The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [96]
“That was the worst thing I’ve seen in my life!” Steve exclaimed. “We don’t need your services. It’s nothing personal. I’m sorry you had to come in on a Saturday, but we don’t need you.” The man left.
Two hours into the meeting, Steve paused dramatically.
“What I’m going to say now can’t leave this room,” he said. “If it does, I’ll fire you. So look around and see if you can trust the other people. If not, leave now.”
They all stayed.
Steve revealed his news: Microsoft was investing $150 million in Apple and promising to continue writing software for the Macintosh for at least five years. And Bill Gates would probably come to Boston in person to share the stage for the announcement.
• • •
APPLE’S DECLARING A TRUCE with Microsoft was trivial and unnecessary, as if Monaco proclaimed that it wouldn’t attack France. Microsoft had long ago conquered almost all the territory and Bill Gates was happy to give Apple a separate peace. Microsoft had been making good money by selling software for Apple’s machines for two decades and it had no reason to stop.
The announcement wasn’t very significant, but August is the slowest season for news, and Steve and Bill were two of the best-known personalities in American business. Steve offered Time the exclusive behind-the-scenes story. Meanwhile, Steve’s admirers at Newsweek, Katie Hafner and Steven Levy, kept trying to schedule a meeting with Steve during Macworld. Steve promised them a special interview, but they later discovered that a Time reporter was following Steve everywhere: the airplane, the hotel, backstage.
Newsweek’s editor, Maynard Parker, was furious when he found out.
“How did this happen?” he demanded.
“Steve was up to his usual tricks,” Katie Hafner recalls. Steve had tried to give out multiple “exclusives” a decade earlier, during the Next debut. He hadn’t changed at all.
Time rewarded Steve by picturing him solo on its cover. Newsweek also put the story on the cover, but it exacted revenge against Steve by running Bill’s photo instead.
What clinched the cover placements was an unexpected but memorable tableau of the two moguls. The bizarre scene came about because Bill didn’t want to fly to Boston, so he decided to address the convention via a live video feed instead. His image was projected on a huge screen at the auditorium, and it dwarfed the life-sized figure of Steve.
The symbolism was simple and compelling: Steve, the counterculture iconoclast, finally being co-opted by Bill, the ominous Orwellian Big Brother. The audience booed and jeered at Bill’s image, and Steve scolded them as if they were unruly schoolchildren.
Many of the Apple cultists felt betrayed, but Wall Street’s investors were reassured by Bill’s display of support. That day, Apple’s stock rose 33 percent to $23 a share.
• • •
ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1997, Steve announced that he would serve as the “interim CEO.” He moved into a conspicuously small office, close to the boardroom. He inherited Gil’s secretary, Vicki, and told her that he didn’t like the pens that Apple kept in stock. He would only write with a certain type of Pilot pen, which he proclaimed was “the best.”
He took to walking around the Apple campus barefoot in cutoff shorts and a black shirt. One day he accosted Jim Oliver, a Wharton Ph.D. who had been Gil’s assistant.
“What do you do here?” Steve demanded.
“I’m wrapping things up.”
“You mean that in a while you won’t have a job?” Steve shot back. “Well, good, because I need someone to do some grunt work.”
What a strange way to motivate people, Jim thought. Then again, it was a chance to work for a legendary figure.
It turned out that the “grunt work” would give Jim a close-up view of Steve’s deliberations about how to save Apple. The job was to take notes at the meetings where Steve would review every part of the company and decide what to keep and what to kill.
The gatherings were held in the boardroom, which was in the only high-rise office building on the low-slung campus. It