Steve Jobs

decision.” At one point Jobs and Ellison pulled a prank on a clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job; they sent him an email saying that he had been selected, which caused both amusement and embarrassment when stories appeared in the papers that they were just toying with him.
    By December it had become clear that Jobs’s iCEO status had evolved from
interim
to
indefinite
. As Jobs continued to run the company, the board quietly deactivated its search. “I went back to Apple and tried to hire a CEO, with the help of a recruiting agency, for almost four months,” he recalled. “But they didn’t produce the right people. That’s why I finally stayed. Apple was in no shape to attract anybody good.”
    The problem Jobs faced was that running two companies was brutal. Looking back on it, he traced his health problems back to those days:
    It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life. I had a young family. I had Pixar. I would go to work at 7 a.m. and I’d getback at 9 at night, and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate. It got close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and down to Apple in a black Porsche convertible, and I started to get kidney stones. I would rush to the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of Demerol in the butt and eventually I would pass it.
     
     
    Despite the grueling schedule, the more that Jobs immersed himself in Apple, the more he realized that he would not be able to walk away. When Michael Dell was asked at a computer trade show in October 1997 what he would do if he were Steve Jobs and taking over Apple, he replied, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Jobs fired off an email to Dell. “CEOs are supposed to have class,” it said. “I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.” Jobs liked to stoke up rivalries as a way to rally his team—he had done so with IBM and Microsoft—and he did so with Dell. When he called together his managers to institute a build-to-order system for manufacturing and distribution, Jobs used as a backdrop a blown-up picture of Michael Dell with a target on his face. “We’re coming after you, buddy,” he said to cheers from his troops.
    One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company,” he recalled. “The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that’s why I decided to stay and rebuild it.”
    Killing the Clones
    One of the great debates about Apple was whether it should have licensed its operating system more aggressively to other computer makers, the way Microsoft licensed Windows. Wozniak had favoredthat approach from the beginning. “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system.” Alan Kay, the star of Xerox PARC who came to Apple as a fellow in 1984, also fought hard for licensing the Mac OS software. “Software people are always multiplatform, because you want to run on everything,” he recalled. “And that was a huge battle, probably the largest battle I lost at Apple.”
    Bill Gates, who was building a fortune by licensing Microsoft’s operating system, had urged Apple to do the same in 1985, just as Jobs was being eased out. Gates believed that, even if Apple took away some of Microsoft’s operating system customers, Microsoft could make money by creating versions of its applications software, such as Word and Excel, for the users of the Macintosh and its clones. “I was trying to do everything to get them to be a strong licensor,” he recalled. He sent a formal memo to Sculley making the case. “The industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers,” he argued.