The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [66]
Bud wanted his work to have an influence on the direction of the industry, and he saw that Sun was becoming a leader. He placed a call to the office of Sun’s chief, Scott McNealy. Within five minutes, Scott returned the call from a car phone. They wanted him.
Steve tried forcefully to convince Bud to stay at Next. After many intense conversations, they found themselves talking on the phone late on a Sunday night.
“You can’t talk me out of it,” Bud said firmly. “I’m going to Sun.”
Early the next morning, when Bud tried to enter the engineering building at Next’s headquarters, he found that his security passcard no longer worked. Steve had cut him off.
• • •
ALONG WITH THE UPPER-LEVEL DEFECTIONS, a little of the mythology of Steve Jobs’s companies was starting to wear off. In February 1991, the San Francisco Chronicle savaged him for the deep cutbacks at Pixar. In April, Forbes published a tough-minded article that began: “The discouraging results at Next, Inc., show that Steve Jobs, whatever his greatness as a visionary, is not much of a manager.” The story showed persuasively that Steve had made public statements grossly exaggerating Next’s sales figures, and that even those inflated numbers were incredibly disappointing.
But despite the emperor-has-no-clothes tone of some of the press, most of the media continued to treat Steve Jobs as a living legend, giving a generous benefit of the doubt to Next. In August, Fortune celebrated the tenth anniversary of the IBM personal computer with a cover photo of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at Steve’s empty Woodside mansion, where they sat together for a lengthy interview. Bill truly belonged on the magazine’s cover: unlike Steve, he had played a role in the creation of the IBM PC, and he had since become an industry leader with a net worth of $4 billion. But it was still Steve who symbolized the romance of entrepreneurship and technological vision.
• • •
THE FOLLOWING MONTH, Laurene gave birth to a healthy son, Reed Paul Jobs. The name Reed was for Steve’s alma mater, Reed College. Paul was the name of Steve’s father and his own middle name.
Laurene thought that the Woodside house was too isolated and remote for raising a family, so they moved to Old Palo Alto, which had much more of a sense of neighborhood and community. Palo Alto was a flat-terrain town where neighbors saw each other on the sidewalks and stopped to chat under the canopy of overarching trees. You could walk a few blocks to the main street, University Avenue, and do all of your errands on foot. The Jobses bought an understated 1920s brick house in a vaguely medieval style. It was one of the larger homes in the area, which was filled mostly with two-bedroom wooden Craftsman bungalows that had been built early in the century for Stanford professors. But like the modest bungalows, their house was situated very close to the street on a small lot. The home, like the town itself, was idyllic and charming but not excessive or ostentatious. Palo Alto was filled with doctors, lawyers, and other upper-middle-class professionals, not CEOs, and it didn’t have the snobby cachet of nearby enclaves like Atherton.
During and after her pregnancy, Laurene helped to run an entrepreneurial venture called Terra Vera (for “green earth”), a gourmet natural-foods startup. She cofounded the company with one of her Stanford classmates, J. J. Mullane, who was known on campus as a militant vegetarian. Together they produced organic salads and healthy burritos filled with tofu, beans, and rice. Laurene collaborated on strategy while J. J. drove the truck and did more of the leg work. As a bootstrapping measure they weren’t afraid to rely on a little nepotism: Terra Vera began catering Next’s parties and events, and its foods were sold at the cafe across from Next’s headquarters. Eventually, the young entrepreneurs talked their way into small contracts