The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [51]
“In 1989, Next was really hot,” recalls Emily Brower, who at the time was a reporter for MacWEEK. After the Davies Hall debut, she heard that Next’s public relations firm had a job opening: “Even though I had a reporter’s disdain for p.r., I said, well, it’s Next. The quality of everything Steve does is really high, and I wanted to be a part of that.”
Next’s staff was growing so rapidly, from two hundred people to five hundred, that the company needed much more space. It moved to two shiny new buildings right beside the bay, a “corporate campus” with an air of prosperity. Steve decorated the new digs with $10,000 leather sofas and elegant black-and-white photographs and bleached oak floors, and he hired I. M. Pei’s architectural firm to build a dramatic freestanding staircase off the lobby. “Steve wanted the company to feel larger than life, and sure enough it did,” recalls David Wertheimer, who was a Next executive at the time. “It felt like ’here’s a company that’s really made it,’ while in reality it wasn’t selling a single computer.”
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IT WAS DURING this critical time in Next’s history, in the first few months of 1989, when the company was on the brink of disaster, that Steve Jobs had a fleeting opportunity to turn Next’s initial failure into one of the most stunning successes of modern business. When the rest of the computer industry looked at Next, it was mightily impressed, but not by the achievements that were dearest and most emotionally charged for Steve. The honchos of Silicon Valley didn’t care about automated factories. They sent their manufacturing offshore to take advantage of cheap Third World labor. And they didn’t care about design or aesthetics. In those fields, Steve Jobs was almost a decade ahead of his time. But the computer titans were utterly in love with NextStep, the software that ran the Next Cube.
What you saw on the screen of the Next looked a lot like what you’d see on the screen of a Macintosh: a mouse freely manipulated a cursor and could click on cute little icons or choose from menu lists or open up several different windows at the same time, showing text in any number of attractive fonts and sizes. The difference was that the Next was even more compelling, even easier to use. John Markoff, a technology reporter for the New York Times, thought of it as “a Macintosh on steroids.” Meanwhile, in 1989, the IBM personal computer and its clones were stuck with much cruder software that displayed only plain text and forced users to rely on maddening keyboard commands like Alt-Ctrl-F5. Microsoft was refining its new Windows software, which would imitate the approach of the Mac, but Windows was still a horrible mess, and very few people attempted to use it.
The Macintosh was far superior, but John Sculley tried to inflate Apple’s profit margins by keeping the Mac’s price exceptionally high, so most customers bought PCs instead. The PC makers wanted to license the Macintosh software to run on their machines, but Apple refused. That left IBM and its cloners in a precarious situation. It meant that they were helpless captives of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, which had a monopoly on the basic software that ran their machines. Every year computer users came to rely more and more on programs that could only work in conjunction with Bill’s software. They were making Bill into a monster of a mogul who would hold great power over the rest of them. To break his lucrative stranglehold, they needed to come up with a whole