Steve Jobs Part 10

When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France's allocations if Ga.s.see didn't jack up sales projections, Ga.s.see got angry. "I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering a.s.saholic. So I could recognize that in Steve."

Ga.s.see was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted to. Francois Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous-computing for all-and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought out the romantic in him. Both Ga.s.see and Negroponte tell tales of him pining over women while there.

Falling.

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: I t was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. I ts beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a "Xerox bigot" when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. I f you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster," which did not enhance its popularity. I t was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, "The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits."

At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the "Macintosh XL." Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. "I was furious because the Mac XL wasn't real," said Hoffman. "I t was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. I t sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned."

The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant"1984" ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, t.i.tled "Lemmings," showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death.

From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. I t didn't seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.

Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. "You guys didn't want to run '1984' last year," one of them said.

According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, "I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial." When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott's brother T ony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song "Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho," and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. "I can't believe you're going to insult businesspeople across America by running that," Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. "I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing."

Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency's entreaties and ran the commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley's wife, Leezy (who couldn't stand Jobs), and Jobs's new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. "I t insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach," the president of a market research firm told Fortune. Apple's marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and apologize for the apology.

Jobs's discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna's firm, was in charge of hand-holding and logistics at the Carlyle.

When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn't like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. "We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is," Cunningham recalled. "I know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was 'stupid' because I didn't know what a real calla lily was." So Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. "That suit's disgusting," he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. "Look, I know you're angry, and I know how you feel," she said.

"You have no f.u.c.king idea how I feel," he shot back, "no f.u.c.king idea what it's like to be me."

Thirty Years Old.

Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. T o celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but also playful-black tie and tennis shoes-party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, "There's an old Hindu saying that goes, 'In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.' Come help me celebrate mine."

One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like "The Girl from Ipanema" to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of "Happy Birthday."

Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to "technology's foremost visionary." Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple I I had been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade since that time. "He went from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald," he said.

Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for. Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tyc.o.o.n. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room. Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served, met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny's.

"I t's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. "Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare." The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs's most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future: Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

I 'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I 'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I 'm not there, but I 'll always come back... .

I f you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I 'm going crazy and I 'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life would soon be changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and out of the thread of Apple's. Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he had been. Perhaps it was time to say "Bye, I have to go," and then reemerge later, thinking differently.

Exodus.

Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in 1984. He needed to recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he didn't like. One day he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to $50,000 to engineers on theMacintosh team. So he went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that Belleville had decided not to give the bonuses to people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later heard that the decision had actually been made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs equivocated, then he said, "Well, let's a.s.sume what you are saying is true. How does that change things?" Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was withholding the bonus as a reason for him to come back, then he wouldn't come back as a matter of principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad taste.

When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have dinner with Jobs, and they walked from his office to an I talian restaurant a few blocks away. "I really want to return," he told Jobs. "But things seem really messed up right now." Jobs was vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged ahead. "The software team is completely demoralized and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won't last to the end of the year."

At that point Jobs cut him off. "You don't know what you're talking about!" he said. "The Macintosh team is doing great, and I 'm having the best time of my life right now. You're just completely out of touch." His stare was withering, but he also tried to look amused at Hertzfeld's a.s.sessment.

"I f you really believe that, I don't think there's any way that I can come back," Hertzfeld replied glumly. "The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn't even exist anymore."

"The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you," Jobs replied. "I want you to come back, but if you don't want to, that's up to you. You don't matter as much as you think you do, anyway."

Hertzfeld didn't come back.

By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. "I 've got it!" he told Hertzfeld one day. "I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field. I 'll just walk into Steve's office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? I t's guaranteed to work." The betting on the Mac team was that even brave Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do that. When he finally decided he had to make his break, around the time of Jobs's birthday bash, he made an appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to find Jobs smiling broadly when he walked in. "Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?" Jobs asked. He had heard about the plan.

Smith looked at him. "Do I have to? I 'll do it if I have to." Jobs gave him a look, and Smith decided it wasn't necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and walked out on good terms.

He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn. When Horn went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, "Everything that's wrong with the Mac is your fault."

Horn responded, "Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in."

"You're right," admitted Jobs. "I 'll give you 15,000 shares to stay." When Horn declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. "Well, give me a hug," he said. And so they hugged.

But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple I I division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple I I , which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its sales at Christmas 1984. "People in the Apple I I group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company," he later said. "This was despite the fact that the Apple I I was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come." He even roused himself to do something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley, berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.

Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a universal remote control device he had invented. I t would control your television, stereo, and other electronic devices with a simple set of b.u.t.tons that you could easily program. He informed the head of engineering at the Apple I I division, but he didn't feel he was important enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about it when the news leaked in the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter's questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple I I division. "Apple's direction has been horrendously wrong for five years," he said.

Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of T echnology. The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a telephone-"An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?"-and then quipped, "I thought at the time that he might be mistaken." Because of the awkward situation surrounding Wozniak's departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So Jobs and Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak recalled, and avoided any discussion of their disagreements.

Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. I t was his style. So he agreed to stay on as a part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the company at events and trade shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not leave well enough alone.

One Sat.u.r.day, a few weeks after they had visited Washington together, Jobs went to the new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign had moved there to handle its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches that the firm had made for Wozniak's new remote control device, and he flew into a rage. Apple had a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working on other computer-related projects, and Jobs invoked it. "I informed them," he recalled, "that working with Woz wouldn't be acceptable to us."

When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who, as usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing him. "Steve Jobs has a hate for me, probably because of the things I said about Apple," he told the reporter. Jobs's action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak's name on it and used the same design language as Apple's products might be mistaken for something that Apple had produced. "I t's not personal," Jobs told the newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak's remote wouldn't look like something made by Apple. "We don't want to see our design language used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can't leverage off Apple's resources; we can't treat him specially."

Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already done for Wozniak, but even so the executives at the firm were taken aback.

When Jobs demanded that they send him the drawings done for Wozniak or destroy them, they refused. Jobs had to send them a letter invoking Apple's contractual right. Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of the firm, risked Jobs's wrath by publicly dismissing his claim that the dispute with Wozniak was not personal. "I t's a power play," Pfeifer told the Journal. "They have personal problems between them."

Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs had done. He lived about twelve blocks from Jobs, who sometimes would drop by on his walks.

"I got so furious about the Wozniak remote episode that when Steve next came over, I wouldn't let him in the house," Hertzfeld recalled. "He knew he was wrong, but he tried to rationalize, and maybe in his distorted reality he was able to." Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to stay on Apple's retainer as a spokesman.

Show down, Spring 1985.

There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of 1985. Some were merely business disagreements, such as Sculley's attempt to maximize profits by keeping the Macintosh price high when Jobs wanted to make it more affordable. Others were weirdly psychological and stemmed from the torrid and unlikely infatuation they initially had with each other. Sculley had painfully craved Jobs's affection, Jobs had eagerly sought a father figure and mentor, and when the ardor began to cool there was an emotional backwash. But at its core, the growing breach had two fundamental causes, one on each side.

For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn't make the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were making. On the contrary, he found Jobs's pa.s.sion for tiny technical tweaks and design details to be obsessive and counterproductive. He had spent his career selling sodas and snacks whose recipes were largely irrelevant to him. He wasn't naturally pa.s.sionate about products, which was among the most d.a.m.ning sins that Jobs could imagine. "I tried to educate him about the details of engineering," Jobs recalled, "but he had no idea how products are created, and after a while it just turned into arguments. But I learned that my perspective was right.

Products are everything." He came to see Sculley as clueless, and his contempt was exacerbated by Sculley's hunger for his affection and delusions that they were very similar.

For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He found Jobs's boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley's lack of pa.s.sion for product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a fault. At one point they were planning to meet with Xerox's vice chair Bill Glavin, and Sculley begged Jobs to behave.

But as soon as they sat down, Jobs told Glavin, "You guys don't have any clue what you're doing," and the meeting broke up. "I 'm sorry, but I couldn't help myself," Jobs told Sculley. I t was one of many such cases. As Atari's Al Alcorn later observed, "Sculley believed in keeping people happy and worrying about relationships. Steve didn't give a s.h.i.t about that. But he did care about the product in a way that Sculley never could, and he was able to avoid having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting anyone who wasn't an A player."

The board became increasingly alarmed at the turmoil, and in early 1985 Arthur Rock and some other disgruntled directors delivered a stern lecture to both. They told Sculley that he was supposed to be running the company, and he should start doing so with more authority and less eagerness to be pals with Jobs. They told Jobs that he was supposed to be fixing the mess at the Macintosh division and not telling other divisions how to do their job. Afterward Jobs retreated to his office and typed on his Macintosh, "I will not criticize the rest of the organization, I will not criticize the rest of the organization ..."

As the Macintosh continued to disappoint-sales in March 1985 were only 10% of the budget forecast-Jobs holed up in his office fuming or wandered the halls berating everyone else for the problems. His mood swings became worse, and so did his abuse of those around him. Middle- level managers began to rise up against him. The marketing chief Mike Murray sought a private meeting with Sculley at an industry conference. As they were going up to Sculley's hotel room, Jobs spotted them and asked to come along. Murray asked him not to. He told Sculley that Jobs was wreaking havoc and had to be removed from managing the Macintosh division. Sculley replied that he was not yet resigned to having a showdown with Jobs. Murray later sent a memo directly to Jobs criticizing the way he treated colleagues and denouncing "management by character a.s.sa.s.sination."

For a few weeks it seemed as if there might be a solution to the turmoil. Jobs became fascinated by a flat-screen technology developed by a firm near Palo Alto called Woodside Design, run by an eccentric engineer named Steve Kitchen. He also was impressed by another startup that made a touchscreen display that could be controlled by your finger, so you didn't need a mouse. T ogether these might help fulfill Jobs's vision of creating a "Mac in a book." On a walk with Kitchen, Jobs spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and declared that they should open a skunkworks facility to work on these ideas. I t could be called AppleLabs and Jobs could run it, going back to the joy of having a small team and developing a great new product.

Sculley was thrilled by the possibility. I t would solve most of his management issues, moving Jobs back to what he did best and getting rid of his disruptive presence in Cupertino. Sculley also had a candidate to replace Jobs as manager of the Macintosh division: Jean-Louis Ga.s.see, Apple's chief in France, who had suffered through Jobs's visit there. Ga.s.see flew to Cupertino and said he would take the job if he got a guarantee that he would run the division rather than work under Jobs. One of the board members, Phil Schlein of Macy's, tried to convince Jobs that he would be better off thinking up new products and inspiring a pa.s.sionate little team.

But after some reflection, Jobs decided that was not the path he wanted. He declined to cede control to Ga.s.see, who wisely went back to Paris to avoid the power clash that was becoming inevitable. For the rest of the spring, Jobs vacillated. There were times when he wanted to a.s.sert himself as a corporate manager, even writing a memo urging cost savings by eliminating free beverages and first-cla.s.s air travel, and other times when he agreed with those who were encouraging him to go off and run a new AppleLabs R&D group.

In March Murray let loose with another memo that he marked "Do not circulate" but gave to multiple colleagues. "In my three years at Apple, I 've never observed so much confusion, fear, and dysfunction as in the past 90 days," he began. "We are perceived by the rank and file as a boat without a rudder, drifting away into foggy oblivion." Murray had been on both sides of the fence; at times he conspired with Jobs to undermine Sculley, but in this memo he laid the blame on Jobs. "Whether the cause of or because of the dysfunction, Steve Jobs now controls a seemingly impenetrable power base."

At the end of that month, Sculley finally worked up the nerve to tell Jobs that he should give up running the Macintosh division. He walked over to Jobs's office one evening and brought the human resources manager, Jay Elliot, to make the confrontation more formal. "There is no one who admires your brilliance and vision more than I do," Sculley began. He had uttered such flatteries before, but this time it was clear that there would be a brutal "but" punctuating the thought. And there was. "But this is really not going to work," he declared. The flatteries punctured by "buts" continued.

"We have developed a great friendship with each other," he said, "but I have lost confidence in your ability to run the Macintosh division." He also berated Jobs for badmouthing him as a bozo behind his back.

Jobs looked stunned and countered with an odd challenge, that Sculley should help and coach him more: "You've got to spend more time with me." Then he lashed back. He told Sculley he knew nothing about computers, was doing a terrible job running the company, and had disappointed Jobs ever since coming to Apple. Then he began to cry. Sculley sat there biting his fingernails.

"I 'm going to bring this up with the board," Sculley declared. "I 'm going to recommend that you step down from your operating position of running the Macintosh division. I want you to know that." He urged Jobs not to resist and to agree instead to work on developing new technologies and products.

Jobs jumped from his seat and turned his intense stare on Sculley. "I don't believe you're going to do that," he said. "I f you do that, you're going to destroy the company."

Over the next few weeks Jobs's behavior fluctuated wildly. At one moment he would be talking about going off to run AppleLabs, but in the next moment he would be enlisting support to have Sculley ousted. He would reach out to Sculley, then lash out at him behind his back, sometimes onthe same night. One night at 9 he called Apple's general counsel Al Eisenstat to say he was losing confidence in Sculley and needed his help convincing the board to fire him; at 11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, "You're terrific, and I just want you to know I love working with you."

At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley officially reported that he wanted to ask Jobs to step down as the head of the Macintosh division and focus instead on new product development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty and independent of the board members, then spoke. He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not having the guts to take command over the past year, and with Jobs for "acting like a petulant brat." The board needed to get this dispute behind them, and to do so it should meet privately with each of them.

Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present first. Jobs insisted that Sculley was the problem because he had no understanding of computers.

Rock responded by berating Jobs. In his growling voice, he said that Jobs had been behaving foolishly for a year and had no right to be managing a division. Even Jobs's strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk him into stepping aside gracefully to run a research lab for the company.

When it was Sculley's turn to meet privately with the board, he gave an ultimatum: "You can back me, and then I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing, and you're going to have to find yourselves a new CEO." I f given the authority, he said, he would not move abruptly, but would ease Jobs into the new role over the next few months. The board unanimously sided with Sculley. He was given the authority to remove Jobs whenever he felt the timing was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom, knowing full well that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, and hugged him.

After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to be conciliatory. Jobs asked that the transition occur slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed. Later that evening Sculley's executive a.s.sistant, Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs to see how he was doing. He was still in his office, sh.e.l.l-shocked. Sculley had already left, and Jobs came over to talk to her. Once again he began oscillating wildly in his att.i.tude toward Sculley.

"Why did John do this to me?" he said. "He betrayed me." Then he swung the other way. Perhaps he should take some time away to work on restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said. "John's friendship is more important than anything else, and I think maybe that's what I should do, concentrate on our friendship."

Plotting a Coup.

Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He went to Sculley's office in early May 1985 and asked for more time to show that he could manage the Macintosh division. He would prove himself as an operations guy, he promised. Sculley didn't back down. Jobs next tried a direct challenge: He asked Sculley to resign. "I think you really lost your stride," Jobs told him. "You were really great the first year, and everything went wonderful. But something happened." Sculley, who generally was even-tempered, lashed back, pointing out that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh software developed, come up with new models, or win customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match about who was the worse manager. After Jobs stalked out, Sculley turned away from the gla.s.s wall of his office, where others had been looking in on the meeting, and wept.

Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May 14, when the Macintosh team made its quarterly review presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate leaders. Jobs still had not relinquished control of the division, and he was defiant when he arrived in the corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley began by clashing over what the division's mission was. Jobs said it was to sell more Macintosh machines. Sculley said it was to serve the interests of the Apple company as a whole. As usual there was little cooperation among the divisions; for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were different from those being developed by the Apple I I division. The debate, according to the minutes, took a full hour.

Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would take the place of the discontinued Lisa; and software called FileServer, which would allow Macintosh users to share files on a network. Sculley learned for the first time that these projects were going to be late. He gave a cold critique of Murray's marketing record, Belleville's missed engineering deadlines, and Jobs's overall management. Despite all this, Jobs ended the meeting with a plea to Sculley, in front of all the others there, to be given one more chance to prove he could run a division.

Sculley refused.

That night Jobs took his Macintosh team out to dinner at Nina's Cafe in Woodside. Jean-Louis Ga.s.see was in town because Sculley wanted him to prepare to take over the Macintosh division, and Jobs invited him to join them. Belleville proposed a toast "to those of us who really understand what the world according to Steve Jobs is all about." That phrase-"the world according to Steve"-had been used dismissively by others at Apple who belittled the reality warp he created. After the others left, Belleville sat with Jobs in his Mercedes and urged him to organize a battle to the death with Sculley.

Months earlier, Apple had gotten the right to export computers to China, and Jobs had been invited to sign a deal in the Great Hall of the People over the 1985 Memorial Day weekend. He had told Sculley, who decided he wanted to go himself, which was just fine with Jobs. Jobs decided to use Sculley's absence to execute his coup. Throughout the week leading up to Memorial Day, he took a lot of people on walks to share his plans.

"I 'm going to launch a coup while John is in China," he told Mike Murray.

Seven Days in May.

Thursday, May 23: At his regular Thursday meeting with his top lieutenants in the Macintosh division, Jobs told his inner circle about his plan to oust Sculley. He also confided in the corporate human resources director, Jay Elliot, who told him bluntly that the proposed rebellion wouldn't work.

Elliot had talked to some board members and urged them to stand up for Jobs, but he discovered that most of the board was with Sculley, as were most members of Apple's senior staff. Yet Jobs barreled ahead. He even revealed his plans to Ga.s.see on a walk around the parking lot, despite the fact that Ga.s.see had come from Paris to take his job. "I made the mistake of telling Ga.s.see," Jobs wryly conceded years later.

That evening Apple's general counsel Al Eisenstat had a small barbecue at his home for Sculley, Ga.s.see, and their wives. When Ga.s.see told Eisenstat what Jobs was plotting, he recommended that Ga.s.see inform Sculley. "Steve was trying to raise a cabal and have a coup to get rid of John," Ga.s.see recalled. "In the den of Al Eisenstat's house, I put my index finger lightly on John's breastbone and said, 'I f you leave tomorrow for China, you could be ousted. Steve's plotting to get rid of you.'"

Friday, May 24: Sculley canceled his trip and decided to confront Jobs at the executive staff meeting on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that his usual seat next to Sculley, who sat at the head of the table, was taken. He sat instead at the far end. He was dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked energized. Sculley looked pale. He announced that he was dispensing with the agenda to confront the issue on everyone's mind.

"I t's come to my attention that you'd like to throw me out of the company," he said, looking directly at Jobs. "I 'd like to ask you if that's true."

Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy about indulging in brutal honesty. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed Sculley with his unblinking stare. "I think you're bad for Apple, and I think you're the wrong person to run the company," he replied, coldly and slowly. "You really should leave this company. You don't know how to operate and never have." He accused Sculley of not understanding the product development process, and then he added a self-centered swipe: "I wanted you here to help me grow, and you've been ineffective in helping me."As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper. A childhood stutter that had not afflicted him for twenty years started to return. "I don't trust you, and I won't tolerate a lack of trust," he stammered. When Jobs claimed that he would be better than Sculley at running the company, Sculley took a gamble. He decided to poll the room on that question. "He pulled off this clever maneuver," Jobs recalled, still smarting thirty-five years later. "I t was at the executive committee meeting, and he said, 'I t's me or Steve, who do you vote for?' He set the whole thing up so that you'd kind of have to be an idiot to vote for me."

Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm. Del Yocam had to go first. He said he loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but he worked up the nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he "respected" Sculley and would support him to run the company. Eisenstat faced Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He liked Jobs but was supporting Sculley. Regis McKenna, who sat in on senior staff meetings as an outside consultant, was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was not yet ready to run the company, something he had told him before. Others sided with Sculley as well. For Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of Jobs and didn't particularly like Sculley. His voice quavered a bit as he told Jobs he had decided to support Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it out and find some role for Jobs to play in the company. "You can't let Steve leave this company," he told Sculley.