Steve Jobs

never-surrender general. But he had lent his copy ofthe tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and he didn’t have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or windows, and finally gave up. The video store didn’t have a copy of
Patton
in stock, so in the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s
Betrayal
.
    Sunday, May 26:
As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures. Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley stood firm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley urged him to take the role of being a product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere “figurehead.” Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley give up control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you become chairman and I’ll become president and chief executive officer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck by how earnest he seemed.
    “Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has got to run the company,” he replied. “I’ve got the support and you don’t.”
    On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs left a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of the folly of siding with Sculley.
    Monday, May 27:
Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalists—Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to Jobs’s Woodside home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculley’s offer to be a productvisionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs. Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.
    When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet. “I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula bluntly declined to back Jobs. “I said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting together a revolt, but that’s not how you do things.”
    Tuesday, May 28:
His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on Tuesday morning. He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans. Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he still had their backing. He did.
    At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée would take over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could stay on with the title of board