiculous,” Norman said.

John Warnock of Adobe, one of Apple’s biggest software partners, said that changed quickly when Jobs returned. “He comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way,” Warnock said. “You have to run Apple that way— very direct, very forceful. You can’t do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the NeXT years and he’s not so mellow anymore.”13

Steve’s Survey

Within days of returning to Apple as the iCEO, Jobs got to work. Once he’d committed, Jobs was in a hurry to fix Apple. He immediately embarked on an extremely thorough survey of each and every product Apple made. He went through the company piece by piece, finding out what the assets were. “He needed to do a review of pretty much everything that was going on,” said Jim Oliver, who was Jobs’s assistant for several months after he returned to the company. “He talked to all the product groups. He wanted to know the scope and size of the research groups. He was saying, ‘Everything needs to be justified. Do we really need a corporate library?’ ”

Jobs set up shop in a big conference room and called in the product teams one by one. As soon as everyone had convened, it went straight to work. “No introductions, absolutely not,” Peter Hoddie recalled. Hoddie is a hotshot programmer who went on to become the chief architect of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia software. “Someone started taking notes. Steve said: ‘You don’t need to take notes. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.’ ”