Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [4]
One of the first recorded messages from Steve Jobs to a netizen after his return to lead a beleaguered Apple gives the first peek at Steve’s earliest plans. It came on Sunday, September 9, 1997, when Adam Tow, a longtime Apple enthusiast and software developer, e-mailed Steve that weekend with a question about the Newton. Adam had built a small independent business selling software for Apple’s personal-digital-assistant line of products and was concerned that Steve was planning to kill the project.
The tenure of John Sculley (“the villain,” according to Steve’s disciples), and then of the executives who succeeded him, became hinged on the Newton’s success. The stylus-controlled PDA, which was called the MessagePad, and the Newton operating system, which relied heavily on handwriting recognition, was the product of more than $100 million invested in research and development by Apple, John told CNET in 2003. “I can look back at something like Newton and feel that it could have had a very different future than what had turned out. Newton could have been one of Apple’s most profitable investments ever,” John said. The project was the impetus for the ARM processor, which is the chip design that eventually found its way into most smartphones and tablets, but the Newton, with its expensive hardware, was not an immediate hit.
By 1993, John Sculley was out at Apple. But not before steering Apple’s computer division toward a pitfall when it adopted the PowerPC architecture from International Business Machines Corp. instead of using the more popular processors from Intel Corp. John’s successor, the German-born Michael Spindler, worked to keep Apple afloat. He unsuccessfully attempted to sell the business to several suitors, including IBM, Sony and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison considered his own Apple takeover, according to Time, but instead decided to join the company’s board in 1997 alongside his newly installed pal, Steve Jobs.) Within three years, Michael Spindler was replaced by Gil Amelio, a cost cutter who also failed to plug the holes in Apple’s sinking ship. At a conference in 2007, Steve mocked Gil by attributing the following quote to him: “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”
In hindsight, Gil’s crowning achievement was to negotiate the return of Steve Jobs by acquiring NeXT. It almost didn’t happen. Gil was also bargaining with Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who left to run a software company called Be Inc. Before developing operating system BeOS, Jean was a principal creator of the Newton, then with John Sculley’s blessing. Gil and Jean couldn’t come to an agreement in negotiations for Apple to buy Be, and so Jean continued independently until his company’s assets were purchased by Palm Inc. Gil bought NeXT because Apple’s computers were in desperate need of a modern operating system. At Apple, the NeXTSTEP software eventually became Mac OS X. To thank Gil for bringing the Apple co-founder back to his roots as a consultant, Steve organized a boardroom coup to overthrow Gil. Steve took over as interim CEO in 1997, and seemingly reluctantly, he was formally named chief in 2000.
All the while, the Newton languished. The products were not performing well in the marketplace or in customers’ hands. Most were PDAs, released before people understood the value of digital organizers, but one product, which also ran the Newton software, was a funky-looking laptop called the eMate 300. Before his ouster, Gil Amelio spun off the