The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [72]
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EVEN AS HE APPROACHED HIS NADIR, Steve’s charismatic personality and his immutable pop-culture legend had a powerful attraction on other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He developed a very close friendship with the software mogul Larry Ellison, who liked to come over to Next’s offices and play with the machines there. Now that Next desperately needed to restore its credibility, Larry agreed to join Steve’s board of directors.
Larry was the cofounder and chief executive of Oracle, which was second only to Microsoft for its size, wealth, and power in the software business. While Steve was trying to forestall his own financial collapse, Larry had become a multibillionaire. While Steve was struggling to stay at the margins of the industry, Larry was taking a place near its red-hot center. The irony was that, despite all that, Larry was the one who worshiped Steve. He yearned to emulate Steve’s charisma and celebrity. Larry was powerful in the business but he remained a virtual unknown to the public. The problem was that Larry made costly arcane software for the elite technological priesthood, not cheap gizmos for the masses. His business was absurdly profitable but dreadfully prosaic. Now that he had the money, he wanted the fame and glory, too. He wanted to be recognized by millions of people as one of the great technological visionaries. He wanted to be an icon like . . . Steve Jobs!
Steve and Larry had much in common to serve as the basis for their friendship. They were both born out of wedlock and put up for adoption. (Larry’s mother was a teenager in New York City who sent him to be raised by relatives in Chicago.) They both struggled for many years to accept and understand why they had been abandoned by their birth parents. They both came from modest economic backgrounds, though Larry liked to exaggerate and romanticize his youthful deprivation. They were both tall, handsome, and slender. They had elegant, austere, minimalist tastes in fashion and design, and a mutual fascination with the Far East. Larry would dress in dark Savile Row suits for work and black silk Japanese sport shirts with black slacks for leisure. He wore an expensive kimono as he walked barefoot by the rock gardens and koi ponds of his secluded mansion, which looked like the home of a feudal Japanese warlord, with shoji screens and samurai armor and a moon-observation platform. From Next’s offices Steve could see Larry’s corporate headquarters rising a few miles away along the bayshore wetlands, a cluster of sleek rounded towers of emerald reflective glass, the most magnificent architecture in the valley.
In 1992, Larry began trying to seduce reporters from the major national publications into writing about his glamorous lifestyle and his technological vision. His timing was good: with Steve in so much trouble, the media needed a new high-tech hero, someone with the glamour and color that was sadly lacking in Bill Gates. In 1993 Fortune dismissed Steve as a “snake-oil salesman,” then put Larry on its cover and let him tout himself as the lone visionary who would merge Silicon Valley with Hollywood and create a new era of interactive media. It was a breakthrough for Larry, his first appearance as the cover boy for a major magazine. Then he rented a huge Hollywood studio at CBS as the setting for a speech about his far-ranging visions. One of Steve’s colleagues who attended the lavish event recalls: “I found myself thinking: Here’s a guy who’s desperately trying to be like Steve Jobs. There was a part of Larry that wanted to be like Steve, to have that power over people. Larry had nothing to be apologetic for, but even though he was worth three billion dollars, while Steve was worth mere millions, Steve still had a big influence on him.”
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STEVE’S COMMUNICATIONS EXECUTIVE, Karen Steele, got up at six o’clock