Inside Steve's Brain Read Online Free

get back into the technology business at Apple. Jobs was tiring of cranking out technology products that were quickly obsolete. He wanted to make things that were longer lasting. A good movie, for example. Good storytelling lasts for decades. In 1997, Jobs told Time :
    “I don’t think you’ll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years. [But] Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it’s a 60-year-old production. People don’t read Herodotus or Homer to their kids anymore, but everybody watches movies. These are our myths today. Disney puts those myths into our culture, and hopefully Pixar will, too.” 7
    Perhaps more important, Jobs was skeptical that Apple could stage a comeback. He was so skeptical, in fact, that in June 1997 he had sold the 1.5 million shares he’d received for the NeXT purchase at rock-bottom prices—all except for a single symbolic share. He didn’t think Apple had a future worth more than one share.
    But in early July 1997, Apple’s board asked Amelio to resign following a string of terrible quarterly financial results, including one that resulted in a loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars, the biggest loss ever for a Silicon Valley company. 8
    The common perception is that Jobs ousted Amelio after backstabbing him in a carefully engineered boardroom coup. But there’s no evidence to suggest that Jobs planned to take over the company. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Several people interviewed for this book said Jobs initially had no interest whatsoever in returning to Apple—he was too busy with Pixar, and he had little confidence that Apple could be saved.
    Even Amelio’s own autobiography makes it clear that Jobs had no interest in taking the helm at Apple, if you ignore Amelio’s assertions to the contrary. “He had never intended that the deal would include his giving Apple any more than some portion of his attention,” 9 Amelio wrote. Earlier in his book, Amelio noted that Jobs wanted to be paid in cash for the purchase of NeXT; he didn’t want any Apple stock. But Amelio insisted on paying a large portion in shares because he didn’t want Jobs walking away. He wanted Jobs committed to Apple, to have “some skin in the game,” as he put it. 10
    Amelio does accuse Jobs several times of engineering his dismissal so that he, Jobs, could take over, but presents no direct evidence. It’s more comforting for Amelio to blame his dismissal on maneuvering by Jobs than on the more straightforward explanation that Apple’s board had lost confidence in him.
    After firing Amelio, Apple’s board had no one else to turn to. Jobs had already been dispensing advice to the company in his role as special advisor to Amelio (nothing particularly Machiavellian about that). The board asked Jobs to take over. He agreed to—temporarily. After six months, Jobs adopted the title of interim CEO, or iCEO, as he was jokingly referred to inside Apple. In August, Apple’s board officially made Jobs the interim CEO while it continued to look for a permanent replacement. Wags noted that instead of Apple acquiring Jobs when it purchased NeXT, Jobs had acquired Apple but had cleverly arranged it so that Apple paid him.
    When Jobs took over, Apple sold about forty different products—everything from inkjet printers to the Newton handheld. Few of them were market leaders. The lineup of computers was particularly baffling. There were several major lines—Quadras, Power Macs, Performas, and PowerBooks— each with a dozen different models. But there was little to distinguish between the models except their confusing product names—the Perfoma 5200CD, Perfoma 5210CD, Perfoma 5215CD, and Perfoma 5220CD.
    “What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products,” Jobs would later say. “It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this