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Now he was losing control again.

He lived only a few blocks down Waverly Street from Steve and Laurene.

• • •

IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1993, a smart, ambitious young reporter at the weekly trade magazine InfoWorld got a tip from a Next insider that the company was killing its computer. The reporter, Cate T. Corcoran, conferred with her editor, who said that he heard that someone had tried to order a NextStation and the order had been rejected. Then she talked to the magazine’s gossip columnist, who found a third source to confirm the story, a disgruntled executive who had recently left Next. With three sources, they could safely break the news.

On Monday, February 8, InfoWorld revealed that Next was shutting its factory and getting out of the hardware business. Even though this was a big scoop, the editors didn’t play the story as the issue’s lead. Next simply wasn’t important enough for the lead.

The following day, the story was picked up by The Wall Street Journal and the two daily newspapers in San Francisco, the Chronicle and the Examiner. On Wednesday, Steve Jobs confirmed the rumors. He announced that Next was making massive layoffs, cutting its staff from 530 people to about 200. Canon was taking over the factory. Next would focus instead on selling its software to run on other machines. Steve would try to salvage a much smaller company out of the ruins.

That day, InfoWorld’s Cate Corcoran went to Next’s headquarters for a one-on-one interview with Steve, whom she had never met before. She was in her mid-twenties. She was escorted by two p.r. women, around her own age, who were exceptionally pretty and slender and beautifully dressed. She thought: Even Steve’s people are incredibly stylish.

They took her to a large empty conference room. Steve arrived. Cate was still inexperienced as a reporter, and she didn’t know that you’re supposed to schmooze first and ask some easy questions to establish a rapport before turning to the harder questions.

“Does the hardware shutdown mean that Next is a failure?” she asked point-blank.

Steve sunk his head into his folded arms on the table.

He rubbed his fingers into his temples.

“I don’t want to do this interview,” he said softly. “I don’t want to do this interview.” He seemed so fragile, depressed, and withdrawn, and she felt empathy for him.

He got up and began to walk out of the room.

As he got to the door, she called out, trying to cajole and coax him back.

He returned and sat for an interview.

Was he truly depressed, she later wondered, or was it all a big manipulation?

• • •

STEVE WAS CAPABLE of manipulating people, but this time it surely wasn’t an act. He was truly emotionally distraught. “It was gut-wrenching for him,” recalls Todd Rulon-Miller. “Steve loves hardware and designing factories. He was a hardware freak.”

“The transition was devastating for Steve: laying off half the company he had built, abandoning this beautiful hardware, acknowledging that the world didn’t need another computer,” recalls Karen Steele, who was Next’s communications manager at the time. “One of our p.r. objectives was not to be mentioned as ’failing’ and ’fledgling.’ It was a humbling experience for Steve. He said he’d eat crow if he had to. I saw him in a humbled capacity with people he had treated poorly in the past.”

Steve’s longtime public relations consultant, Allison Thomas, resigned the account. They needed p.r. advice. Karen Steele convinced Steve to try to rehire Andy Cunningham.

It was an embarrassing act of contrition. After Steve had criticized Andy’s work and dumped her in the late eighties, she went on to build her reputation as the smartest publicist in Silicon Valley, and her firm had grown from three people to well over a hundred.

Karen made the call.

“I’m surprised,” Andy said. “Does Steve know you’re calling? Are you aware of the history here? We had a falling-out. I will not work with the same Steve as he was before.”

Steve called her, and he seemed remarkably humbled and reformed. Astonishingly,