Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #7

there are certain realities here,

both psychological and market,

that are going to come into play,

in my own personal judgment.

And I think this is a window

that we've got. We've been given it.

And thank God we've been given it.

Nobody else has done this.

It's a wonderful window.

We have 18 months.

The article was about people

who are maniacal about work.

And Steve Jobs was the most maniacal

person I could think of,

which is why I wanted

to write about him.

You made the connection

in that first piece a bunch of times,

you know, the monk among priests.

What was the relationship

between that extreme

of working 24/7

and that monastic life?

I mean, he did seem to have

that rather interesting dedication.

OK, so, a monomaniacal commitment

to something

is something

that most people don't have.

And that, like the monk, requires you

to kind of shed extraneous things,

and Steve Jobs absolutely,

positively had that.

Jobs talked about

becoming a monk

at this remote Zen temple

where Kobun Chino had studied.

I wonder what he liked

about the idea of it.

Was it the discipline of the monks?

Their unwavering focus?

In meditation, Jobs loved

inspecting his own mind

and changing the way it worked.

He focused on the spirit of things

and sought perfection

in the machines he made.

But Kobun thought

Jobs was missing the point.

A search for perfection

would never bring him peace

or harmony with those around him.

But maybe harmony is

what Jobs was looking for in Japan.

He went there dozens of times,

and not just for business.

He stayed in fancy hotels,

not Zen temples,

but right to the end,

he kept going back.

After he met and later married

Laurene Powell,

he would take three

of his four children there,

including Lisa.

Jobs's relationship with Lisa

remained full of conflict,

but a few years before Jobs's death,

Lisa wrote about a moment of peace.

I didn't live with him, but he

would stop by our house some days,

a deity among us for

a few tingly moments or hours.

He was a more extreme vegetarian

than my mother and I

and sharp-focused.

One day, he spit out a mouthful of soup

after hearing it contained butter.

With him, one ate a variety of salads.

He believed that great harvests

came from arid sources.

Pleasure from restraint.

He knew the equations

that most people didn't know.

Things led to their opposites.

But once, he took me with him

on a business trip to Tokyo

where we went to a sushi bar

in the basement of the Okura hotel

with its high ceilings and low couches,

like a Hitchcock set.

He ordered great trays of unagi sushi,

cooked eel on rice.

He ordered too many pieces, knowing

we wouldn't be able to finish them,

but that we didn't want

to feel they would run out.

It was the first time I'd felt,

with him,

so relaxed and content

over those trays of meat.

The excess, the permission and warmth

after the cold salads

meant a once inaccessible space

had opened.

He was less rigid with himself,

even human under the great ceilings

with the little chairs,

with the meat and me.

But the event was not self-sustaining.

We went back home to salads.

They satisfied me less

now that I knew the alternative.

- What eventually happened to NeXT?

- Apple purchased it.

- OK, when?

- I believe 1997.

When Apple bought NeXT,

Apple was pretty messed up.

It was pretty easy to see.

Apple Computer,

a pioneer in the personal computers

and software business,

has fallen on hard times.

Over a three-month period,

Apple's profits plunged

by more than $50 million.

With big losses in the last

quarter, with profit margins shrinking,

Apple seems destined for a takeover.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple

with Steve Wozniak,

and on Friday,

Apple went to the well once again,

bringing Jobs back as a consultant,

writing one

of the most unlikely chapters ever

in the lore that is Silicon Valley.

Steve.

I joined the company

in February '97.

After a couple of days there,

I was in complete shock.

The company was close to bankruptcy,

and it was total chaos.

The NeXT acquisition

had just occurred,

and there were major changes

going on.

And Steve was involved at that point

in time, but on the margins.

I haven't been back here

in over ten years,

so, yeah, it's an interesting feeling.

It's a little strange,

but not too strange.

At some point in time,

the process was started

to look for a full-time CEO.

And at that point in time,

Steve got much more involved.

Now, he still wasn't the CEO.

I don't think he was 100% sure

the company was savable yet,

and so I think he was

hedging his bets a little bit.

He had to make a decision whether he

really wanted to take on that role

because being CEO of Apple

is an all-consuming role,

and I'm not sure Steve thought

that that's something

that he wanted to do for what

turned out to be the rest of his life.

I took the title of Interim CEO

and agreed to come back for 90 days

to help recruit a full-time CEO.

How did that recruitment effort go?

I failed.

You know, the real hero

of that early part of the story

is Fred Anderson.

Fred restructured the company

financially

and bought us the time to build

the foundation for today's Apple.

And then Fred even had an impact

on the product strategy

because when Steve came back,

the first major project we

started was a network computer.

That was kind of the rage at the time,

but it wasn't a consumer product at all.

Fred kept going,

"You know, wait a minute,

we got to have a consumer product."

"You guys have to focus

on a low-end Mac

because that's what's going to

turn the company around."

So, the executive team and Steve

decided that we would switch

from doing the network computer

and make that the iMac.

There you go, right here.

Can you see it?

She comes in colors everywhere

In the world of computers,

it's kill or be killed.

And the original whiz kid was thought

to be dying an early death.

We went for colors that really expressed

the spirit of the machine.

And that is... you know,

it's powerful, but fun.

And the first thing

I thought I'd do is give you an update.

We've managed to go from losing

a billion dollars the year before

to actually making over $200 million

during the first three quarters.

Boy, what a difference a year makes.

Guess what? Mac is back.

She comes in colors everywhere

She combs her hair

She's like a rainbow

He was the kind of person that

could convince himself of things

that weren't necessarily true.

He could go to people

and ask them to do something

that they thought was impossible.

Steve did create

reality distortion around him.

You know, if he told you

the sky was green, for a while,

you'd kind of go, "Yeah, OK.

Yeah, the sky's green."

To me... marketing is about values.

This is a very complicated world.

It's a very noisy world.

And we're not going to get a chance

to get people to remember much

about us. No company is.

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