The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [90]
He was going back to Apple.
During Steve’s long exile, Apple lost almost all of the qualities that had made it such an astonishing success during his heyday there. Apple’s software had once stood out as innovative, original, and uncommonly easy to use, but it hadn’t changed all that much in a decade, and in that time Microsoft had managed to imitate it—and to fight off Apple’s legal challenges to its copycat ways. Apple was celebrated for the industrial design of its machines, its bold aesthetics, but somehow its products had come to resemble the bland beige boxes of every other computer manufacturer. Apple gained notoriety by having a youthful, charismatic, mediagenic leader, but its board of directors succeeded in bringing in a string of top executives who had none of those characteristics. The greatest asset that Apple still had was a strong brand, an image that connoted creativity and nonconformity. But that aura was a legacy from an earlier era, and it was deteriorating badly. Apple’s stewards were trying to coast on a reputation that no longer matched up with the reality. And, arrogantly, they were demanding a premium price for products that no longer were much better, or different, from what hundreds of other PC makers were offering.
Apple seemed bound for bankruptcy. Its stock price had fallen from $60 a share in 1992 to $17 a share at the end of 1996, a period when other computer stocks were rapidly doubling or tripling. The company’s annual sales had plummeted from $11 billion to $7 billion. Its market share fell from 12 percent, which had made it the leader, to 4 percent, which made it an also-ran. Apple had lost $1 billion in the past year and seemed on a course to lose billions more. For years, the CEOs—first John Sculley, then Michael Spindler—had been trying to sell the company. They shopped it to the big players in global electronics—Philips, Siemens, Kodak, AT&T, IBM, Toshiba, Compaq, Sony—but they couldn’t find a buyer.
John Sculley had initially cast himself as a marketing guru, a master of image and advertising. But after he ousted Steve Jobs, he went native in Silicon Valley and yearned to prove himself as a technologist. As he struggled to master the intricacies of engineering, he lost touch with what had endeared the Apple brand to millions of enthusiasts: the cool, young, hip image that appealed to creative individuals rather than their corporate overseers. In 1993, as Apple’s profits began to tank, the board forced him to quit.
While Sculley wasn’t a true pop-culture hero like Steve Jobs, at least he was a dynamic guy who enjoyed the spotlight and tried fervently to become a visionary. His successor, Michael Spindler, a German-born Apple veteran, was known as a behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts manager. Spindler was an odd choice to run a business built on charismatic leadership and cultural panache. He was standoffish and indecisive. He despised the media and disliked making public appearances. He was also the wrong man to lead a company in crisis. Spindler couldn’t deal with stressful situations: his colleagues would see him literally shake and shiver.
Apple’s fleeting opportunity to ensure its long-term survival came in 1995 as Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy proposed merging the two companies under his own proven leadership. But when McNealy saw that Apple’s loss for the fourth quarter was going to be even worse than expected, he drastically lowered his bid.
On January 8, 1996, Spindler checked into the hospital with heart palpitations. His doctor said that he had to quit his job soon or he was going to die. On January 31 the board of directors replaced Spindler with one of its own members, Gil Amelio, who was a veteran executive from National Semiconductor, which was well known to Silicon Valley insiders but unknown to the general public. National didn’t sell to consumers—it manufactured microchips for the big computer manufacturers. Running a behind-the-scenes component supplier wasn’t exactly the best training for a CEO who