The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [121]
The bad news kept coming. In February Apple revealed that demand for Cubes was actually three times below expectations. Dataquest reported that Apple’s sales shipments of Macs to retailers were down 50 percent in the United States. Even Dell, the industry’s high flyer, said it would cut 1,700 employees, its first layoffs in its history. Its stock had fallen by almost 60 percent in 12 months.
At least there was plenty of good news from Steve’s other company. Pixar remained the overwhelming source of his wealth, and it was performing exceptionally well. The stock had been rising for months and it traded at more than 100 times its anticipated 2001 earnings, a vote of tremendous confidence from investors. Pixar proved that Wall Street still believed in Steve’s vision and leadership skills despite the tumultuous ride at Apple. With profits of $78 million on revenues of $172 million in 2000, Pixar was a money machine with a profit margin that almost any CEO could envy.
Steve still had little involvement in the day-to-day operations at Pixar, other than his passion for supervising the details in the design and construction of its new campus, which he oversaw carefully. His personal coup came about when the company moved into the headquarters, a $94 million complex on the site of an old cannery in Emeryville, California, just outside of Berkeley. The neighborhood was an industrial district where artists had converted abandoned buildings into lofts. Pixar’s structures, while new, were fashioned to look like old warehouses that had been restored. The architecture was Corporate Cushy meets Faux Loft. The sixteen-acre campus was filled with a lavish spate of amenities for Pixar’s 500 employees—an indoor gym, lap pool, volleyball and basketball courts, jogging path, three screening rooms, an outdoor amphitheater for company meetings, and even an apple orchard. The campus was built from 515,000 bricks in seven colors (including “mojave” and “coral”) and fifteen shapes. The contractors called the masonry mix the “Pixar blend,” as if Steve were concocting an espresso drink rather than a workplace.
Pixar’s artists and animators liked the comfort of the new facility, but still they weren’t entirely happy with what Steve had given to them. In the new place they had their own private offices, enclosed by walls and doors, but many said that they liked it better in the cramped open environment of the old facility, where there were no barriers to communicating and cavorting with their colleagues. It was a minor gripe, but it marked a small victory of Steve’s personality in his old war with the culture created and nurtured by John Lasseter. Nonetheless, Pixar’s people welcomed the campus as a symbol of enduring success after many years of intense struggle and repeated failures.
As for Apple, though, would its success prove enduring or ephemeral?
The PC market was becoming a lousy business of selling a near-commodity product for ever-thinner profit margins. But Apple had some unique advantages. Almost alone among PC makers it had a consumer brand that represented an image, an attitude, and a lifestyle. (The notable exception was Sony, a company that Steve had long admired and seen as a model).