Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [173]
By the time Sculley departed, Apple’s board had degenerated. The people who had been major owners of the company and had a vested interest in its success had been replaced by an odd cast. This troupe was almost certainly bolted together by a nominating committee eager to demonstrate political correctness by assembling a board composed of people with different experiences and backgrounds. Over the course of forty-eight months in the mid- 1990s, the Board included the company’s own Chief Financial Officer, a person who had built a riverboat gaming company, the CEO of an enormous European packaging company, the head of National Public Radio, and an executive from Hughes Electronics and StarTV. None of these people had experience in the personal computer industry, none had worked for any time in Silicon Valley, none knew the others well and none, with the exception of Markulla, had a major economic or emotional interest in Apple. It is hard to imagine that they thought of themselves, let alone acted, as owners. If there were any bond tying them together it was probably the desire to avoid embarrassment. It’s little wonder they made two terrible selections, each of whom was more suited to be a corporate undertaker than an imaginative leader.
The first, Michael Spindler, was a European whose business life, prior to Apple, had consisted of stints at DEC and Intel, where he had been a marketing strategist. As CEO he continued efforts begun by Sculley to sell Apple—with IBM, Sun Microsystems and Philips as his principal targets—and debating whether to license the Macintosh operating system to other manufacturers. An alliance with IBM and Motorola—the sort of convoluted corporate lash-up which in the world of technology never amounts to anything—was supposed to slow Microsoft by marrying Apple software to microprocessors made by the other two companies. In 1996, after less than three years as CEO, Spindler was ushered to the exit. The eight-person Board, without surveying outside candidates, turned to a fellow director, Gil Amelio, and charged him with rejuvenating Apple. Though Amelio liked to be referred to as Doctor (for his PhD in Physics), it was obvious, even before his appointment, that he was not the sort of medicine-man the patient needed.
While Apple shriveled, Steve Jobs endured his wilderness years—an arduous, painful journey that, in retrospect, was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. After being banished from Apple, he sold all but one share of his stock and, aged 30, cast about for a new beginning. In 1986 he bought Pixar, a 44-person company which was owned by the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, and had developed a small reputation for making computer-aided animation systems. Jobs was largely interested in the influence Pixar’s technology could have on personal computers. But for Jobs, Pixar was not the main event. In 1985 he formed a new computer company which, with characteristic elegance and symbolism, he named NeXT. There began a tortured tale which culminated at the end of 1996 with the most unlikely of endings: an acquisition by Apple.
Between NeXT’s formation and its sale lay many sagas. The company showed how difficult it is for anyone to start another company after enjoying extraordinary success with a first. Jobs was a victim of his fame and notoriety and, instead of recalling all the lessons of Apple’s first year (when money was tight, resources strained, survival always a question, and a workbench in his parents’ garage the production line) his first acts at NeXT seemed like a continuation of life at a $1 billion company. Paul Rand designed NeXT’s corporate logo just as he had done for IBM, ABC and UPS; I.M. Pei, the high priest of modernist architecture, was commissioned to build a floating staircase (echoes of which showed up years later in many apple stores), and Ross Perot, Stanford University and