The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [79]
Larry’s lot was magnificent: it was on the best block of the best neighborhood, at the top of the hill in Pacific Heights, with panoramic postcard views of the city and the bay. He had torn down the rotting old house, which was built by a nineteenth-century sugar baron. In its place he was finishing a brazenly modern structure of glass, steel, and concrete. The society columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle quipped that the street-side exterior resembled a sleek espresso machine. The city’s elite all wanted to get a look inside.
Steve’s oldest friend, Bill Fernandez, found the address and walked past the lineup of valet-parking attendants. Inside, he was astonished when he came up to the floor-to-ceiling glass walls suspended above the edge of a cliff. Half the house was torn up and filled with dust and rubble, but Laurene had hung curtains that hid the construction work. The curtains were a clever variation on the party’s Moroccan theme. Dozens of guests nibbled on vegetarian hors d’oeuvres as they sat cross-legged on the floor or sprawled like sultans on plump throw pillows. Bill Fernandez talked with a balding disheveled middle-aged computer hacker, who turned out to be Steve’s buddy William Randolph Hearst III, the grandson of the megalomaniacal publishing magnate who inspired Citizen Kane.
The crowd was silenced for Steve’s moment of glory. One of the Pixar executives presented Steve with a large framed poster of Buzz Lightyear and Woody. It was a blowup of a still from Toy Story, signed by many of the animators and the technical crew.
Steve said that he was very touched.
The scene was tantalizing but cryptic. The crowd began buzzing with gossip:
What the hell was Steve up to? When and how did he get into the movie business?
• • •
AROUND THE SAME TIME, a group of Newsweek writers and editors met at the magazine’s headquarters on New York’s Madison Avenue to deliberate about the candidates for a splashy feature on the fifty most important people in technology.
Two of the writers, Steven Levy and Katie Hafner, nominated Steve Jobs.
“Everyone else in the room said, ’Huh?’” Katie recalls. “It was sad.”
Steve had once been seen as the single great figure of the computer revolution. Now, the wags of the New York media hardly considered him one of the top fifty. And there was no doubt about who was No. 1. Bill Gates was preparing for the release of Windows 95. Steve’s loyalists printed a T-shirt that said “Windows 95 = Next 88.” If anything, the tag line overstated the virtues of Windows, which still wasn’t as easy to use as Next’s old software. But the bragging rights were small consolation for the hangers-on at a desperately struggling company. Now Windows had tens of millions of customers while Next had only tens of thousands. Windows dominated the computer industry. The only viable competitor in the consumer market was Apple, which accounted for 8.3 percent of global PC sales at the beginning of 1995. Apple’s market share had remained fairly steady through the 1990s, but its still-profitable position was about to be threatened by the formidable one-two punch of Microsoft and Intel. The new version of Windows 95 made PCs almost as intuitively easy to use as Macs. And Intel was preparing for the debut of its Pentium chip, which would give PCs about the same bang-for-the-buck in speed and power as the Power PC chip provided for the Macintosh. Together, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Intel’s Andy Grove lorded over the industry and commanded the kind of attention and celebrity that had once belonged to Steve Jobs.
The gatekeepers of the business press had already dismissed Steve, but they didn’t know about the plans he was secretly developing for his dramatic comeback.
Steve’s scheme was clever and audacious. He wanted to take Pixar public immediately