Inside Steve's Brain Read Online Free Page B

fairly gentle about it, but firm.”
    Jobs didn’t cut from the top. He called on each product group to nominate what should be cut and what should be kept. If the group wanted to keep a project alive, it had to be sold to Jobs—and sold hard. Understandably, some of the teams argued to keep projects that were marginal, but were perhaps strategic, or the best technology on the market. But Jobs would frequently say that if it wasn’t making a profit, it had to go. Oliver recalled that most of the teams volunteered a few sacrificial lambs to which Jobs responded, “It’s not enough.”
    “If Apple is going to survive, we’ve got to cut more,” Oliver recalled Jobs saying. “There were no screaming matches. There was no calling people idiots. It was simply, ‘We’ve got to focus and do things we can be good at.’ ” Several times Oliver saw Jobs draw a simple chart of Apple’s annual revenues on a whiteboard. The chart showed the sharp decline, from $12 billion a year to $10 billion, and then $7 billion. Jobs explained that Apple couldn’t be a profitable $12 billion company, or a profitable $10 billion company, but it could be a profitable $6 billion company. 15

Apple’s Assets
    Over the next several weeks, Jobs made several important changes.
    Senior Management. He replaced most of Apple’s board with allies in the tech industry, including Oracle mogul Larry Ellison, who’s also a friend. Several of Jobs’s lieutenants from NeXT had already been given top positions at Apple: David Manovich was put in charge of sales; Jon Rubinstein, hardware; Avadis “Avie” Tevanian, software. Jobs set about replacing the rest of the executive staff, with one exception. He kept Fred Anderson, the chief financial officer, who had recently been hired by Amelio and wasn’t considered old guard.
    Microsoft. Jobs resolved a long-running and damaging patent lawsuit with Microsoft. In return for dropping charges that Microsoft ripped off the Mac in Windows, Jobs persuaded Gates to keep developing the all-important Office suite for the Mac. Without Office, the Mac was doomed. Jobs also got Gates to publicly support the company with a $150 million investment. The investment was largely symbolic, but Wall Street loved it: Apple stock shot up 30 percent. In return, Gates got Jobs to make Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default web browser on the Mac, an important concession as Microsoft battled Netscape for control of the Web.
    Jobs started talks with Gates personally, who then sent Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Gregory Maffei, to hammer out a deal. Maffei went to Jobs’s home and Jobs suggested they go for a walk around leafy Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. “It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies,” said Maffei. “[Jobs] was expansive and charming. He said, ‘These are things that we care about and that matter.’ And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn’t ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured out what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal.” 16
    The Brand. Jobs realized that while the products sucked, the Apple brand was still great. He considered the Apple brand as one of the core assets of the company, perhaps the core asset, but it needed to be revitalized. “What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike,” Jobs told Time in 1998. 17 "Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think outside the box, people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.”
    Jobs held a