The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [19]
Todd knew he was expected to show enthusiasm and say: “Oh, wow.”
But he was really thinking: Oh, my God! What am I getting myself into?
Still, Steve Jobs was just so incredibly compelling. He took the job.
For Todd Rulon-Miller and all of the first two hundred employees, joining Next was an act of faith. New recruits weren’t allowed to know any specific details of the company’s plans beyond the vague notion of creating a computer for higher education. It was only once you had actually gone to work there that you began to get the details. You had to commit based solely on your conviction in Steve and his charismatic leadership, not based on even a cursory appraisal of the company’s technology or strategy. The secrecy persisted even into the summer of 1988, three years into the life of the company. That’s when Steve interviewed a marketing guy named Paul Vais. They sat for forty-five minutes at a picnic table in a patch of dirt behind the offices on Deer Creek Road. Vais was physically uncomfortable. It was late afternoon and the California sun was “hot as hell,” he recalls, and ants were crawling through the dirt all around. Steve wanted him to hire a bunch of people and put together a dramatic public event for the introduction of the Next computer. But Vais couldn’t see the computer or know anything about it, not until he took the job.
“It was a real leap of faith,” he recalls.
But Steve was so extraordinarily compelling. He made the leap.
• • •
THREE YEARS AFTER ITS FOUNDING, Next was burning through money, bleeding money, hemorrhaging money, without ever having released a single product under its own name. “All we’ve shipped is a T-shirt,” went the joke at Deer Creek Road.
The faithful still believed in Steve: after all, hadn’t the creation of Macintosh taken so much longer than planned? But now Apple was earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year thanks to the Mac’s delayed success. Anyone who doubted Steve’s vision could find reassurance by looking at the contrast between the interfaces of the Microsoft-Intel PC and the Mac. In 1988, almost everyone with a PC was still staring at a single font of clunky fluorescent text against a black screen. Mac users enjoyed the intuitive ease-of-use of pointing and clicking with the mouse and icons and windows, while PC people were still forced to struggle with arcane keyboard commands—Alt-Shift-F5!—to perform simple tasks. Microsoft’s programmers had tried to imitate the look and feel of the Mac, but their Windows was still so buggy, unreliable, and artless that it was considered something of a joke, and it had attracted few users. It would take Bill Gates’s crew a long struggle to catch up—another four years until the 1992 release of Windows 3.1, the first version of Windows that worked passably well, and then another three years after that until the debut of Windows 95, which was remarkably like the Mac.
But during the years when Steve’s technological achievement was still far ahead and his legend was far greater, Bill was beginning to eclipse him in wealth. In 1980, when Apple Computer had its initial public offering, Steve was a folk hero with stock worth $240 million, and Bill was still an obscure figure. But Bill catalyzed his career by making the deal to provide software for the IBM personal computer. In 1986, when Microsoft went public, Bill’s stock was worth $375 million, and his face was on the cover of Fortune as the computer industry’s rising young star. Meanwhile, Steve’s wealth had diminished to around $100 million.
During the early days at Next, Steve discovered that one of his business associates, a young software entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen, was a good friend of Bill’s. He told her that he’d like to know more about the Microsoft centimillionaire.