StudEbiker
100 kW
neptronix said:
Totally agree on this one. iTunes is so ridiculously lame I don't understand how the iPod has done so well. I won an iPod in a giveaway, sold it on Ebay, and bought a Sony MP3 Walkman.
Steve Jobs
- Thread starter gensem
- Start date
Totally agree on this one. iTunes is so ridiculously lame I don't understand how the iPod has done so well. I won an iPod in a giveaway, sold it on Ebay, and bought a Sony MP3 Walkman.
vanilla ice
1 MW
I feel the same as oatnet.. WTF is up with some of the posts in this thread? I'd expect that on lesser forums... Even if you hate somebody it don't mean you need to go disrespecting them when they die.
AussieJester
1 TW
oatnet said:
It Doesn't alwaaays have to be like that all oatnet, sucks to be you though if you don't like what others have to say, seeing this is a public forum last time i checked, where everyone gets to express their thoughts and ideas, I have attempted to help many on this forum in the 4 years i have been here not just bag on others....don't like my posts its veeery simple put me on ignore and stop bitching like a hurt 12 year old bitch if you don't like what others have say to say, frocks sake oatnet
.oatnet said:
My best mate has an iphone & i have had the misfortune to use it on occasion, i dont like them plain and simple, no appologies to you or anyone else that does, this is my opinion again don't like it tuff titties oatnet its not aaaall about pleasing you aaaall the time
... I own an android and it does 'just work' must be doing it wrong if yours doesn't, made a hell of a PC guy i bet Finally...wth is thread is about Jobs, where exactly have i directly bagged him? I don't like the product
doesn't mean i don't respect the man and what he has done.
KiM
MitchJi
10 MW
Hi,
Sorry if this was already posted (didn't read most of the thread - they should have tested an Ebike
):
Sorry if this was already posted (didn't read most of the thread - they should have tested an Ebike
):Steve Jobs said:
hillzofvalp
100 kW
someone told me today that jobs was respectable pothead at least going into his twenties..
Lyen
10 kW
I just returned from the local San Francisco Apple store and see hundreds of people hanging in the store front with cops and press there. People write things on sticky and stick it on the glass. Anyway, I am depressed after watching the news on his death. He was definite a great guy with brilliant ideas. I still have one of the original Macintosh (8MB + 20MB hard drive) from the golden age. He could have invent an iBike if he is still around.
There was a coincidence that I just happened to be in Berkeley on October 5th the city where his old garage was. I hope the other Steve (the hardware guy) can take over his spot soon.
There was a coincidence that I just happened to be in Berkeley on October 5th the city where his old garage was. I hope the other Steve (the hardware guy) can take over his spot soon.
dingoEsride
100 kW
whether you like apple products or not it doesn't deter from the fact that without his creativeness in techo gadjets the competitors wouldn't try to regain some of the market by bringing out improved gadjets themselves, so indirectly you are buying his idea
vanilla ice
1 MW
Too soon..Philistine said:
oatnet
1 MW
CNN had a nice piece on Jobs' life, my wife found a link to it:
-JD
[youtube]xY4VkkRhsgI[/youtube]
-JD
[youtube]xY4VkkRhsgI[/youtube]
spinningmagnets
100 TW
I am 52, and I have always been a late-adopter, though I was facinated by emerging technology. The way I remember it (Mac Vs PC)...
For PCs there was only one game in town and that was IBM. They were hugely expensive, and their focus was clearly on being the desktop computer at work. I remember Excel and Lotus-123 being hyped. I never heard of ANYone who had one of the early IBMs at home, I think they were over $5,000 (of course they got better and cheaper over time)
Apple II was the first product I remember selling well in homes.
The Apple II was considered very affordable compared to the IBM (how times have changed!). I remember Apple had the mouse (point and click) interface first, and IBM only adopted it after they began losing sales of computers to small businesses to Apple. Training a worker on an IBM took a long time because of the book full of commands that they had to learn and keep handy nearby (anyone remember MS-DOS before Windows 95?) I remember graphic artists and musicians used only the Apple back then, regardless of the price.
I may be off a bit, but the way I remember the mass of people buying home computers was when Microsoft came out with Windows-95 and the rise of AOL for people E-mailing. That was about the time that Macs became noticeably more expensive than PCs, because of the competition between dozens of PC makers using Windows-95 (Like Dell, Gateway, Toshiba...)
For PCs there was only one game in town and that was IBM. They were hugely expensive, and their focus was clearly on being the desktop computer at work. I remember Excel and Lotus-123 being hyped. I never heard of ANYone who had one of the early IBMs at home, I think they were over $5,000 (of course they got better and cheaper over time)
Apple II was the first product I remember selling well in homes.
The Apple II was considered very affordable compared to the IBM (how times have changed!). I remember Apple had the mouse (point and click) interface first, and IBM only adopted it after they began losing sales of computers to small businesses to Apple. Training a worker on an IBM took a long time because of the book full of commands that they had to learn and keep handy nearby (anyone remember MS-DOS before Windows 95?) I remember graphic artists and musicians used only the Apple back then, regardless of the price.
I may be off a bit, but the way I remember the mass of people buying home computers was when Microsoft came out with Windows-95 and the rise of AOL for people E-mailing. That was about the time that Macs became noticeably more expensive than PCs, because of the competition between dozens of PC makers using Windows-95 (Like Dell, Gateway, Toshiba...)
Subject: Using a PDA as a bike computer?Lyen said:He could have invent an iBike if he is still around.
busted_bike said:
Dee Jay
100 kW
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- Dec 11, 2007
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gogo said:Subject: Using a PDA as a bike computer?Lyen said:He could have invent an iBike if he is still around.
busted_bike said:
yeah been harping on using a netbook with flash drive and some sort of USB cell monitor a few years back.
Then I discovered the Adruino only early this year
and then discovered Puppy Linux just last month! So small, you can boot it off a pen drive and run it on RAM!
Netbook + Adruino + Puppy Linux sounds like the way to go!
Dee Jay
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spinningmagnets said:
ya man, I remember starting with BASIC. My computer timeline started with Commodore PET, then Atari 400 and 800, then programming games and creating music on the Commodore Vic-20, Then PC clone with only DOS. Then Windows blew me away! (cant remember the version)
At first, I felt like I missed out on the whole Apple subculture, but now I think it's good that I wasn't so pampered and got the chance to experience other computers, not pigeon-holed with Apple
spinningmagnets
100 TW
I like Apple products, I'm not a hater. I had a Mac laptop for a few years in the late 1990's. IMHO, they were very innovative and user-friendly, and even affordable in the beginning.
When PCs were dragged kicking and screaming into having a mouse, plus Windows-95, they became user-friendly. When PC prices began dropping rapidly, Apple made the conscious decision to concentrate on upscale wealthy early-adopter products that were cutting edge. Sculley ran Apple for a while, and then Jobs came back to completely refocus Apples strategy and research/development.
The big difference between Apple products and PCs is the closed interconnection between Apple hardware and software. They make both, so they are guaranteed to work well, but it stifles outside innovation from 3rd party developers. If you want your program to work with Apple products, you have to sign away your life to them.
Apple Has about 76 Billion in excess cash. So, clearly someone likes their products, even at the premium prices. Even though they are successfully clinging to their niche, they have been useful in the way that they have strongly influenced the mass market of the hardware and software of PCs...
When PCs were dragged kicking and screaming into having a mouse, plus Windows-95, they became user-friendly. When PC prices began dropping rapidly, Apple made the conscious decision to concentrate on upscale wealthy early-adopter products that were cutting edge. Sculley ran Apple for a while, and then Jobs came back to completely refocus Apples strategy and research/development.
The big difference between Apple products and PCs is the closed interconnection between Apple hardware and software. They make both, so they are guaranteed to work well, but it stifles outside innovation from 3rd party developers. If you want your program to work with Apple products, you have to sign away your life to them.
Apple Has about 76 Billion in excess cash. So, clearly someone likes their products, even at the premium prices. Even though they are successfully clinging to their niche, they have been useful in the way that they have strongly influenced the mass market of the hardware and software of PCs...
Dee Jay
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spinningmagnets said:
It's the DIY ethics and the passion that I really dig about Steve Jobs, and even Bill Gates, but now it's all about wasting money and fashion statements .
It's the fanboyism that I hate.
I wouldn't care about crapple fanboyism so much if I didn't have family members who fell for that trap, unfortunately I do… the same two nephews who fell for that Dr. Dre Beats scam. :lol:spinningmagnets said:
spinningmagnets
100 TW
One opinion: "Steve Jobs tweaked the ideas of others" plus a list to support this position...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Dee Jay
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I still can't believe a health conscious man like him can get sick and die, especially a billionaire who can afford the best medical technology and top physicians in the world. and the fact that people like Dr Berzinski and Rick Simpson have come forward in recent years with cures to cancer...I'd say Steve Jobs was poisoned for sabotaging Apple :|
gensem
100 kW
If you want to play with conpiracy... I woulda say the cancer market worth more than he could pay and thats why he died... or maybe the board did not like him and decided to cease his treatement.
But still in mind what echo is... slow down coz your are not invincible as or credit card made you believe
But still in mind what echo is... slow down coz your are not invincible as or credit card made you believe
oatnet
1 MW
Dee Jay said:
Sadly, after the pancreatic tumor was removed, Steve tried to address the cancer risk with homeopathic methods, instead of the chemo the doctors recommended. When he finally came around a few years? later, the cancer had spread throughout his body. There are quotes of him regretting that choice. The billionare is what kept him alive so long afterwards...
-JD
dnmun
1 PW
hard to believe the trash people posted on this thread about someone they have no clue about. just found this for those who can read.
FEATURES October 06, 2011, 9:49 AM EDT
Steve Jobs: The Beginning, 1955-1985
The high school loner who figured out what the world wanted from technology
By Jim Aley
The video is close to 35 years old and the picture isn’t great, but it’s obvious Steve Jobs is nervous. He won’t sit still. As the makeup and sound guys in the television studio do the final preparations before the cameras go on, there’s the long-haired nerd—he must be 23, 24—swiveling around in his chair, wearing a jacket and tie and a pair of square wire-frame glasses. He hasn’t done much media, that’s clear to the talent handlers, who try to get him to relax a little with small talk. Jobs isn’t paying attention.
“God! Look at that!” he says, squinting at a monitor and running his hand through his hair, which looks washed for a change. “Look, I’m on television!”
“You’re on TV in New York, too,” says one of the handlers. This studio is probably in San Francisco, though the particulars are lost to history.
“No, no.” Jobs leans forward, and watches another studio person brush his sleeve. “Am I really? Are you serious? God! I was just in New York last week!” More swivels and small talk. Jobs looks up at the lights, hand-combs his hair again, and tells the people fussing around him that he’s ready to throw up. “I’m not joking,” he says. Sip of water. A producer announces he’s ready to roll. Jobs swivels. Forced smile. Hand through hair. “God!”
Knowing what Steve Jobs would become, it’s endearing to watch him babble with stage fright. He had already started a tiny company that is drawing crowds of hobbyists at computer fairs, but he’s decades away from the showman whose product unveilings will become cultural milestones. The music business now comes in two eras: pre-iPod and post-iPod [footnote 1]. Same with mobile and the iPhone, and if history holds, the iPad will mark an epochal split in personal computing. Jobs would claim that he never invented those things; he discovered them. They were always there, someone just needed to “connect the dots,” to put the parts together into a whole no one else seemed to see.
The video fuzzes out and cuts before the interview with the anchor in New York. Jobs probably did fine. Even then, he seemed able to convince anyone of anything. If charm didn’t work, he’d threaten, weep, whatever worked. The engineers and local high school kids he’d talked into working for him could attest to that. The force of will, the uncompromising aesthetic, the mean streak—he already had a reputation in Silicon Valley. But other people had those traits. Connecting the dots into a persona that can create a $350 billion empire out of technological desires the world never knew it had—that required something exceptional.
Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to a pair of unwed graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattah Jandali. They put him up for adoption when he was an infant, and he was taken in by Clara and Paul Jobs, who raised their son in a ranch house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, about three miles from where Apple (AAPL) eventually would put its headquarters.
Young Steve wasn’t easy. He stuck a bobby pin into a wall outlet and had to be taken to a hospital after tasting ant poison. When he was old enough to go to school, his teachers—the ones who bored him, anyway—found him obnoxious and disruptive, when he wasn’t inattentive. In the classroom, he’d set off little bombs and let loose snakes. “I was pretty bored in school,” he told Playboy in 1985, “and I turned into a little terror.”
His classmates mostly thought he was “really strange,” as Mark Wozniak, the younger brother of his future partner Steve Wozniak, once put it. Jobs himself would later tell an interviewer, “I wasn’t a jock. I was a loner for the most part.” One foggy day, a gym teacher had the class do laps on a track. When Jobs reached the far end, obscured from the teacher’s view by the fog, he sat down and watched his classmates puff by. He rejoined the pack the next lap. “He had figured out how he could get away with half the work and still get credit for the whole thing,” a classmate, Bruce Courture, told Jeffrey S. Young in the 1988 Jobs biography The Journey Is the Reward.
Jobs wasn’t lazy. He wanted to absorb as much of the world as possible. But he was choosy, and one thing he chose was electronics. Silicon Valley was buzzing with promise in the 1960s. Lockheed was doing moon-shot work, Hewlett-Packard was already a geek paradise. Engineers were all over the place. Workshops sprouted in garages up and down Crist Drive, and the garage of Paul Jobs, a machinist, was no exception. He kept a spotless workbench and cleared a space for Steve to tinker. “It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up,” Jobs told a Smithsonian Institution historian in 1995. For a smart kid in the Valley, electronics, especially computer electronics, was more than a career choice. In those days, he said, “The best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. … They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents.”
When Jobs was around 12, a neighbor showed him some electronics tricks, such as a microphone that worked without an amplifier. The guy was a ham radio operator as well as an employee of Hewlett-Packard [footnote 2], and Jobs idolized that company and its founders. One day he called William Hewlett himself, about some parts for a frequency counter he was trying to build. Hewlett must have been impressed or at least amused, because he stayed on the phone for 20 minutes. Jobs got the parts he needed—and, a few years later, a summer gig at HP.
Jobs didn’t love just electronics. He read a lot of Shakespeare, listened to a lot of Dylan. This was California in the 1970s, with all the explorations of self implied by that decade and place. By high school he was experimenting on himself. Curious about the mind-expanding possibilities of sleep deprivation, he’d stay up a couple of nights in a row. He smoked pot and hash, and, as he would repeatedly remind employees and reporters over the years, dropped LSD.
When he graduated from Homestead High School in 1972, he declared that he would attend Reed College in Oregon. Reed was known for its mixture of academic rigor and tolerance of counterculture, but it was expensive. His parents were aghast. “We tried to talk him out of it,” Paul Jobs later told Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who wrote The Little Kingdom, an early book about Apple. Steve wouldn’t budge, and his parents gave in. Jobs dropped out of Reed after six months. He didn’t leave right away, though: He stuck around for a year and a half, sleeping on friends’ floors and living off the money he raised by collecting bottles for the deposits. He wandered around campus barefoot, stopping in libraries to read about Zen Buddhism and doing some more bodily experimentation. The teachings of Arnold Ehret fascinated him. Ehret, a 19th century physician from Prussia, believed that good health was a matter of eliminating mucus from the body. The Ehret diet was heavy on figs, nuts, grated horseradish, and honey. That sounded about right to Jobs.
The fruitarian, shoeless Buddhist and mendicant ex-student listened in on classes, too, and was transfixed by one in particular: a course on calligraphy. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating,” Jobs told Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005. He said he eventually combined those calligraphy sessions with computers—beauty with technology, a big connect-the-dots moment.
If he’d had any money while in Oregon, Jobs would probably have headed to Asia to immerse himself in Buddhism. But he didn’t, so he drifted back to the Bay Area and talked his way into a job at Atari [footnote 3], the video game maker. He had no formal technical training, but he clearly knew enough about electronics that Al Alcorn, then Atari’s chief engineer, detected something in the long-haired kid and hired him as a game designer. It was that or call the police, because Jobs wouldn’t leave the lobby until he got work. “He looked pretty grubby,” Alcorn later told Moritz. “He was talking a mile a minute and claimed to be working on the HP35 calculator. He said he could turn the HP45 into a stopwatch. He implied he was working for HP. I was impressed, said, ‘hey, fine,’ and didn’t bother to check.”
Jobs’s fellow employees couldn’t stand him; he was an arrogant weirdo who smelled funny. The fruitarian diet, Jobs was convinced, purged his body of impurities and thus eliminated the need to bathe. Rather than fire him, Alcorn had Jobs come in after hours so the other employees didn’t have to deal with him.
The night shift had its advantages. Jobs remained in touch with a guy who’d graduated from Homestead High a few years before him, a hardcore nerd named Steve Wozniak. Woz had a job at HP and serious engineering talent. He also was addicted to video games, and Jobs let him into the Atari offices to play late into the night. In return, Woz helped Jobs with projects. One was an assignment that came from Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell (who later founded the Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant chain). Bushnell asked Jobs to figure out a design for the game Break-Out, where players would use a Pong-like paddle to smash a wall of bricks. Unbeknownst to Bushnell or Alcorn, Jobs turned around and made a deal with Woz: Do the coding, and Jobs would split the $600 completion fee with him. Woz did the work, and Jobs got his money and gave Woz $300—his “half.” Problem was, Jobs got $1,000 as his fee. Woz didn’t find out about Jobs’s lie until a year later, according to iCon, the 2005 book by Young and William L. Simon. When he did find out, he was so hurt he cried.
They were an unusual pair who shared a love of electronics. Woz was the tech genius and Jobs the brash idea man. They’d first bonded at the Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of engineers and hobbyists who would gather to swap parts and ideas. An early Woz-Jobs production was a “blue box”—a hacker’s term for a device that taps into the phone system to make free long-distance calls. It worked. They prank-called the Vatican and realized they could make money selling blue boxes handmade by Woz. It was amazing: Build a little machine and fake out the phone company and its billions of dollars of equipment. “That was an incredible lesson,” Jobs said in the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxes.”
Wozniak began putting together a contraption that he and Jobs could show off to their Homebrew buddies. The Apple I [footnote 4] was little more than a motherboard. Whoever bought one—Woz and Jobs sold 50 to a local hobby store—had to supply a case to hold the circuitry, not to mention a keyboard and monitor. It may have been primitive, but it was the proof of concept the two needed. They knew they could build a better computer, and Jobs knew people would buy it.
Jobs discovered that he liked business. But he hated it, too, or at least feared the potential of the Establishment-loving monster he’d become if he loved it too much. He couldn’t quite square his business self with his hippie-fruitarian self. He did make it to India [footnote 5] while still at Atari. With little money and no shoes, he found a baba, shaved his head, and came down with scabies and dysentery. The poverty in India wasn’t the lifestyle choice some hippies were making back home; these people were just plain poor. That experience dispelled any notions that the truth necessarily lay in the mud of the Indian rainy season.
Yet even as Woz struggled to build enough computers to keep up with demand, Jobs yearned to return to Asia and live a monastic life of contemplation. This time, Japan called to him. His friend Dan Kottke sent Jobs a letter making fun of him: “After performing an extensive prana to the lotus feet of suchness, gaze lovingly upon picture with cosmic thoughts of cosmic relevance and profundity until phone rings. Answer phone, haggle furiously, and refuse to sell for less than $2.3 million.” Jobs consulted Kobin Chino, a Japanese Zen master in Berkeley he met after he got back from India. Should Jobs head to Japan or descend into business? Chino, who barely spoke English, observed the dramatic soul-searching and, like Kottke, found it funny. So obvious: Stick with the computers, the Zen master said.
Woz and Jobs officially launched Apple Computer on April Fool’s Day, 1976.
In the late 1970s, computer makers were popping up much the way car companies did in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. Osborne, Commodore, and RadioShack were all selling what were becoming known as “personal computers.” Like the Apple I, they were made for hobbyists. They were hard to use and didn’t really do much. The Altair, the earliest, pretty much just lit up little lights once you laboriously connected a bunch of switches on the logic board.
Jobs wanted the next computer to be something different—an appliance, something anyone could use. That was the Apple II, which came out a year after the Apple I. He hammered at his message as the company grew: Computers should be tools. Trip Hawkins, one of Apple’s first 50 employees, remembers Jobs obsessing over an article he’d read in a science magazine about the locomotive efficiency of animal species. “The most efficient species was the condor, which could fly for miles on only a few calories,” Hawkins says. “Humans were way down the list. But then if you put a man on a bicycle, he was instantly twice as efficient as the condor.” The computer, Jobs said, was a “bicycle for the mind.”
“That line was so good it became part of his routine,” says Hawkins. “We ended up creating an ad out of it.”
Jobs had another message: These tools had to be beautiful. The Apple II did look great, for then: It had a case and keyboard and fit easily on a desk. Jobs’s aesthetic suffused everything, even the circuit boards. He insisted the circuits be redone to make the lines straighter.
The Apple II was a hit that powered the company for the next seven years, through an initial public offering in 1980 and all the way to the release of the Macintosh. Jobs became a star. His hair was still long, but it was styled. He wore suits. He dated celebrities: Joan Baez (who was 14 years his senior, but who once was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend) and Diane Keaton (nine years his senior; no obvious Dylan connection). He talked about his company as an anti-Establishment force, waging a crusade to battle the faceless archenemy, which back then was IBM. “You always need to have bad guys and good guys in America,” says Regis McKenna, the legendary Silicon Valley public-relations man who worked with Apple beginning in the late 1970s. “Apple was thumbing its nose at this big world of monolithic standards. It became a rebel. It became a symbol of fast growth, youth.”
Jobs was always charismatic, but as Apple grew, his stage presence became mesmerizing. “He knew how to modulate his voice,” says Hawkins. “He always knew how to get an audience in the palm of his hand in seconds—to get them into a story that’s emotionally interesting. Then he’d bring his voice down, so people are hanging on every word.”
Jobs’s inexplicable hold on people got a name, the “reality-distortion field.” It was a sardonic term, because once you left the reality-distortion field all jazzed and ready to put in another 20-hour day, you remembered that the guy could be such a jerk. In 1978 his onetime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a daughter, Lisa. Jobs denied paternity. After a DNA test confirmed he was the father, he still said Lisa wasn’t his. Perhaps he convinced himself by entering his own reality-distortion field.
At Apple, Jobs inspired without inspiring much love. “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Andy Hertzfeld, who helped develop the Macintosh, told Moritz. “The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The people at Apple had a name for that behavior, too: “the shithead-hero roller coaster.” Guy Kawasaki, another early employee who was assigned to recruit outside developers to write software for the new machine, said Jobs once came by his cubicle with an executive Kawasaki didn’t recognize. Jobs asked for Kawasaki’s opinion about some third-party company’s software. Kawasaki replied that he didn’t think it was very good. “And Steve turns to the guy and he says, ‘See, that’s what we think about your product,’” Kawasaki says, laughing. The stranger was the third-party company’s chief executive officer. “I’m sure the CEO did not expect to get ripped like that.”
Everyone at the company knew Jobs was brilliant, but there were too many tirades and humiliations to let him really run the company. Early on, even Jobs knew Apple needed managerial help. By the time the Apple II came out in 1977, Apple already had some adult supervision. Mike Scott, a former National Semiconductor executive, was CEO. Mike Markkula, who had gotten rich at Intel, got the early financing together; he would later serve both as CEO and chairman over the years. Both were among Apple’s first seven employees, and they tried to figure out ways to work with the unpredictable front man. Scott irritated Jobs from the start. They’d argued over who got which employee number and what color the engineers’ workbenches should be. (Jobs won that round—the benches were white.) Apple went public in 1980 [footnote 6]. It had $117 million in revenue and a bureaucratic superstructure like any Fortune 500 company. Woz had mostly checked out by then. The Apple II was his technology, not what came after.
Jobs wanted a computer that was dead simple to use, something where you could just turn it on and the thing worked. He saw the future he was looking for in 1979 on a visit to Silicon Valley’s holy of holies, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. PARC was the copier company’s Bay Area outpost. Researchers had been working on a computer called the Alto, which had a graphical user interface. Jobs saw the prototype and couldn’t believe it. Rather than having to type commands to move a cursor around the screen, you just rolled a little box called a “mouse” and clicked on drop-down menus. He immediately started planning on how he’d replicate the technology. “Ultimately it comes down to taste,” Jobs said in Triumph of the Nerds. “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy. Great artists steal.’” Over the next five years, Jobs frog-marched a rotating cast of Apple designers and engineers to create what would turn into the Macintosh. The machine did blow people’s minds, at least for a while. But there was a problem: Jobs.
Jobs had to have a calla lily. It was 11 p.m. in New York City in December 1983, and he absolutely had to have a calla lily in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. No other flower would do. He also needed a piano. “Not that he played one,” says Andrea Cunningham, who did marketing for Apple. He merely stipulated that his room have one. Cunningham was part of Jobs’s entourage in town for a Fortune magazine photo shoot to promote the Mac, which was going to be introduced just a month later on Jan. 24, 1984. “He was being such a pill,” says Cunningham. “He staunchly refused to do anything the photographer asked.” To lighten the mood, she set up a tape recorder and played music Jobs liked—the Michael Jackson album Thriller. No dice; Jobs refused to pose. Then the song Billie Jean came on. “He snapped to and was a different guy,” she says. “And as soon as the song ended, he reverted back. So I kept rewinding the tape to play over and over so he’d behave.”
It was the usual Steve, micromanaging and playing with people’s heads. Like Cunningham, people developed workarounds. After Mike Scott got fired and Markkula got tired of running the company, Jobs recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo with the now-famous line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” For a time, Sculley’s strategy for dealing with Jobs seemed to be, let Steve be Steve. Jobs was the founder; Sculley was the hired help. “At exec staff meetings, all you had to do was watch the body language,” Jay Elliot, then an Apple executive, told iCon authors Young and Simon. “Steve and John would talk to each other, but everyone else who was supposedly reporting to John spent all their time talking to Steve. He was in charge.”
That relationship continued as Jobs introduced the Mac. It was a spectacular performance that began with the Big-Brother-Is-IBM commercial that ran once, during the 1984 Super Bowl. The 60-second spot, directed by Ridley Scott, showed an Orwellian world of grim conformity. A lone woman in a tank top with a Mac logo sprints through the grayness and throws a hammer through a giant screen, shattering Big Brother’s droning visage.
Jobs followed that up two days later at the Apple annual shareholder meeting. He walked onstage, took a Mac out of a bag—and the Mac itself started talking. “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag…” The show was flawless. Jobs had long since transformed from the fidgeting amateur who was so nervous he wanted to barf. Now he was recognizably Steve Jobs, arbiter of culture and denter of the universe. He was funny, too, which had hardly been a strong point in his presentation skills.
After the post-launch frenzy, Mac sales slowed. Apple’s device was underpowered and didn’t have nearly enough software programs to match Big Blue’s inelegant PC. Apple’s board of directors, especially venture capitalist Arthur Rock, came around to thinking something had to be done about Jobs. “Back then he was uncontrollable,” Rock told Institutional Investor magazine two decades later. “He got ideas in his head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted to do. Being a founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of whether it ended up being good for the company.”
The board told Sculley he had to act. In April he relieved Jobs of day-to-day duties and made him vice-chairman. Then Jobs lost that title, too. At 30, he lost the thing that most mattered to him. “I didn’t see it then,” he would say in 2005, “but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
Starting over, however, turned out to be tougher—much tougher—than Steve Jobs thought.
Footnotes:
1. Total revenue from U.S. music sales, 1999: $14.6 billion. Total revenue from U.S. music sales, 2009: $6.3 billion. The iPod was released on Oct. 24, 2001.
2. Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939 by Stanford classmates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
3. Al Alcorn, who hired Jobs at Atari, designed Pong, the company’s first big success. Founded in 1972, Atari was sold to Time-Warner for $28 million in 1976.
4. In November 2010, an Apple I sold for $212,267 at a Christie’s auction in London.
5. Seeking enlightenment, Jobs traveled to India in 1974 with his Reed College friend Dan Kottke.
6. Since its IPO in 1980, Apple’s stock price has jumped from $22 to $378.25 a share.
Aley is an editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.
FEATURES October 06, 2011, 9:49 AM EDT
Steve Jobs: The Beginning, 1955-1985
The high school loner who figured out what the world wanted from technology
By Jim Aley
The video is close to 35 years old and the picture isn’t great, but it’s obvious Steve Jobs is nervous. He won’t sit still. As the makeup and sound guys in the television studio do the final preparations before the cameras go on, there’s the long-haired nerd—he must be 23, 24—swiveling around in his chair, wearing a jacket and tie and a pair of square wire-frame glasses. He hasn’t done much media, that’s clear to the talent handlers, who try to get him to relax a little with small talk. Jobs isn’t paying attention.
“God! Look at that!” he says, squinting at a monitor and running his hand through his hair, which looks washed for a change. “Look, I’m on television!”
“You’re on TV in New York, too,” says one of the handlers. This studio is probably in San Francisco, though the particulars are lost to history.
“No, no.” Jobs leans forward, and watches another studio person brush his sleeve. “Am I really? Are you serious? God! I was just in New York last week!” More swivels and small talk. Jobs looks up at the lights, hand-combs his hair again, and tells the people fussing around him that he’s ready to throw up. “I’m not joking,” he says. Sip of water. A producer announces he’s ready to roll. Jobs swivels. Forced smile. Hand through hair. “God!”
Knowing what Steve Jobs would become, it’s endearing to watch him babble with stage fright. He had already started a tiny company that is drawing crowds of hobbyists at computer fairs, but he’s decades away from the showman whose product unveilings will become cultural milestones. The music business now comes in two eras: pre-iPod and post-iPod [footnote 1]. Same with mobile and the iPhone, and if history holds, the iPad will mark an epochal split in personal computing. Jobs would claim that he never invented those things; he discovered them. They were always there, someone just needed to “connect the dots,” to put the parts together into a whole no one else seemed to see.
The video fuzzes out and cuts before the interview with the anchor in New York. Jobs probably did fine. Even then, he seemed able to convince anyone of anything. If charm didn’t work, he’d threaten, weep, whatever worked. The engineers and local high school kids he’d talked into working for him could attest to that. The force of will, the uncompromising aesthetic, the mean streak—he already had a reputation in Silicon Valley. But other people had those traits. Connecting the dots into a persona that can create a $350 billion empire out of technological desires the world never knew it had—that required something exceptional.
Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to a pair of unwed graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattah Jandali. They put him up for adoption when he was an infant, and he was taken in by Clara and Paul Jobs, who raised their son in a ranch house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, about three miles from where Apple (AAPL) eventually would put its headquarters.
Young Steve wasn’t easy. He stuck a bobby pin into a wall outlet and had to be taken to a hospital after tasting ant poison. When he was old enough to go to school, his teachers—the ones who bored him, anyway—found him obnoxious and disruptive, when he wasn’t inattentive. In the classroom, he’d set off little bombs and let loose snakes. “I was pretty bored in school,” he told Playboy in 1985, “and I turned into a little terror.”
His classmates mostly thought he was “really strange,” as Mark Wozniak, the younger brother of his future partner Steve Wozniak, once put it. Jobs himself would later tell an interviewer, “I wasn’t a jock. I was a loner for the most part.” One foggy day, a gym teacher had the class do laps on a track. When Jobs reached the far end, obscured from the teacher’s view by the fog, he sat down and watched his classmates puff by. He rejoined the pack the next lap. “He had figured out how he could get away with half the work and still get credit for the whole thing,” a classmate, Bruce Courture, told Jeffrey S. Young in the 1988 Jobs biography The Journey Is the Reward.
Jobs wasn’t lazy. He wanted to absorb as much of the world as possible. But he was choosy, and one thing he chose was electronics. Silicon Valley was buzzing with promise in the 1960s. Lockheed was doing moon-shot work, Hewlett-Packard was already a geek paradise. Engineers were all over the place. Workshops sprouted in garages up and down Crist Drive, and the garage of Paul Jobs, a machinist, was no exception. He kept a spotless workbench and cleared a space for Steve to tinker. “It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up,” Jobs told a Smithsonian Institution historian in 1995. For a smart kid in the Valley, electronics, especially computer electronics, was more than a career choice. In those days, he said, “The best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. … They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents.”
When Jobs was around 12, a neighbor showed him some electronics tricks, such as a microphone that worked without an amplifier. The guy was a ham radio operator as well as an employee of Hewlett-Packard [footnote 2], and Jobs idolized that company and its founders. One day he called William Hewlett himself, about some parts for a frequency counter he was trying to build. Hewlett must have been impressed or at least amused, because he stayed on the phone for 20 minutes. Jobs got the parts he needed—and, a few years later, a summer gig at HP.
Jobs didn’t love just electronics. He read a lot of Shakespeare, listened to a lot of Dylan. This was California in the 1970s, with all the explorations of self implied by that decade and place. By high school he was experimenting on himself. Curious about the mind-expanding possibilities of sleep deprivation, he’d stay up a couple of nights in a row. He smoked pot and hash, and, as he would repeatedly remind employees and reporters over the years, dropped LSD.
When he graduated from Homestead High School in 1972, he declared that he would attend Reed College in Oregon. Reed was known for its mixture of academic rigor and tolerance of counterculture, but it was expensive. His parents were aghast. “We tried to talk him out of it,” Paul Jobs later told Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who wrote The Little Kingdom, an early book about Apple. Steve wouldn’t budge, and his parents gave in. Jobs dropped out of Reed after six months. He didn’t leave right away, though: He stuck around for a year and a half, sleeping on friends’ floors and living off the money he raised by collecting bottles for the deposits. He wandered around campus barefoot, stopping in libraries to read about Zen Buddhism and doing some more bodily experimentation. The teachings of Arnold Ehret fascinated him. Ehret, a 19th century physician from Prussia, believed that good health was a matter of eliminating mucus from the body. The Ehret diet was heavy on figs, nuts, grated horseradish, and honey. That sounded about right to Jobs.
The fruitarian, shoeless Buddhist and mendicant ex-student listened in on classes, too, and was transfixed by one in particular: a course on calligraphy. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating,” Jobs told Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005. He said he eventually combined those calligraphy sessions with computers—beauty with technology, a big connect-the-dots moment.
If he’d had any money while in Oregon, Jobs would probably have headed to Asia to immerse himself in Buddhism. But he didn’t, so he drifted back to the Bay Area and talked his way into a job at Atari [footnote 3], the video game maker. He had no formal technical training, but he clearly knew enough about electronics that Al Alcorn, then Atari’s chief engineer, detected something in the long-haired kid and hired him as a game designer. It was that or call the police, because Jobs wouldn’t leave the lobby until he got work. “He looked pretty grubby,” Alcorn later told Moritz. “He was talking a mile a minute and claimed to be working on the HP35 calculator. He said he could turn the HP45 into a stopwatch. He implied he was working for HP. I was impressed, said, ‘hey, fine,’ and didn’t bother to check.”
Jobs’s fellow employees couldn’t stand him; he was an arrogant weirdo who smelled funny. The fruitarian diet, Jobs was convinced, purged his body of impurities and thus eliminated the need to bathe. Rather than fire him, Alcorn had Jobs come in after hours so the other employees didn’t have to deal with him.
The night shift had its advantages. Jobs remained in touch with a guy who’d graduated from Homestead High a few years before him, a hardcore nerd named Steve Wozniak. Woz had a job at HP and serious engineering talent. He also was addicted to video games, and Jobs let him into the Atari offices to play late into the night. In return, Woz helped Jobs with projects. One was an assignment that came from Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell (who later founded the Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant chain). Bushnell asked Jobs to figure out a design for the game Break-Out, where players would use a Pong-like paddle to smash a wall of bricks. Unbeknownst to Bushnell or Alcorn, Jobs turned around and made a deal with Woz: Do the coding, and Jobs would split the $600 completion fee with him. Woz did the work, and Jobs got his money and gave Woz $300—his “half.” Problem was, Jobs got $1,000 as his fee. Woz didn’t find out about Jobs’s lie until a year later, according to iCon, the 2005 book by Young and William L. Simon. When he did find out, he was so hurt he cried.
They were an unusual pair who shared a love of electronics. Woz was the tech genius and Jobs the brash idea man. They’d first bonded at the Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of engineers and hobbyists who would gather to swap parts and ideas. An early Woz-Jobs production was a “blue box”—a hacker’s term for a device that taps into the phone system to make free long-distance calls. It worked. They prank-called the Vatican and realized they could make money selling blue boxes handmade by Woz. It was amazing: Build a little machine and fake out the phone company and its billions of dollars of equipment. “That was an incredible lesson,” Jobs said in the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxes.”
Wozniak began putting together a contraption that he and Jobs could show off to their Homebrew buddies. The Apple I [footnote 4] was little more than a motherboard. Whoever bought one—Woz and Jobs sold 50 to a local hobby store—had to supply a case to hold the circuitry, not to mention a keyboard and monitor. It may have been primitive, but it was the proof of concept the two needed. They knew they could build a better computer, and Jobs knew people would buy it.
Jobs discovered that he liked business. But he hated it, too, or at least feared the potential of the Establishment-loving monster he’d become if he loved it too much. He couldn’t quite square his business self with his hippie-fruitarian self. He did make it to India [footnote 5] while still at Atari. With little money and no shoes, he found a baba, shaved his head, and came down with scabies and dysentery. The poverty in India wasn’t the lifestyle choice some hippies were making back home; these people were just plain poor. That experience dispelled any notions that the truth necessarily lay in the mud of the Indian rainy season.
Yet even as Woz struggled to build enough computers to keep up with demand, Jobs yearned to return to Asia and live a monastic life of contemplation. This time, Japan called to him. His friend Dan Kottke sent Jobs a letter making fun of him: “After performing an extensive prana to the lotus feet of suchness, gaze lovingly upon picture with cosmic thoughts of cosmic relevance and profundity until phone rings. Answer phone, haggle furiously, and refuse to sell for less than $2.3 million.” Jobs consulted Kobin Chino, a Japanese Zen master in Berkeley he met after he got back from India. Should Jobs head to Japan or descend into business? Chino, who barely spoke English, observed the dramatic soul-searching and, like Kottke, found it funny. So obvious: Stick with the computers, the Zen master said.
Woz and Jobs officially launched Apple Computer on April Fool’s Day, 1976.
In the late 1970s, computer makers were popping up much the way car companies did in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. Osborne, Commodore, and RadioShack were all selling what were becoming known as “personal computers.” Like the Apple I, they were made for hobbyists. They were hard to use and didn’t really do much. The Altair, the earliest, pretty much just lit up little lights once you laboriously connected a bunch of switches on the logic board.
Jobs wanted the next computer to be something different—an appliance, something anyone could use. That was the Apple II, which came out a year after the Apple I. He hammered at his message as the company grew: Computers should be tools. Trip Hawkins, one of Apple’s first 50 employees, remembers Jobs obsessing over an article he’d read in a science magazine about the locomotive efficiency of animal species. “The most efficient species was the condor, which could fly for miles on only a few calories,” Hawkins says. “Humans were way down the list. But then if you put a man on a bicycle, he was instantly twice as efficient as the condor.” The computer, Jobs said, was a “bicycle for the mind.”
“That line was so good it became part of his routine,” says Hawkins. “We ended up creating an ad out of it.”
Jobs had another message: These tools had to be beautiful. The Apple II did look great, for then: It had a case and keyboard and fit easily on a desk. Jobs’s aesthetic suffused everything, even the circuit boards. He insisted the circuits be redone to make the lines straighter.
The Apple II was a hit that powered the company for the next seven years, through an initial public offering in 1980 and all the way to the release of the Macintosh. Jobs became a star. His hair was still long, but it was styled. He wore suits. He dated celebrities: Joan Baez (who was 14 years his senior, but who once was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend) and Diane Keaton (nine years his senior; no obvious Dylan connection). He talked about his company as an anti-Establishment force, waging a crusade to battle the faceless archenemy, which back then was IBM. “You always need to have bad guys and good guys in America,” says Regis McKenna, the legendary Silicon Valley public-relations man who worked with Apple beginning in the late 1970s. “Apple was thumbing its nose at this big world of monolithic standards. It became a rebel. It became a symbol of fast growth, youth.”
Jobs was always charismatic, but as Apple grew, his stage presence became mesmerizing. “He knew how to modulate his voice,” says Hawkins. “He always knew how to get an audience in the palm of his hand in seconds—to get them into a story that’s emotionally interesting. Then he’d bring his voice down, so people are hanging on every word.”
Jobs’s inexplicable hold on people got a name, the “reality-distortion field.” It was a sardonic term, because once you left the reality-distortion field all jazzed and ready to put in another 20-hour day, you remembered that the guy could be such a jerk. In 1978 his onetime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a daughter, Lisa. Jobs denied paternity. After a DNA test confirmed he was the father, he still said Lisa wasn’t his. Perhaps he convinced himself by entering his own reality-distortion field.
At Apple, Jobs inspired without inspiring much love. “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Andy Hertzfeld, who helped develop the Macintosh, told Moritz. “The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The people at Apple had a name for that behavior, too: “the shithead-hero roller coaster.” Guy Kawasaki, another early employee who was assigned to recruit outside developers to write software for the new machine, said Jobs once came by his cubicle with an executive Kawasaki didn’t recognize. Jobs asked for Kawasaki’s opinion about some third-party company’s software. Kawasaki replied that he didn’t think it was very good. “And Steve turns to the guy and he says, ‘See, that’s what we think about your product,’” Kawasaki says, laughing. The stranger was the third-party company’s chief executive officer. “I’m sure the CEO did not expect to get ripped like that.”
Everyone at the company knew Jobs was brilliant, but there were too many tirades and humiliations to let him really run the company. Early on, even Jobs knew Apple needed managerial help. By the time the Apple II came out in 1977, Apple already had some adult supervision. Mike Scott, a former National Semiconductor executive, was CEO. Mike Markkula, who had gotten rich at Intel, got the early financing together; he would later serve both as CEO and chairman over the years. Both were among Apple’s first seven employees, and they tried to figure out ways to work with the unpredictable front man. Scott irritated Jobs from the start. They’d argued over who got which employee number and what color the engineers’ workbenches should be. (Jobs won that round—the benches were white.) Apple went public in 1980 [footnote 6]. It had $117 million in revenue and a bureaucratic superstructure like any Fortune 500 company. Woz had mostly checked out by then. The Apple II was his technology, not what came after.
Jobs wanted a computer that was dead simple to use, something where you could just turn it on and the thing worked. He saw the future he was looking for in 1979 on a visit to Silicon Valley’s holy of holies, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. PARC was the copier company’s Bay Area outpost. Researchers had been working on a computer called the Alto, which had a graphical user interface. Jobs saw the prototype and couldn’t believe it. Rather than having to type commands to move a cursor around the screen, you just rolled a little box called a “mouse” and clicked on drop-down menus. He immediately started planning on how he’d replicate the technology. “Ultimately it comes down to taste,” Jobs said in Triumph of the Nerds. “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy. Great artists steal.’” Over the next five years, Jobs frog-marched a rotating cast of Apple designers and engineers to create what would turn into the Macintosh. The machine did blow people’s minds, at least for a while. But there was a problem: Jobs.
Jobs had to have a calla lily. It was 11 p.m. in New York City in December 1983, and he absolutely had to have a calla lily in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. No other flower would do. He also needed a piano. “Not that he played one,” says Andrea Cunningham, who did marketing for Apple. He merely stipulated that his room have one. Cunningham was part of Jobs’s entourage in town for a Fortune magazine photo shoot to promote the Mac, which was going to be introduced just a month later on Jan. 24, 1984. “He was being such a pill,” says Cunningham. “He staunchly refused to do anything the photographer asked.” To lighten the mood, she set up a tape recorder and played music Jobs liked—the Michael Jackson album Thriller. No dice; Jobs refused to pose. Then the song Billie Jean came on. “He snapped to and was a different guy,” she says. “And as soon as the song ended, he reverted back. So I kept rewinding the tape to play over and over so he’d behave.”
It was the usual Steve, micromanaging and playing with people’s heads. Like Cunningham, people developed workarounds. After Mike Scott got fired and Markkula got tired of running the company, Jobs recruited John Sculley from PepsiCo with the now-famous line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” For a time, Sculley’s strategy for dealing with Jobs seemed to be, let Steve be Steve. Jobs was the founder; Sculley was the hired help. “At exec staff meetings, all you had to do was watch the body language,” Jay Elliot, then an Apple executive, told iCon authors Young and Simon. “Steve and John would talk to each other, but everyone else who was supposedly reporting to John spent all their time talking to Steve. He was in charge.”
That relationship continued as Jobs introduced the Mac. It was a spectacular performance that began with the Big-Brother-Is-IBM commercial that ran once, during the 1984 Super Bowl. The 60-second spot, directed by Ridley Scott, showed an Orwellian world of grim conformity. A lone woman in a tank top with a Mac logo sprints through the grayness and throws a hammer through a giant screen, shattering Big Brother’s droning visage.
Jobs followed that up two days later at the Apple annual shareholder meeting. He walked onstage, took a Mac out of a bag—and the Mac itself started talking. “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag…” The show was flawless. Jobs had long since transformed from the fidgeting amateur who was so nervous he wanted to barf. Now he was recognizably Steve Jobs, arbiter of culture and denter of the universe. He was funny, too, which had hardly been a strong point in his presentation skills.
After the post-launch frenzy, Mac sales slowed. Apple’s device was underpowered and didn’t have nearly enough software programs to match Big Blue’s inelegant PC. Apple’s board of directors, especially venture capitalist Arthur Rock, came around to thinking something had to be done about Jobs. “Back then he was uncontrollable,” Rock told Institutional Investor magazine two decades later. “He got ideas in his head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted to do. Being a founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of whether it ended up being good for the company.”
The board told Sculley he had to act. In April he relieved Jobs of day-to-day duties and made him vice-chairman. Then Jobs lost that title, too. At 30, he lost the thing that most mattered to him. “I didn’t see it then,” he would say in 2005, “but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
Starting over, however, turned out to be tougher—much tougher—than Steve Jobs thought.
Footnotes:
1. Total revenue from U.S. music sales, 1999: $14.6 billion. Total revenue from U.S. music sales, 2009: $6.3 billion. The iPod was released on Oct. 24, 2001.
2. Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939 by Stanford classmates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
3. Al Alcorn, who hired Jobs at Atari, designed Pong, the company’s first big success. Founded in 1972, Atari was sold to Time-Warner for $28 million in 1976.
4. In November 2010, an Apple I sold for $212,267 at a Christie’s auction in London.
5. Seeking enlightenment, Jobs traveled to India in 1974 with his Reed College friend Dan Kottke.
6. Since its IPO in 1980, Apple’s stock price has jumped from $22 to $378.25 a share.
Aley is an editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.
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Steve Jobs: The Wilderness, 1985-1997
Cast out from Apple, Jobs tried—and failed—to make a different kind of computer
By Peter Burrows
On May 31, 1985, a few hours after he had been stripped of all authority at the company he had co-founded, Steve Jobs sat bewildered and puffy-eyed on a mattress in his nearly furniture-less 30-room mansion. Apple Computer had subsumed his entire adult life. He was 30 and unmarried. With no one to come home to, Jobs spent hours that evening talking to whichever of his friends picked up the phone. He sounded desperate enough that former Apple (AAPL) executive Mike Murray raced over to the mansion. “I didn’t think he should be alone,” says Murray.
A month later, Jobs had recovered sufficiently to travel with a girlfriend through Russia and Italy, flirt with California’s Democratic Party bosses about a possible Senate run, and, after a conversation with Nobel laureate Paul Berg [footnote 1] about the need for more powerful computers for science students, muse about creating a new kind of computer company. In September, Jobs announced that he was quitting Apple and its board, where his role was almost entirely ceremonial, to start NeXT Computer. NeXT machines would power the world’s top brains by simplifying powerful UNIX computers for the higher education market. That was the plan, anyway.
Despite promises not to compete with Apple, Jobs wooed some of Apple’s best managers, including Bud Tribble, who’d led development of the Macintosh operating system; education market chief Dan’l Lewin; and Susan Barnes, a graphic artist who had created many of the Mac’s famous icons. He either called his targets from the remote office to which he’d been banished or invited them for long neighborhood walks, where he made the NeXT pitch. Jobs ended up landing six recruits, who joined him most days that September at his mansion for brainstorming sessions and meals prepared by a married couple, both chefs, who lived in Jobs’s guest cottage. Nothing at these meetings was put on paper. Jobs knew he was daring Apple to sue him—and Apple did just that a few weeks after NeXT launched, accusing Jobs of “nefarious” raiding of Apple staffers who were armed with trade secrets. The company pulled the suit a few days after filing rather than risk revealing trade secrets in the discovery process.
Jobs had sold $14 million of his $100 million Apple stake. (He would soon sell the rest.) He poured most of it into making NeXT look less like a startup than an immediate Apple competitor. Millions went into the construction of a state-of-the-art factory [footnote 2] in Fremont, Calif., so posh that Jobs hosted dinners there. It would pay for itself, provided NeXT could sell more than 150,000 of the workstations it planned to offer each year. He also rented airy office space in a Palo Alto building that had an I.M. Pei-designed stairway, [footnote 3] and he loaded the place up with $10,000 sofas and $5,000 chairs. Famed graphic designer Paul Rand received a $100,000 fee to create the company’s logo.
NeXT had style in abundance, and it had funding. Electronic Data Systems (EDS) founder H. Ross Perot invested $20 million, and Canon later put in $100 million. What it lacked was discipline. Apple’s 21st century dominance has been built on a limited product line and Jobs’s insistence that Apple use only proven outside technologies. At NeXT, by contrast, Jobs crammed the Hartmut Esslinger-designed cube-shaped computer with every shiny new toy he could find. There was an Ethernet port for easy networking; a microphone and speech-processing software; a patented, hard-to-manufacture monitor stand; and a magneto-optical drive he predicted would be faster and cheaper than a floppy. The result was a computer that cost $10,000 to make—and wasn’t worth the price. “We had 350 employees,” recalls Chris MacAskill, who ran developer relations for NeXT. “And 349 didn’t want to bet the company on that stupid magneto-optical drive.”
Jobs received ample feedback that his strategy was as muddled as his product vision. Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz sparred with Jobs about software. NeXT didn’t run the Microsoft Office suite. Instead it relied on a handful of companies, such as Schwartz’s Lighthouse, to make knock-off apps. Jobs wanted the software guys to sell their wares for $99, similar to PC packages at the time. “When you sell your computer at PC prices, I’ll give you PC pricing on my software,” Schwartz told him, before pricing Lighthouse software for NeXT at $1,000. According to former NeXT managers including MacAskill, Lighthouse ended up being one of only a handful of software firms to make money from its NeXT products.
If Jobs knew NeXT was a loser, he rarely let on. He remained demanding, confident, and grandiose. Asked to deliver the keynote speech at a computer trade show at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, Jobs told MacAskill to ship out Jobs’s own desk—complete with the vase and red rose he always kept there—for him to sit at onstage. He insisted that the desk be placed at a 28-degree angle, to match the angle of Rand’s box-shaped logo, which was tipped to one side. A few minutes before the curtains opened, MacAskill begged Jobs not to introduce a new Lotus spreadsheet that hadn’t been cleared by Lotus. “Fine,” Jobs said, “then you do the speech,” and walked off “only to return as the curtain opened.” MacAskill says he and everyone else put up with the volatility and withering personal insults because “we really thought we had the chance to change the world.”
The hopes of the NeXT team would remain just that, however. The seeds of Jobs’s renaissance actually trace back to a different source. While Jobs was still at Apple, he and Alan Kay, a technologist at the company, took a limo to visit a small special-effects outfit in Marin County owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Lucas was going through a divorce and looking to spin off the company, which would come to be known as Pixar. It aspired to create the world’s first feature-length animated movie made entirely on computers. Given the state of computing power at the time, the goal was years away, but Jobs left the meeting convinced that Apple should buy Lucas’s company to help extend its lead in graphics.
Following his ouster from Apple, Jobs made a $5 million offer. Pixar founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith thought it was too low, and worried that Jobs was more interested in computers than movies—and more focused on repairing his legacy than supporting their dreams. “We didn’t want to be the first woman after the divorce,” Catmull later explained to staffers.
Catmull and Smith instead pursued deals with SGI (SGI), Microsoft (MSFT), and EDS, then a subsidiary of General Motors (GM). None of them worked out. (GM’s joint bid with Philips Electronics was all but inked, but fell through when EDS founder and future NeXT investor Perot was booted from GM’s board.) In the end, Jobs bought Pixar for $10 million—roughly a tenth of the opening weekend box office for 2010′s Toy Story 3 and 0.13 percent of the $7.4 billion Walt Disney (DIS) would pay for Pixar [footnote 4] in 2006.
Jobs’s initial approach to running Pixar mirrored his approach to NeXT. The suspicions of Catmull and Smith were correct: Jobs wasn’t that interested in making movies. Rather than special effects, Jobs focused on a corporate-sales business, which he believed was more vital to the company’s future. He positioned Pixar to sell $150,000 computers loaded with Pixar software to corporate graphics departments—and gave the cash-strapped company $100,000 to hire Esslinger’s Frog Design to design the machine. Jobs indulged former Disney animator John Lasseter by forking over a few hundred thousand dollars a year to create three-minute shorts—Luxo Jr., Red’s Dream, and Tin Toy, in which metal objects such as lamps, unicycles, and drummer-boy toys came alive. The shorts wowed the crowd at the annual graphics industry convention each year, even if Jobs remained somewhat indifferent to them.
By 1990, Jobs and co-founder Smith were warring for Pixar’s soul. At a board meeting that year, after screaming at each other from just inches apart like an umpire and manager, Smith tried to grab a whiteboard marker from Jobs. “You know how Jobs loves to control that whiteboard, but I’d had enough,” says Smith, who says Jobs began making fun of his Southern accent. “He was street-fighting. It was ugly.” Smith left less than a year later, when Jobs O.K.’d his plan to use a Pixar technology to create a new graphics company. Then Jobs wrote him out of Pixar’s history, says Smith. You won’t find any mention of him on the company’s website. “It’s all true—the good and the bad,” says Smith of working with Jobs. “Even if we don’t like each other, he financed us when nobody else would.”
For a while it appeared that both of Jobs’s new companies would fail. When he was finally ready to unveil his first NeXT prototypes in October 1988, Jobs pumped up expectations by renting out San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. The machine played a duet with one of the symphony’s violinists. The first NeXT wouldn’t go on sale until a year later, and when it did, no amount of showmanship could distract from its $6,500 price—which was many thousands more than the price target in the original NeXT business plan. (Jobs never made the mistake of pre-announcing a product again.)
Jobs tried to find more customers by signing distribution deals with IBM (IBM) and Businessland, a chain of computer stores, and releasing a new 1990 model priced at $5,000 that at least nodded to consumer needs with a traditional floppy drive. By 1992 key staffers, including Tribble and hardware engineering chief Rich Page, were leaving. At one board meeting around this time, Perot [footnote 5] was discussing how NeXT needed to do a better job listening to consumers. Jobs walked out on him. “Did the CEO of this company just walk out on me?” asked Perot, according to a former NeXT executive. “Does that mean I get my $20 million back?” NeXT kept Perot’s money but lost him from the board. He resigned in June 1992. (Perot did not respond to requests for comment.)
The situation at Pixar was just as dire—and financially worse for Jobs. Without a steady source of revenue, he was forced to write more than $40 million in personal checks to keep the business afloat. “It was not an insignificant portion of my net worth,” [footnote 6] he told BusinessWeek in 1998. “There were times that we all despaired, but fortunately not all at the same time.”
What changed everything was not Jobs’s intuitive sense of the market nor his vision as a product guy but a cowboy and an astronaut. After more than a decade of annual treks to Disney’s headquarters in Burbank, Pixar had pushed the state of the art to the point that it finally landed a three-film production contract in 1991. By early 1994 it was clear that the company’s first movie, Toy Story, was going to be extraordinary.
Jobs wasn’t born to the movie business, but he’d surrounded himself with creative people during his days at Apple and, as he explained in 1998, it merely took time to adapt that experience from one discipline to another. “Hollywood and Silicon Valley exist in the same state, but they have absolutely no idea about each other,” said Jobs. “It’s hard work [making good movies]. That’s why so much of it isn’t any good—just like with software.” Jobs would also win respect for knowing the limits of his expertise. After a few unsuccessful attempts to stick his fingers in the movie-making process, he took the hint from Pixar staffers and agreed to stay out of all story meetings, according to several former Pixar staffers. Former Walt Disney Studios head Joe Roth remembers that, before Toy Story came out, Jobs argued it should be marketed as the first fully computerized movie. Roth and others disagreed. “I said we’re going to sell it as a great story, and let people be wowed by the tech,” Roth told BusinessWeek. “And you know what? He said O.K.”
In the weeks before Toy Story‘s Nov. 22, 1995, release, Pixar was more than $4 million in debt, with revenues of just $10 million, according to SEC filings. The company was tiny. Only the advance buzz about Toy Story gave Pixar’s future any shape. Former Pixar Marketing Vice-President Pamela Kerwin says that Larry Sonsini, Jobs’s friend and the chairman of Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told her and other Pixar executives that Jobs’s idea of an initial public offering at that point was delusional. Yet for the first time in years, Jobs was telling people he felt he had a great product in his back pocket—and one that wasn’t aimed at the suits and academics he’d targeted with the NeXT cube, but at the upscale, mainstream consumers he’d won over at Apple.
Jobs told Goldman Sachs’s bankers to time a Pixar IPO around the debut of the movie. Ten days after Toy Story opened to long lines and soaring reviews, Pixar went public at $22 a share. When the stock closed at $33 that afternoon, Jobs celebrated by sampling 150-year-old balsamic vinegar. With an 80 percent stake in the company, he was a paper billionaire. He called his friend Larry Ellison to say he’d made it to the B-club.
Suddenly, Jobs was no longer just a computer guy. There were changes in his personal life, too. In 1991 he married Laurene Powell, whom he had met while preparing to give a talk at Stanford Business School. Avi Tevanian, NeXT’s software chief, and another executive arranged for a low-key bachelor party at a well-known San Francisco eatery. After they sat down, Jobs decided they needed to go to a nearby spot that made only soufflés. The wedding, a small affair held at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, was officiated by a Buddhist monk. The newlyweds moved to Palo Alto and had their first child, Reed, named for the college Jobs attended but never graduated from. Jobs soon welcomed his estranged daughter, Lisa [footnote 7], back into his house, as well.
By all accounts, Jobs had entered a contented middle age, the Sturm und Drang of his Apple days now fading into history. During an appearance to promote Toy Story‘s DVD release on Oct. 30, 1996, Jobs was asked by Charlie Rose whether Apple could turn itself around. “It’s just a spectator sport for me now,” said Jobs. Rose didn’t buy it; he bet Jobs that he’d be doing something in computing within five years. “Oh, I tend to stay with what I start until somebody kicks me out.” Jobs wasn’t truly indifferent about Apple, of course. He told friends that the company was dying. When Ellison explored purchasing Apple in 1996, Jobs told BusinessWeek that he tried to talk him out of it. “I thought he’d lose his shirt.”
NeXT wasn’t performing any better. With money rapidly disappearing, Jobs had announced in early 1993 that NeXT would get out of the costly hardware business. Instead it would license its NeXTStep software, a variant of the powerful UNIX operating system that could work with many processors and more effectively handle sound and graphics. The move was long overdue, but according to Tevanian, Jobs lost interest once there were no more sleek machines to make. By 1995, Jobs told a family friend that he was prepared to let NeXT go bankrupt.
In 1996, a marketing manager at NeXT took it upon himself to call Apple to gauge its interest in NeXTStep. It was an open secret in Silicon Valley that Apple had given up on its own crumbling operating system and was in talks to buy tiny software maker Be Inc. so it could start fresh, replacing MacOS with BeOS. Jobs had no idea about any of this. He found out only when he happened to call a NeXT colleague at the same moment that a team from Apple arrived for a NeXTStep demo, say former NeXT executives.
It did not take him long to capitalize. On Dec. 2, 1996, Jobs demonstrated NeXTStep to Apple CEO Gil Amelio in a conference room at Palo Alto’s Garden Court Hotel. “He turned on the charm that day,” says former Apple CFO Fred Anderson. Apple ended up paying $430 million for NeXT, well above the $185 million price Be CEO Jean-Louis Gasse had agreed to sell his company for. Upon hearing the news, Gasse fumed to BusinessWeek that “Steve cast a homoerotic spell on Amelio and the Apple board,” though he says now, “It was the best thing for the world.” On the night of the deal, Jobs said: “I’ve been gone for 11 years. Apple’s a very different place, and I’m a very different person.”
The Jobs who returned to Apple’s Cupertino campus for the first time in a decade initially betrayed no signs of wanting to run the company. Although Apple dug up his original ID badge, he rarely came into the office, choosing instead to invite Apple executives for walks around Palo Alto. But as weeks passed he couldn’t hide his disapproval of Amelio’s strategy for keeping Apple out of bankruptcy. An executive remembers Jobs walking out of one meeting and calling Amelio “a bozo.” When Apple’s board ousted Amelio in July 1997, Jobs at first refused to take the job full-time, choosing to call himself “the iCEO,” for “interim.” He only dropped the “interim” in early 2000, when the board gave him a Gulfstream V jet and options for 10 million Apple shares which later turned out to have been improperly backdated, to artificially raise their value to the share price at an earlier date.
His first moments back at the helm certainly seemed like “Old Steve.” Minutes after Amelio gave his goodbye to the executive staff, Jobs—clad in shorts and scruffy as a beach bum—walked in and swiveled in his chair at the head of the board table. Rhetorically, he asked the group why Apple was in such poor shape. Before anyone could answer, he roared: “The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!” Amelio had a plan to vastly simplify Apple’s product line, but by the end of the day Jobs had done that and more. From then on the focus was on birthing the iMac, the product that saved Apple from bankruptcy, and before long he had O.K.’d work that led to the iPod, the product that changed the company’s trajectory for good.
Despite the occasional outbursts, a wiser, more effective Jobs was rapidly emerging. While NeXT veterans such as software chief Tevanian and hardware maven Jon Rubinstein were already on Apple’s executive staff, Jobs identified and promoted Eddy Cue out of customer service to build Apple’s online store. (Cue has run iTunes since its 2001 inception.) Jobs also discovered the design bunker of Jonathan Ive, which was located across the street from Apple’s main Infinite Loop [footnote 8] campus—a sure sign that it was seen as a lower priority than other corporate functions. In short order, Jobs moved Ive close to his own office and gave him cutting-edge equipment, his own kitchen, and hefty security to ensure secrecy.
What Apple seemed to have in Jobs 2.0 was all of the features that made the young Steve Jobs great—charisma, vision, rigorous standards—with some new functionality, too. Perot had counseled that the only way investors would let him pursue cool things was by delivering consistent profits, so Jobs became the business world’s most unapologetic sandbagger; Apple has beaten Wall Street’s expectations by 30 percent, on average, since 2006, according to Bloomberg data. If he wasn’t softer, Jobs was at least more considerate; he ended company speeches with thanks to employees and their families for putting up with the grueling hours.
And the simple elegance of his product vision was also coming into focus. A few months after taking over, Jobs called operations chief James M. McCluney and hardware engineering chief Rubinstein into his office and dramatically lifted a Styrofoam model of what would be the iMac out of a bowling bag. The duo reported back a few weeks later that it wouldn’t work, because they couldn’t find room for a floppy drive. Hardly missing a beat, Jobs said, “No worries. Disk drives are over the hill. CDs are going to get so cheap that no one will miss [floppies].” Says McCluney: “It was remarkable. It was a snap judgment.”
Before Jobs could begin wowing consumers and delivering profits, he needed some help from a once-hated rival. Microsoft was thinking of discontinuing the Mac version of its Office suite of apps—a move that might well kill the already shrinking Mac business. Amelio had already begun talks with Microsoft that were designed to win huge patent royalty payments. Jobs—the same emotional enfant terrible of years past—had a better idea, though many of his loyalists would initially think he’d sold his soul to the devil.
Footnotes:
1. Berg won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for his study of the biochemistry of nucleic acids.
2. A 1990 Fortune article reported that robots outnumbered people 13 to 5 on the NeXT production line. Jobs said, “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.”
3. The U.S. Patent Office shows two design patents for glass staircases under Jobs’s name; the staircases are a prominent feature at Apple Stores.
4. The highest-grossing Pixar film was Toy Story 3, which hit theaters in June 2010. It took in $1.1 billion worldwide.
5. In a 1988 BusinessWeek interview, Perot recalled introducing Jobs to the King of Spain at a party in San Francisco. Jobs sold the monarch a computer.
6. Jobs’s net worth as of September 2011 was an estimated $7 billion.
7. Apple introduced the Lisa computer, named for Jobs’s daughter, in 1983. Officially, Lisa stood for “local integrated software architecture.” It retailed for $9,995.
8. Apple has unveiled plans to build a new campus on a nearby 175-acre site. The main building, which is in the shape of a ring, will house up to 13,000 employees.
Burrows is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in San Francisco.
Cast out from Apple, Jobs tried—and failed—to make a different kind of computer
By Peter Burrows
On May 31, 1985, a few hours after he had been stripped of all authority at the company he had co-founded, Steve Jobs sat bewildered and puffy-eyed on a mattress in his nearly furniture-less 30-room mansion. Apple Computer had subsumed his entire adult life. He was 30 and unmarried. With no one to come home to, Jobs spent hours that evening talking to whichever of his friends picked up the phone. He sounded desperate enough that former Apple (AAPL) executive Mike Murray raced over to the mansion. “I didn’t think he should be alone,” says Murray.
A month later, Jobs had recovered sufficiently to travel with a girlfriend through Russia and Italy, flirt with California’s Democratic Party bosses about a possible Senate run, and, after a conversation with Nobel laureate Paul Berg [footnote 1] about the need for more powerful computers for science students, muse about creating a new kind of computer company. In September, Jobs announced that he was quitting Apple and its board, where his role was almost entirely ceremonial, to start NeXT Computer. NeXT machines would power the world’s top brains by simplifying powerful UNIX computers for the higher education market. That was the plan, anyway.
Despite promises not to compete with Apple, Jobs wooed some of Apple’s best managers, including Bud Tribble, who’d led development of the Macintosh operating system; education market chief Dan’l Lewin; and Susan Barnes, a graphic artist who had created many of the Mac’s famous icons. He either called his targets from the remote office to which he’d been banished or invited them for long neighborhood walks, where he made the NeXT pitch. Jobs ended up landing six recruits, who joined him most days that September at his mansion for brainstorming sessions and meals prepared by a married couple, both chefs, who lived in Jobs’s guest cottage. Nothing at these meetings was put on paper. Jobs knew he was daring Apple to sue him—and Apple did just that a few weeks after NeXT launched, accusing Jobs of “nefarious” raiding of Apple staffers who were armed with trade secrets. The company pulled the suit a few days after filing rather than risk revealing trade secrets in the discovery process.
Jobs had sold $14 million of his $100 million Apple stake. (He would soon sell the rest.) He poured most of it into making NeXT look less like a startup than an immediate Apple competitor. Millions went into the construction of a state-of-the-art factory [footnote 2] in Fremont, Calif., so posh that Jobs hosted dinners there. It would pay for itself, provided NeXT could sell more than 150,000 of the workstations it planned to offer each year. He also rented airy office space in a Palo Alto building that had an I.M. Pei-designed stairway, [footnote 3] and he loaded the place up with $10,000 sofas and $5,000 chairs. Famed graphic designer Paul Rand received a $100,000 fee to create the company’s logo.
NeXT had style in abundance, and it had funding. Electronic Data Systems (EDS) founder H. Ross Perot invested $20 million, and Canon later put in $100 million. What it lacked was discipline. Apple’s 21st century dominance has been built on a limited product line and Jobs’s insistence that Apple use only proven outside technologies. At NeXT, by contrast, Jobs crammed the Hartmut Esslinger-designed cube-shaped computer with every shiny new toy he could find. There was an Ethernet port for easy networking; a microphone and speech-processing software; a patented, hard-to-manufacture monitor stand; and a magneto-optical drive he predicted would be faster and cheaper than a floppy. The result was a computer that cost $10,000 to make—and wasn’t worth the price. “We had 350 employees,” recalls Chris MacAskill, who ran developer relations for NeXT. “And 349 didn’t want to bet the company on that stupid magneto-optical drive.”
Jobs received ample feedback that his strategy was as muddled as his product vision. Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz sparred with Jobs about software. NeXT didn’t run the Microsoft Office suite. Instead it relied on a handful of companies, such as Schwartz’s Lighthouse, to make knock-off apps. Jobs wanted the software guys to sell their wares for $99, similar to PC packages at the time. “When you sell your computer at PC prices, I’ll give you PC pricing on my software,” Schwartz told him, before pricing Lighthouse software for NeXT at $1,000. According to former NeXT managers including MacAskill, Lighthouse ended up being one of only a handful of software firms to make money from its NeXT products.
If Jobs knew NeXT was a loser, he rarely let on. He remained demanding, confident, and grandiose. Asked to deliver the keynote speech at a computer trade show at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, Jobs told MacAskill to ship out Jobs’s own desk—complete with the vase and red rose he always kept there—for him to sit at onstage. He insisted that the desk be placed at a 28-degree angle, to match the angle of Rand’s box-shaped logo, which was tipped to one side. A few minutes before the curtains opened, MacAskill begged Jobs not to introduce a new Lotus spreadsheet that hadn’t been cleared by Lotus. “Fine,” Jobs said, “then you do the speech,” and walked off “only to return as the curtain opened.” MacAskill says he and everyone else put up with the volatility and withering personal insults because “we really thought we had the chance to change the world.”
The hopes of the NeXT team would remain just that, however. The seeds of Jobs’s renaissance actually trace back to a different source. While Jobs was still at Apple, he and Alan Kay, a technologist at the company, took a limo to visit a small special-effects outfit in Marin County owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Lucas was going through a divorce and looking to spin off the company, which would come to be known as Pixar. It aspired to create the world’s first feature-length animated movie made entirely on computers. Given the state of computing power at the time, the goal was years away, but Jobs left the meeting convinced that Apple should buy Lucas’s company to help extend its lead in graphics.
Following his ouster from Apple, Jobs made a $5 million offer. Pixar founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith thought it was too low, and worried that Jobs was more interested in computers than movies—and more focused on repairing his legacy than supporting their dreams. “We didn’t want to be the first woman after the divorce,” Catmull later explained to staffers.
Catmull and Smith instead pursued deals with SGI (SGI), Microsoft (MSFT), and EDS, then a subsidiary of General Motors (GM). None of them worked out. (GM’s joint bid with Philips Electronics was all but inked, but fell through when EDS founder and future NeXT investor Perot was booted from GM’s board.) In the end, Jobs bought Pixar for $10 million—roughly a tenth of the opening weekend box office for 2010′s Toy Story 3 and 0.13 percent of the $7.4 billion Walt Disney (DIS) would pay for Pixar [footnote 4] in 2006.
Jobs’s initial approach to running Pixar mirrored his approach to NeXT. The suspicions of Catmull and Smith were correct: Jobs wasn’t that interested in making movies. Rather than special effects, Jobs focused on a corporate-sales business, which he believed was more vital to the company’s future. He positioned Pixar to sell $150,000 computers loaded with Pixar software to corporate graphics departments—and gave the cash-strapped company $100,000 to hire Esslinger’s Frog Design to design the machine. Jobs indulged former Disney animator John Lasseter by forking over a few hundred thousand dollars a year to create three-minute shorts—Luxo Jr., Red’s Dream, and Tin Toy, in which metal objects such as lamps, unicycles, and drummer-boy toys came alive. The shorts wowed the crowd at the annual graphics industry convention each year, even if Jobs remained somewhat indifferent to them.
By 1990, Jobs and co-founder Smith were warring for Pixar’s soul. At a board meeting that year, after screaming at each other from just inches apart like an umpire and manager, Smith tried to grab a whiteboard marker from Jobs. “You know how Jobs loves to control that whiteboard, but I’d had enough,” says Smith, who says Jobs began making fun of his Southern accent. “He was street-fighting. It was ugly.” Smith left less than a year later, when Jobs O.K.’d his plan to use a Pixar technology to create a new graphics company. Then Jobs wrote him out of Pixar’s history, says Smith. You won’t find any mention of him on the company’s website. “It’s all true—the good and the bad,” says Smith of working with Jobs. “Even if we don’t like each other, he financed us when nobody else would.”
For a while it appeared that both of Jobs’s new companies would fail. When he was finally ready to unveil his first NeXT prototypes in October 1988, Jobs pumped up expectations by renting out San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. The machine played a duet with one of the symphony’s violinists. The first NeXT wouldn’t go on sale until a year later, and when it did, no amount of showmanship could distract from its $6,500 price—which was many thousands more than the price target in the original NeXT business plan. (Jobs never made the mistake of pre-announcing a product again.)
Jobs tried to find more customers by signing distribution deals with IBM (IBM) and Businessland, a chain of computer stores, and releasing a new 1990 model priced at $5,000 that at least nodded to consumer needs with a traditional floppy drive. By 1992 key staffers, including Tribble and hardware engineering chief Rich Page, were leaving. At one board meeting around this time, Perot [footnote 5] was discussing how NeXT needed to do a better job listening to consumers. Jobs walked out on him. “Did the CEO of this company just walk out on me?” asked Perot, according to a former NeXT executive. “Does that mean I get my $20 million back?” NeXT kept Perot’s money but lost him from the board. He resigned in June 1992. (Perot did not respond to requests for comment.)
The situation at Pixar was just as dire—and financially worse for Jobs. Without a steady source of revenue, he was forced to write more than $40 million in personal checks to keep the business afloat. “It was not an insignificant portion of my net worth,” [footnote 6] he told BusinessWeek in 1998. “There were times that we all despaired, but fortunately not all at the same time.”
What changed everything was not Jobs’s intuitive sense of the market nor his vision as a product guy but a cowboy and an astronaut. After more than a decade of annual treks to Disney’s headquarters in Burbank, Pixar had pushed the state of the art to the point that it finally landed a three-film production contract in 1991. By early 1994 it was clear that the company’s first movie, Toy Story, was going to be extraordinary.
Jobs wasn’t born to the movie business, but he’d surrounded himself with creative people during his days at Apple and, as he explained in 1998, it merely took time to adapt that experience from one discipline to another. “Hollywood and Silicon Valley exist in the same state, but they have absolutely no idea about each other,” said Jobs. “It’s hard work [making good movies]. That’s why so much of it isn’t any good—just like with software.” Jobs would also win respect for knowing the limits of his expertise. After a few unsuccessful attempts to stick his fingers in the movie-making process, he took the hint from Pixar staffers and agreed to stay out of all story meetings, according to several former Pixar staffers. Former Walt Disney Studios head Joe Roth remembers that, before Toy Story came out, Jobs argued it should be marketed as the first fully computerized movie. Roth and others disagreed. “I said we’re going to sell it as a great story, and let people be wowed by the tech,” Roth told BusinessWeek. “And you know what? He said O.K.”
In the weeks before Toy Story‘s Nov. 22, 1995, release, Pixar was more than $4 million in debt, with revenues of just $10 million, according to SEC filings. The company was tiny. Only the advance buzz about Toy Story gave Pixar’s future any shape. Former Pixar Marketing Vice-President Pamela Kerwin says that Larry Sonsini, Jobs’s friend and the chairman of Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told her and other Pixar executives that Jobs’s idea of an initial public offering at that point was delusional. Yet for the first time in years, Jobs was telling people he felt he had a great product in his back pocket—and one that wasn’t aimed at the suits and academics he’d targeted with the NeXT cube, but at the upscale, mainstream consumers he’d won over at Apple.
Jobs told Goldman Sachs’s bankers to time a Pixar IPO around the debut of the movie. Ten days after Toy Story opened to long lines and soaring reviews, Pixar went public at $22 a share. When the stock closed at $33 that afternoon, Jobs celebrated by sampling 150-year-old balsamic vinegar. With an 80 percent stake in the company, he was a paper billionaire. He called his friend Larry Ellison to say he’d made it to the B-club.
Suddenly, Jobs was no longer just a computer guy. There were changes in his personal life, too. In 1991 he married Laurene Powell, whom he had met while preparing to give a talk at Stanford Business School. Avi Tevanian, NeXT’s software chief, and another executive arranged for a low-key bachelor party at a well-known San Francisco eatery. After they sat down, Jobs decided they needed to go to a nearby spot that made only soufflés. The wedding, a small affair held at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, was officiated by a Buddhist monk. The newlyweds moved to Palo Alto and had their first child, Reed, named for the college Jobs attended but never graduated from. Jobs soon welcomed his estranged daughter, Lisa [footnote 7], back into his house, as well.
By all accounts, Jobs had entered a contented middle age, the Sturm und Drang of his Apple days now fading into history. During an appearance to promote Toy Story‘s DVD release on Oct. 30, 1996, Jobs was asked by Charlie Rose whether Apple could turn itself around. “It’s just a spectator sport for me now,” said Jobs. Rose didn’t buy it; he bet Jobs that he’d be doing something in computing within five years. “Oh, I tend to stay with what I start until somebody kicks me out.” Jobs wasn’t truly indifferent about Apple, of course. He told friends that the company was dying. When Ellison explored purchasing Apple in 1996, Jobs told BusinessWeek that he tried to talk him out of it. “I thought he’d lose his shirt.”
NeXT wasn’t performing any better. With money rapidly disappearing, Jobs had announced in early 1993 that NeXT would get out of the costly hardware business. Instead it would license its NeXTStep software, a variant of the powerful UNIX operating system that could work with many processors and more effectively handle sound and graphics. The move was long overdue, but according to Tevanian, Jobs lost interest once there were no more sleek machines to make. By 1995, Jobs told a family friend that he was prepared to let NeXT go bankrupt.
In 1996, a marketing manager at NeXT took it upon himself to call Apple to gauge its interest in NeXTStep. It was an open secret in Silicon Valley that Apple had given up on its own crumbling operating system and was in talks to buy tiny software maker Be Inc. so it could start fresh, replacing MacOS with BeOS. Jobs had no idea about any of this. He found out only when he happened to call a NeXT colleague at the same moment that a team from Apple arrived for a NeXTStep demo, say former NeXT executives.
It did not take him long to capitalize. On Dec. 2, 1996, Jobs demonstrated NeXTStep to Apple CEO Gil Amelio in a conference room at Palo Alto’s Garden Court Hotel. “He turned on the charm that day,” says former Apple CFO Fred Anderson. Apple ended up paying $430 million for NeXT, well above the $185 million price Be CEO Jean-Louis Gasse had agreed to sell his company for. Upon hearing the news, Gasse fumed to BusinessWeek that “Steve cast a homoerotic spell on Amelio and the Apple board,” though he says now, “It was the best thing for the world.” On the night of the deal, Jobs said: “I’ve been gone for 11 years. Apple’s a very different place, and I’m a very different person.”
The Jobs who returned to Apple’s Cupertino campus for the first time in a decade initially betrayed no signs of wanting to run the company. Although Apple dug up his original ID badge, he rarely came into the office, choosing instead to invite Apple executives for walks around Palo Alto. But as weeks passed he couldn’t hide his disapproval of Amelio’s strategy for keeping Apple out of bankruptcy. An executive remembers Jobs walking out of one meeting and calling Amelio “a bozo.” When Apple’s board ousted Amelio in July 1997, Jobs at first refused to take the job full-time, choosing to call himself “the iCEO,” for “interim.” He only dropped the “interim” in early 2000, when the board gave him a Gulfstream V jet and options for 10 million Apple shares which later turned out to have been improperly backdated, to artificially raise their value to the share price at an earlier date.
His first moments back at the helm certainly seemed like “Old Steve.” Minutes after Amelio gave his goodbye to the executive staff, Jobs—clad in shorts and scruffy as a beach bum—walked in and swiveled in his chair at the head of the board table. Rhetorically, he asked the group why Apple was in such poor shape. Before anyone could answer, he roared: “The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!” Amelio had a plan to vastly simplify Apple’s product line, but by the end of the day Jobs had done that and more. From then on the focus was on birthing the iMac, the product that saved Apple from bankruptcy, and before long he had O.K.’d work that led to the iPod, the product that changed the company’s trajectory for good.
Despite the occasional outbursts, a wiser, more effective Jobs was rapidly emerging. While NeXT veterans such as software chief Tevanian and hardware maven Jon Rubinstein were already on Apple’s executive staff, Jobs identified and promoted Eddy Cue out of customer service to build Apple’s online store. (Cue has run iTunes since its 2001 inception.) Jobs also discovered the design bunker of Jonathan Ive, which was located across the street from Apple’s main Infinite Loop [footnote 8] campus—a sure sign that it was seen as a lower priority than other corporate functions. In short order, Jobs moved Ive close to his own office and gave him cutting-edge equipment, his own kitchen, and hefty security to ensure secrecy.
What Apple seemed to have in Jobs 2.0 was all of the features that made the young Steve Jobs great—charisma, vision, rigorous standards—with some new functionality, too. Perot had counseled that the only way investors would let him pursue cool things was by delivering consistent profits, so Jobs became the business world’s most unapologetic sandbagger; Apple has beaten Wall Street’s expectations by 30 percent, on average, since 2006, according to Bloomberg data. If he wasn’t softer, Jobs was at least more considerate; he ended company speeches with thanks to employees and their families for putting up with the grueling hours.
And the simple elegance of his product vision was also coming into focus. A few months after taking over, Jobs called operations chief James M. McCluney and hardware engineering chief Rubinstein into his office and dramatically lifted a Styrofoam model of what would be the iMac out of a bowling bag. The duo reported back a few weeks later that it wouldn’t work, because they couldn’t find room for a floppy drive. Hardly missing a beat, Jobs said, “No worries. Disk drives are over the hill. CDs are going to get so cheap that no one will miss [floppies].” Says McCluney: “It was remarkable. It was a snap judgment.”
Before Jobs could begin wowing consumers and delivering profits, he needed some help from a once-hated rival. Microsoft was thinking of discontinuing the Mac version of its Office suite of apps—a move that might well kill the already shrinking Mac business. Amelio had already begun talks with Microsoft that were designed to win huge patent royalty payments. Jobs—the same emotional enfant terrible of years past—had a better idea, though many of his loyalists would initially think he’d sold his soul to the devil.
Footnotes:
1. Berg won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for his study of the biochemistry of nucleic acids.
2. A 1990 Fortune article reported that robots outnumbered people 13 to 5 on the NeXT production line. Jobs said, “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.”
3. The U.S. Patent Office shows two design patents for glass staircases under Jobs’s name; the staircases are a prominent feature at Apple Stores.
4. The highest-grossing Pixar film was Toy Story 3, which hit theaters in June 2010. It took in $1.1 billion worldwide.
5. In a 1988 BusinessWeek interview, Perot recalled introducing Jobs to the King of Spain at a party in San Francisco. Jobs sold the monarch a computer.
6. Jobs’s net worth as of September 2011 was an estimated $7 billion.
7. Apple introduced the Lisa computer, named for Jobs’s daughter, in 1983. Officially, Lisa stood for “local integrated software architecture.” It retailed for $9,995.
8. Apple has unveiled plans to build a new campus on a nearby 175-acre site. The main building, which is in the shape of a ring, will house up to 13,000 employees.
Burrows is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in San Francisco.
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