Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft would become the unchallenged steward of corporate computing. And corporations would welcome its standardization. In a headlong rush to improve productivity through technology, they spent trillions of dollars. In 1991, the $124 billion of corporate spending on information technology accounted for just 2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that percentage had more than doubled to 4.6 percent. The leading beneficiary of all that was Microsoft; over that same period, its revenues rose from $1.8 billion to $23 billion, its profits rose from $463 million to $9.4 billion, and its stock price appreciated 3,000 percent.
Mired at NeXT, Steve enjoyed hardly any of the spoils of this frenzy. He did sell a few computers to businesses, and once the Internet emerged as the world’s great network, the company’s WebObjects software turned into a useful tool for corporations developing custom websites. But these were table scraps. For the most part, Steve Jobs could only watch from the sidelines as his old friend and nemesis, a man far more suited to the demands of the corporate market, became arguably the most important businessperson on the globe.
AFTER ABOUT TWO and a half hours, we wrapped up the interview. I had covered the two men for years, but bringing these dynamic and headstrong competitors together for a conversation had been like seeing them for the first time in three dimensions. A kind of a parallax effect in their interaction helped me better discern and appreciate each. Perhaps it was because they weren’t there to sell anything that I could see them with more nuance. Their proximity and innate competitiveness had brought out spontaneous displays of wit, sharp-edged opinions, and even a sense of friendship that they might not have allowed to show in a different setting.
George Lange, who had been circling the two, camera in hand, during much of the encounter, now wanted to set up the shoot for the cover photograph. We didn’t have much time—Bill was adamant about getting to the San Francisco airport in time for his scheduled flight back to Seattle. George had considered shooting them outside, but he decided that the main staircase, which curved dramatically up from the living room, would work better for the cover. He explained his reasons to both. Bill was never that particular about press photo shoots—his primary concern was that they happen quickly. But Steve fancied himself a self-taught expert on the art form. The most intense negotiations I ever had with him when proposing a story for Fortune were about the photography. Steve had all kinds of advice about the pictures that would accompany an article, especially about the stylistic approach to his cover portrait. He could be more than a little vain about how he was portrayed, and always sought the upper hand in deciding not only who would do the shooting, but how the portraits would be set up. This time, however, he didn’t put up a fuss. He climbed right up the red clay steps and sat down. As soon as George looked at him he exclaimed, “Steve, you’re not wearing shoes! Don’t you want to wear some shoes for the cover of Fortune?” Steve shrugged and said, “Sure, fine.” He ran upstairs, grabbed a pair of sneakers, and came back wearing them—with the laces left untied.
After the shoot, I told Bill I’d run him over to the airport in my Volvo station wagon, but we had to wait a minute so George could take a photo of the three of us in Steve’s backyard, for the editor’s page of the magazine. Then Bill and I rushed off to the airport. We didn’t say much—I could tell that he had moved on and was already thinking about what was next for him. “You guys get along pretty well,” I remarked. “Why shouldn’t we?” he answered. He was preoccupied, but polite as always. “Thanks. I’m really glad we did that,” he said as he jumped out of the car.
George’s photo turned out to be my favorite from the many cover stories I worked on with either Bill or Steve. Wrought-iron railings swoop around the two young cybertycoons, who are perched shoulder to shoulder on the staircase, Steve one step higher than Bill. The expressions on their faces seem without pretense to me, and very revealing of their personalities. Bill looks like the cat who ate the canary. And Steve, who seemingly could sell anyone (except Bill, that is) the Golden Gate Bridge, has the sly smile of a clever young man who would never outgrow his penchant for making mischief.
Despite his business woes, Steve did have reasons to smile. If he was adrift professionally, he was starting to settle personally, in a way that gave him great satisfaction. His daughter Lisa had just come to live with him and Laurene. This was a complicated kind of atonement on his part, given the way he had immaturely and irresponsibly tried to deny his paternity. And the impending arrival of his son, Reed, excited this very untypical man in a deeply normal way. Reed, of course, was the first child he had planned for, and when he arrived in October, Steve reacted as so many fathers do—he became a know-it-all, in that deadly serious way that’s deeply amusing to parents who have been through the exercise. “They were classic new parents,” remembers Mike Slade. “They did everything wrong. They were both hippies, right? So the kid was in their bed the whole time, the kid was only breastfed. So what did the kid do? Let’s see, he screamed all the time and he was hungry all the time ’cause, duh, right? So within a week they looked like prison camp survivors.
“Steve is kind of a baby himself, right?” Slade continued. “And the guy was getting no sleep. So he instantly became a madman. It was right out of the CIA torture training manual. I’m not kidding. Within a week of Reed being born he was like, ‘I’ve gotta hire a president and COO. I’ve gotta do it. Ooh, it’s too much.’ ” But even this was a reflection of the very standard delight he took in his son, and the seriousness he was going to apply to the endeavor of raising Reed.
There was one other reason for Steve to be happy then, although nobody—including Steve—understood it at the time.
Bill’s strategy—to have Microsoft steer the industry toward a standardization that fit the needs of business—would shape everything about computing in the 1990s. Workstations did become subsumed by PCs. Mainframes did turn into nothing more than vast arrays of circuit boards built upon the PC architecture. The personal computer giants of that decade, companies like Dell and Compaq and HP and Gateway, churned out one artless machine after another, competing on brute measures like speed, power, and delivery times. The billions of people around the world who came to depend on the PC interacted daily with interchangeable boxes powered by the same chips, and they executed their tasks through applications governed by the same operating system. Apple, which had been the one company producing unique computers for individuals, foundered as Sculley and the hapless CEOs who succeeded him chased the same market as everyone else. By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac’s “1984” commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B’s, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told. The personal had been stripped out of personal computing. Year after year after year, Microsoft’s domination increased with one inevitable and inexorable and dull step after another. It seemed that Windows might rule forever. The rise of Bill Gates was as dull as the computing he enabled. At least that’s how Steve felt about the work of his far more successful rival.
All this standardization left an opening, of course. An opening for someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people, rather than primarily serve the needs of business. An opening for someone just like Steve Jobs. At the time of our interview, Steve was still a confused fellow. His lingering resentment of the way he had been treated by Sculley and the Apple board, his frustration about the misfortunes and secondary importance of NeXT, and his egotistical need to matter in an industry whose direction was being dictated by someone else made it impossible for him then to see a way out of his dilemma. For the next few years, he would press ahead with his goal of making winners of NeXT and Pixar. But eventually he would sense his way to the opening that Gates had left behind—the opening for a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me. And when he found that opening, and made the most of it, he was rewarded with a kind of adulation that Gates would never come close to receiving.