The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [91]
It was ironic that just when the press was beginning to hype a new wave of remarkably young, change-craving, self-made, speed-crazed technology entrepreneurs who harkened back to the old Steve Jobs mythology—players like Marc Andreessen (from Netscape), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com)—the Apple board members insisted on hiring CEOs who were in their own image: aged, cautious old-school managers mired in the ways of lumbering corporate giants.
Gil Amelio was the ultimate wrong guy. In 1996, his first year as CEO, Apple lost $1 billion. It looked like Apple was in a vicious death spiral. There wasn’t a clearly articulated strategy for restoring market share. Even many of Apple’s most loyal fans held off from buying new Macintoshes because they didn’t know what was going to happen to the company.
Apple’s breakdown was captured in a joke told by Chris Espinosa, who had joined the company in the late 1970s, when he was a teenager, and was still there in the late 1990s. He said that there were four kinds of Apple employees, and each kind reflected the personality of one of the four men who had led the company. There were “artists,” who were passionate about being different and creating innovative products, like Steve Jobs. Then came the “wanna-bes,” epitomized by John Sculley, who wanted to be at Apple because it was so cool. They’re the worst, the joke said, because they contribute nothing. Then there were the “nuts-and-bolts types,” who were implementers, not innovators, like Mike Spindler. And finally, there were the “social climbers,” like Gil Amelio. They were bad, too, but at least they were easy to spot and they were always gone in a year or two.
That, indeed, was about how long Gil would last.
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EVEN BEFORE COMING TO APPLE, Gil Amelio’s track record was blemished and his egotism was an embarrassment. Many observers believed that National Semiconductor’s problems only worsened during his tenure as CEO, but he went ahead nonetheless and published a book about the “turnaround” he had supposedly engineered. “He was totally out of his depth,” recalls Louise Kehoe, the Financial Times correspondent, who had followed his career for many years. “I was astonished that he could be appointed to run Apple.”
Gil’s plan for Apple, while flawed, was fairly simple. He wanted the Macintosh’s software to be able to compete with Microsoft’s Windows NT, an expensive program for corporate clients that needed to link together many machines into smoothly functioning networks. Apple had spent billions of dollars on research and development over the years, but somehow it had failed to create an alternative to Windows NT, at least one that worked. The only choice, he felt, was to buy someone else’s software.
By November 1996, Apple was nearly ready to close a deal with Be, a startup founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who had tried to cast himself as a silver-tongued technological visionary, sort of a Steve Jobs type with a Gallic flavor. Be was a very small, struggling company, but it had the kind of software that Gil wanted.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving week, a mid-level manager at Next, acting impulsively, without the knowledge of his bosses, left a voice message for Apple’s chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, saying she should consider Next instead of Be.
The following Monday, she called the Next manager. On Tuesday, representatives from Apple and Next held a conference call. On Wednesday, they had an all-day meeting in the Next boardroom. They adjourned for Thanksgiving and resumed talks the following week. It was only on that Wednesday that one of the Next executives told Steve what they were doing.
“Guess what,” said the VP of sales, “we’re talking to Apple.”
“Apple who?” Steve replied.
It was no secret to Steve’s friends that