The tricky part of the show came when he had to explain that this radically new computer would have to make do with black-and-white and grayscale graphics, a cost-cutting decision (it saved NeXT $750 per machine) that had become unavoidable as Steve’s persnickety meddling had delayed the machine and driven up its cost. No matter. Steve simply presented the screen as a magnificent design element. He bragged about the subtle shades of gray in a way that almost demeaned a color screen as an unnecessary extravagance. As the demo went on, Steve’s claims became more grandiose, as if these NeXT machines might revolutionize the academics of not just science but the arts as well. Given all this potential, he suggested, it was remarkable that the NeXT computer would cost only $6,500; that its printer was priced at a mere $2,000; and that customers who wanted a conventional hard drive to augment the machine’s storage capacity would pay just $2,000 more. Still, he couldn’t completely conceal the reality that a fully functioning NeXT computer system would cost well over ten grand—some seven thousand dollars more than it was supposed to have.

Steve knew he had to end the show with something that would obscure this unfortunate detail, something that would bring the concert hall crowd to its feet. And that something was music. For the previous six weeks, he had pushed Tevanian, who had been with the company just a few months, to build a music synthesizer software application that could show off the Cube as a more multitalented computer than anything else around. Developing that music synthesizer capability was a tricky bit of programming, and one night, after weeks of effort, Tevanian finally figured out how to make it work. “Suddenly, this circuit board was producing sound! I thought, This is amazing!” Tevanian remembers. “It’s eleven o’clock at night, though, and there is nobody there to show it to. So I run to the building next door, and lo and behold, Steve is still working. I said, ‘Steve, I’ve got to show you something.’ So we run back over to the engineering lab and I show him. And he just starts swearing at me. ‘Why did you show this to me? I can’t believe you did this!’ he yells. And I say, ‘Steve, you don’t understand, it works!’ And he says, ‘I don’t care, because it sounds horrible. I don’t ever want to see anything like this again.’

“I learned a lot from that interaction,” Tevanian adds. “Most people who work in a Steve Jobs organization end up quitting or being fired when that happens, but I just put my head down and thought, Okay, so there is a bar that you have to exceed before you can show it to him. I can show it to other people, but not to him.”

At the very moment when the audience might have been expected to grow restless, Steve unveiled Tevanian’s trick. He had the computer play gamelan music from Indonesia in a percussive demonstration of polyphonic sound generation. The audience sat rapt as amplified, synthesized music swelled to fill the hall. Steve, like a parent trying not to seem overly proud, broke into a taut smile. Nobody had heard anything quite like this come out of a computer. But that was just the warm-up act. Steve next invited Dan Kobialka, the concertmaster for the San Francisco Symphony, to perform a duet alongside the Cube on his violin. The selection was an excerpt from Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor. Steve backed away and spotlights illuminated the two performers; for more than five minutes, Davies Symphony Hall seemed as intimate as a living room. When Kobialka lifted his bow at the end, the standing ovation was spontaneous. A third spotlight trained on Steve, who was holding a single rose as he bowed to the adoring throng.

Reactions to the premiere were as over-the-top as the event itself. Industry mavens like Stewart Alsop, Dick Shaffer, and Michael Murphy forecast that the machine would make NeXT a $200- to $300-million-a-year company by 1990. Shaffer called himself a “convert.” Even leaving the pundits aside—after all, they were in the business of grandiose predictions—the more sober press accepted Steve’s claims for his new machine. I called it “dazzling” myself in my front-page article for the Wall Street Journal, and even described it as “relatively inexpensive.” As Steve had intended, I was comparing the machine to existing workstations, and not to the original price point he’d promised the universities that were supposed to be his key customers.

The truth that all of us missed was that this was a machine that had virtually no chance to succeed in the marketplace. Steve’s mismanagement meant that the NeXT computer was only somewhat less expensive than most workstations, with just a few marginal improvements that didn’t offset its many shortcomings. The principles on which NeXT had been based were in tatters, the goals of those long-gone offsite meetings trashed. Jobs had been told emphatically from the start that the machine should cost no more than $3,000; more recently, his collegiate advisers had told him that it should probably be priced at half that. Colleges were not about to spend $10,000 on a fully tricked-out NeXT computer system, versus $2,500 for a Mac or $5,000 for a low-end Sun workstation. The game was already over, but few of us knew it.

STEVE’S MOST IMPORTANT and direct competitors were not fooled by the glitzy debut. The folks at Sun Microsystems laughed off the introduction. CEO Scott McNealy, a brash Detroiter who played hockey in his spare time, thought that Steve’s fancy fonts and magnesium case were wasted on the hard-core buyers of workstations. “We give them what they want,” he told me, “and they don’t really care how pretty the icons are.”

If Steve had started NeXT with a clear mind and even an ounce of humility, Sun is the company he would have acknowledged as his most dangerous competitor—and potentially his best role model. McNealy, one of four cofounders who started the company in 1982, had become CEO in 1984. He was only three months older than Steve but seemed far more seasoned. His father had once been the CEO of American Motors, the now-defunct automaker that is remembered primarily for offbeat car models like the Nash Rambler and the AMC Pacer. At night, as a child, Scott would pore through his father’s briefcase when he wasn’t looking. As an adolescent, and later as a college student, he became what he called a “factory rat,” spending time on the plant floor learning firsthand about the complexities of auto manufacturing, and about the dynamics of corporations that manage large numbers of people. A child of privilege, he went to Detroit’s most prestigious private schools, and then on to Harvard for a business degree, finishing up with a Stanford MBA.

McNealy couldn’t have been more different from Steve Jobs. Aside from his formal education, he was a rabid jock. He liked country music and heavy metal, not Dylan and the Beatles. McNealy was an irrepressible practical joker who was prone to shoot from the lip, but he managed his company with a maturity that Jobs only pretended to have. Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously.

Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company. McNealy was focused, budget conscious, and opportunistic. Steve’s goals were muddled, and he was a spendthrift who was slow off the mark. McNealy had thrown in with his cofounders at Sun to sell a lot of machines, serve his customers, and make a lot of money. Steve had founded NeXT because he was furious at John Sculley and Apple, because he desperately needed a second act, and because he thought it was his responsibility—and birthright—to keep astounding the world. There had been a market to be attacked when Steve founded NeXT; McNealy’s success proved it. But Steve was still young and immature, and didn’t think there was anyone else in the computer business who really mattered. He was looking in the mirror while McNealy had been looking out the window to learn what the world really needed.