Steve Jobs In Exile by Geoffrey Cain

How strongly I recommend this book: 8 / 10

Date read: June 25, 2026

Get this book on Amazon. Here are my other book notes on biographies, psychology, and more.

Reflection

This was a very interesting book on how Jobs became Jobs before his second stint at Apple. This phase of his life was what I really wanted to understand.

When the entire industry was focused on hardware elements, Jobs really cared about the user experience and naturally focused on building software at NeXT. That was what ended up giving them the edge. I was especially surprised by how foundational his push was around object-oriented programming and web objects, which became the formation of everything that was to come.

What was also pretty incredible was seeing how he refused to let developers port existing software over. Even when NeXT was deep underwater, when it would have been so much easier to let people move legacy apps over just to get higher distribution, any other CEO would have folded. Jobs was just like, “Nope.” He insisted on original software built specifically for the platform. The perseverance for that vision was incredible.

He started out kind of reckless, but you really get to see his maturity grow from his time at NeXT all the way until his return to Apple. I’ve seen interviews where Jobs said he was actually grateful Apple fired him because the NeXT experience helped him mature and become a much more powerful, all-around leader.

If you want to see Jobs in his own words right in the middle of this transition, check out my transcript and notes from Steve Jobs The Lost 1995 Interview, where he reflects on NeXT, the software revolution, and the future of computing.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

Part One

• Ross’s fascination with Steve followed a pattern. Many in Apple’s orbit lavished attention on Steve while overlooking John’s contributions to the company, fueling an emerging rivalry between the two that was exacerbated by Apple’s shaky market position.
• In response, John—the Wharton-trained, former PepsiCo president—made a plan to reshape Apple’s corporate hierarchy. From its earliest days as a start-up, the company had relied on flat management. This had facilitated scrappiness and the creative exchange of ideas when Apple was young. But as it grew, John watched the lack of structure fuel chaos and infighting. He believed that a mature Apple needed centralized leadership to succeed. So he moved to combine the product divisions under one C-suite that would report up to him. The plan sounded simple enough. But John faced one big obstacle: bringing Steve to heel. Under his proposed reshuffle, Steve would become one of three coequal product executives. On the back side of his office door, John hung a graphic outlining his mission: a simple pyramid with himself perched at the top. Steve wasn’t having it, particularly as his respect for John dwindled.
• On May 7, 1985, John and Jay landed in Paris. They needed a spiritual replacement for Steve to lead the Mac team and hoped to convince the head of Apple France, a debonair executive named Jean-Louis Gassée, to do it. Like Steve, Jean-Louis had a je ne sais quoi. He was charismatic and handsome. He wore leather jackets, seductive colognes, and a diamond earring. He had appeared in French Vogue, where he was lauded as one of France’s best-dressed men. Even his descriptions of tech strategy had an edge. “At Apple,” he wrote, “one sometimes tends to forget that life is not made of a series of orgasms but also of love.”
• Steve spoke to Jean-Louis in the parking lot the day before John was set to leave for China, telling him everything he planned to do. “Steve, it’s not your company,” Jean-Louis replied. “It’s our company.” Big mistake. That night, during a dinner at the home of Apple’s chief counsel, Al Eisenstat, Jean-Louis pulled John into the living room and revealed Steve’s plot. Shocked, John canceled his China trip and joined Apple’s executive staff and board members the next day for its 9: 00 a.m. board meeting, as he recounted in his memoir, Odyssey. John waited to start the meeting until Steve, who was running late, arrived. It was an ambush—Steve thought John was in China.
• “You’ve probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out of you,” Steve told Newsweek in 1985. “If you relax you’ll start breathing again. That’s how I felt all summer long.”
• Two days later, Steve abandoned his European future and returned to California, where he pondered entering politics—he liked the idea of becoming a larger-than-life historical figure à la John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. He even talked with two political operatives, Pat Caddell and Scott Miller, about the possibility of running for the Senate. But Steve had a problem: He couldn’t figure out whether to run as a Democrat or a Republican. He had never even registered to vote. Ultimately, he decided against it. “I’ve got too much hair left for politics,” he said.
• Then Steve went to Paris. He wondered if it might be time to take his considerable fortune and retire to a quiet life as an American expatriate—reading literature at cafés, studying master painters at museums.
• His Open Mac plan departed dramatically from Steve’s philosophy. Jean-Louis, with John’s backing, wanted to make the Mac more expandable—adding slots for third-party cards, more ports for peripherals, and greater flexibility for users who wanted to customize their machines. Steve had always opposed such changes. He believed that by controlling every aspect of the system, Apple could offer users a more elegant experience. But that control came at a cost: The Mac remained limited in what it could do and expensive compared with alternatives.
• In his quietude, Steve embarked on a more structured process of reflection to decide on his next steps. He began listing out, in bullet points, his favorite projects from the last ten years at Apple. As he did so, a clear trend emerged: He felt drawn to education-related initiatives. Helping schools and students made him feel connected to his own happy youth.
• Steve decided to found a new company to build a 3M computer. His decision came together gradually, inspired by conversations that proved influential over time. One debate stuck with him. Two years earlier, before the Mac’s commercial release, Steve had visited Andy van Dam, Computer Science Department chairman at Brown University, to demonstrate the Mac. Instead, Andy showed Steve an auditorium filled with forty Apollo workstations, networked together and costing around $ 50,000 each. He was blunt about the Mac’s comparative limitations. “Steve, look at these machines in our auditorium,” he said, gesturing at the powerful workstations. “They all have hard drives. They’re networked together. This is proven technology. I love the idea of an affordable, little computer, but nobody’s going to be satisfied with the amount of memory you have.” Steve dismissed him; the argument grew into a “big fight,” Andy recalled. But the confrontation planted something. Now, with Steve sidelined, the professor’s words carried new weight.
• For Dan’l, Susan, Bud, Rich, and George, a realization dawned: They had just hatched a mutiny. They couldn’t back out now. If they had made the wrong choice, it could devastate their careers and upend their lives.
• As they worked through possibilities, Steve’s confidence began to falter. He wondered aloud whether he had become washed up, an impostor, yesterday’s visionary. He asked if he was doomed to spend the rest of his life wandering aimlessly. Compounding his insecurity, hostile board members were speaking to The Wall Street Journal, tearing Steve to shreds anonymously. The trash talk became a regular occurrence. Steve complained to Apple board member Mike Markkula that the reports were both “misleading to the public” and “unfair to me” and that Apple was “adopting a hostile posture towards me and the new venture.”
• From the stage, Bill extolled the virtues of the CD. He said it would displace the floppy disk and transform how we watch media, listen to music, and access our information. As Bill spoke, he kept saying the word next. The next big thing, the next device, the next standard, all coming in the next year. “I had my little journal,” Tom said, “and I wrote down the word next probably twenty-five times.” Listening to Steve’s greatest rival, Tom experienced an epiphany. He hopped on an airplane back to San Francisco and called Steve. “I got it,” Tom said, heart pounding, “Next.” Silence on the other end. Then: “I love it!” The name Next imbued a sense of agency, suggesting that Steve had leapt onward to his next great endeavor where he would make cooler and more advanced technology than he had at Apple. Steve didn’t seem at all bothered that the name was inspired by the words of a frenemy. On September 19, 1985, he registered the name Next Inc. with the state of California.
• Legal warfare had the unexpected side effect of welding the team together like combat veterans. And Steve, displaying the single-minded determination that had made him famous at Apple, refused to let anything slow him down. “Now, you might say we’re all crazy,” he told Newsweek. “We have a general direction. We want to find out what higher education needs. We plan to visit a lot of colleges in October and just listen. Then we want to build it for them, whatever it is.” The team scattered into the field like corporate anthropologists. They haunted electronics shops like ComputerLand and Businessland, lurking in the aisles to watch which machines made people stop and stare and which ones they walked right past. The team made a careful study of product bundles and packaging choices.
• Joanna knew that Steve’s reality distortion field could motivate people, but she worried it could also get them into trouble. Set an unrealistic date, she cautioned, and the team would be forced into flawed design decisions. She reminded Steve that when they had been at Apple, this exact dynamic had led them to put out an unrealistic list of fifteen software packages that would be released in one year, only to make bad design decisions under pressure, and then be forced to tear up their work and start over. Steve cut in. Next needed to plant a stake in the ground, he said. If they missed the spring 1987 window, sales would fall short, they’d fail to cover operating costs, and word would spread that Next was flailing. “A lot of the credibility starts to erode,” he warned. But, George asked, would any customers take the 1987 deadline seriously in the first place? He also doubted the team’s ability to finish software in that time, pointing out they’d been burned at Apple when they’d tried to create a word processor that was supposed to take six months but remained unfinished three years later. “That’s what I’m worried about,” he said. “Well, George,” Steve snapped, “I can’t change the world!” Steve rejected the idea that past failures guaranteed future ones. “If we don’t do this,” Steve said, “we will not be able to attract great people, we will not be able to retain some of the ones we have, and it just won’t be us.” Ultimately, Steve ended the debate. The team would have eighteen months to build an entire computer—along with its operating system—from scratch, and that would be that. They knew the ambitious timeline reflected one of Steve’s core mantras: Great artists ship.
• George, cash-strapped from a $ 35 million divorce settlement, was threatening to fire the division’s entire team if no buyer emerged. His approach to creative work seemed to be to assemble the world’s best team, complete the movie, and then “blow them out,” Susan said—dissolve the group and start fresh next time. According to Susan, Steve found this approach revolting. At Next, he was determined to build the opposite: a permanent ensemble of brilliant people who would stay for the next impossible project and the next one after that. Steve wanted grokking from team members—full-body absorption of the company’s DNA.
• Accordingly, Steve set a high bar for new recruits—“ Zero is better than a negative,” he said. He sought both brilliance and breadth: champion swimmers, musicians, surfers—people with edge. In interviews, he posed each candidate a trick question. He might say, “Are you the best hardware designer in your field?” If the candidate said no, he would reply, “Then I’d rather talk to them!” Steve was obsessed with finding and keeping the best people. And he had witnessed what happened when leaders failed to do it.
• Pixar worked with technology Steve didn’t understand—computer graphics and animation—and he was forced to trust his team’s expertise. Ed observed that Steve “didn’t know anything about graphics or the direction it was going. He just believed it was going to become important.” Ed even asked Steve to stay out of creative meetings because his presence was so overpowering that he could derail discussions simply by speaking. Where Ed handled the Pixar team, at Next, Steve would become his own biggest obstacle to keeping great people. He was determined to manage everything, from the exact shades of color used in the logo down to the angle of robots on the factory floor—decisions that often brought him into conflict with his team. As Susan liked to remind him about Silicon Valley talent, “your assets have feet” and could walk out anytime.
• Sticking with Steve demanded a certain temperament. Steve respected talented people who could fight. “Next was a very intellectually contentious environment,” recalled Leo Hourvitz, a software developer who joined Next in December 1985. You had to be willing to push back against Steve. Your ideas would survive only if you could “evangelize… and convince all the smart people around that this was the best option,” Leo said. The culture was so intensely combative that when Next veterans moved on to other companies, their new colleagues would tell them to dial it back. They’d been conditioned for a kind of intellectual warfare that didn’t exist elsewhere.
• Four months into the lawsuit, Apple showed up with a proposed settlement. Among other things, it would dictate the kind of computer Next would be allowed to build. Apple wanted to force Steve into building premium, high-performance computers exclusively. For Steve, this was perfect—this was, after all, exactly what he had started Next to do. Bud watched Apple’s own goal with disbelief. “I felt like Br’er Rabbit,” he said. In the African American folktale, Br’er Rabbit tricks Br’er Fox into throwing him into a briar patch—the one place he most wants to be—by begging not to be thrown there. According to Apple’s terms, Next’s machine would have to include a chip at 20 megahertz or faster, an intimidatingly powerful processor when Apple’s lawyers wrote it down. The computer would need to have at least 4 megabytes of RAM, a luxury for 1986. And it had to have a high-resolution display with more pixels than Apple’s—meaning crisper, clearer graphics that would make Apple’s screens look fuzzy by comparison. The monitor also couldn’t sit on top of the computer. Finally, the computer couldn’t use Apple’s floppy disk format or chipsets.
• Steve’s dedication to Japanese Zen, with its emphasis on simplicity and minimalism, informed his approach to design as well as to life. At meetings, Steve was already beginning to sketch out the form of the company’s computer with his hands in the air. He kept making the same shape: a cube. Steve had been inspired by a five-foot black cube called the Connection Machine, unveiled in 1985. It stood like the black monolith from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, its translucent panels revealing thousands of red LEDs blinking like synapses in a giant brain. The machine was the brainchild of MIT computer scientist Danny Hillis, who wanted to build artificial intelligence by connecting sixty-four thousand processors in what he called a “20-dimensional hypercube.” “Someday, perhaps soon, we will build a machine that will be able to perform the function of a human mind, a thinking machine,” he wrote about his idea.
• Hartmut began by sharing his assessment that Apple’s existing products were clunky and uninspired. In response, Steve gave him carte blanche to experiment with a new direction. Hartmut’s first triumph was the Apple IIc, which featured a crisp white aesthetic dubbed “Snow White.” The look became a visual blueprint for Apple’s next generation of tech. “Hartmut rescued us, and I think he’s the best product designer in the world,” Steve said about his work at Next. By 1986, Hartmut had become disenchanted with John’s soulless approach to building computers. After resolving his contractual obligations with Apple, he signed a new contract with Next and got to work on his kitchen table. He felt free to finally pursue a design with philosophical depth. Hartmut was taken with Steve’s idea of designing a cube. “It’s a mystical shape that never exists in nature,” Hartmut said. It was pure, unblemished, abstract. As much as any industrial product could, Hartmut hoped that a cube would challenge the user and invite contemplation. Hartmut drew inspiration from ancient geometry—the Greek cubic form, which was later echoed in Islamic architecture through the Kaaba, the sacred black stone structure in Mecca that Muslims face during prayer.
• Paul did not suffer fools gladly. As a teacher at Yale, his critiques were so brutal that one student, pushed past his limit, punched him in the ear. When Ford Motor Company invited Paul to redesign its logo, he walked into a conference room with fifty executives and immediately asked, “Who makes the decisions here?” Then he presented only to that person while the other forty-nine people sat watching. At IBM, where he worked as a design consultant, Paul believed the UK team’s output was “the worst work shown in IBM. Poorly conceived and implemented. Disorganized, cheap appearing,” as a colleague wrote. One time, finishing up a portfolio review with one of IBM’s graphic designers, Paul asked the designer how old he was. Thirty-two, came the reply. “You still have time to be good,” Paul said. After the designer left, Paul turned to his colleague Tom Hardy and asked, “Was I too hard on that guy?” “He believed criticism was how you got to excellence,” Tom explained. In Paul’s mind, brutal honesty was a form of kindness. Steve thought Paul’s designs were “phenomenal.” And it matched his own aspirations. “[ Paul’s] work for me is very emotional and yet, when you study it, it’s very intellectual,” Steve recounted. “If you scratch the surface on any of his work, you find out the depth of the intellectual problem solving that’s taken place.” When Steve spoke to Paul for the first time, he asked if Paul could present him with a few options for Next’s logo. “No,” Paul said. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me.” Paul’s price: $ 100,000, whether or not Next ended up using the logo. It was a monumental sum, but Steve agreed.
• Steve’s extravagance wasn’t pure recklessness: He knew exactly how much money he was burning. He understood business mechanics in ways few people recognized. At Apple, he had mastered cash flow—getting paid by customers quickly while taking time to pay suppliers. “I can do a balance sheet better than anyone,” he once told Susan, “but I’ll never get credit for building on a shoestring.” At Next, he was playing a different game. One of Susan’s financial analysts captured the shift: “We in finance are all looking at segments of an orange, and Steve keeps seeing the whole orange.” Rather than bootstrap again, Steve was making calculated bets on an expensive foundation. According to Susan, he believed so strongly in Next’s potential that he saw cheaper alternatives as false economy, like trying to turn a Volkswagen into a Mercedes instead of just buying a Mercedes from the start. And Steve’s openness to financial oversight had limits. What Susan considered responsible stewardship, he saw as nagging—it was his money after all. His spending priorities also sent a clear message to the team: Even something as quotidian as the office tile work needed to reflect the company’s soul.
• Steve’s meticulousness extended to NeXT’s slide decks, brochures, and the sign at the office driveway. He wanted the phone and fax numbers on the company’s letterhead to align precisely. He felt that the company’s business cards, printed on cardstock from the legendary papermaker Crane, weren’t thick enough. “However, SJ wants them heavier,” Susan wrote Paul. “Maybe something from Mohawk Superfine?” The NeXT team kept its aesthetic standards high too, in anticipation of Steve walking by. Graphic designers called it the most painstaking work of their careers, obsessing over the slope of a single line or the shape of a caption. They would even rewrite internal documents to avoid awkward line breaks or jagged margins. Whether through his intensity, his taste, or his insistence on discipline, Steve created a design culture that employees never forgot. Many loved the high standards and the pride that came from producing excellent work. Even years later, a number said that NeXT was the most magical place they’d ever worked. Nowhere else came close.
• A few weeks later, Paul flew back to California to present the logo to Steve. After eating dinner at the Jackling House, Paul handed Steve a carefully prepared booklet that traced his creative journey to reach the final design. Steve sat on the floor and read each page slowly. The booklet contained discarded options and each evolution that led to the final design. As Steve turned the pages, his smile grew. When he finally arrived at the black cube, tilted at exactly 28 degrees with “NeXT” split across two lines, he jumped to his feet and gave Paul a bear hug. Paul looked surprised. Paul liked Steve and valued their partnership. But he still had reservations. He told Bob, “You wouldn’t want to work for this guy. He’s a taskmaster.” Bob thought: “Pot, meet kettle.”
• Still, Steve’s feedback was hard to predict or plan for—and could be searing. Partway through an ad agency pitch meeting, Steve cut off the already nervous executives with a request. He wanted a phone book brought to him. Once it arrived, he leafed through a few pages. Then, looking up, Steve said, “This makes for more interesting reading than this shit I’m hearing from you guys.” The room froze. He was mercurial too. NeXT team members referred to this as the “hero-shithead rollercoaster”—a phrase they’d inherited from Apple veterans who’d ridden it before them. He could lavish praise on your work one moment, then turn around and tear you apart in front of a room the next. You never knew where you stood.
• Steve had another interest in CMU. He had heard about a software revolution taking place within its computer science labs led by a pioneering PhD student named Avie Tevanian. Avie, the son of an Armenian machinist and a bookkeeper, grew up in New England and went to college at the University of Rochester, where he had spent his time coding computer games. As a doctoral student at CMU, he began building something far more ambitious—a tool that could change software development forever. Avie’s breakthrough lay deep in the machine. He was rethinking the computer’s kernel—its software heart. The kernel instructs the machine on how to complete basic functions like managing memory, juggling tasks, and keeping everything running. At the time, kernels were sprawling beasts jammed with functions. Among other things, kernel code typically instructed computers on file management, networking, and drivers. Avie and his colleagues wanted to simplify the kernel by stripping it down to the bare essentials, while pushing everything superfluous outside. Avie’s stripped-down model was called the “microkernel.” It was more flexible and easier to port to different machines than a traditional kernel design. Crucially, its clean architecture made it well suited for juggling multiple processors—accommodating the latest advances in hardware design. On a muddy walk to lunch, Avie’s fellow researchers joked about naming the microkernel “muck.” A faculty member misheard it as “Mach” and the name stuck.
• William, Steve, and Bud chose to work in the language Objective-C, which was little known at the time. Because of the way it leveraged something called object-oriented programming, it offered engineers simplicity and flexibility that the alternative C + + lacked, allowing them to execute and update applications more quickly and easily. Bigger companies like AT& T and Bell Labs were throwing their weight behind C + +, which meant they, not NeXT, would have far more control over the programming language. Steve also wanted a language that could be unique for his platform. “That was simply not possible with C + +,” Bud recounted. At the time, software development was a painstaking process. Engineers had to write out every program line by line. Each and every application was a one-off, built from the ground up. As a result, designing software was frustrating, expensive, and slow. Most of the industry followed the “waterfall technique,” a rigid process that locked developers into monthslong cycles. “You’d start by writing a design, then draw flowcharts, then code everything in C,” Bud explained, “compile it, debug it, and finally hand it to users, only to hear, ‘This is terrible, I can’t figure this out.’ So you’d go back to the top of the waterfall and start again.” The process was so time-consuming, Bud said, that teams would often give up early. “They’d just say, ‘This is taking forever. It’s good enough.’ ” The waterfall technique started to break down as hardware advanced. Manufacturers were releasing new computers with four or eight processors—up from the old single-processor standard. And new power brought new software expectations. What if, developers began to ask, you could build software like Legos? Instead of starting from scratch, what if you could develop reusable, modular components and snap them together to perform various tasks? It would all be enabled by object-oriented programming. Traditional programming was like writing a recipe in which every step had to be spelled out from scratch each time—dice the onions, heat the pan, add oil, wait thirty seconds, add onions, stir every minute. Object-oriented programming was different. Developers could create smart building blocks called “objects” that knew how to handle themselves. An “onion” object would already know how to dice itself, how long it needed to cook, when it was done. A “pan” object would know its own temperature and when it was ready. Instead of writing out every tedious instruction, programmers could just tell these objects to work together: “Onion, cook yourself in that pan.” The objects would figure out the rest.
• Before, brilliant ideas weren’t getting built because writing software was just too hard. But NeXT would enable small teams to build powerful apps without an army of engineers, thanks to AppKit coupled with a program called Interface Builder. Interface Builder was a visual tool that let developers drag and drop AppKit’s components to design their applications in real time. “Just sitting down and watching Interface Builder operate,” Bud said, “was such a vivid way to demonstrate that you didn’t have to be a programmer.” It unlocked creativity. People looked at it and thought, “Gee, I could try that.” Steve immediately saw the power of AppKit and Interface Builder. Though he didn’t write code, he had a relentless eye for design and a need to shape the user experience. The team’s new tools gave him control over the software development process—just as he had hovered over foam mock-ups during the Mac’s development, he could now do the same with software. He’d sit next to Bud, point at the screen, and say, “Move this menu here. Put that dialog box there.” And it would happen immediately. Steve could now direct software development the way a filmmaker cuts a scene—intuitively, visually—refining the feel and flow frame by frame.
• But where the media was concerned, Steve could be an open book. One day in summer 1986, he got in his car with Esquire journalist Joe Nocera and veered into a reflective mode as they drove toward San Francisco. “Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time,” Steve told him, “you have to give up other lives you could be living.” He gave a small shrug. “You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished.” Then, after a pause: “Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.” But, Joe asked, wasn’t the CEO of NeXT the very definition of a businessman? “My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things.”
• Steve thought that building a NeXT-operated facility thirty minutes away would give him tighter control over manufacturing. And it would all be automated. He loved the idea that the manufacturing tech could stamp out human error and variability. He envisioned the facility enabling an elaborate buying experience. Just like Ferrari customers fly to Maranello, Italy, to pick out their cars straight off the assembly line, so would NeXT’s customers with their computers. “If you’re going to buy a great sports car, what’s the best way to do it?” he reportedly asked employees. “You fly to Europe, go to the factory, and buy it there.”
• Then, on November 5, 1986, the Texas businessman H. Ross Perot happened to tune into PBS. On came Entrepreneurs, the documentary about NeXT that John Nathan had filmed earlier that year. Watching Steve in action, Ross remembered the spark he’d felt when meeting Steve years earlier at Apple. Back then, he was assessing the company for a possible acquisition by his client GE. Steve was “Mr. Electricity. Smart, modest, and not on any kind of an ego trip,” Ross later told Life. “This young man went up against IBM… and ate ’em alive.” The next morning, Ross left Steve a voicemail in his high-pitched, rapid-fire Texas drawl. “If you ever need an investor, call me,” he said. Steve didn’t want to look desperate. So he waited a week, then picked up the phone.
• NeXT had pulled off a remarkable feat: securing capital without showing a real product. Now the company had backers, a board, and a bankroll. To skeptics, it still looked like vaporware masked by charisma. But to the true believers, including Ross, Pat, and the early team, something deeper was taking shape. They believed they were building the future.

Epigraphs

• At the same time, Steve felt he was running out of time to make his mark. The feeling would surface in conversations with colleagues, when Steve told them about his intuition that he wouldn’t live a long life. He couldn’t explain where it came from, but at thirty-one, he believed his time was limited.
• I didn’t see it then, 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, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005
• Steve encapsulated the philosophy behind those technical decisions with the phrase “If you want to make a revolution, raise the lowest common denominator”—meaning NeXT would drag the entire industry upward with innovation rather than merely match existing machines. His employees were fired up to be a part of this vision, but they were often tired too. Even as they raced to finish the computer, he calmly told his team about their product’s inevitable death and demise. Every computer platform peaked after five years, he explained, then declined slowly as its own software became its prison.
• After all the brouhaha, Steve made the call: The team would go with the newer surface-mount architecture. Steve told his board he was “extremely pleased” with the decision. Never mind that the final circuit board turned out instead to be a hybrid of the two architectures. Steve, as Rich later put it, had a habit of turning future possibilities into present facts.
• Next on the Deep Shit List? Designing the computer’s chips. Steve made a bet that revealed the forward-looking expanse of his vision. While competitors’ computers ran on one megabyte of memory, NeXT machines would ship with eight, which was already overkill for 1987. But Steve predicted they’d need to double it: “Every computer we ship is going to have 16 megabytes within two years,” he told his employees. But building that far into the future meant tortuous complexity in the present. When it came time to deliver, a pair of engineers everyone called Big Dave and Little Dave—nicknamed simply for their contrasting sizes—was tasked with building the gate arrays, custom chips that would do the work of multiple standard chips on a single piece of silicon. Steve wanted to consolidate everything onto one massive custom chip—partly for looks, partly because he thought it would sound impressive to customers.
• NeXT searched the country to find a machine shop capable of making tooling that could accommodate Steve’s design, reported journalist Randall E. Stross. One shop in Chicago could do it. It agreed to make custom tooling for molds that would come apart with all the sides releasing at once, for the price of $ 650,000. Even then, the molds would leave faint seams on the edges of the case. Imperfections like that would never fly with Steve, so NeXT bought a $ 150,000 machine that did nothing but sand mold lines. But it still wasn’t enough. Inspired by a turntable he liked, Steve decided that the magnesium case should be painted a deep matte black. The result looked stunning but wasn’t especially practical. The black paint revealed every manufacturing imperfection, and it could be easily damaged. Even a plastic shipping bag would scuff the finish. One engineer brought up a problem to Steve. The special black paint couldn’t be applied by robots, he said; it would have to be done by hand. That would ruin the company’s vision for an entirely automated factory. Steve wasn’t hearing it. He kept pushing, kept gesturing, kept finding new angles of attack while the engineer grew more and more unhappy. “It took a while to get the process working,” Rich said, “but in the end it was automated.” All told, the Cube wound up costing far more to manufacture at low volumes than the team had planned. The paint job alone cost $ 50—as much as the team had originally budgeted for the entire exterior of the Cube.
• One day in early 1987, an executive from Canon had called Steve with an unusual message: “I want you to come back over to Japan and romp through the laboratories.” Canon wanted Steve walking through its labs, blessing its technology with his attention. He had a track record of building multiple billion-dollar products and making his suppliers rich and famous. They saw him as someone who could spot magic in components they’d overlooked. Canon executives told Steve they were developing something called an erasable magneto-optical disk that could store 256 megabytes—vastly more than the typical floppy disk, which held about 1.4 megabytes.
• “Only Steve Jobs really thought music was great,” Julius later admitted. “The rest of the company thought of it as an optional thing.” In the 1980s, computers barely made sounds beyond simple beeps and blips. If you wanted decent audio on your personal computer, you had to buy a separate circuit board called a sound card, crack open your computer case, and plug it into one of the slots inside—assuming you could figure out how and had a slot available.
• “Not a lot of you know what this thing does,” he said, holding up an audio chip called a digital signal processor before thirty employees, “but let me tell you, I dream great dreams.” Julius Smith, a Stanford music professor and signal processing expert who consulted for NeXT one day a week, had brought proof to the retreat of what the chip would enable. He played cassettes of music created entirely by computer—no instruments, no musicians, just mathematical code turned into something akin to a MIDI file. With existing technology, it had taken a powerful computer the size of a room hours to generate these few minutes of music. When the music filled the room through high-end Bose speakers, the employees fell silent. Steve rose and asked, “Should we do this?” The technology existed. Julius had just proved it. Steve wanted to shrink that power into a desktop machine, making advanced audio as accessible on the Cube as the Macintosh had made computer graphics. Julius said yes.
• Instead, he gave a demonstration of his beloved audio chip. Steve played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” on endless repeat on speakers. “Watch!” he announced. He held up a prototype motherboard like an excited kid. The advisors stared at the motherboard. Nothing moved. No fans whirred, no lights blinked. Just Bruce Springsteen on a loop. “Well, gee, that’s really great, Steve. What am I not seeing?” asked Michael Carter, Stanford’s computing director. “Nothing’s moving!” Steve said, triumphant. The digital signal processor was creating perfect audio while the motherboard sat perfectly still—experiencing no mechanical vibrations that other computers needed to make sound. “The advisory board was unanimously ‘blown away’ with the product and its embedded technology,” Steve recounted to his other board, the board of directors, “and wants NeXT to win.” But a few members of the advisory board—including Stanford’s Michael Carter, Brown administrator Brian Hawkins, and Vassar College administrator Marty Ringle—also reminded Steve of the importance of keeping the price low. The expectation among future customers remained $ 3,000 per unit, they said. Whatever else the machine became, it couldn’t scare off universities with sticker shock. Steve nodded in tacit agreement. But the truth was already obvious. Steve was building a cutting-edge machine with untested features. The dollar signs were adding up.
• As Steve wrote to the board, “NeXT is the only company in the world committed to making an optical drive the main system mass storage device.” Canon promised a prototype by July but wasn’t sure it could hit Steve’s specified price of $ 500 per drive. The drive meant another risk. If it worked, NeXT would be at the center of a giant leap forward for computer storage. If it didn’t, the company would be stuck with an unproven gamble compromising the core of its workstation.
• Every company process was ad hoc. Getting things done meant persevering through endless internal politics until Steve finally made a decision. Every raise, every hire, and every stock grant went through him.
• Still, Pat and Ross stood behind Steve’s judgment. They believed the team was already doing everything it could. “Keep smiling,” Pat wrote to Steve, “and keep your troops smiling.” Smiling? Ha. Inside NeXT, team members were exhausted by Steve’s frequent verbal tirades and his personalized leadership style. Instead of formal systems or performance reviews, Steve imposed a de facto hierarchy based on what he saw as technological importance. Software engineers were his favored inner circle—they created the user experience that would dazzle customers. The digital hardware team came second, designing the custom chips that would give NeXT its competitive edge. Analog teams, like George’s hardware team, were barely acknowledged at all. To Steve, analog hardware was essentially plumbing, the power supplies, voltage regulators, and basic circuitry that kept the machine running.
• To prepare for the meeting, NeXT engineers had stayed up for days trying to get a Cube prototype to perform basic functions, like booting up without crashing, and opening and closing files. At four in the morning on the day of the presentation, they finally turned on the machine to a miracle: One line of text for running commands appeared on the screen. At the meeting that day, NeXT’s academic advisers stared at the screen, unsure why Steve was so excited. “What’s that?” an adviser asked, confused. The system worked, but it clearly still had a long way to go.
• A purely rational CEO might have focused all his energy on fixing what wasn’t working. But Steve had a different instinct: When in trouble, think bigger. While NeXT burned through cash and missed every deadline, Steve conducted secret negotiations that had the power to reshape the entire computer industry. They began at Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s seventieth birthday party on June 30, 1987, otherwise known as the Post publisher’s gala. It was the kind of Washington power pageant that Steve both desperately wanted to be a part of and scorned—six hundred luminaries gathered to pay homage to the woman who had helped bring down a president. At the party, Steve found himself face-to-face with John Akers, IBM’s CEO. John, the archetypal IBM company man, had spent twenty-seven years marching up the Big Blue ladder wearing dark gray suits. He embodied everything Steve had positioned Apple against. Now John needed a boost. While IBM had once looked untouchable in the computer market, the company was now hemorrhaging billions of dollars in value. John had promised shareholders a return to greatness and Steve spotted an opening. “I couldn’t resist telling him I thought IBM was taking a giant gamble betting its entire software strategy on Microsoft,” Steve said to Fortune, “because I didn’t think its software was very good.” He was referring to the fact that every IBM PC ran on Microsoft’s DOS operating system. Steve explained to John that Microsoft was just grafting Macintosh features onto Windows, creating a crude imitation of what Apple had already perfected. John thought for a moment then asked a question that made Steve’s pulse quicken: “How would you like to help us?” He could hardly believe it. An alliance between NeXT and IBM—which sold computers by the millions—would rock the industry. It could give NeXT the broad distribution it would otherwise struggle to achieve. And it could offer the company a needed cash infusion. As an added bonus, any deal would edge Bill Gates toward the sidelines.
• Five years earlier, Bill had become enchanted by Steve and the still-under-development Mac. So much so that he’d created an entire division within Microsoft to write software for it. Steve and Bill had talked regularly, and Microsoft became the premier maker of Mac software—earning hundreds of millions along the way. Then, in 1983, the partnership crumbled. Steve felt that Bill had stolen the Mac’s graphical user interface for his operating system that was still in development, Windows 1.0. He dragged Bill into an Apple conference room and accused him of committing a grievous betrayal. Now Steve was on the cusp of edging Bill out. If IBM made NeXTSTEP the standard for its workstations, Bill would lose both money and power. And that’s exactly what NeXT proposed to IBM, audaciously suggesting that IBM adopt NeXTSTEP for its new workstation computers under development. To prevent conflicts of interest, the proposed deal stipulated that IBM would remain focused on the business market while NeXT stayed confined to the education market. If IBM agreed to the terms, the deal would put NeXT’s software on millions of machines worldwide and keep IBM out of its academic market. As the deal was negotiated, things began to grow cozy between NeXT and IBM. The NeXT team started referring to their IBM counterparts as family. “Cousin Bill” was Bill Lowe, the head of IBM’s PC operations.
• But whether consciously or not, Steve had perfected the art of projecting strength from weakness. Here he was, the CEO of NeXT—a start-up with no shipped products and a rapidly dwindling bank account—lecturing IBM about the terms of a potential deal. In reality, IBM had other options for software. But this was probably NeXT’s one best shot at gaining distribution and escaping Silicon Valley obscurity. In September, Steve pushed his luck even further. He hosted the IBM executives at his Woodside home and laid out ambitious financial terms for the deal. IBM would have to pay NeXT royalties for its operating system, starting at a breathtaking $ 500 per copy. Meanwhile, IBM’s flagship personal computer, the Personal System/ 2, cost about $ 2,000 for the entry-level version. The terms were negotiated down, but the talks soon stalled. Steve grew impatient and decided to lay down the law to IBM’s executives. Any workable deal would have to be quick and simple, he told them over the phone. IBM’s interpretation of quick and simple arrived at ten o’clock the night before IBM’s negotiating team would arrive again from headquarters in Armonk, New York. The NeXT team gathered around the fax machine, watching impatiently as page after page spewed out. “When’s it gonna stop? When’s it gonna stop?” they wondered aloud. “Typical IBM,” Dan’l joked. Finally, the fax machine fell silent. Sitting in the spool was a 125-page contract thick enough to choke a lawyer. Steve opened it that night and made it to page ten. “This is not going to work,” he told NeXT counsel Gary Moore, who had represented Steve and Rich in the Apple lawsuit and then joined NeXT as its top lawyer. An internal memo described it as “brain-damaged,” Silicon Valley–speak for hopelessly bureaucratic. Steve wanted a deal that favored NeXT. And he understood a fundamental law of negotiation: Whoever writes the first draft controls the conversation. “If we start from this document, we’re not going to end up in a place that makes sense,” he told Gary.
• To understand the magnitude of what IBM was offering, consider the computing landscape at that moment: The entire industry was up for grabs. Businesses and institutions were still deciding what operating system would run their computers for the next decade. If IBM, as the undisputed king of computing, threw its weight behind NeXTSTEP—with its elegant interface, object-oriented programming, and groundbreaking technology—Steve’s software could become the standard that every office worker booted up each morning. NeXTSTEP could have been what Windows eventually became. The deal could put Steve Jobs back on the map.

Foreword

• As he left, I could see him rubbing the brochure between his fingers, gauging the quality of the paper. That simple act clued me in on a trait of his I would come to appreciate over the years: his focus. When you were talking to him, he had a great way of removing everything around and just looking at you. When faced with a business problem, he knew how to cut out distractions and reduce it to its very essence. And when it came to matters of design, like logos and paper quality, he was always a critic. Later, when we worked together at Apple and NeXT, I would travel with him around the world. Wherever we went, Steve’s focus followed. When we were walking down the street in another city, he might see a car and point out something about its design to me: the shadow cast by the curve of a fender, the shape of a headlamp, and even the choice of paint color best suited to a particular model. He was perpetually searching for insight and seeking excellence.
• In better news, Canon had finally delivered its optical disk. “Revolutionary,” Steve said when NeXT finally received it. By using this optical disk instead of a traditional hard drive for storage, the computer wouldn’t emit any pesky mechanical noise. Instead, the futuristic cube would whisper to life. But NeXT’s engineers weren’t so sure about Canon’s drive. When Rich bolted it into the Cube and powered it up for a test run, minutes passed. No boot. Unix—the operating system that was built to constantly swap data with storage—hit a wall. The optical drive couldn’t keep up. “It was slower than expected,” said Rich. To fix the speed problem, NeXT decided to offer customers traditional hard drives as optional add-ons—another unplanned, inelegant, and expensive concession. It wouldn’t be the last compromise. As the team trudged along, competitors Sun Microsystems and Apple had begun transitioning their high-end workstations to color displays. Now customers in scientific labs, medical imaging facilities, and academic publishing houses were all asking for them. But color monitors generated lower-definition images than those of the grayscale monitors they replaced. Steve wasn’t on board with the muddier image quality, demanding WYSIWYG—that the display resolution match a laser printer’s output with perfect fidelity. Steve made the call that NeXT should stick with the older, higher-resolution grayscale monitors. Better to ship a machine that looked outdated than one stuck with what Steve called “baby color.” Besides, megapixel color would have doubled the price, creating an impossible burden for a start-up already bleeding cash. The technological retreats were piling up. Steve had promised a groundbreaking computer in every respect. Now there was a growing feeling within NeXT that the team was preparing to ship yesterday’s technology.
• By May 1988, NeXT’s financial outlook was also looking seriously gray. The company had $ 25 million in the bank but needed $ 27.5 million to survive the year. To make it work, they’d need to sell sixteen thousand machines by year-end. But the team could barely get one to boot properly. The situation didn’t stop Steve from planning another grand, expensive gesture. As the company approached a hundred employees, Steve told Pat and Ross that the company’s footprint needed to grow. He had found an opportunity for NeXT to move to a brand-new office park, Seaport Centre in Redwood City, overlooking a creek and a marina. Ross and Pat reviewed the lease, which covered six buildings and would cost nearly $ 2.5 million in first-year rent, with millions more committed to tenant improvements and campus upgrades. The figures were shocking—NeXT was proposing to spend more on office space than most start-ups raised in total funding. But the board approved it. Steve had sold them on his vision for growth.
• Jonathan hammered away at the core question: “How does a small company win market acceptance?” Sure, NeXTSTEP was powerful, he acknowledged. But without a library of tools and applications built by third-party developers, he believed that NeXT would struggle to gain traction. Steve got the concern. He had been working hard to pursue software partnerships. He started by going after Improv—Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Lotus’s experimental spreadsheet software—which could do things Excel couldn’t touch.
• Steve had even bigger ambitions too. He wanted NeXT computers to crack open a field that most considered dead: artificial intelligence. The grand promises of the early ’80s—computers that would diagnose cancer or argue legal cases—had crashed and burned in what they called “AI winter.” Yet when Steve visited labs at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, he saw researchers hunched over $ 50,000 workstations, stubbornly teaching machines baby steps like understanding sentences or solving puzzles. They wrote in Lisp, an exotic programming language that lets programmers manipulate ideas the way other languages manipulated numbers. Steve made a decision that would have sounded insane to other executives: bundle Allegro Common Lisp—software that cost thousands per license—for free with every NeXT machine. While IBM and Sun treated AI tools as exotic luxuries, Steve was intent on putting them in university computer labs.
• Like Lotus, the players were drawn by the man in charge as much as the machine he was building. Adobe brought the technology called Display PostScript(which would later evolve into the format called the Portable Document Format, or PDF), making NeXT the first computer in which screen and printer spoke the same language—what you saw on your monitor was exactly what would print on paper, pixel-perfect at 400 dots per inch.
• Just over two years earlier, at the Pebble Beach retreat, the team had warned Steve that setting an impossible deadline would force them into bad decisions and flawed designs. Now they were living in the worst of all worlds. The ambitious release timeline had forced them to compromise on design, and they had missed their target date by more than a year. Steve woke up to the reality after spending a week with the workstation on his desk. “The computer takes several minutes(my guess is five plus) to boot,” he wrote to his senior team. “My computer crashes once every hour or two. With the current state of our software, the industry will laugh us into bankruptcy. We are running out of time. It’s all up to you.” For months, when Dan’l had tried to raise these exact concerns, Steve had dismissed him, saying his marketing team wasn’t “spending enough time with the product.” Now Steve was seeing the problem for himself. The sales team had a name for this Steve phenomenon: “Go North.” The joke went like this: Steve hires a salesman and tells him to “Go North.” Sacramento. “Keep going.” Oregon. “Go North.” Washington. “Go North.” Finally, the guy’s calling from the Arctic Circle. “What the hell are you doing up there?” Steve explodes.
• His focus made him different from anyone else I’ve worked with. It was a superpower. But like a lot of strengths, it could be a double-edged sword. He sometimes let his focus get in his own way. At NeXT, it led him to obsess maniacally on many of the wrong things, relentlessly pursuing perfection at the expense of his company’s viability. It could also make him bruising to work for. He didn’t know how to exempt anyone from his exacting—and often changing—standards, whether they were waiters, top corporate lieutenants, or university presidents. He struggled to show others grace.
• To prepare for the launch, Todd Rulon-Miller had to recruit more world-class salespeople without being able to say anything about the product they’d be selling or when it would ship. Todd had joined NeXT two years earlier, walking away from a six-figure salary at Tandem Computers, a major manufacturer of machines for banks and telecommunications companies. Now he made a $ 75,000 base salary with stock options at NeXT. He’d bet his career on Steve’s vision, and he was asking others to do the same. Another challenge: Sales were certain to be an uphill challenge even when they had a finished computer to sell. NeXT’s target customers—university professors and researchers—had what Todd’s planning documents called a “zero BS quotient.” They had deep technical expertise and were fiercely skeptical. They would see through the machine’s flaws instantly: its sluggish optical drive, outdated processor, and inflated price. “You’re talking to people who think small, and then you’ve got Steve Jobs who’s bigger than the world,” Todd said.
• NeXT’s machine still didn’t work, but now IBM was committed to backing it. From IBM’s perspective, NeXT offered an escape hatch from irrelevance. The company feared becoming a boring, commodity PC maker. And despite all of NeXT’s troubles, IBM hoped NeXTSTEP could offer excitement again. Steve declared victory. He’d played chicken with the world’s largest computer company and won. Or, at least, he convinced himself he had. Whether or not it would save NeXT was another question.
• When approached about staging the NeXT launch, the director was skeptical. “Why do you need me?” George asked Steve, “You could get anyone to do that.” “We want someone with a name,” Steve insisted to NeXT designer Eddie Lee, his liaison with George. “We want to work with the best.” George agreed to stage the event. He hoped to ditch the mores of stuffy corporate presentations, instead pitching Steve on an immersive experience with projections on the floor—and even some spinning elements from his installations. In the end, though, the team settled on something more conventional: a man(Steve) sitting onstage clicking through computer applications projected onto a screen behind him, with a vase of flowers on a black-clothed table. George was reduced to a very expensive stagehand for a live demo.
• Making everything more difficult, Steve would regularly stand behind the software engineers as they worked, reaching past them to point at code on their screens to demand adjustments. One time, as the engineers worked on NeXT’s system for organizing and storing files for the 0.8 release, Steve started rearranging how the computer organized and accessed data. The problem was that customers expected NeXT to work like other workstation computers they were familiar with. With his changes, Steve had created a file system that confused users into rejecting the operating system. Steve spent the two days before his launch event rehearsing at a high school gymnasium in Berkeley. To combat buggy software and frequent crashes, the team constructed an elaborate digital illusion. As Steve demonstrated software on an onstage computer, a hidden machine in the wings would actually handle all the music and audio demos.
• At one in the morning, bleary-eyed and desperate, Julius bumped into Steve and Bud in the NeXT hallway. “How bad would it be if we just played a CD?” he asked, regretting it immediately. Steve fixed him with a lethal stare. “If you can’t get this together,” he said, “you will not have descendants.” For Steve, music wasn’t just another computer feature; it had become the soul of the machine. He was determined that NeXT’s computer would make live music and had placed a donated Steinway grand piano in the NeXT lab as a hulking monument to that commitment.
• On Wednesday, October 12, 1988, the day of the event, grown men wept outside Davies Hall. Three thousand invitations had gone out for the unveiling, but many of Steve’s most devoted followers hadn’t been on the list. Some had trekked from across the country to see their hero present, with no invitation in hand, only to be denied entry. Even at his lowest ebb, exiled from Apple and running a struggling computer company, Steve inspired loyalty, fervor, devotion. Burt, who was six feet tall and two hundred pounds, was stationed at the door to keep them out. One particularly desperate soul caught his attention: “I took a bus all the way here from Kansas City,” he pleaded.
• The night before the launch, Steve and his presentation team stayed up arguing until two in the morning about the exact shade of green that would be used on the projector. The color they settled on would be only one among many background colors used during the presentation. But Steve insisted on getting it exactly right. So there they sat, cycling through a parade of barely distinguishable RGB values in a dark conference room as the night ticked away. With only hours to go until showtime, NeXTSTEP’s bugs still hadn’t been fixed. Onstage crashes were looking inevitable. At the last minute, Bud materialized with a new OS disk, casually instructing Paul Vais, the presentation’s executive director, to load it for the software demonstration because “it’s more stable.” To Paul, it felt like putting a Band-Aid on a leaky submarine. “If it crashed,” Paul said, “I would have been dead.” But at least they’d settled on the right shade of green.
• Then, at 9: 30 a.m., he walked out to thunderous applause. “I think I speak for everybody at NeXT saying it’s great to be back.” Beat. “I haven’t done this in a few years, so I’m a little nervous today.” It sounded like the man had just admitted weakness to almost three thousand people. But Steve’s team, waiting in the wings, knew better. Steve Jobs didn’t do nervous. “I think together, we’re going to experience one of those times that occurs once or twice in a decade of computing. A time when a new architecture is rolled out that’s really going to change the future of computing.” Every computer architecture had roughly a ten-year life cycle, he now claimed(though he’d told NeXT employees it was only five years). The IBM PC? “Peaked in around 1986.” The Macintosh—his own baby? “It’s going to peak next year. You can already see cracks in the architectural foundation.” He wasn’t done. “You will never see programs for the Macintosh that escape the orbit of working perfectly on that nine-inch electronic screen.” He also said, “Macintosh was a revolution in making it easier for the end user, but the software developer paid the price of that revolution. It is a bear to develop software for these things.” He claimed that NeXT’s computer, with its more powerful processor and bigger screen, would shatter these chains. With the Cube, developers could finally build the future.
• Then Steve did something with few precedents: He built an application live onstage using Interface Builder, dragging and dropping a physics simulation that a graduate student had created. A gas molecule bounced in a cylinder that materialized on screen. Backstage, the team was sweating. The molecule viewer had been crashing all week. “We were all biting our nails in the back, hoping it doesn’t glitch this one time,” said systems engineer Gregor Bailar. Miraculously, it didn’t. The audience oohed and aahed.
• Then Steve turned to the demos. “For those of you that aren’t software developers in the audience, I’d like to remind you of the first two laws of demoing. First law of demos is that demos will always crash. And the second law of demos is that the probability of crashing goes up with the number of people watching.” The audience laughed. “So if something goes wrong today, have some compassion for the demo-er.” Steve sat down to demonstrate the NeXT Cube. As if on cue, the computer paused while booting. Backstage, Paul felt his stomach plunge. “Oh shit, it’s failing,” he thought. Steve turned slowly toward him, eyes like lasers. No compassion there.
• Nearly two hours into the presentation, Steve jumped in to interrupt partner testimonials. “Excuse me, I’m going to have to cut this short,” he said. “We’re running a little late today. And there’s another group called the San Francisco Symphony that thinks they need the hall this afternoon.” Steve had saved his biggest gamble for last. The team had planned a duet between Daniel Kobialka, principal second violinist at the San Francisco Symphony, and the Cube, which would calculate its part in real time. Steve said that music was the NeXT feature “that strikes closest to the soul.” The first notes of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor emerged from the black Cube, carrying a distinctive digital clarity—not warm, not quite human, but miles beyond the beep-and-buzz of a 1980s computer. Then Daniel raised his Stradivarius. The virtuoso’s bow touched the strings and ignited something genuinely new: man and machine, trading phrases of a three-hundred-year-old masterpiece. Daniel swept through a passage, his fingers dancing up the neck of his violin. Then the computer would answer, holding the melody, keeping time with one of the world’s great violinists through the concerto’s most demanding runs. The hall erupted. After three years in the wilderness, Steve had just reminded everyone why they’d missed him.
• Then he spelled out the hard drive options to replace that slow optical disc: $ 2,000 for the smaller one or $ 4,000 for the bigger one. For the price, the audience gave him a standing ovation. Burt sat frozen. Thousands of industry experts had just whooped and hollered for a computer and printer combo that cost more than a Honda Civic. Only Steve Jobs could price a machine out of its market and get adulation in return. As Burt put it, “I just looked at my counterpart and I said, ‘I know nothing.’
• “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it!” In the pages of Newsweek, Bill Gates dismantled NeXT’s Cube piece by piece. “[ Steve] put a microprocessor in a box. So what?” he said. With regard to the futuristic optical drive: “Anyone can write Sony a check.”(Never mind that the check actually went to Canon.) The sleek design? Bill told Computerworld: “If you want black, I’ll sell you a can of paint.” Though the Cube bore the brunt of his anger, Bill was still feeling rattled by something bigger: the IBM deal. IBM was a crucial partner in Bill’s plan to scale up his Windows operating system. If Steve and IBM took things to the next level, Microsoft could find itself facing a major new competitor in the workstation market.
• Ironically, Bill was holding on to IBM at the exact moment Steve was pursuing Bill. “Steve wanted Microsoft’s applications in the worst way,” recalled NeXT sales executive Mark Hayes. Steve hoped Microsoft would develop apps similar to Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for the Cube. But every conversation between the two men ended the same way. “I talked to Gates,” Steve would report back to his team. “We’re not gonna get it. He just doesn’t want to enable us to compete.” The standoff hinted at the opposing philosophies that animated the two titans’ rivalry. In the Cube, Steve wanted to build a closed, proprietary system where every developer had to create software that was unique to his machines. Doing so, he believed, would facilitate a better user experience. In contrast, Bill wanted to scale Windows quickly, selling software that could run on everyone’s hardware. Microsoft was “in the business of writing for machines that sell in the millions,” Bill later said, “so [NeXT] is not for us.”
• In early 1985, Steve was pushed out of Apple. He called me later that year. “I’m going to start a new company focused on higher education,” he said. “I want you to come with me.” That same day, I met Steve at his home in Woodside for a walk, which was his favorite way to have deep conversations. He described to me the vision for what would become NeXT: He wanted to build on our work together at Apple and develop a powerful computer for higher education institutions. The relationships and market expertise that I had developed at Apple would be essential for the venture.
• The situation with working units wasn’t much better. Developers called the unfinished operating system “useless.” University clients were unhappy with them. Even at Reed College, Steve’s alma mater, sentiment was the same: The college needed a faster and bug-free system. Other schools had taken delivery of the computers but left them languishing in their white boxes, unopened. Customers were also coming to terms with the machine’s lack of basics: no color, no video, no floppy drive. “You said things would be simple,” university administrators told sales teams. The incomplete software left users with more complicated demands to code their desired programs from scratch. An internal NeXT report stated that art history professors had been complaining—they didn’t want to learn Objective-C.
• Dan’l decided to lay out the facts in an email to Steve: Bud’s software team, under orders from Steve, had redesigned how the computer organized files without documenting the changes. The company was selling to the most technically sophisticated customers on earth while offering “no logical rationale” for fundamental changes to how users could find and access their documents. Even within NeXT, employees were calling each other just to find where basic files were stored. Dan’l blamed the software team for burning through “$ 2–3 million per month with no accountability, or written schedule.” Todd concurred. The sales team had supported engineering for two years, accepting low salaries and earning no commissions because there was nothing to sell. “To find out we’ve ‘run out of money’ when it has finally become our turn to take the baton is a little disillusioning,” Todd wrote to Steve.
• While Ross hadn’t arranged this particular meeting, word of Steve’s pattern of refusing government work reached him anyway. He wasn’t happy. These weren’t ordinary business partners Steve was alienating. Ross’s executives included the same men who had broken their colleagues out of an Iranian prison when the government collapsed nine years earlier—former employees at Ross’s previous company, Electronic Data Systems, who had flown into hostile territory to rescue their own people. As Dan’l recalled, “You did not mess around with these guys.” But Steve was casually blowing them off.
• As much as the partnership made sense, Steve had a lingering reservation. “Your stores are ugly,” he kept telling Kevin. Where NeXT was a boutique manufacturer obsessed with elegant design and visions of premium retail distribution, Businessland operated mostly through direct sales to corporations. Its typical location was scattered with simple wooden office desks holding an array of Compaq, IBM, and HP computers on top—no beauty in sight. NeXT adopted an internal slur for the Businessland team: mattress salesmen. After weeks of negotiation, NeXT and Businessland closed a deal at 9: 00 p.m. on February 21, 1989. Steve raised a toast. “Let’s go kick the shit out of some people,” he told the gathered Businessland executives. “I am pleased(very pleased!!) to report that we ‘plucked a BIG one,’ ” Steve wrote to all of NeXT. “We have just taken a large, bold step in the continuing adventure of building the best computer company in the world.”
• Dave had committed Businessland to selling $ 150 million worth of NeXT computers over the coming year, giving Steve his best shot at surpassing the goal he had set against Dan’l’s advice, of selling $ 125 million worth of computers. But Steve’s micromanagement made getting started harder than expected. When Kevin sent Steve slides he had prepared for a joint NeXT-Businessland presentation to corporate customers at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, Steve called him and said, “These are terrible. [Creative Director] Susan Kare and I are coming over tomorrow at two o’clock. We’re going to redo your slides, and you get to have three words and three points on the slide, and that’s it.”
• But even NeXT’s one-upping salespeople kept getting one-upped by Steve. When customers were on the fence, they’d bring him in for what sales employees called “Steve on a stick.” It was his presentation done the same way every time: black backdrop, minimalist staging, even down to having a single calla lily flower in a vase on a table nearby. It worked like magic. When Patrick pitched the computer, sales prospects kept delivering the same verdict: beautiful machine, great software, but too slow and expensive. When Steve stepped in, he could execute the sale nearly every time. It gave him little sympathy for how hard it was to sell the computers. “You don’t know how to sell this,” Steve would tell Kevin. “You guys haven’t given us anything we can sell,” he responded. So the salespeople had to get creative. Patrick remembers pitching a tanning bed distributor that was secretly selling the same tanning lotion under eight different brand names. They were tracking customers by writing down their names and orders on index cards. Patrick’s team built a demo showing how NeXT could digitize the entire operation. He made the sale.
• Steve’s Deep Shit List kept growing. But now when he read it at company meetings, no one listened. If every problem was existential, people thought, then nothing really was. And they were fed up with shit—especially Steve’s. He was making everything so much harder. Employees revolted at a company retreat in Santa Cruz, promising to resign if he continued his tirades. Steve responded by fostering a new obsession: the Japanese philosophy of total quality management. He announced to the company that he was going to be taking a different approach to management, following in the mold of Japanese business leaders who understood that smart companies reject management in which “bosses do the thinking while workers wield the screwdrivers.” Instead, he hoped to mobilize “every ounce of intelligence” from all employees.
• Steve played cool about the deal in public, acting as if Canon was chasing him rather than the other way around. “A reasonable fraction of what Canon is investing is going into the bank,” he told the Associated Press, as if NeXT was drowning in money. With Canon’s investment, NeXT’s valuation soared to $ 600 million, which was welcome news to both Businessland and IBM, who had staked their reputations on NeXT’s success. Steve was convincing the world that he was relevant once again.
• For all the books and movies that have been made about Steve, and about Apple, most fail to document the real story of this period of his life—and of NeXT. Too often, these years are breezed over or airbrushed. As we often discussed at NeXT, growing a company is like polishing rocks in a tumbler. Over time, the mix and grit change into a shiny, well-functioning team. Along the way, though, things can be rough. You’re crashing into each other, experiencing ups and downs. By overlooking this discomfort, these narratives ignore the role that the NeXT years played in both Steve’s leadership development and the eventual outcome: In the late 1990s, NeXT’s core technology became essential to Apple’s survival.
• Dan’l reminded Steve of the team’s agreement to limit the initial run to two thousand units until NeXTSTEP 1.0 was finished. He said that the constraint had originally come from Bud’s engineering team, which didn’t want to flood the market with an unfinished operating system. Steve kept pushing: The team had to hit twenty-five thousand units or bust, he said. “I learned from you,” Dan’l said, his voice sharp, “the best way to lose money is to build product that people don’t want to buy.” Steve wouldn’t let it go. He wanted the orders placed. “I’m not going to authorize that,” Dan’l said. “You want it, you own it.” Steve had his answer. If Dan’l wouldn’t order the inventory as the marketing chief whose department ran sales, then Dan’l wouldn’t be making those decisions anymore. By fiat, the marketing department now belonged to Steve.
• Dan’l still remained NeXT’s primary spokesman, so the man who’d just been stripped of his marketing role now had the unpleasant task of explaining to reporters why it was actually a promotion. “I believe that this is a very positive change,” he dutifully explained. Steve had a final gift: After Dan’l finished spinning his own demotion to the press, Steve stripped him of the press job too. Dan’l surveyed the wreckage. “There were no adults in the room, except for maybe me,” he reflected later. Maybe a couple of others, like Phil. His colleagues heard the rumors about Dan’l’s rupture with Steve and asked what really happened in that room. “I will be happy to tell the real tale,” he promised supporters. “I am not a gambler, I only bet on myself, and that is exactly what I have done.”
• At Apple, I had learned that our working relationship would only succeed if I treated him as an equal and was clear, direct, and assertive with him. Steve knew that too.
• Dan’l pushed for triage: “The time has come to look at our business proposition.” Every operating assumption had been proved wrong: The product wasn’t ready, the budget had collapsed, and the strategy kept shifting like sand. He believed that Steve, for all his brilliance, was setting them up for continued failure.
• With IBM, Steve had overestimated his power. And he knew it. Years later, he confided in Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull that he had learned a lesson from the collapse of the IBM deal: Never overplay your hand. Decades after the deal fell through, NeXT executives remained tortured by what could have been. They still believed that a NeXT-IBM partnership could have shifted the entire trajectory of personal computing, preempting the Microsoft Windows monopoly that took hold through the decade. IBM had committed almost $ 100 million and would have shipped NeXT-powered computers to its thousands of corporate customers at the same moment that Windows was struggling to find its footing. NeXTSTEP had a real shot at becoming the standard. But Steve flushed it.
• I wanted to understand the method behind their magic. How did they grow their audience, while staying current with changing times? One thing I discovered was that transformative leaders always return to an origin story or a core concept, again and again. For Steve, his core was the Macintosh.

Part Two

• The end at Apple had come over dessert in Palo Alto with John Sculley. When John asked what Jean-Louis really thought of him, he gave the unvarnished truth. “You, John Sculley, don’t know enough about the products for me to respect working with you.” Just like Steve had told John five years earlier. Two days later, Jean-Louis was fired.
• “Gassée wanted to present himself like the second coming of Steve Jobs,” said William Adams, who worked with both NeXT and Be as a software developer, “but he didn’t have the vision.” Jean-Louis had “Steve Wozniak kind of guys” building clever solutions to problems nobody had asked them to solve, William said.
• Steve’s Warp Nine project—to build a cheaper computer in just nine months—was nearing completion. The team called it the NeXTstation. True to form, Steve insisted on adding one more thing. He decided the pizza-box-shaped computer would sit under the monitor and needed an AC connection on the back. The Apple lawsuit settlement from four years earlier required that the box sit alongside, not beneath, the monitor. But that settlement had expired. That way, users could plug their monitors right into the computer, adding convenience and leaving one less cable running to the wall outlet. Steve was obsessed with reducing cable clutter, and years later demanded that the iMac come with only a single cable on the back of the monitor.
• When The Wizard of Oz moment arrived, the screen burst from black and white to color at the exact instant Dorothy entered Oz. The audience gasped. Steve pushed further, demonstrating a Ferrari with transparent windows. “You can even see the mountain through the windshield,” he declared. The NeXTstation’s video board was revolutionary for 1990—one of the first to render actual video on a computer. Other computers of the day could show flat, opaque images like houses and trees. But they couldn’t render transparent objects like windows and glass. Steve had finally done what everyone begged him to do: listened to the market, cut the price, simplified the product. But by now he was three years late. And the computer’s price remained too high—still considerably above the $ 3,000 price point university buyers had originally demanded.
• The $ 4,995 NeXTstation came with a measly 30 megabytes of free disk space, while most affordable personal computers of the day had between 40 and 200 megabytes. Yet the NeXTstation’s raw speed was undeniable. Byte magazine’s tests showed the NeXTstation running almost twice as fast as competing IBM machines. But the hardware didn’t matter so long as the company didn’t have enough outside developers willing to build software for its platform. As The New York Times opined, “In the end, it will all come down to software. For Next Inc. to flourish, Mr. Jobs must find a way to start a software avalanche.” Instead, Steve made the problem worse, actively discouraging developers from porting their existing software to NeXT. When developers tried to create conversion tools that would bring thousands of PC and Mac programs to NeXTSTEP, company executives shut them down. Steve wanted only original creations built specifically for his computers. He was choosing purity over survival. — Note: Story of big risks that Jobs took in favor of a vision
• Now Disney was simultaneously Pixar’s most prestigious client and Steve’s greatest humiliation. Disney needed the company’s technology but pretended like it didn’t exist. Steve turned on the NeXTstation and Donald Duck appeared on the screen in brilliant color. He thought the technology would command respect. But as he demonstrated the machine’s capabilities, he couldn’t help thinking about his resentment, he later told NeXT employees. Four years of Disney using Pixar’s technology in secret, four years of no credit. Steve brought it up. “That’s when things went sideways,” Jim recalled. “The argument escalated fast.” Finally, Jeffrey looked at Donald Duck on screen, then back at Steve. “Steve, there’s a difference between commerce and art,” he lectured. “Commerce is that beautiful computer that your salespeople brought in. Art is that picture of Donald Duck that you have on your computer, illegally, without our permission. “And if people mess around with our art,” Jeffrey continued, “we’ll grab them by the balls and squeeze them.” He wasn’t so mad as to tank a prospective deal completely—Jeffrey eventually agreed to buy twenty workstations. But he would not accept Steve lifting Disney’s intellectual property. Pixar, he said, would remain an uncredited partner. Steve sat there, Roy’s cigarette smoke wafting over his face, taking threats over a cartoon duck.
• He called his system “Mesh” in a March 1989 proposal. By the next year, the name evolved to the World Wide Web. For eighteen months, Tim’s proposal gathered dust. Tim had been advocating for a NeXT Cube at CERN, drawn to its advanced development environment. Tim’s boss, Mike Sendall, quietly signed off on Tim’s project—as an excuse to test the NeXT Cube. “He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I’d been talking about so enthusiastically,” Tim told Fresh Air. “And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine…‘ Why not just do this hypertext thing you’re talking about?’ ” In autumn 1990, Tim took delivery of a machine unlike any other at CERN: the latest, upgraded NeXT Cube, which had been released alongside the NeXTstations that summer. After its unboxing, it sat like a sculpture on Tim’s desk, matte black and aesthetically perfect. Tim made quick use of it, employing the application builder and taking advantage of the system’s ability to display formatted text and images exactly as they would appear in final software with minimal code—crucial for creating the first visual web browser. But the real magic was NeXT’s use of object-oriented programming. While other developers in his position might have to build their systems from the ground up, the Cube allowed Tim to focus solely on bringing his innovation to life. “I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms,” he wrote, “because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already.” Through October and November, Tim coded in Objective-C, pounding away in his gray-floored office. Before Tim’s project, accessing files on remote computers was a clunky, multistep process. Users had to know the exact machine address, log in with specialized software, and type a series of commands to locate what they needed. One wrong keystroke and nothing would work. But NeXT’s visual system let Tim hide these addresses completely. To create a hyperlink—the clickable blue text that would come to define the web—a user simply browsed to something interesting, hit Command-M, selected text in their document, and hit Command-L. The system memorized and managed all those complex addresses invisibly. Command-line programming gave way to pointing and clicking, transforming the internet from a specialists’ tool into something your grandmother could use.
• In Tim’s telling, the NeXT was more than just a computer. It was “a platform: something that allows you to build things which without it would have been possible, but a lot of work.” Because NeXT computers lay beyond most physicists’ budgets, Tim encouraged intern Nicola Pellow to create a “line-mode browser” that could run on any machine. He also built a gateway to CERN’s phonebook database. “Mundane as it was,” he later wrote in his book Weaving the Web, “this first presentation of the Web was, in a curious way, a killer application.” Beneath the elegant interface, he was building the plumbing of a new universe: HTTP(the protocol that would let computers request and deliver web pages), HTML(the language that would structure billions of documents with headings, paragraphs, and those revolutionary clickable links), and the server software that would deliver this information to anyone who asked. These three inventions, now invisible to the billions of people who use them daily, would become the fundamental architecture of the web, as essential and unnoticed as plumbing in a house. By December, info.cern.ch went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black magnesium cube in CERN’s Building 31. Tim scrawled a warning on the Cube in red ink: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” If anyone disobeyed, then the entirety of the World Wide Web would disappear from the internet until Tim restarted the machine. Where Tim saw his project as a leap forward, others weren’t so sure. “I didn’t find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of the web,” Tim recalled. “They quite reasonably asked to know why it was different from the past.”
• To understand their legitimate doubts, it’s helpful to know that the internet and the World Wide Web aren’t the same thing. The internet is the underlying network infrastructure—the cables, routers, servers, and protocols that connect computers worldwide. The web is just one application that runs on top of it, a system for sharing and linking documents through clickable hyperlinks. In 1990, many competing systems existed for navigating and organizing information online, including email, FTP for file transfers, and other information retrieval systems. Tim’s web hadn’t yet emerged as the standard. Internet projects like Gopher, developed at the University of Minnesota, competed for the same space. NeXT itself was also building automatic internet connectivity for consumers, with modems, IP registration, even billing.
• The circle was almost complete. NeXT had built the machine that birthed the web and provided the development environment that made it possible. Yet the company was missing what would soon become a revolution. While Tim Berners-Lee’s invention spread from one NeXT Cube to millions of screens worldwide, Steve had already moved on to other battles. Nobody—not Steve, not Tim, not anyone at NeXT—could have predicted that this crude interface for sharing physics papers would reshape civilization itself.
• Another managed to pack the entire Steve paradox into a single breath, describing his personal life as “lacking due to his narcissism and shallowness,” then saying, “he has far-reaching vision and can vitalize plans and goals.” Others said he had “integrity as long as he gets his way,” was “extremely bright and competent,” and “would serve well in a position of trust and confidence”—almost everyone said that, even the people who’d just finished cataloging his sins.
• Before I turn it over to Geoff, I want to highlight an underappreciated part of every technology story. And that is: family. Not corporate family, but the wives, husbands, children, partners, parents, and chosen family members who support founders and builders as they do great work. I know that I would not be writing this foreword without my own family. And I am certain Steve would not have become the person he did without his. When we first founded NeXT, Steve didn’t have much family to speak of. At times, it led to contention between Steve and me. It was important to me to spend time with my wife and young sons. But Steve made it difficult. He often demanded the leadership team appear in person for weekend meetings, whether on holidays or family birthdays. I did my best to draw boundaries. After I left the company, Steve began to understand why. During the later NeXT years, he got married, had his second, third, and fourth children, and learned what it meant to be a father. In this same window, both of his adoptive parents died. When his father passed away, in 1993, the loss affected Steve deeply, and he invited me to the burial. There were less than ten people present. Soon after that, we had breakfast together. As was typical, Steve arrived a little late. But this time, with an unusual opening remark. “You were right,” he declared with that same old grin. “About what?” I said, incredulously, recalling the many years of argument and struggle as we built NeXT. “Family,” he said. We talked for a long time that morning, with little mention of products, but great enthusiasm for the life lessons that only family can deliver. It is my belief that Steve’s success and the eventual success of Apple emanate from this balance and the commitment to and trust in others that he learned from his family. It’s a lesson we should all heed.
• Steve’s relationship with his own technology revealed itself in unexpected ways. When a new Canadian engineer named Steve Hayman noticed that nobody at NeXT had claimed the email alias steve@ next.com—despite seven or eight Steves working there—he figured he could take it. Late one Friday night, two weeks into the job, he filled out the form to redirect steve@ next.com to his own address, shayman@ next.com. The system approved it automatically. Then the avalanche began. Emails from reporters, CEOs, financiers—all thinking they were writing to Steve Jobs—flooded Steve Hayman’s inbox. “Of course I didn’t read any of it,” he later wrote on his blog. But panic set in immediately. In a desperate attempt to undo his mistake before anyone noticed, Steve Hayman filled out the form again, this time redirecting steve@ next.com to sjobs@ next.com. Then he sent Steve a confessional email: “I did something dumb… This was a bad idea, I’m sorry.” But Steve didn’t rip into him. “Great idea, thank you,” he responded.
• As his inner circle began to dissolve, Steve found refuge in an unlikely place: his inbox. By 1991, Steve had become one of the world’s first email power users, receiving what Director of Operations Greg Brandeau estimated to be a thousand messages each day at sjobs@ next.com. This wasn’t typical for a CEO in 1991. Email was still a novelty in most offices. Many executives didn’t even have email addresses, and those who did might check them once a week. Most Silicon Valley workers chose to walk down the hall rather than risk their message sitting unread for days. Steve was different. He lived in his inbox, firing off responses at 3: 00 a.m., running his company from his keyboard. But the software was primitive.
• It felt like signature Steve. The team had seen him lose major customer deals, watch the entire team slump in dejection, only to return the next morning with electric enthusiasm—and no small amount of bluster. Steve had this ability to “confidently state things that he did not know to be true,” software developer Leo Hourvitz observed.
• Three weeks later, on September 22, 1991, his son, Reed, was born. As Steve’s company flailed, he discovered something that mattered more. “Having Reed has been a different experience for me that I won’t even attempt to put into words,” Steve said in a magazine interview. “It’s as if I never saw the color green before and all of a sudden when Reed was born, I could see the color green.” Something was softening in him. As things went off the rails, Ron observed, “he’d get humble, he’d be very self-reflective.” Mike concurred. “When [Steve] was desperate, that was his absolute best,” he said.
• In 1991, Reed College invited Steve to speak to incoming freshmen. “Character is built not in good times,” he told them, “but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity.”
• Steve eventually acknowledged what everyone had been trying to tell him. “Corporate America discovered that they could use NeXTSTEP to build their in-house, mission-critical custom apps, five to ten times faster too,” Steve soon told an audience at his next product launch in San Francisco. “And they came to us and said, ‘You don’t realize what you have. You have potentially the biggest breakthrough in the computer industry that we have seen in the last decade.’ ” NeXT was teaching Steve something he’d never learned at Apple: how to transform failure into fuel.
• NeXT still needed third-party developers to build software for NeXTSTEP. However, the developer community wasn’t exactly thrilled to be making tools for the CIA. They knew about the spies’ relationship with NeXT because the three-letter agencies placed orders for their independent software, which only worked on NeXT machines. Steve needed someone with cultural cachet who could make NeXT seem cool again, someone who could convince hackers and idealists that the platform was still worth their time despite its new clientele. John Perry Barlow—a Mormon cattle rancher, computer geek, and Grateful Dead lyricist—fit the bill perfectly. His friends called him “Barlow.”
• While NeXT and NeXTWORLD fought over editorial control, they both overlooked the actual future. In August 1991, NeXTWORLD writer Daniel Kehoe spotted an announcement for a software app called “WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12.” The app allowed users to edit the hypertext—the code—that made up the websites on the information system, spelled “WorldWideWeb.” The name seemed to Daniel to be “a bit of a conceit since the only users at the time were high-energy physicists at a few research institutes.” Daniel wanted to cover the web for NeXTWORLD, but the editors weren’t interested. They worried it had limited appeal.
• Steve also forecast something radical. While the internet already connected universities and corporations through physical cables and dial-up modems, Steve envisioned computers with a built-in “radio net or something” that would make them wirelessly connected everywhere. Once that happened, he argued, being disconnected would feel “like having a telephone that’s not plugged in.”
• When Steve took the stage, his two-and-a-half-hour presentation contained flashes of his old showmanship but, as Barlow wrote, “a lot more steak than sizzle.” The newly announced products were “pretty prosaic stuff”—enterprise software for financial trading, healthcare, and corporate clients. The scene would have been unrecognizable to Ross or Dan’l Lewin, the executives who had begged Steve to embrace exactly this kind of pragmatic focus three years earlier. Steve was finally doing everything they had pleaded with him to do: Listen to customers. Talk about sustainable market segments instead of revolutionary dreams. He had finally become the CEO they had hoped for then. But the transformation had come too late. Steve’s pivot might have saved NeXT if he’d done it in 1988 or 1989, back when he was blowing up the IBM deal and chasing perfect control over his hardware and software rather than sustainable profit. As it stood, the markets had matured and competitors Sun and IBM had caught up. The company that might have succeeded with pragmatic focus five years earlier was now just another enterprise software vendor arriving late to a crowded party. And the change wasn’t complete. He had finally mastered both sides of the game—hardware and software. The problem was that only one side mattered anymore, and he couldn’t bring himself to let the other one die.
• Steve wasn’t going to give up. He’d learned that the best people were worth the wait. “When you meet somebody that good… you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise,” he told students at MIT. “I’ve always found it best not to compromise and just keep chipping away.”
• The full horror of the situation hit Mike as he listened to the Motorola call. This maneuver was about more than chips; it was about power. IBM, Motorola, and Apple controlled the processors, the operating systems, and the manufacturing. But NeXT? The company was a mouse in a field of giants. “We had no leverage,” Mike said. “We were completely at their mercy. And they had no mercy.” The moment crystallized eight years of strategic mistakes. Steve had been offered every path to scale: IBM’s partnership that could have put NeXT on millions of desktops, Ross Perot’s connections throughout the federal government, distribution deals that could have moved them beyond boutique sales. Each time, Steve had walked away, betting that his superior technology would create its own demand, that if he built something perfect enough, the world would beat down a path to his door. Instead, his competitors’ ecosystems grew massive while NeXT stood still. Apple’s user base now reached the millions, deepening its supplier relationships. IBM’s enterprise dominance had solidified. Microsoft captured the PC revolution and had spent eight years building an unshakeable foundation of developers, users, and hardware partners.
• It would finally turn NeXT into a software company, competing directly with Microsoft and Windows. Andy Grove himself had helped bring about the decision. Many months earlier, he stood before NeXT’s leaders and told them that porting to Intel was do-or-die. “Steve’s a dear friend of mine,” he said, “and I’m just gonna tell you guys, you’re not gonna make it if you don’t run on Intel chips.” Andy’s logic was based on simple market math. Without Intel’s massive installed base, NeXT wouldn’t be able to attract the software developers the company so desperately needed. Developers made software for platforms with many users, and users bought computers that had the best software. More users meant more software sales, which meant more developers creating apps, which meant more reasons to buy Intel-based PCs, feeding Intel’s dominance.
• “This is the single most important thing that ever happened to NeXT,” Mike said. Steve promised that he would never again let himself be dependent on other companies’ road maps. He kept his word, spending $ 278 million to buy chipmaker P.A. Semi in 2008 after he returned to lead Apple. The purchase would allow Apple to design its own processors for the iPhone and iPad—and eventually create Apple silicon chips to power Macs. The lesson of NeXT’s dependence on Motorola and other suppliers had stuck.
• By later in 1992, Steve claimed it had been the plan all along, “the strategic model that we’ve always had: We’re a software company that happens to make great hardware,” he told NeXTWORLD. Steve claimed it was evidence of an ascendant NeXT. Onstage at COMDEX 1992, the computer industry’s largest trade show, he called his company “the only serious challenge to Microsoft.” In reality, the switch to Intel meant bending the knee to Bill Gates, who’d long argued that closed systems would always lose to open ones. Now Steve was listening to his customers and accepting their help. “And boy, we need it, so that’s good,” he told an audience at MIT.
• Steve’s desperation was growing. For months, the financial reality had been closing in on him, but he had refused to face the truth that he was running out of money. He was bleeding money on two fronts—pouring his personal fortune into both NeXT and Pixar. When Steve recruited an Intel executive named Marcel Gani as the NeXT CFO earlier that year, Steve had called him at 2: 00 a.m. and told him that he wouldn’t reveal his accounting books because he wanted to hire “risk-takers.” Steve insisted that everything was fine because NeXT had the backing of Intel. Marcel had believed him. Then Marcel dove into the books and discovered the devastating truth. NeXT was effectively bankrupt. Steve had been living in a financial fantasy. Marcel soon quit.
• By March 1993, PvC had left the company too. Those who worked closest to Steve noticed something changing, though the process looked anything but graceful. The pattern that had defined him for years was finally breaking apart, the wild emotional swings that colleagues had learned to brace for. Up, down, up, down, they recounted. But now the crashes seemed to hurt more, and the highs couldn’t lift him as high. Each betrayal left him rawer than the last. Dan’l Lewin, who had mended fences with Steve after their falling out, pointed to a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises that captured what everyone was witnessing: “How did you go bankrupt?” asked one character, Bill Gorton. “Two ways,” explained another, Mike Campbell. “Gradually, then suddenly.” Steve’s transformation was following the same excruciating arc. The powerful energy that used to sustain him for days would collapse into periods of hollow exhaustion. Friends watched him struggle with something he’d never had to face before: the possibility that intensity alone might not be enough. The financial terror brought him closer to losing everything he’d built. The personal betrayals cut deeper because he’d allowed himself to trust people who then walked away. Steve was being forced to find something he’d never needed before: a center that could hold when passion failed, when vision wasn’t enough, when everything around him collapsed. Learning to live without the extremes that had defined him was perhaps the most painful education of his life.
• NeXT’s hardware division had built computers so gorgeous that they ended up as sculptures of industrial art. The magnesium cube is still studied at design schools today. NeXT machines are part of the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and the Science Museum in London. In 2024, Christie’s, the prestigious fine art house, auctioned a Cube for more than $ 20,000. Computers from NeXT’s beige-box competitors ended up in landfills. NeXT’s hardware failure came down to timing. The company’s features were too early to market—shipping optical discs before storage was cheap and reliable, employing object-oriented programming before developers embraced it, creating megapixel displays when everyone else made do with small, blurry screens. Meanwhile the company’s hardware strategy itself was too late. The computer industry had fundamentally shifted while NeXT was stuck endlessly perfecting its Cube. By the early 1990s, corporate America wanted commodity hardware they could buy from multiple suppliers, not elegant sculptures from a single vendor. The age of proprietary computer architectures was ending, killed by Microsoft’s software dominance and the rise of interchangeable PC clones. NeXT was trying to win a hardware war that was already over. “We made a really great computer,” Steve later told Fresh Air. “But the world had changed enough to where the door to establish a new hardware company really had closed even before we started the company. We just didn’t know that at the time.” Steve had been trying to recreate past glories at Apple when the rest of the world had moved on. He took that lesson to heart: When the world changes, you have to change with it.
• Steve spoke briefly about his father. He felt lucky to have been his son—in the family’s Los Altos garage, Steve had watched Paul carefully sand the backs of cabinets and fence posts, learning the lesson that the parts of a product you can’t see should be as beautiful as the parts you can. Paul had taught Steve how to work with his hands, to respect craftsmanship, to never cut corners even when no one would look. Steve, the man who commanded audiences of thousands, stood before a handful of mourners, saying goodbye to the mechanic who’d raised him.
• Apple, meanwhile, had drifted into a fog of its own. The company had squandered its dominant position, going from $ 1 billion to $ 8 billion in revenue and spending its newfound cash developing glamorous innovations with no practical use. Meanwhile its product line had become a mess of divergent offerings. In 1993 alone, the company released more than seventy products.
• In June 1993, the board called John into a meeting and forced him to resign. A few days later, the company announced a $ 188 million quarterly loss and 2,500 layoffs, amounting to 15 percent of the workforce. John spent the next fifteen years coping with his failure. “I wish I had reached back to Steve and told him, ‘I want to help you come back to Apple,’ ” he told CNN Money. Steve’s verdict on John was less generous. “What can I say?” he told interviewer Robert X. Cringely. “I hired the wrong guy.” He had watched from exile as John turned Apple into everything he despised: a bloated bureaucracy that confused activity with achievement, releasing more than seventy products while neglecting to consider what would make any one of them truly great. “John Sculley got a very serious disease,” Steve continued. “It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work.”

Part Three

• As CFO, Dominique imposed discipline. “[ Dominique] was a great steadying force for Steve,” Warren said. He developed a top ten process that Steve immediately embraced. Unlike the reactive Deep Shit List, which catalogued unfolding crises, the Top Ten was proactive—“ the art of making the impossible possible,” as Dominique called it. Each item had an owner, a deadline, and an ambitious goal that, if achieved, would move the company forward. Every Monday morning, the executive team gathered to review progress. “If we were falling behind in one of the top ten, we would basically all focus on that and say, how do we fix it? How do we transfer resources to it?” Dominique said. The Top Tens cascaded through the company—engineering had one, sales had one, even the Japan office had its own list. Dominique understood that focus meant saying no. When one team proposed an internet venture incubator, Dominique nixed it. The company would have to wait until it had more money in the bank. Every decision came down to one question: Could NeXT afford it?
• When the two finally met, their one-hour meeting stretched to seven. They walked Palo Alto’s streets as Steve evangelized NeXT’s technology—the multimedia experience, the drag-and-drop interface that made Microsoft look prehistoric. They talked about software architecture. Dominique discussed his photography hobby, Steve brought up his obsession with design. Steve also told Dominique about NeXT’s disconnect. The company had built tomorrow’s technology for customers who didn’t know they needed it yet—at a price they couldn’t afford. “Basically, at the time, NeXT was what you see on the Mac today,” Dominique reflected, “with the multimedia experience, drag and drop.”
• Steve turned to another adviser during this challenging period: his friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Back when Steve had just left Apple, the two were neighbors in Woodside. Their friendship began with an argument over Steve’s pet peacock, which had been a gift from an ex-girlfriend. “The peacock wandered over and woke me up,” Larry later recounted at the All Things Digital conference. When he complained to Steve, Steve commiserated with him—he didn’t like the peacock either, he said. The disagreeable pair hit it off right away. Neither Steve nor Larry ever disclosed what became of the peacock, though it’s likely that Steve sold it or gave it away. Larry operated like Steve did. They were both human magnets turned to maximum strength, either pulling people into their orbit or flinging them away. There was no neutral ground with either man. “I say Steve’s my best friend, and Steve says I’m his best friend,” Larry told his biographer Mike Wilson. “And he says, ‘Well you’re my only friend, so you must be my best friend’… I could use the same joke.” While Steve burned through his fortune keeping two companies alive, Larry’s wealth grew. Oracle made the unglamorous software that ran corporate back rooms, the databases and digital plumbing no one saw but every company needed. Larry was proof positive that boring could make for a better business proposition than beautiful.
• Even if boring could pay the bills, it couldn’t hold Steve’s interest. As the company pivoted to enterprise software, Steve’s attention wandered. Dominique saw Steve nearly fall asleep in meetings with CIOs. So he began stepping away from NeXT. “He let us [manage] the company,” Dominique said. It was a major shift for the infamous micromanager. And as it turned out, Monday morning meetings ran more smoothly without him there. Steve began spending more time at Pixar, trading NeXT’s elegant designer headquarters for the ratty sofas of Pixar’s bare-boned offices. Two different worlds, both burning Steve’s money.
• In NeXT’s early years, bug tracking had been ad hoc, with no systematic documentation. Charly’s comprehensive approach finally let the team triage what could realistically ship with each release—which “boulders” were essential and which “pebbles” could wait. The result was software that, despite the company’s turmoil, consistently delivered. “What went out into the world of developers was very solid,” Charly recalled. Charly managed all of it with a spreadsheet. It symbolized a departure from before—a company-wide transformation. NeXT’s future was no longer going to be shaped by revolutionary tools but with cells and Monday morning triage. Even so, the engineers still worked off of their discontinued NeXT computers. “The beautiful hardware was everywhere,” Charly remembered. “It held up until we left.”
• By early 1994, things were beginning to turn around for NeXT. That year, the company achieved its first profit of $ 1 million on revenues of $ 49.6 million, thanks to the Sun licensing agreement and financial austerity. After nine years of losses, NeXT was finally stepping into the black. The company was unrecognizable from Steve’s original vision. No more black cubes, no beautiful factories. In their place: bug tracking and the unsexy plumbing that made corporate systems work. The young man who had wanted to put a dent in the universe was beginning to think smaller, measuring progress in pebbles rather than boulders. And while his fortune evaporated, his wisdom condensed. He now understood that genius without discipline ends in expensive failure. At NeXT’s East Coast Developer Conference, Steve’s newfound humility peeked through. “I wanted to close by saying something to all of you who’ve been with the NeXT community through ’93, which is: Thank you,” he said. “We put you guys through a difficult year.” “Everybody else thought it was our epitaph,” Steve said.
• He couldn’t code, but he could grasp the essence of any technical problem instantly. An engineer might explain to Steve why something couldn’t work—whether because of memory constraints, processing limits, or fundamental physics—and Steve would probe gently. “Yeah, but what if…?” he’d ask. He had a gift for connecting disparate ideas and suggesting combinations that violated conventional wisdom. He refused to accept the thousand reasons why something wouldn’t work. As much as the problem-solving interested him, Steve struggled to put his greatest strength to work: selling the software innovations. Technology needed drama to capture imagination. How could he dramatize a class in object-oriented programming? How could he make sorting algorithms sexy?
• As 1994 went on, a violent first-person shooter game called Doom, released at the end of the previous year, exploded around the world. Players wandered through a military facility on one of the moons orbiting Mars, blasting demons in gruesome detail, with unprecedented speed and realism. It was so good that it even sparked congressional hearings on video game violence. The NeXT team watched in awe as the game conquered millions of computers and reshaped the industry. They learned that John Carmack, the game’s twenty-three-year-old creator, had built the entire thing on NeXT machines. “The first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer,” John later wrote in a Facebook post. For a young programmer frustrated by the constant crashes and primitive development tools of DOS and Windows, the Cube was a revelation. It didn’t crash, and its development tools were years ahead of everything else on the market. While other developers fought with their machines, John could focus on what mattered: building the best game he could. Before the game blew up, John had requested to include a “Developed on NeXT computers” line in Doom’s opening credits. NeXT said no. Steve didn’t think very highly of games. To him, they were toys. NeXT built computers for serious work. When Doom became a success, NeXT scrambled to reverse course. But by then, John wrote on Facebook, “that ship had sailed.” NeXT had attracted exactly the kind of revolutionary developer Steve claimed to want, only to push him away because his work didn’t come dressed in a suit.
• While Apple fumbled with Newton’s handwriting recognition, Steve was playing with a different new technology. He’d rigged up voice activation on his cell phone. Warren Weiss later called it “a version of Siri,” fifteen years before the real thing was released. Steve would call Warren and laugh as he experimented with this primitive voice technology. But there was no large company to build it with, no platform to launch it from. Just Steve and his engineers tinkering in their office.
• Larry had become a billionaire two years earlier. He wanted to help Steve find a similar path. But a life of riches didn’t motivate Steve. “He wasn’t trying to be famous,” Larry would later say at All Things Digital. “He wasn’t trying to be powerful. He was obsessed with the creative process and building something that was beautiful.”
• While the tech world fixated on Bill, Steve was discovering satisfaction in quieter pursuits. At home in Palo Alto, away from the industry spotlight, he was learning to find meaning in everyday family decisions. The Jobs family had been making do with a subpar washer and dryer, and it was time to shop for replacements. So Steve and Laurene began discussing the pros and cons of various laundry appliances around the dinner table. They agreed that American washing machines were fast but rough. Steve observed that European machines took twice as long but treated clothes like precious objects. “We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family,” Steve told Wired. He sounded like a different Steve than before. “The problem is I’m older now, I’m forty years old, and this stuff [technology] doesn’t change the world,” he said. “Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time.” His reflective mode continued in an interview with the Silicon Valley Historical Association. “All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I am fifty,” he said. He later told them: “You’re building up a mountain, and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. But no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment.” Steve’s deliberations over laundry machines continued for about two weeks. At forty, the man who had once vowed to put a dent in the universe was finding profound satisfaction in sharing time—and sharing his love of technology and design—with his family. They ended up buying a Miele.
• The web was still in its creation phase, Steve told Wired. Nobody knew what it would become. At NeXT, Steve had been largely ignoring it. “Steve ignored the web because it was not his idea,” software engineer Nico Popp recalled. At NeXT, Steve had created a culture where engineers were free to pursue side projects—a freedom that would prove crucial. He wanted his team to follow their curiosity. One problem: Every day, NeXT’s engineering team dealt with the same paper chase—bug reports arriving by fax and email from developers, fixes going back the same way. Everyone knew there had to be a better solution.
• Steve prepared a presentation that outlined his three predicted stages of the web’s evolution. It started with the one-way publication of information(the current stage). Second, it would facilitate the two-way exchange of information through a server. This is what Nico had just demonstrated. Third, the web would enable electronic commerce—processing transactions, managing inventory, and supporting complex business applications. Steve demonstrated the third stage by showing how someone might be able to book a flight on the web—selecting departure cities, destinations, and dates through the interface. Steve planned to unveil this vision at his opening speech at the WebMania conference in San Francisco in January 1996.
• When Steve changed one object during the demonstration—when he updated an address or modified customer information—“ you saw the system automatically change everything else,” Greg explained. The engineers had built “a display of all of the objects talking to each other.” When one changed, the system would automatically update all the other objects. Steve had found a way to make object-oriented programming beautiful and comprehensible. In 1995, this idea was a revelation. At the time, each and every web page was hand coded, resulting in an identical experience for every visitor. That made building the online future impossible. “Every time [an online store] had a price change, you’d have to touch ten thousand web pages to rebuild,” Steve said at a product demonstration at the Sharper Image store on San Francisco’s Sutter Street. “That’s untenable.”
• Steve saw WebObjects as truly transformative. He envisioned a future where online stores could offer thousands of products without the massive expense of printing and mailing catalogs. Instead of sending thick booklets to every household—the way Sears and JCPenney did—retailers would be able to show each customer exactly what they wanted to see, when they wanted to see it. When a user entered information, Steve envisioned a server processing the request and sending back a custom page. Shopping for a red Honda Civic with leather seats? The server could create that exact page—with current inventory, local pricing, and available options—just for you, in that moment. As he imagined the web future, an excitement Steve had lost during years of enterprise sales suddenly flooded back to him. “If you look at things I’ve done in my life, they have an element of democratizing,” Steve told Wired. “The Web is an incredible democratizer.” He rhapsodized about how his tools would allow any lone online developer to build things that once took entire corporate teams to create.
• To approach the problem, Steve employed what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind”—a concept he had discovered after dropping out of Reed in 1972 in a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In it Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” The myriad opportunities that WebObjects enabled let Steve view enterprise applications with fresh eyes. Instead of dull corporate tools, he envisioned dynamic, consumer-facing websites that happened to be powered by enterprise data. In his telling, humdrum airline booking software became a way for customers to plan trips from their home computers. An inventory database didn’t just enable corporate bureaucracy, it became the engine that would power personalized shopping experiences. By 1996, Steve compared the inevitability of the web’s growth to that of the telephone. When you have just two phones, “it’s not very interesting,” he told Wired, “it’s probably not until you get to around ten thousand telephones that it really gets interesting.” The web had achieved critical mass, he explained, and things were about to get exciting.
• Five days after Netscape’s blockbuster IPO, Steve emerged on the stage at the Object World Conference in San Francisco to promote WebObjects. He followed Larry Ellison’s playbook. “We are absolutely moving into the consultant selling mode,” Steve announced. “Following in the footsteps of probably Oracle would be the best example.” Instead of simply selling WebObjects software licenses, NeXT would deploy teams of consultants to work on-site with clients for months at a time, implementing and customizing WebObjects for each company’s specific needs. This approach would generate much higher revenue per customer and deeper client relationships. Steve had struck a chord. “Everybody was lining up,” Dominique said. “We had meetings every fifteen minutes with big customers.” A week and a half later, Microsoft’s Redmond campus became the center of the tech universe. Microsoft was launching Windows 95. The release turned into a watershed for the industry, with customers lining up outside electronics stores for the midnight release. Within the first four days, Windows 95 sold one million copies, breaking every record for software sales. The Start button quickly became an icon, showing up on billboards, in TV commercials set to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” and on the front page of every newspaper. “Windows 95 is so easy to use, even a talk show host can figure it out,” Bill told Jay Leno, who stood onstage with him at the launch. At thirty-nine, Bill became the wealthiest man in America with a net worth of $ 14.8 billion. It appeared to be a straight triumph for Bill’s philosophy of flexible computing—suggesting that consumers clearly didn’t care about design or an elevated user experience and that companies should focus instead on capturing market share. By now, Steve had fully bought into Bill’s belief about open systems. WebObjects ran on HP servers, Sun machines, even Windows NT.
• Two years before, Netscape’s founder Marc Andreessen had come to Steve with a demo of an earlier browser called Mosaic. Dominique remembered Steve telling him: “Anybody can write thirty thousand lines of code,” explaining why he had dismissed Marc out of hand. Now all Steve could do was watch Marc rake in billions while he burned through his savings to keep the company afloat.
• Serious customers continued to line up for WebObjects. Disney, Shell, Chrysler—members of the Fortune 500. Within a month, WebObjects had racked up more than $ 2.5 million in sales. One customer was Michael Dell. The soft-spoken founder had built Dell Computer Corporation from his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. His biggest innovation was cutting out the middleman and selling PCs directly to customers via mail-order catalogs. By the early 1990s, Dell had grown into a roaring success. Then came its first annual loss and a cash squeeze that nearly killed the company. Michael saw the web as his salvation. He wanted to build a website that would allow customers to configure their PCs online—choose processors, memory, features—then check out with a credit card. A complete vision for e-commerce before e-commerce existed. When he asked IBM to build the website, the company quoted Michael a two-year timeline. Then he tried NeXT. As Michael explained the concept to Dominique and Sina Tamaddon, VP of professional services, Sina took notes, disappeared, and returned during the same meeting with a working demo, built using objects. “We can get that ready for you in one week,” Sina said. Michael signed up almost immediately. “Nobody had ever [built a website like that],” Dominique recalled. It was ambitious and novel. Though WebObjects had become NeXT’s focus, Steve couldn’t help but pitch Michael additional products. Steve went over to Michael’s house to pitch NeXTSTEP as a replacement for Windows on Dell computers, Michael later recalled. But he politely declined. Within a year, Dell’s WebObjects-powered online sales exploded, growing to $ 3 million a day and quickly becoming the core of the company’s distribution strategy. Dell represented the next generation of tech manufacturers, leaving behind the giants like IBM and Sun that Steve had spent the last decade courting. The web was a clean slate that would place the aging behemoths and nimble challengers back at the same starting line, together.
• But Steve felt conflicted about the plan: Taking Apple by force would require him to return to a company he wasn’t even sure he wanted to lead again. And he certainly couldn’t stomach forcing his way in through a hostile takeover. “If I do this I need to do this standing on the moral high ground,” Steve told Larry.
• In spring 1995, Steve sought refuge with designers, artists, and marketers. He took his friend Paul Vais, the former NeXT executive director of marketing, on a drive in his Mercedes sedan. Steve popped a cassette tape into the dashboard and pressed play. A jazz ensemble burst from the stereo, playing a lilting melody. Then came the voice of the pop singer Randy Newman: “You’ve got a friend in me / You’ve got a friend in me.” “What do you think of this?” Steve asked him, explaining how it was going to become the theme song for Toy Story. “I don’t get it,” Paul said. Then the true meaning dawned on Paul. There was a deeper vision that informed all of Steve’s work, whether at Pixar, NeXT, or Apple. He cared about imparting a story, not merely building technology. “No amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story,” Steve later reflected. “That’s what Steve was really thinking about,” Paul said. “[ NeXT] had the best technology, and it wasn’t going to win the day if it didn’t have great storytelling. That fusion of art and science… was one of his most powerful insights.” Toy Story was a monument to this insight. It had taken the Pixar team four years of nonstop work to execute. Woody alone required 723 control points—the invisible digital joints that animators pulled like a puppet’s strings. Pull one point, his eyebrow raises. Adjust another, his mouth forms a smile. Each animated tree in the film had 10,000 leaves. The film’s 81 minutes contained 114,000 frames and 34 terabytes of files from the company’s graphics software, RenderMan. No one had attempted computer animation at this scale before. “It is not only an exercise in artistic creativity and in computer science technology,” Steve said. “It is also an exercise in managing scale and complexity that we have not seen in the likes of computer graphics very often.”
• John and Pixar President Ed Catmull had effectively managed Steve away from the creative process, asking him to stay out of meetings with the company’s brain trust of creative decision-makers. That left John and his team to craft characters and storylines, while Steve focused on the business side. In part, that meant writing big checks. “Steve knew that making movies was not his forte,” Dominique explained. Steve, Ed, and John had secured a major three-film deal with Disney in July 1991. While Steve handled the financial negotiations, he deferred to John, the executive producer, on creative matters—an arrangement that had been crucial to convincing the Pixar team to accept Steve’s leadership when he bought the company from Lucasfilm. John wouldn’t have allowed things to happen any other way. Steve had learned that respecting this boundary was essential to keeping Pixar’s creative talent. But Steve remained Pixar’s nominal CEO. “I remember it was kind of weird for him to be CEO of two companies. He was getting crap for that,” said Paul.
• In August 1995, Steve took the stage at SIGGRAPH, the annual gathering for computer graphics professionals. He was there to talk about the technology behind Toy Story. As he spoke, audience members saw a different Steve from the serious software leader they had come to know. As he talked, he appeared lit from within, boyish in his excitement about making film history. “We are at the centenary of this incredible invention,” he told the audience. A hundred years after the Lumière brothers’ first motion picture, decades after Walt Disney gambled on color with Snow White, he said that Pixar was picking up the baton and delivering the next evolution in cinema. Toy Story would be the first completely computer-generated feature-length motion picture, he told the audience. Pixar let Steve dream about making a dent in the universe again.
• “Steve had that type of compassion,” Jim said. Ed later recalled that this wasn’t unusual behavior for Steve. When Pixar employees fell seriously ill, Steve would visit them in the hospital and arrange access to top specialists.
• “Hello, Larry?” Steve asked, according to the book. It was Larry Ellison. “I made it,” Steve said. With Pixar’s stock price closing at $ 39 per share, Steve’s stake in the company was now worth approximately $ 1.2 billion. He had just become a billionaire. The magnitude of this reversal was staggering to Ed. Back in 1986, Steve paid only $ 5 million for Pixar, which looked like a bargain, from George Lucas. But over the nine years that followed, as Pixar struggled to make a profit, Steve kept writing checks to fund it. Just before the IPO, he was down $ 54 million total—what Ed called “a substantial portion of his net worth.” Each check he’d written during those lean years had been an act of faith in his team. Now, in a single day, that faith had been vindicated beyond his wildest projections. Colleagues who were in the room heard something almost relieved in his tone. The man who had always professed not to care about money calling to announce his entry into the three-comma club. They believed Steve was using the money to keep score—proof that he’d finally won, despite all the failures. But more than that, the IPO finally gave Steve leverage. He had learned to trust his team at Pixar, and as a result, he could maneuver going forward from a position of strength.
• Throughout their partnership, Ed had developed a unique approach to working with Steve that avoided the explosive confrontations others experienced. “I never had sort of one of these loud yelling arguments with Steve ever,” Ed said. The secret was understanding how Steve’s mind worked: “Steve did not want to be guided in his thinking. He wanted to know what the facts are on which to base something.” Ed once had a disagreement with Steve that stretched across three months. “He was just wrong,” Ed said. “The fact that he has a powerful personality and he could talk and think faster than I could didn’t make him right.” Rather than escalate, Ed would present his case then wait. Eventually, Steve would say, “Oh, you’re right, and that’s the end of the discussion.”
• Ed had watched Steve undergo what he called “a fairly major transformation” in the four years leading up to this moment. The period began with personal milestones in 1991: Steve’s marriage to Laurene, Reed’s birth. Steve was also learning hard lessons about timing. His vision often outpaced reality. At NeXT, he decided not to include a floppy disk drive in the Cube; he was technically correct that floppies would eventually disappear, but the decision was commercially disastrous for its time. Almost everyone with a computer stored their data on floppy disks. “You can’t get ahead of the curve too much,” Ed observed. Steve “didn’t understand that.” The computer industry was littered with companies that had been right too early. But with Pixar’s IPO, Steve had finally learned the lesson of timing. Computer animation was ready for mainstream audiences and Toy Story had proved the market existed. This time, Steve hadn’t jumped too far ahead of the curve. He’d ridden it exactly when it crested.
• The transformation was real and lasting. “The people who were with Steve by the end of ’95 pretty much stayed with him for the rest of his life,” Ed observed. By November 1995, Steve had become the kind of leader people wanted to follow long-term. And he was humbled. “If you don’t treat [talented workers] right, they can go get another job in ten minutes, right?” he later recounted to an interviewer. “So a strange thing happens, which is the sort of the hierarchy of power inverts, and the CEO is actually at the bottom. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people, because they’re the ones that are doing all the brilliant work, you know.” Looking back, Ed saw Steve’s arc as “more like the hero’s journey. He came back, he learned from the experiences and mistakes he made.” The man who had emerged by November 1995 was different. He was still demanding, still visionary, but tempered by failure and success in equal measure.
• More than almost anyone else he knew, one man embodied the values Steve cherished most—big thinking, creative rebellion, a distaste for corporate complacency. That man was Paul Rand. By March 1996, a decade had passed since the two had worked together on NeXT’s logo.
• The old Steve Jobs—the one who had stormed out of Apple in 1985—might have seized the moment to launch an assault and force his way back in. But a decade of struggle had changed him. He arrived at the same conclusion he did last time Larry talked about a takeover. “I decided I’m not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,” he told The New York Times. “If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.” The corporate raider who’d once taken Xerox PARC’s graphical interface, who’d built his career on audacious moves, discovered a line he wouldn’t cross. Taking Apple by force would prove he’d never really belonged there. He’d rather wait forever. So he decided to stay at NeXT and sell more WebObjects. He wanted redemption, but he wanted it on his own terms.
• Steve’s exhaustion with NeXT ran deeper than most people realized. From his perch at Pixar, Ed had been watching the contrast between the two companies with growing unease. Pixar was soaring after its November 1995 IPO, while NeXT continued to struggle for broader relevance, despite the success of WebObjects. Then Ed read a NeXT press release that troubled him deeply. Steve was quoted talking enthusiastically about how exciting and successful NeXT was with financial companies buying their software for analysis. “When I read that, I thought, ‘Oh, crap, this is not what Steve is all about,’ ” Ed recalled. “That’s not the exciting thing he wanted to do with his life.”
• The challenge of rehabilitating NeXT’s reputation fell to Nicole DeMeo, the company’s director of worldwide communications. Before coming in-house, Nicole had spent three years at public relations firm Porter Novelli advising NeXT as a client. She had watched NeXT struggle to win positive press despite genuine technical breakthroughs. Since joining the company, she had been running messaging workshops with the executive team, trying to find a story that would stick. And she’d have to do something else, too: make infrastructure sexy. The bankers needed something tangible for the January road show, when NeXT executives and their bankers would have to travel from New York to Boston to Chicago pitching investors. They needed something physical for reporters to photograph, something investors could visualize and remember. Then, through their network of start-up contacts in Seattle, Nicole’s PR team came up with a piping-hot answer: pizza. A company called CyberSlice was using WebObjects to build the world’s first nationwide pizza delivery website. By telling a story about pizza—a concept everybody gets—NeXT wouldn’t be forced to talk about boring enterprise middleware or backend infrastructure. Instead, they could tell the story of pizza, ordered online and delivered to your door. When she told Steve, he loved the idea. “[ Steve] saw this as a way to bring some attention, bring some energy,” said Tim Glass, one of CyberSlice’s cofounders. “It’s hard to say ‘pizza’ with a frown on your face.”
• Tim and his cofounder, Bryan Cupps, were inspired to build CyberSlice after seeing the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller, The Net. The film is about an eccentric and reclusive computer hacker named Angela Bennett who works out of a home office, advising company leaders on their information technology systems. But when she stumbles on government secrets, her identity gets stolen, and she’s forced to go on the run from assassins and the police. Though critics considered the film tacky and far-fetched, it predicted technological change with uncanny accuracy. It depicted remote work, identity theft, a digital fireplace, online flight booking, and—in an iconic opening scene—online pizza delivery. None of these innovations were broadly available at the time.
• Even before starting in earnest, the cofounders ran into problems with their business model. The entire concept of web delivery sounded alien—even a little scary—to mom-and-pop pizza joints and their customers. “They heard about this thing called the internet, but they had no idea what it was,” Tim said. “So how could you get all these restaurants connected? How could you get their modems connected? It was just too complex.” They weren’t the only ones with reservations. When Tim and Bryan pitched CyberSlice to venture capitalists, some were eager to invest. Others, not so much. “I’m gonna tell you about an invention,” one VC shot back after hearing their pitch, “it’s called the telephone!” Critics didn’t realize that online deliveries could solve a critical problem in the pizza industry. Local pizza shops were struggling to achieve citywide reach. Outside of the yellow pages, marketing happened by word of mouth, paper menus, and refrigerator magnets. In practice, that limited businesses’ reach to a few-mile radius and restricted customers’ options to what was in their neighborhoods. CyberSlice planned to unlock the vast potential of the internet to allow users to access restaurants around their city and let businesses finally achieve a wider reach. Everything would come together on the CyberSlice website, which is where NeXT’s WebObjects came in. Google Maps did not exist and the geographic data sold at the time cost millions of dollars. So Bryan had to start from scratch to build the geographical database of pizza restaurants. Bryan divided the United States into a grid, with each square less than an eighth of a square mile. Then he gave each square a unique ID. The system would identify which grid the customer was located in, then display each restaurant delivering to that grid.
• “When I walked in the door, I was facing five crises,” Gil told Fortune: We were dangerously low on cash; the quality of our products was poor; the development of our next-generation operating system was behind schedule and in disarray; Apple’s famously contrarian corporate culture was almost impossible to manage; and our product line and development efforts were fragmented to the point that the company was completely unfocused. He discovered a total of three hundred active research and development projects. After slashing the number to fifty, he still thought it was too many. The engineering culture had devolved into anarchy. Gil kept hearing variations of the phrase “Steve Jobs can get away with whatever he wants, so I’m going to do whatever I want.” One routine financial review meeting pushed Gil over the edge. Apple’s CFO casually glossed over a $ 50 million quarterly loss to currency exchange, as if hemorrhaging money were just another line item. When Gil pressed him on it, the CFO shrugged. “That’s pretty much what we do every quarter,” he said. At the center of this chaos sat Copland, the operating system that was supposed to save the company.
• At the Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1996, Gil had announced that instead of shipping Copland as one revolutionary OS, Apple would release it piecemeal—a feature here, an update there—in a last-ditch effort to save face and buy time. But developers weren’t easily fooled. And neither was the press. It confirmed what they saw as Gil’s unfitness for the job—coming from National Semiconductor and stocking Apple’s executive ranks with semiconductor experts who had never run a computer company. Gil and his team knew how to manufacture chips, not create magic for consumers. He also faced criticism for slow decision-making. One Apple executive told journalist Brent Schlender, “It’s as if Gil was a microprocessor running at 25 megahertz when the rest of the industry, and many people at Apple, have clock speeds of 200 megahertz. He takes six weeks to make a decision that should take only one.” At a cocktail party that spring, Gil had described Apple as “a boat. There’s a hole in the boat, and it’s taking on water. But there’s also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions… My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction so we can save the treasure.” A fellow CEO turned to his companion after Gil walked away. “But what about the hole?” he asked.
• By 1996, Copland had metastasized into something monstrous. Competing software teams had turned the project into a battlefield, with each faction demanding their pet features be included. The feature list exploded. And deadlines kept slipping away. When a beta release in November 1995 failed to reassure developers, Apple pushed Copland’s release date all the way to January 1997.
• Meanwhile, Steve watched Apple’s continued implosion with disgust. “I try not to talk about Apple too much, but what I will say is that the day I left Apple, we had a ten-year lead over Microsoft,” he told Fresh Air. “The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years.”
• His logic: Apple had given itself mere months to make a decision. The clock was ticking, with two months until the deadline. According to someone close to the negotiations, Jean-Louis allegedly said, “A man in the desert doesn’t bargain on the price of water.” Jean-Louis felt so confident in his position that he leaked news of the negotiations to the press. The stories appeared everywhere—BusinessWeek, the San Jose Mercury News, The Wall Street Journal. Now everyone knew that Be was in talks to save Apple and that Jean-Louis was likely coming home. The coverage put pressure on Apple’s stock price and made Gil look desperate.
• So Garrett called Ellen and left the same pitch on her answering machine. He didn’t focus on Steve, instead talking about NeXT’s technology. He argued that if Apple wanted to be thorough it should at least look at NeXT. “I hadn’t even thought about that,” Ellen later told journalist Jim Carlton. “Ellen did something that was unusual for a person in her position,” Steve recounted to The New York Times. “She returned his phone call.” Garrett rushed to his boss Mitch Mandich, who ran sales at NeXT. He laid out what had just happened—the call, Ellen’s interest, the door he might have just cracked open. Mitch looked shocked but smiled “like, holy shit, this could be a really great opportunity,” Garrett recalled. Mitch went and got Steve and Avie. “Ellen Hancock wants to meet,” Garrett told them. In any other universe, Garrett’s call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve was about to enter Apple’s airspace once again.
• While Microsoft owned the market, NeXT had a corner on elegance. “The user experience on Microsoft was not good,” Dominique said. “It was getting a bit embarrassing.” Acquiring NeXT could help Bill solve the problem. But the talks fell apart. Microsoft executives feared what would happen if NeXT’s engineers came inside. These weren’t just programmers, after all—they were Steve’s handpicked assassins, people who’d spent years building technology that made Microsoft’s best efforts look clunky.
• On December 2, with NeXT’s IPO struggling to materialize and Apple approaching its self-imposed deadline, Steve walked into Gil’s conference room on the eighth floor of Apple’s headquarters. He pitched Apple’s leadership on an entirely new strategy, built around NeXT. Yes, he said, NeXT had the software to shore up the Macintosh. But there was a greater opportunity too: NeXT could enable Mac software to work on standard PCs, opening up new markets that Apple had never been able to touch. Steve was at his charismatic best. But Gil understood the magnitude of what he was considering. Steve had been forced out of Apple for good reasons. He was impossible to manage, mercurial, destructive to corporate order. Bringing him back would be inviting chaos. Two days later, Ellen informed Apple’s board that NeXT was in play. They gave the green light for what Gil called a “shootout.” The two archenemies would face off in Cupertino, each pitching his respective company: Steve Jobs, the exiled cofounder, versus Jean-Louis Gassée, the prince who’d replaced him.
• As he began to detail NeXTSTEP’s innovative features, Gil noticed something different about Steve. He wasn’t the same person as the self-absorbed entrepreneur Gil had once known. In his place stood a “pragmatic, specific, precise” executive, Gil wrote in his memoir, On the Firing Line. In command of the facts, praising his system’s virtues without pushing too hard. It helped that, despite NeXT’s many troubles, Steve wasn’t desperate to make a deal with Apple. NeXT had positioned itself as a strategic partner, not a company seeking rescue. Steve still left open the possibility of the IPO. Even as he extolled NeXTSTEP’s virtues, he was transparent about the company’s financial situation. He opened NeXT’s books to reveal losses of $ 50 million from 1993 to mid-1996. Steve clearly recognized NeXT’s limitations. And it seemed he was beginning to recognize his own too. When the time came for a technical demo, he turned the floor over to Avie instead of doing it himself.
• Then senior Apple engineer Wayne Meretsky began asking Steve and Avie pointed questions about any shortcomings of using NeXT software for Apple. The room’s energy shifted, and for a brief moment, the presentation threatened to become adversarial. But Steve didn’t dismiss Wayne’s concerns or deflect as he might have in the past. He acknowledged them, suggesting that they were the kind of solvable engineering problems that accompany all technological advancements. “Steve was, as one would expect, smooth,” Wayne later recounted to former Apple executive Jay Elliot. “Everyone in the room understood how valuable software that could control so much processing power could be for Apple.”
• Because the two teams had been kept separate, Jean-Louis had no idea what Steve had just done. He wasn’t prepared for the fight. “Jean-Louis… did not understand that this was a shootout, or else still thought he had the decision locked up,” Gil wrote in On the Firing Line, “even though stories had been appearing in the papers for ten days about my conversations with Steve.” Jean-Louis’s presentation lasted mere minutes. According to Gil, he essentially said, “Your technical people have met with my technical people, so you know the strengths of our solution.” He didn’t deliver a pitch and didn’t invite a technical discussion as his opponents had. The Apple executives watched Jean-Louis’s nonperformance with resentment. They had carved time out of their schedules to watch a substantive technical presentation. Where Steve and Avie had demonstrated their product’s superiority through working code, Jean-Louis offered only entitled assumptions. Where NeXT had treated Apple’s team as serious evaluators, Be treated them as inconvenient hurdles getting in the way of an inevitable conclusion. “Everything pointed toward Steve Jobs and NeXT,” Gil concluded, “but Jean-Louis had made it a no-contest.” The Apple engineer in the room, Wayne, agreed.
• Even as he worked to seal the NeXT deal, Gil’s allies gave him stark warnings about what Steve’s return might mean for his own leadership. “I remember sitting in a meeting and saying to Gil, ‘If you buy NeXT, Steve will end up running the company,’ ” a former senior Apple executive told John Heilemann of The New Yorker. “But Gil didn’t understand how much firepower Steve had. Either that or he felt he could harness it. And you can’t. Steve doesn’t know how to do anything but lead.” An Apple alumnus who had known Steve since the early eighties put it more colorfully. He called Ellen directly and, according to Heilemann, said: “Ellen, Steve is going to fuck Gil so hard his eardrums will pop.” Ellen herself told Gil that she suspected Steve would succumb to “founderitis”—the inability of company founders to work under anyone else’s authority.
• Gil needed Steve as part of the package—NeXT without Steve would be like buying the Starship Enterprise without Captain Kirk. Steve knew this and used it as leverage. The negotiations revealed Steve’s deep ambivalence. He demanded a consultant’s fee but no executive title. He wanted influence without obligation, presence without commitment. As talks continued through December 19, Chris, along with Nancy Heinen, NeXT’s general counsel, worked through draft after draft, trying to define a role that was hard to pin down: How do you contract with someone who hasn’t decided if he really wants to be there? The solution that emerged after midnight gave Steve everything he wanted: He would be free to assess Apple’s situation and define his role later. No obligations, no constraints. Gil got NeXT’s technology and the promise of Steve’s involvement—somehow, somewhere. Apple paid north of $ 400 million for NeXT and gave a blank check to Steve to write his own future at Apple. One man was betting the company. The other was keeping his options open.
• NeXT executives thought Gil failed to grasp what Steve’s twelve years in the wilderness had given him. Steve came away not only with better skills for building technology but better strategies for getting exactly what he wanted.
• In the time he’d been gone, he’d experienced a deep shift. He had lost the desperation of a couple years earlier. He could now take a larger view, staring down challenges with confidence and calm. He had learned how to step back, delegate, and let go. He understood how to choose his battles instead of fighting every single one. That’s how dozens of NeXT executives remembered him during this time.
• “Thank you. Thank you very much. Let’s chat for a few minutes about what we are trying to do here,” Steve said onstage, as if the previous two hours hadn’t just happened. Then he made things insanely simple. “This is our mission,” he began, speaking without notes. “What we want to try to do is to provide relevant, compelling solutions that customers can only get from Apple.” He paused as the audience applauded. “If we can’t figure out how to do that, then I think there’s a lot of other options for people to buy their computers from.” Where Gil had spun up a tortured airplane metaphor, Steve’s slide showed a clean outline of a building, with each floor representing a successive level of software development. He explained that DOS, the most basic operating system, put developers on the ground floor by offering virtually nothing in the way of prewritten code. The Mac’s toolbox brought developers up to the fifth floor. But, with Windows 95, Microsoft had caught up. “That’s not good for us,” Steve said. Thanks to NeXTSTEP, Steve said that Apple could take the lead once again, lifting developers up to the twentieth floor. He demonstrated NeXTSTEP’s capabilities by running five QuickTime movies simultaneously. Then he built a working application in real time using NeXTSTEP’s Interface Builder, dragging components together like blocks and connecting them without writing any code. This way of building software without writing code was central to NeXTSTEP’s appeal but still alien to most Mac developers. The audience was glued. Steve had learned to harness his charisma—instead of overtly selling the product, he simply showed them why his software was special.
• The next day, Apple’s press office found a dismaying report in the San Francisco Examiner. It lambasted Gil for his speech that “meandered from point to point in the fashion of Bob Dole, and droned on for 150 minutes in the best tradition of Fidel Castro.” Worse still, the article said that, for all its endless information, the presentation lacked the one thing the expo attendees wanted to see most: “a plan to survive.” In his book, Gil pinned the poor performance on his speechwriter, blaming him for being insufficiently prepared and missing deadlines. But colleagues said Gil had taken a vacation before his keynote to his home in Lake Tahoe and failed to rehearse the speech.
• Just like that, Steve had installed his people to head up Apple’s core technology divisions—even though, as Jon later recalled, Steve “wasn’t around that much the first six months.” The fact that Steve could orchestrate such strategic personnel changes while barely present revealed Apple’s desperation, not a master plan to take the company over. It was so close to collapse that its CEO was eagerly handing over key divisions to proven talent, regardless of their loyalties. But some Apple executives speculated that Steve was orchestrating an overthrow, methodically placing his loyalists in key positions. Gil himself wondered about Steve’s true motives. “Maybe Steve really was just setting me up, putting his own people in place, ready for a palace coup,” he later wrote. “If so, the decisions I made were bad for me. But they were beneficial for Apple, and I would likely have made them even had I known for certain that Steve was being guided by ulterior motives.” Gil’s calculation was simpler than palace intrigue. Apple needed the best talent it could get, and with the company months from bankruptcy, there was no time for anything but competence.
• Steve’s distrust of Apple management ran so deep that he didn’t even rely on the company’s IT support for his personal computers. When Steve needed technical help at home—setting up his Mac, troubleshooting software—he called Pixar instead of Apple. For months, Ed Catmull recalled, “the systems person at Pixar was the one who was providing the Apple support in his home… because he actually didn’t have the people he trusted at Apple at the time.”
• From a family trip to Wimbledon, Ed called Steve—whom he’d never met in person and had spoken to only once before—to offer him Apple’s future as CEO. Steve declined the title but offered to help. “I can’t do that,” Steve said. “I’m the CEO of Pixar. It’s a publicly traded company. We have all these wonderful employees. We have these shareholders. And I can’t go be CEO of another public [company]… I can’t desert them. So I can’t do this. I’ll help you any way I can, but I can’t.” Though Steve declined, the question gnawed at him. At 8: 00 a.m. on a Saturday, Steve called his mentor, Intel cofounder Andy Grove, who was known for his blunt advice. As Steve recounted in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2003: And I was thinking about it and called up a friend of mine, a really smart guy, a good friend I’d known for a long time that works at another company in the industry. And I probably woke him up in the morning, about eight o’clock one morning, and I was telling him about my struggles about, should I, could I do this? Should I not? And this and that… And finally, he interrupted me after about four minutes and he said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple. Why are you telling me all this?” And I said, “Oh, OK. I’m sorry.” And I hung up the phone. And I realized: You know, I do give a shit about Apple. That’s when Steve decided to step into a larger role at Apple.
• The ultimatum revealed how seriously Steve took Apple’s downfall. According to those who knew him during this period, Steve remained reluctant about deeper involvement with Apple. But when he did engage, he engaged completely. The board purge was about ensuring that if Apple was going to be saved, the people overseeing that effort would be capable of the task.
• At the May 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, in front of a crowd of hundreds, a developer stood up and said to Steve, “You’re a bright and influential man… it’s sad and clear that on several counts you’ve discussed, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then: “Perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.” The crowd murmured uncomfortably—“ the last seven years,” was a stinging reference to his failure at NeXT. But Steve didn’t blow his cool. Instead, he took a long pause, smiled slightly, and began with an admission. “One of the hardest things when you’re trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas,” he said. Then he laid out a principle that would come to define the new Apple. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” he said. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.” He continued with humility. “I readily admit there are many things in life that I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about. So I apologize for that too.”
• In the meantime, Steve pared down Apple’s out-of-control product development portfolio. Steve found that about 30 percent of the products were good and held promise. He thought the rest were distractions. So he killed 70 percent of existing product lines, including, eventually, the Newton, and shuttered the entire Advanced Technology Group. “Apple is executing wonderfully on many of the wrong things,” he explained at Macworld that August. But “Apple needs to find where it is still incredibly relevant and focus on those areas.” He identified two areas where Apple still led the industry. First, its neglected brand. Despite its troubles, the Apple logo and name remained as iconic as Coca-Cola, Disney, and Nike. Second, Apple’s operating system, which Steve referred to as “still the best thing in the world.” He acknowledged the fear that Apple might now abandon Mac OS and then complained that previous leadership had been “walking all over it.” But the Mac OS was “one of the core assets of the company” that “has yet to really be fully exploited.”
• “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Steve said over the hostile crowd. “I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.” Then he said, “The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over, as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy.” The booing crowd couldn’t know how hard-won this pragmatism was. Steve would later admit that idealism was one of his greatest weaknesses. “Sometimes I go for ‘best’ when I should go for ‘better,’ and end up going nowhere or backwards,” he told an interviewer. He’d learned to question whether he was “blinded by ‘what could be’ versus ‘what is possible,’ doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop.” The Microsoft deal embodied that lesson, choosing better over best and survival over purity. It was the kind of pragmatic decision the younger Steve could never have made.
• Steve, with his instinct for branding, shortened the new title to iCEO, Apple’s first i name. “It was kind of like a call option on the job,” Avie explained to the Computer History Museum. Steve could test-drive running Apple without staking his reputation on the turnaround. If Apple proved unsalvageable, he could walk away, having only been interim CEO of someone else’s disaster. But Steve didn’t walk away. In twelve years, he’d gone from a boy wonder expelled from his own kingdom to its returning king. But this was not the Steve Jobs of 1985. That Steve would have probably killed the Microsoft deal over pride. Would have micromanaged Apple’s software transformation. Would have built uncompromisingly beautiful products that no one could afford. He would probably have chosen being right over succeeding.
• Steve had just died, she said. At around 3: 00 p.m. that day, he had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, a condition he had initially left untreated. The news spread fast across the NeXT community, first through text messages and phone calls, and then on the alumni mailing list. Many felt a complicated grief. They had worked for a genius who’d treated them as expendable, who’d humiliated them in meetings, who’d made the best and brightest feel small. Many of them carried those wounds for decades, unable to forgive him for what he’d done. His passing began to change that. Former NeXT sales manager Mark Hayes couldn’t remember where he was when he heard the news, but he remembered exactly what happened inside him. “I was able to release a lot of anger that I had bottled up inside me,” he recounted. Twenty years of resentment suddenly had nowhere to go. “I started to look more favorably at all of his gifts, and the things he did accomplish.”
• In April 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store. Steve had managed to convince paranoid record labels to sell songs online for ninety-nine cents each, but the real triumph was on the store’s backend. The store ran on WebObjects, scaled up to handle a massive number of transactions. After selling more than a million songs in its first week, it proved that NeXT’s enterprise-grade tools could be adapted for regular consumers at scale.
• At NeXT, Steve had tried to control everything from day one with insufficient resources. At Apple, he built the resources first then seized control. The iPhone proved that the whole stack strategy could work so long as you had the power to enforce it. When the iPhone launched in 2007, NeXT alumni swapped emails on a mailing list called “ex-NeXTers,” trading sarcastic humor whenever Apple unveiled some “revolutionary” feature they had built at NeXT in 1994. The iPhone’s operating system, its development tools, and much of its underlying architecture traced back to code and apps they had written a decade earlier. In fact, buried in some of Apple’s code were the initials “NS,” a marker that stood for “NeXTSTEP.” NeXT had become what Steve once predicted his life’s work would amount to: a sediment layer in computing history.
• Steve] demanded an opinion, a point of view—declare, decide, do,” Todd said. “They were all active verbs under Steve.” The audience knew this Steve well, the demanding perfectionist. But then Todd’s voice softened. “He had a big heart,” he said, then a long pause. “Carefully hidden.” Somewhere, they knew about this Steve too.
• As his legend has grown, I’ve noticed competing narratives emerge. Some cast him as superhuman, airbrushing his shortcomings. Others focus on those shortcomings to the exclusion of everything else, overlooking Steve’s generosity and deep loyalty. Both versions deprive Steve of his humanity. Worse, they neglect the improbable story of his evolution. For those looking to glean insights from Steve’s life, I believe this story contains his greatest lesson: the importance—and the discipline—of embracing personal transformation.
• At NeXT and Pixar, the period from 1985 to 1997 was our crucible. Three key events transformed our companies and, by extension, the computer and entertainment industries at large. First, Pixar cultivated a bonded team that changed animation forever. Second, NeXT developed an operating system—NeXTSTEP—that led to its acquisition by Apple. And most importantly, Steve himself changed, returning to Apple equipped with the skills he needed to lead a revolution.
• During these years, I watched Steve travel the Hero’s Journey. He was cast out of his own kingdom, condemned to struggle in the wilderness, but he was forged by that struggle and emerged as a once-in-a-generation leader. While the process of transformation is fascinating in its own right, it raises a more profound question: What characteristics lead someone to pursue personal transformation while working to create something of lasting value? Foremost for Steve, I believe, was his relentless commitment to truth-seeking. During his decade-long tenure as CEO of Pixar as a public company, our board meetings were a testament to that, featuring extraordinarily intense and lively debate. When Steve decided to fire two members of the board, his reasoning surprised me: They never disagreed with him. If they never disagreed, he asked, then what value did they bring to the company? Steve always sought difficult feedback and responded accordingly.
• The lesson for the rest of us is clear: Don’t attempt to emulate Steve’s final form. Instead, embrace the work of personal transformation. Develop the intense curiosity to learn from mistakes and adjust course accordingly. Test your ideas against those of others. Be open to being proved wrong. Above all, when you fail, always be willing to begin again. Ed Catmull Cofounder of Pixar
• Steve’s distance from Pixar’s day-to-day work allowed him to bring fresh eyes to the process. It was remarkable to me how well he understood the mechanics of narrative storytelling despite not being a filmmaker. And, as the fastest thinker in any room, he delivered his thoughts with a confidence that cut through the noise. In truth, there were often elements of Pixar films that Steve didn’t like, but he never assumed that his judgment was better. He welcomed opposing ideas. Our team understood that disagreements were never personal—if you could convince Steve that your idea was stronger, he would turn on a dime and give it his full-throated support.