Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [174]
As NeXT evolved into a maker of corporate workstations, Jobs was taken out of his natural milieu. Instead of conjuring up ideas for products millions of consumers could use, he found himself consigned to a market in which purchasing decisions are made by committees who aren’t rewarded for making adventurous choices; where competitors such as Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and, of course, Microsoft wasted no opportunity to heap scorn; and where an expensive sales force is required to make inroads into customers. The black, cube shaped computer, which fell victim to terrible delays—one of the many curses that imperil an over-financed start-up—soon found itself along other Jobs-inspired products in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Customers were less impressed. NeXT’s founding team gradually got burned out by the strain and the scent of failure. In 1993, Jobs threw in the towel on the systems business and attempted to convert NeXT into a software business—a strategy that invariably is the harbinger of doom for any computer company.
By 1996, both NeXT and Apple had petered out. Jobs had been relegated to a cameo act in the computer business, although his tenacity and patience at Pixar had paid off. Nine years after his purchase of the company, the release of the animated picture Toy Story and a subsequent IPO gave the company the financial staying power to cope with the muscle of its exclusive distribution partner, Disney (which, a decade later, bought the company for $7.4 billion, thereby making Steve Jobs its largest individual shareholder since Walt Disney himself).
Then, almost like a chapter out of a nineteenth century Victorian romance, Jobs, getting wind of Apple’s interest in purchasing Be, a company started by a former Apple executive, convinced Amelio that he was better advised to purchase NeXT and use its prowess with the UNIX operating system as the software foundation of Apple’s future. Amelio voted for NeXT, bought the company for $430 million in cash, gave Jobs 1.5 million shares of stock and thus, unwittingly, issued his own exit visa. There followed an awkward period during which Jobs announced that he was only interested in advising Amelio and taking care of Pixar. His sale of all but one of his recently awarded Apple shares registered his real opinion of Amelio. Less than three quarters after NeXT became part of Apple, Amelio was replaced by Jobs, who was appointed interim CEO. This provoked cackling and headlines that sounded like obituary notices: “How did this mess happen? The untold story of Apple’s demise” and “Rotten to the Core” were just two of the messages splattered across the front of national magazines. Michael Dell, then one of the darlings of the personal computer industry, posed a rhetorical question about Apple in the fall of 1997: “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Steve Jobs had been weathered by his years in the wilderness. His battle with NeXT had taught him to to cope with dire circumstances and his experience in the animation business at Pixar was as the CEO of the world’s most technologically advanced creative company. The Apple he inherited in the fall of 1997 had lost its creative zest and leadership position in the technology industry, was almost out of cash, was unable to recruit bright young engineers, was drowning in inventory of unsold computers and had nothing imaginative in the works. Jobs was unromantic. The marketing department, eager to announce a change for the better, wanted to run ads that said “We’re back!” Jobs would brook none of it.
Instead, he rolled out an advertising campaign labeled, “Think different,” based on a series of black-and-white photographs of remarkable individuals. A couple of iconoclastic businessmen were billboarded, but they were heavily outnumbered by the artistic and inventive. There were musicians (Bob Dylan, Maria Callas and Louis Armstrong),