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Jobs would spend weeks preparing for his keynotes, insisting on multiple rehearsals Clockwise from Left: Everett Collection; Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images; Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images
Design guru Jony Ive, left, and hardware chief Jon Rubinstein, with early iMacs Left to Right: Noah Berger/Bloomberg; Susan Ragan/AP Photo
Steve Jobs was not accustomed to boos, but there he was, on stage at the airy and decrepit Park Plaza Castle auditorium in Boston, absorbing a crescendo of unhappiness. It was 1997, the year Jobs replaced Gil Amelio and declared himself “interim CEO” of Apple, saying he was too busy with Pixar and family to take over permanently. At the annual Macworld Expo that August, Jobs told the long-suffering Apple faithful that there was still hope for the computer company but that it would first have to put aside its all-too-consuming fixation with its dominant rival, Microsoft.
“We are shepherding some of the great assets in the computer industry. If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things,” said Jobs, dressed in his trademark outfit of that era, a sweater vest and pleated slacks. Microsoft, he announced, was investing $150 million in Apple and making a promise to develop Microsoft Office software for the Macintosh for the next five years. Bill Gates popped up on a 100-foot screen, appearing pedantic and flaccid in contrast to Jobs’s swagger. “The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned,” Jobs said after Gates’s brief and awkward speech, trying to quell the disappointed audience, some of whom appeared to be in tears.
The détente forged on that August day was, in retrospect, a cold calculation by Jobs that Apple did not need to win the old battle for the PC in order to prevail in a dawning war for digital media devices and the Internet. It was also the first bit of evidence that despite his professed ambivalence, Jobs was fully committing himself to an Apple turnaround. Colin Crawford, who ran Macworld in the 1990s along with publications such as MacWEEK, recalls asking Jobs back then why he wanted to return to the company he had founded. “He sort of looked at me quizzically and said that his and Apple’s DNA were completely intertwined,” Crawford says. “He said that Apple’s brand was badly tarnished and that he intended to repolish it.”
It’s difficult to remember how far Apple had fallen. Just a few months away from bankruptcy, the company had a dwindling 4 percent share of the PC market and annual losses exceeding $1 billion. Three CEOs had come and gone in a decade; board members had tried to sell the company but found no takers. Two months after Apple’s deal with Microsoft, Michael Dell told a tech industry symposium that if he ran Apple, he’d “shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.”
Lucky for the shareholders that Jobs and not Dell was at Apple’s helm. Apple’s market capitalization went from $3 billion at the start of 1997 [footnote 1] to $350 billion today—more than the valuation of Microsoft and Dell combined—making it the second most valuable company in the world. A single share, worth a little over $4 the day Dell spoke, is now worth nearly 100 times that. Much would be written about how Apple forever changed the way people communicate, entertain themselves, even the way they absorb information. Here’s a simpler way to sum up Apple’s influence, in four words: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad.
Jobs recognized that an industry dominated by Microsoft and Intel would not adapt smoothly in the era of personal media and communication devices. Those companies could not move quickly while in lockstep with their multiple partners in hardware and retail, and Jobs bet that they would not innovate rapidly or radically enough, since their profits relied on the preservation of an old regime. He also understood that in the fluid and rapidly evolving technology business—where new technologies are constantly disrupting the established winners—there was a chance to reshuffle the deck in his favor.
