Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [3]
The ugly encounters at Apple were necessary because Steve Jobs would have never been as effective a leader and businessman had he not been forced to wander and rebuild. He admitted as much, saying in a commencement speech to Stanford University’s 2005 graduating class: “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.”
This phase has been dubbed “the second act,” a Shakespearean concept of partitioning one’s life into decade-long theatrical works. In a nod to this idea, Steve told computer scientist and mathematics wiz Stephen Wolfram around the start of this about what he “wanted to do with his thirties.” His second act began with the sale of $70 million worth of Apple stock and the founding of NeXT Computer in 1985, which designed high-end computer hardware for schools. When Steve first demonstrated NeXT and its communication-heavy software to an audience, a sample e-mail appeared in the system’s client that began: “Dear Steve.” Establishing his importance to the project, every NeXT computer owner, which was not many, received a welcome e-mail from Steve Jobs. Tim Berners-Lee, who developed infrastructure for the World Wide Web using a NeXT, remembers the message fondly. “The NeXT was brilliant,” Tim wrote. “A big thing Steve Jobs did for the world was to insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating!”
While running NeXT, Steve spent $5 million to purchase a computer-animation division of Lucasfilm Limited called Pixar in 1986 from George Lucas, the Star Wars creator. Steve invested about $50 million more of his own money into the venture, and the company incorporated as Pixar Animation Studios, first selling video-production tools and then producing some of the most beloved family films in decades, including Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. The Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock, immediately making Steve Disney’s largest shareholder until his death.
The many facets of the second act are worth exploring, but they are well documented. During that time, Steve was open to having reporters and authors accompany him to meetings, and write about his lifestyle. That was partly because he was just coming off a failure at Apple, and needed to prove himself again as well as gin up attention for his new endeavors. By the time of his return to Apple in 1996 with its acquisition of the struggling NeXT, Steve was bitter over what he perceived as unfair portrayals of him in books and news reports. Steve closed the spigot on access, except for anointed reporters who would be granted a modicum of his time just before or after the introduction of a new product.
While an important traditional source of information was cut off, a new medium began dripping the words of Steve Jobs. His return coincided with the stratospheric rise of the Internet and the debut of the first candy-colored iMac (the “i,” as Apple said then, stands for Internet). So the savvy executive leveraged electronic mail as a new place to disseminate his edicts. Compared to today, almost no one was sending e-mails regularly, and even fewer had access to a search engine in order to retrieve Steve’s contact information. The Apple faithful, sharing tips on message boards and through mailing lists, unearthed the direct lines to Steve one by one: sjobs@apple.com, sjobs@pixar.com, sj@pixar.com, steve@mac.com, ceo@apple.com and theboss@apple.com.
The stories told through Steve Jobs’ e-mails and the letters from admirers hold insights into the man’s thinking and his company’s inner-workings, two topics that are among