Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli

Author:Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385347419
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

WHILE THE THINK DIFFERENT campaign captured the public’s attention, Steve was busy throwing out all kinds of pieces of the old Apple. The restructuring touched every corner of the company. Out went the Newton and eMate product lines, and the stores and engineering and marketing groups that supported them. (In an odd twist of fate, ex-CEO Amelio came back to visit Steve at Apple headquarters late in 1998 with an offer to buy the assets and intellectual property of the mothballed Newton operations. A few days after the meeting, Steve told me he was flabbergasted that Amelio would have any interest in trying to make a go of it with the Newton. But selling it to him would have been “a cruel joke,” he told me. “I can be mean, but I could never be that mean. No way would I let him further humiliate himself—or Apple.” So the Newton stayed dead. Many of its key engineers were retained, however.)

Out went the contracts that licensed the MacOS to the clone manufacturers. Steve hated the idea of having his operating system in the hands of others, and he had refused to sign on as iCEO without the promise that he could shut down the clones. This was the most expensive of the many decisions Steve made in the course of stabilizing the company. To avoid the litigation that would naturally arise from Apple abrogating the contracts, the company had to pay the clonemakers to disappear quietly. The most successful of these was Power Computing, which had commandeered a 10 percent share of the market for MacOS-compatible computers. Apple paid $110 million in cash and stock to acquire the company and hire some of its engineers.

Out went the inventory. Tim Cook became a new member of the team in March 1998 when he was hired away from Compaq—where he had been called “the Attila the Hun of inventory”—to be Apple’s chief of operations. Cook was a wiry bird of a southerner, thin and bookish-looking despite his athleticism—he biked and ran long distances regularly. Cook spoke quietly, with a soft Alabama drawl, but he may have been the toughest executive at Apple. Cook’s work drew no public attention, but it was crucial to trimming the company. In the nine months after he arrived, Apple reduced its inventory from $400 million worth of unsold, unwanted Macs down to $78 million. Cook was responsible for perhaps the most dramatic example of Steve’s hurry to rid himself of the burdens of Apple’s recent past: the bulldozing of tens of thousands of unsold Macs into a landfill in early 1998.

Finally, out went another 1,900 employees. This was the last tranche of Anderson’s resizing of the company. All in all, Anderson had taken the company from 10,896 full-time employees down to 6,658. Steve told me that being a father made firing people much harder than it had been. “I still do it,” he said, “because that’s my job. But when I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being five years old, kind of like I look at my kids.

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