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On May 31, 1985, a few hours after he had been stripped of all authority at the company he had co-founded, Steve Jobs sat bewildered and puffy-eyed on a mattress in his nearly furniture-less 30-room mansion. Apple Computer had subsumed his entire adult life. He was 30 and unmarried. With no one to come home to, Jobs spent hours that evening talking to whichever of his friends picked up the phone. He sounded desperate enough that former Apple executive Mike Murray raced over to the mansion. “I didn’t think he should be alone,” says Murray.
A month later, Jobs had recovered sufficiently to travel with a girlfriend through Russia and Italy, flirt with California’s Democratic Party bosses about a possible Senate run, and, after a conversation with Nobel laureate Paul Berg [footnote 1] about the need for more powerful computers for science students, muse about creating a new kind of computer company. In September, Jobs announced that he was quitting Apple and its board, where his role was almost entirely ceremonial, to start NeXT Computer. NeXT machines would power the world’s top brains by simplifying powerful UNIX computers for the higher education market. That was the plan, anyway.
Despite promises not to compete with Apple, Jobs wooed some of Apple’s best managers, including Bud Tribble, who’d led development of the Macintosh operating system; education market chief Dan’l Lewin; and Susan Barnes, a graphic artist who had created many of the Mac’s famous icons. He either called his targets from the remote office to which he’d been banished or invited them for long neighborhood walks, where he made the NeXT pitch. Jobs ended up landing six recruits, who joined him most days that September at his mansion for brainstorming sessions and meals prepared by a married couple, both chefs, who lived in Jobs’s guest cottage. Nothing at these meetings was put on paper. Jobs knew he was daring Apple to sue him—and Apple did just that a few weeks after NeXT launched, accusing Jobs of “nefarious” raiding of Apple staffers who were armed with trade secrets. The company pulled the suit a few days after filing rather than risk revealing trade secrets in the discovery process.
Jobs had sold $14 million of his $100 million Apple stake. (He would soon sell the rest.) He poured most of it into making NeXT look less like a startup than an immediate Apple competitor. Millions went into the construction of a state-of-the-art factory [footnote 2] in Fremont, Calif., so posh that Jobs hosted dinners there. It would pay for itself, provided NeXT could sell more than 150,000 of the workstations it planned to offer each year. He also rented airy office space in a Palo Alto building that had an I.M. Pei-designed stairway, [footnote 3] and he loaded the place up with $10,000 sofas and $5,000 chairs. Famed graphic designer Paul Rand received a $100,000 fee to create the company’s logo.
NeXT had style in abundance, and it had funding. Electronic Data Systems (EDS) founder H. Ross Perot invested $20 million, and Canon later put in $100 million. What it lacked was discipline. Apple’s 21st century dominance has been built on a limited product line and Jobs’s insistence that Apple use only proven outside technologies. At NeXT, by contrast, Jobs crammed the Hartmut Esslinger-designed cube-shaped computer with every shiny new toy he could find. There was an Ethernet port for easy networking; a microphone and speech-processing software; a patented, hard-to-manufacture monitor stand; and a magneto-optical drive he predicted would be faster and cheaper than a floppy. The result was a computer that cost $10,000 to make—and wasn’t worth the price. “We had 350 employees,” recalls Chris MacAskill, who ran developer relations for NeXT. “And 349 didn’t want to bet the company on that stupid magneto-optical drive.”
