The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [70]
Steve’s Japanese partners at Canon tried to protect their $100 million investment by putting in another $30 million to cover Next’s losses and sustain it into the next year. But it turned out that Canon was throwing good money after bad. Next sold only twenty thousand computers for the entire year of 1992, fewer than Apple sold in a single week. Canon had to sustain Next by giving it a $55 million line of credit.
The infusions of Japanese money came at a high price: Canon pressured Steve to bring in a more experienced manager from the outside to run the company with him. He hired Peter van Cuylenberg, a British executive who had spent sixteen years at Texas Instruments. The new man would share a new “office of the president” along with Steve.
A mass exodus began. Mike Slade thought that Steve’s new hire was pompous and treacherous. After only one year as the vice president of marketing, Mike quit. His unexpected departure was devastating to morale at the company. Then Todd Rulon-Miller, the vice president of sales, quit as well. Then Steve received the resignation of Rich Page, his hardware guru. Rich was the fourth of Steve’s five cofounders to leave.
Steve himself came close to quitting. “He got right at the edge there—emotionally, psychologically,” recalls a colleague. “Right to the edge.” He told a friend that he contemplated giving up entirely, handing the keys to the company to Canon, and abandoning his career so he could spend his time playing with his baby son, Reed.
But he couldn’t leave. He felt trapped. He couldn’t face the shame of walking away from a conspicuous failure, the embarrassment of conceding that he couldn’t do it again.
In a meeting at Next headquarters, Steve looked around at the remaining members of his executive staff and he told them bitterly: “Everyone here can leave—except me.”
• • •
THE GREATEST INSULT came when his handpicked new partner, Peter van Cuylenberg, tried to betray him. Peter called Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems. He proposed that Sun should buy Next, kick out Steve, and then install him, Peter, as the head of the operation.
Scott McNealy had no reason to feel loyalty toward Steve Jobs. For the past year, Next had been running vicious attack ads against Sun as a desperate ploy to gain attention. But Scott didn’t seem disturbed by Steve’s effort to pick a fight: “Who cares about Next?” he told a reporter. He said that he worried about IBM and Microsoft, not about Next.
Scott was a brutally tough competitor but he also had a sense of honor.
He called Steve and told him about Peter’s betrayal.
Steve was outraged.
It was history repeating itself, the horrible John Sculley episode all over again.
• • •
IT WAS BAD ENOUGH that Peter van Cuylenberg had turned out to be a frightening reincarnation of John Sculley. Soon, a kind of living ghost from the Apple years returned to haunt and torment Steve. It was as if Steve were being punished for his past sins.
In December, Steve’s car windshield was broken by a vandal, as were sixteen windows in his house in Palo Alto. A few days later, Laurene saw a man sitting on the curb across the street and holding a bag of rocks.
The man wasn’t a stranger. He was Burrell Smith, who had been the chief hardware designer of the Macintosh. Burrell had been a legendary figure at Apple, a brilliant engineer who pushed himself incredibly hard to fulfill Steve’s demanding visions. But after Steve unfairly criticized and humiliated him in front of the Macintosh team in 1985, he had left Apple and never returned, not even to pick up his final paycheck. In the following years, his mental health deteriorated. In 1990, he suddenly lost control and vandalized a church in Palo Alto, knocking over two statues and breaking the panes of stained glass. He was diagnosed as a bipolar manic-depressive with a “chemical brain imbalance.” After eighteen months of taking lithium, he