When Gassée learned that Amelio had decided to go shopping for an operating system, he was shocked. It was almost as if the stars had aligned for him to sell his company to Apple, even though he would have to deal with some new faces at the company. “I was looking for an exit sign,” Gassée recalls, “and here came Amelio.” But Gassée made a serious tactical mistake by trying to milk the situation for all it was worth. Amelio offered to buy Be Inc. for about $100 million, which was a reasonable price for a company with its limited track record. But Gassée overreached, rebuffing Amelio’s offer, as well as a counteroffer of $120 million.

I ran into Gassée one weeknight in late October 1996 at what was an unlikely haunt for him—the Buffalo Grill, a steakhouse (since closed) in a shopping mall in San Mateo, fifteen miles north of his hometown of Palo Alto. The location was out of the way, and not the kind of place where you would go to ogle Silicon Valley notables. That was precisely why Gassée had chosen the restaurant.

My wife was with me, so I nudged her on toward our table while I hung back to say hello to Jean-Louis, whom I knew socially as well as professionally; our daughters were classmates at a school in Palo Alto. He was clearly embroiled in serious conversation; he hadn’t noticed me yet, so I slapped him on the back and asked him something like “What are you doing up this way? Don’t you have any good restaurants in Palo Alto?” Gassée recoiled as if I were a ghost. That’s when I looked around the table and recognized the others. Seated with him were Ellen Hancock, a former IBMer who was now Apple’s executive VP for R&D and chief technology officer; Douglas Solomon, Apple’s senior VP of strategic planning and corporate development; and venture capitalist David Marquardt (who also sat on the Microsoft board of directors). Marquardt, I knew, was Be’s primary adviser for financial dealings, and his firm was also Be’s biggest investor. I realized that the very last thing this group wanted was to be seen by a business journalist. Never before had I seen the voluble Gassée at such a loss for words.

When I rejoined Lorna at our table, I told her how awkward the encounter had seemed. My first reaction was that it was some sort of powwow about bringing Gassée back into Apple’s management team. But if that were the case, why would Ellen Hancock, who was so new to Apple, be there instead of Gil Amelio? “Well, what do you think Steve would make of it?” Lorna asked. So, when we got home, I called Steve at his home.

It was a rather short conversation. When I asked Steve what he thought might be going on, he immediately shifted into petulant mode. “Jean-Louis Gassée is evil,” he snapped. “I don’t say that about many people, but he is evil.” Then he made some comment to the effect that whatever Apple had planned, the company should have nothing to do with Gassée or his technology. “We’ve been at this for ten years at NeXT, and the BeOS is shit. It has to be. Operating systems get better with age and the BeOS isn’t old enough or tested enough to be any good.” That didn’t really answer my question, but it sure showed I had gotten his dander up. I asked him to be sure to let me know if he heard anything interesting. Not surprisingly, he didn’t; I didn’t talk to him again until December, when I called to see if I could get some comment from him for a story about Apple’s surprise purchase of NeXT for cash and stock totaling $429 million.

STEVE HAD SWUNG into action long before my phone call. Earlier that fall, Avie Tevanian had alerted him to the fact that Apple was looking for an operating system, and Steve immediately met with his investment bankers to determine if it made any sense to try to sell NeXT to Apple. “We felt that we were a generation ahead of everyone else, and now we might have the chance to make that work in a mass-market world,” says Tevanian. While it was public knowledge that the NeXTSTEP OS had been ported to Intel’s PC microprocessors, it wasn’t widely known that Avie and his team had also gotten it running on computers using the PowerPC chip. Avie and his team knew their way around all the major nonproprietary microprocessors, which is more than could be said for Be’s programmers. Steve had told Avie to drop the PowerPC effort a few months earlier; now Avie had his team revive it and double down to make sure the OS was ready to present to Apple.

Steve was playing three games at once as he approached Apple. First, he really wanted to torpedo Gassée. “Steve was bitter that I chose to side with Sculley,” Gassée remembers. “He said I stabbed him in the back, and whatnot.” One evening, as Steve was leaving the Palo Alto restaurant Il Fornaio, he passed a table of software execs that included Gassée. “So I hear you’re going to save Apple, Jean-Louis,” he said, before heading out the door. Gassée had no idea that NeXT was even being considered by Apple. He thought he had the deal sewn up.

Second, Steve wanted to protect and pay back his investors. Third, he wanted to find suitable next acts for the key people who had stuck with him at NeXT. As Susan Barnes once told me, “If you weren’t good at your job, he owed it to the rest of the team to get rid of you. But if you were good, he owed you his loyalty.” So while the price was important, so was what the acquiring company intended to do with the NeXT technology, and how they would embrace the technologists who built it. Steve knew he had to convince Amelio that the real jewels that Apple would be acquiring were NeXT’s people.

Amelio was an easy mark, and Steve knew it. He saw him as a stuffed shirt who enjoyed the fruits of being CEO but knew little about selling personal computers. So Steve was at his flattering best as he wooed Amelio. In a crisp presentation to the CEO and Ellen Hancock on December 2, he explained that he was willing to do whatever it took to make the deal work, and that he was confident that their good judgment would lead them to NeXT. On December 10, he and Avie made what Amelio himself described as a “dazzling” presentation of the NeXT operating system, during a bake-off against Be at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto.

Just ten days later, Steve had a deal, one that was sealed in Steve’s kitchen and got him out of NeXT with more than he could ever have imagined. Avie was guaranteed a central role in the development of Apple’s system software strategy and a spot on Amelio’s senior executive staff. The price was rich, thanks largely to the recent success of WebObjects, and especially compared to what Amelio had offered Gassée: Steve and his investors would get $429 million in cash and Apple stock. “It wasn’t about the money,” says Gassée, who concedes that he asked too much for Be. “It was about bringing Steve back. He had a choice between bringing Steve back or not bringing Steve back, and he made the right choice. They could do things we couldn’t do.”

Most of the Apple shares went to Steve, who agreed to sign on as special adviser to Amelio. The annual MacWorld trade show in San Francisco was coming up in a few weeks, so he offered to make one of his trademark stage presentations after Amelio’s keynote address to publicly underscore his “return” to the company he helped hatch.

On a Saturday in late December, Steve invited me over to his house. He was already working on his remarks for MacWorld, and he wanted to see what lines would resonate. But he also wanted to talk about Amelio. “You wouldn’t believe what a bozo Amelio is,” he hissed. What most galled him was that Amelio, he felt, had no clue about selling to walking, breathing people. “All he knows is the chip business, where you can count your customers on one hand,” Steve groused. “They aren’t people, they’re companies, and they buy chips by the tens of thousands.”