Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [3]
In 1985, Jobs was effectively kicked out of Apple for being unproductive and uncontrollable. After a failed power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs quit before he could be fired. With dreams of revenge, he founded NeXT with the purpose of selling advanced computers to schools and putting Apple out of business. He also picked up a struggling computer graphics company for $10 million from Star Wars director George Lucas, who needed cash for a divorce. Renaming it Pixar, Jobs propped up the struggling company for a decade with $60 million of his own money, only to see it eventually produce a string of blockbusters and turn into Hollywood’s premier animation studio.
NeXT, on the other hand, never took off. In eight years it sold only fifty thousand computers and had to exit the hardware business, concentrating instead on selling software to niche customers like the CIA. This is where Jobs could have disappeared from public life. With NeXT failing, he might have written his memoirs or become a venture capitalist like many before him. But in hindsight, NeXT was a stunning success. NeXT’s software was the impetus for Jobs’s return to Apple, and it became the foundation of several key Apple technologies, especially Apple’s highly regarded and influential Mac OS X.
Jobs’s return to the company in 1996—the first time he set foot on the Cupertino campus in eleven years—has turned out to be the greatest comeback in business history. “Apple is engaged in probably the most remarkable second act ever seen in technology,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told Time magazine. “Its resurgence is simply phenomenal and extremely impressive.”6
Jobs has made one savvy move after another. The iPod is a smash and the iPhone looks like one, too. Even the Mac, once written off as an expensive toy for a niche audience, is staging a roaring comeback. The Mac, like Apple itself, is now thoroughly mainstream. In ten years Jobs has hardly made a single misstep, except one big one: he overlooked Napster and the digital music revolution in 2000. When customers wanted CD burners, Apple was making iMacs with DVD drives and promoting them as video editing machines. “I felt like a dope,” he told Fortune magazine.7
Of course, it’s not all been savvy planning. Jobs has been lucky. Early one morning in 2004, a scan revealed a cancerous tumor on his pancreas: a death sentence. Pancreatic cancer is a sure and quick killer. “My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die,” Jobs said. “It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.” But later that evening, a biopsy revealed that the tumor was an extremely rare form of cancer that is treatable with surgery. Jobs had the operation.8
During 2008, he went through a period of rapid weight loss, appearing alarmingly gaunt at product presentations. Although he and Apple denied anything was wrong (Jobs was suffering from a “common bug,” the company initially said), it was patently clear Jobs’s health was in decline. In December, just before Macworld, he unexpectedly took a six-month leave of absence from Apple. He had a digestive imbalance, he said, treatable by modifying his diet, and he needed time away from work to concentrate on getting well. In his absence, the chief operating officer, Tim Cook, took over as acting CEO.
Now in his early fifties, Jobs lives quietly, privately, with his wife and four kids in a large, unostentatious house in suburban Palo Alto. A Buddhist and a pescatarian (a vegetarian who eats fish), he often walks barefoot to