The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [95]
Reed could order fruit smoothies from the bar but no candy, no ice cream. For the entire week, Lisa kept thinking how much she wanted to slip a Tootsie Roll to the boy.
Steve enforced a strict diet for Reed, but in other ways he was an indulgent parent. When they went together on a sailboat for a whale-watching trip, Reed was scared by the rough water. Steve asked the captain to turn around and return them to the resort. The captain refused, noting that there were several other paying passengers and that the waters would calm down. Steve proceeded to call for a rescue boat to come out and get them.
Steve was accustomed to being the captain of his own ship. He only knew how to lead, not how to follow.
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LATER THAT MONTH, March 1997, Larry Ellison confirmed to the San Jose Mercury News that he was thinking of making a hostile bid for Apple and then giving the company to Steve to run. But Larry wasn’t sure. He asked the paper’s readers to send e-mail to him if they supported the idea.
Larry’s public posturing was bizarre. If you really want to take over a company, you don’t broadcast your intentions, which drives up the stock price and makes the deal more expensive. And you don’t indulge in Hamlet-like indecision in front of the media.
Even more embarrassing, the e-mail address that Larry gave out didn’t work. He said to use saveapple@oracle.com, but Oracle’s software could only accept addresses with a maximum of eight characters before the @ sign. So he had to change it to savapple@oracle.com. Larry was supposed to be some kind of technical genius, but he didn’t know one of the simplest facts about his own company’s internal computer systems.
Larry didn’t need to finance a takeover because Steve was maneuvering so effectively toward a palace coup. The crucial blow came when Apple announced that it lost $708 million in the first three months of 1997. The company had lost a total of $1.6 billion in the first year and a quarter of Gil Amelio’s tenure as chief executive. Gil had to go. The Macworld scene and the press coverage had shown that there was great enthusiasm for Steve. And the board of directors needed something dramatic to lift the stock price.
On July 9, the board ousted Gil.
Steve thrust himself into the power vacuum and quickly took control. He purged the board of members who had watched ineffectually during Apple’s long decline. Then he installed three of his own loyalists, including Larry.
There was turmoil and uncertainty among the thousands of Apple employees as Steve seized power, since no one knew what he was going to do, not even Steve himself. “Steve didn’t have a plan at all,” recalls Heidi Roizen.
Nonetheless, Wall Street’s analysts were thrilled by the coup. Investors quickly bid up Apple’s stock from $13 a share to $20. But many of the industry’s leading figures remained skeptical. Michael Dell, the highflyer of computer makers, said that if he were running Apple, he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Steve was offended by the flippant remark, and he sent e-mail to the rival mogul. “CEOs are supposed to have class,” he wrote. “I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.”
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THE SUMMER 1997 Macworld convention in Boston was scheduled for early August, only a month after Steve installed himself as Apple’s untitled but de facto leader. He called a meeting for a Saturday morning with the team of a half-dozen people who were producing the event.
“OK, I think you know who I am,” he said as he entered the room. “Who are you and what can you do for me?”
They went around the table. One man said he was an outside consultant who