Part 10 (1/2)

When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France's allocations if Ga.s.see didn't jack up sales projections, Ga.s.see got angry. ”I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering a.s.saholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”

Ga.s.see was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted to. Francois Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous-computing for all-and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought out the romantic in him. Both Ga.s.see and Negroponte tell tales of him pining over women while there.

Falling.

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: I t was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. I ts beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by s.h.i.+pping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a ”Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. I f you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname ”the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. I t was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, ”The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”

At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the ”Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. ”I was furious because the Mac XL wasn't real,” said Hoffman. ”I t was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. I t sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned.”

The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant”1984” ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, t.i.tled ”Lemmings,” showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death.

From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. I t didn't seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.

Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. ”You guys didn't want to run '1984' last year,” one of them said.

According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, ”I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott's brother T ony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song ”Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. ”I can't believe you're going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. ”I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publis.h.i.+ng.”

Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency's entreaties and ran the commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley's wife, Leezy (who couldn't stand Jobs), and Jobs's new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. ”I t insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research firm told Fortune. Apple's marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and apologize for the apology.

Jobs's discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna's firm, was in charge of hand-holding and logistics at the Carlyle.

When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn't like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. ”We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. ”I know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was 'stupid' because I didn't know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. ”That suit's disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. ”Look, I know you're angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.

”You have no f.u.c.king idea how I feel,” he shot back, ”no f.u.c.king idea what it's like to be me.”

Thirty Years Old.

Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. T o celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but also playful-black tie and tennis shoes-party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, ”There's an old Hindu saying that goes, 'In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.' Come help me celebrate mine.”

One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like ”The Girl from Ipanema” to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of ”Happy Birthday.”

Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to ”technology's foremost visionary.” Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple I I had been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade since that time. ”He went from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.

Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for. Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tyc.o.o.n. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room. Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served, met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny's.

”I t's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing,” Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. ”Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare.” The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs's most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future: Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

I 'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I 'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I 'm not there, but I 'll always come back... .

I f you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, ”Bye. I have to go. I 'm going crazy and I 'm getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life would soon be changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and out of the thread of Apple's. Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he had been. Perhaps it was time to say ”Bye, I have to go,” and then reemerge later, thinking differently.

Exodus.

Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in 1984. He needed to recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he didn't like. One day he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to $50,000 to engineers on theMacintosh team. So he went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that Belleville had decided not to give the bonuses to people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later heard that the decision had actually been made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs equivocated, then he said, ”Well, let's a.s.sume what you are saying is true. How does that change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was withholding the bonus as a reason for him to come back, then he wouldn't come back as a matter of principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad taste.

When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have dinner with Jobs, and they walked from his office to an I talian restaurant a few blocks away. ”I really want to return,” he told Jobs. ”But things seem really messed up right now.” Jobs was vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged ahead. ”The software team is completely demoralized and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won't last to the end of the year.”

At that point Jobs cut him off. ”You don't know what you're talking about!” he said. ”The Macintosh team is doing great, and I 'm having the best time of my life right now. You're just completely out of touch.” His stare was withering, but he also tried to look amused at Hertzfeld's a.s.sessment.

”I f you really believe that, I don't think there's any way that I can come back,” Hertzfeld replied glumly. ”The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn't even exist anymore.”

”The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Jobs replied. ”I want you to come back, but if you don't want to, that's up to you. You don't matter as much as you think you do, anyway.”

Hertzfeld didn't come back.

By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. ”I 've got it!” he told Hertzfeld one day. ”I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field. I 'll just walk into Steve's office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? I t's guaranteed to work.” The betting on the Mac team was that even brave Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do that. When he finally decided he had to make his break, around the time of Jobs's birthday bash, he made an appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to find Jobs smiling broadly when he walked in. ”Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?” Jobs asked. He had heard about the plan.

Smith looked at him. ”Do I have to? I 'll do it if I have to.” Jobs gave him a look, and Smith decided it wasn't necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and walked out on good terms.

He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn. When Horn went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, ”Everything that's wrong with the Mac is your fault.”

Horn responded, ”Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.”

”You're right,” admitted Jobs. ”I 'll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. ”Well, give me a hug,” he said. And so they hugged.

But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple I I division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple I I , which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70% of its sales at Christmas 1984. ”People in the Apple I I group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said. ”This was despite the fact that the Apple I I was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come.” He even roused himself to do something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley, berating him for lavis.h.i.+ng so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.

Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a universal remote control device he had invented. I t would control your television, stereo, and other electronic devices with a simple set of b.u.t.tons that you could easily program. He informed the head of engineering at the Apple I I division, but he didn't feel he was important enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about it when the news leaked in the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter's questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple I I division. ”Apple's direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said.

Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of T echnology. The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a telephone-”An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”-and then quipped, ”I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the awkward situation surrounding Wozniak's departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So Jobs and Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak recalled, and avoided any discussion of their disagreements.

Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. I t was his style. So he agreed to stay on as a part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the company at events and trade shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not leave well enough alone.

One Sat.u.r.day, a few weeks after they had visited Was.h.i.+ngton together, Jobs went to the new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign had moved there to handle its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches that the firm had made for Wozniak's new remote control device, and he flew into a rage. Apple had a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working on other computer-related projects, and Jobs invoked it. ”I informed them,” he recalled, ”that working with Woz wouldn't be acceptable to us.”

When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who, as usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punis.h.i.+ng him. ”Steve Jobs has a hate for me, probably because of the things I said about Apple,” he told the reporter. Jobs's action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak's name on it and used the same design language as Apple's products might be mistaken for something that Apple had produced. ”I t's not personal,” Jobs told the newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak's remote wouldn't look like something made by Apple. ”We don't want to see our design language used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can't leverage off Apple's resources; we can't treat him specially.”

Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already done for Wozniak, but even so the executives at the firm were taken aback.