The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [92]
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ANOTHER MOMENT that revealed Steve’s strong emotional attachment to Apple came when he was giving a talk to the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s High Tech Club at the home of a student. For three hours he sat in the lotus position on the floor in front of the living-room fireplace, answering questions good-naturedly. Afterward, the host, a young MBA candidate named Steve Jurvetson, asked the legendary figure to autograph his Macintosh keyboard, which had already been signed by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.
Steve Jobs said that he’d do it, but only if first he could remove all the unnecessary keys that his successors had added in a foolish effort to make the Mac more like a Microsoft-Intel PC. He despised the long row of so-called function keys (like “F1”) and the cluster of navigational arrow keys, which were clunky alternatives to the more intuitive process of using a mouse to explore menus and icons. So Steve Jobs pulled his car keys out of his pocket and began scooping into the computer keyboard, violently disgorging all the keys that offended him. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he said with a straight face. Only then, when he had mutilated the apparatus, did he take a pen and scribble his autograph on it. He was making a statement: he still had an intensely proprietary feeling about Apple’s computers, and he yearned to restore the company in accordance with his vision.
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GIL AMELIO wanted Apple to buy Next. He liked Next’s software and he grasped the potential public relations value of Steve Jobs, the living legend, returning to the company he cofounded twenty years earlier and serving as some kind of ambassador of goodwill.
“I’m not just buying the software,” Gil told his colleagues. “I’m buying Steve.”
He thought, with shocking naivete, that Steve could be controlled, that Steve would willingly serve as a figurehead. That Steve wouldn’t try to promote an agenda of his own.
On Monday, December 16, 1996, The Wall Street Journal published rumors about the negotiations, and journalists from dozens of media outlets began calling to try to confirm the story. It looked like the deal would be done sometime during that week, since the weekend marked the beginning of the Christmas holiday.
Christopher Escher, Apple’s p.r. director, told Gil that the official announcement should be made early in the week, before the beat reporters went on vacation. “Let’s not do it the night before Christmas,” he said jokingly.
He was chosen to write a draft of a letter from Steve to Apple’s employees. It wasn’t hard for him to predict what Steve would want. “Steve likes big, dramatic, advertising-copy kind of shit,” he recalls. “Dramatic bullshit about ’returning to the journey.’ Self-dramatizing. Self-glorifying. Oedipus returning to Colonnus.”
Christopher submitted the draft.
Steve called him and said that he liked it.
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AS CHRISTMAS NEARED, they set a price of $430 million, astoundingly high for a failing company. A single issue was blocking the closing of the deal. Gil insisted that Steve sign an employment contract committing him to work for Apple for a certain period of time.
Steve stubbornly refused.
The deal was constantly flipping, off and on and off again. Twice Christopher Escher ordered satellite trucks to the Apple campus to broadcast the press conference to news organizations and to Apple’s employees, and twice he had to send the trucks home.
On Friday, December 20, the beat reporters were thoroughly irritated by Apple as they waited impatiently at their offices in San Francisco and tried to rearrange their travel plans for the holiday.
Christopher ordered the satellites once again.