The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [0]
BROADWAY BOOKS NEW YORK
Contents
title page
dedication
preface
1 next
2 pixar
3 crises
4 comeback
5 apple
6 being steve
epilogue: the third coming?
acknowledgments
index
about the author
praise for The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
copyright
To my parents and Katharine
And very special thanks to Suzanne Oaks and Suzanne Gluck
Preface
December 1992
It was all going to hell.
His followers were abandoning him. His friends no longer believed in him. The press, which had adored him for so long, now excoriated him. His money was running out. An awesome fortune—nearly squandered. He had made a hundred million in a handful of years, and now he was blowing it just as quickly on his failing startups. Within a few months, it could all be gone. Super rich and world famous in his twenties, and now, in his thirties, he was . . . what? A has-been? A guy who got lucky once but couldn’t do it again? A fallen hero, the victim of his own hubris?
He had vowed to show that his precocious success at Apple wasn’t a fluke, that the board had been wrong to kick him out, that he could launch another great company and once again change the world with a revolutionary machine. But after seven years of intense struggle, his new venture, Next, was one of the most conspicuous flops in American business. Apple sold more computers in a single day than Next sold in a full year. Next was bleeding money, hemorrhaging money, and seemingly everyone was walking away: his sales honcho, his hotshot marketing chief, even four of his five cofounders.
Steve himself was very close to quitting. He told a friend that he contemplated giving up entirely, abandoning his career. He was right at the edge—emotionally, psychologically, financially. He felt trapped. He dreaded the shame of walking away from a great public failure, the embarrassment of conceding that he couldn’t do it again, that he couldn’t go it alone, that maybe it had all been a fluke.
In a meeting at Next’s headquarters on the shore of San Francisco Bay, he looked around at the besieged refugees of his thinned-out executive team and he told them, in a tone of bitterness and envy: “Everyone here can leave—except me.”
• • •
ON FEBRUARY 10, 1993, Next announced that it was shutting its factory, killing its computer, and laying off most of its people. The following day, a newspaper reporter went to Next’s headquarters for a conversation with Steve. She asked him point-blank: “Does this mean that Next is a failure?”
Steve sunk his head into his folded arms on the table.
He rubbed his fingers into his temples.
“I don’t want to do this interview,” he said softly. “I don’t want to do this interview.” He seemed fragile, depressed, and withdrawn.
He got up and walked away.
For months he was emotionally distraught. He had failed, and it was devastating to him. Gut-wrenching. Humbling, even.
On May 25, 1993, Steve was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the annual Next convention at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He was going to talk about his plans for resuscitating the company. That morning The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about him—a brutal put-down. It said that Steve had taken “a steep fall from a very lofty perch” and that he was “fighting to show that he still matters in the computer industry.”
His public relations handler saw him as he prepared to go onstage in front of a thousand people.
He had read the article.
“It could have been worse,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Yeah,” he shot back morosely. “If you were me.”
• • •
THE NEXT LAYOFFS PROCEEDED BITTERLY. Three hundred people cleared out of headquarters. The place seemed like a wasteland. A bunch of salvagers and used-furniture dealers went to the Next factory for an auction of what was still left. They bid on hundreds of lots that were laid out on the barren cement floor. They bought everything on the cheap—the chairs, the trash cans, the paper shredders, all the surplus Next computers and laser printers and oversized monitors. It was weirdly reminiscent of