The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [104]
Steve was the best showman in American business, and he worked hard at his art, preparing maniacally for weeks before an appearance. He got ready for a keynote much the way that the playwright Oscar Wilde had prepped for a dinner party: he spent countless hours rehearsing the succinct lines that he would throw off as if they were improvisations.
Steve delivered his ninety-minute address to the audience of four thousand Apple fans. Then he began to walk offstage, but after a few steps he suddenly stopped and turned to the crowd.
“I almost forgot,” he said casually. “We’re profitable.”
Apple had made a $45 million profit in the previous quarter, thanks to Steve’s cost cutting and the unexpectedly strong sales of its expensive new G3 computers.
It was big news, and he had saved it for the end, as though it were an afterthought.
• • •
WHILE THE MACWORLD appearance got Steve back in the newspapers, it called attention to the fact that he had immersed himself at Apple for six months but still refused to accept the title of CEO. He paid himself only $1 in salary as interim CEO, and he didn’t own a single share of Apple stock. The board of directors prodded Steve to commit formally to the company, which would be reassuring to Wall Street. The board tried to entice him with princely sums: first it offered him 5 percent of Apple’s stock, then 8 percent, or about $270 million.
Steve simply wouldn’t declare himself CEO. Even his old friends were puzzled by his motivation. Regardless of what he told the press, his obligations to Pixar took little time, and his family would have to cope with his renewed workaholism whether he was the supposedly interim chief or the admittedly permanent one.
Whatever his title, his leadership seemed to be working. On April 15 he announced a second consecutive quarterly profit, $55 million. Apple’s stock had nearly doubled in 1998, from $15 a share to almost $30. The Apple board told the press that Steve could stay on as interim CEO for as long as he wanted. It wasn’t looking for anyone else.
• • •
THE IMAC, Steve’s biggest coup and the clincher to the turnaround, was still to come.
Steve had abandoned his original idea of the iMac as a stripped-down network computer when he saw that Larry Ellison, Sun, and IBM had all failed to popularize their own NCs. The Internet was booming, as people logged on from their offices and homes and popularized sites like Yahoo and Amazon.com. But even though a cheap stripped-down NC was all that people really needed to browse the Web, consumers still wanted full-fledged PCs, which had hard drives so they could access their files without always having to go online. And PC prices had fallen so dramatically—partially as a preemptive response to the perceived NC threat—that the NCs had failed.
As he shifted his plans, Steve nonetheless kept the concept of a relatively inexpensive sleekly shaped machine with the computer and monitor combined in a single casing, a so-called all-in-one design.
Steve acted purely on gut instincts with the iMac. All the research by other manufacturers said that consumers wouldn’t buy all-in-one computers. “Steve said, ’I know what I want and I know what they want,’” recalls Steve’s friend Mike Slade, the former Next marketing executive, who had become a consultant to Apple.
The i in iMac was shrewd but misleading. The machine wasn’t an Internet computer any more or less than the Intel-Microsoft PCs (or other Macs, for that matter). The typical users of home computers had no trouble plugging phone lines into their modems, finding the America Online icons that popped up on the screens of their new PC monitors, and dialing in and signing up for Internet access. Steve was trying to capitalize on the buzz and the exploding popularity of the Net more through slick “positioning” than by product design.
Steve unveiled the iMac on May 6, 1998, in the auditorium of a junior college near Apple, the same site where he had held the Macintosh’s premiere fourteen years earlier. The symbolism was