I reminded Steve that just a few months earlier he had told me about how he and Larry Ellison had briefly mulled the possibility of a hostile takeover of Apple. “If he’s such a bozo, why are you sticking around? Couldn’t you take your share of the money and just walk?”
“I can’t just walk away from Avie and the others, and say ‘So long, nice knowing you!’ Plus,” he continued, “I can tell that there are still a lot of other really good people at Apple. I just don’t think Amelio is the right guy to lead them.”
“Well then, what about you?” I said, asking the question on everyone’s mind. Steve hemmed and hawed. He seemed as unsure of himself as I’d ever seen him.
THERE ARE SOME people who have always believed that Steve did everything he could to engineer a triumphant return to the top job at Apple, that he was executing some grand master plan all along. Gil Amelio is one of them; Bill Gates is another.
The truth is more subtle. Over the previous decade, Steve had learned to act less impulsively. In the past, he had overreached time and again. Now he was willing to walk slowly down a path, and if following his nose led him somewhere better than where he thought he was headed, that’s where he would go. In the months after the sale of NeXT, as he studied Amelio and understood more about the current state of Apple, Steve displayed the more deliberate approach he would bring to the company when he was in charge.
The two men whom Steve trusted the most at Apple during the period following the sale of NeXT agree that Steve did not intend to become Apple’s CEO. Avie Tevanian was now Amelio’s chief of software engineering, while Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein had been brought in at Steve’s suggestion to run the hardware division. “We didn’t think we were coming to Apple to work for Steve,” says Tevanian. “He just didn’t seem that interested.” Steve repeatedly told them he was reluctant to take on the job, much less lobby for it.
Coming to Apple wasn’t exactly a dream come true for either Avie or Ruby. A few weeks after the NeXT deal closed and the two were settling into their new roles, Apple revealed that it had lost $120 million during the quarter ending December 31, 1996. “I asked Steve, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into here?’ ” remembers Tevanian. “Because it was clear that Apple was the company that was broken, not NeXT. You could look at the two of us as Steve wanting to get his own people in, but he did it because it was the right thing. He knew these other people. They were the reason Apple was screwed up.”
“I don’t believe any of the Machiavellian stuff,” adds Ruby, a native New Yorker with the svelte looks of a long-distance runner. “When I got there, I took a look around and thought, Oh my God. What did I just get myself into?”
In the weeks after our December chat, Steve and I met a few more times over his kitchen table for a series of off-the-record discussions. Steve described what he was finding at Apple, in the hope that I would push ahead with a story about the sorry state of things in Cupertino. He spoke freely, although he insisted that I disguise any quotes I wanted to use. At one point he rhetorically asked: “Why do I feel like it’s my fiduciary responsibility to see a negative story about my own company?”
The main answer was that the more he got to know Amelio, the more he realized that Dr. Gil—and his team—could never lead Apple back to any kind of prominence. He was dismayed by so much at the company, and he blamed the board of directors as much as Amelio. He couldn’t believe that any board could ever have envisioned the dour Michael Spindler, “the Diesel,” as an inspirational leader, just as he was dumbfounded that the board had then hired someone like Amelio. He believed that Amelio, who ascended to the CEO position after just one year on the board, had maneuvered himself into the gig by positioning himself as a turnaround expert. “But how can he be a turnaround expert,” Steve asked me, “when he eats his lunch alone in his office, with food served to him on china that looks like it came from Versailles?”
Amelio did himself no favors. Rather than adapt to Apple, he seemed to try to get the company to take on his personality. He had surrounded himself with top executives drawn mostly from the semiconductor industry he knew so well, and he was never effective in public situations. Once, while talking to a group at a dinner party that included Larry Ellison, Amelio tried to put his company’s problems in perspective for the other guests. “Apple is a boat,” he said. “There’s a hole in the boat, and it’s taking on water. But there’s also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing still. My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.” After Amelio walked away, Ellison turned to the person standing next to him and asked, “But what about the hole?” That was one story Steve never got tired of telling.
Steve was unfair to Amelio. Although he did once tell Amelio that arranging the $661 million in new financing was a good move, he gave him little credit for anything else, even though it was Amelio who signed off on the critical restructuring that Anderson was managing. And when Steve did acknowledge that there was some good work going on inside the company, he credited this to employees who had the true “Apple spirit”—the one that he and Woz had instilled years before—and not at all to Amelio.
But Steve was also right about Amelio, as I discovered when I did finally report and write a story about Apple for Fortune in early 1997. In dire need of strong leadership, Apple was in the hands of a bumbling CEO. It had almost two dozen separate marketing teams, which didn’t communicate with one another. Its product line was metastasizing. The Mac clone licensing program made no sense. And Amelio was letting the problems get out of hand.
His lack of leadership went on public display at the annual MacWorld trade show in San Francisco, on January 7, 1987. Amelio’s opening speech was a meandering disaster. Back then, Apple held four annual MacWorlds, with the others coming later in the year at Tokyo, Paris, and Boston. The keynote speeches had become Apple’s primary showcases for introducing new products, and for rallying software developers and customers. Amelio, a barrel-chested, stiffly moving introvert, tried his best to appear a little more hip by ditching his usual uniform of wingtips and a pin-striped suit for a brownish shirt with a banded collar, a sport jacket, and loafers. The highlight of his talk was supposed to be the formal announcement of the acquisition of NeXT and of Steve’s return as an adviser. Steve, who had dressed up more than usual, sporting tailored, pleated black pants, a matching Eisenhower jacket, and a white shirt buttoned tight at the collar, waited in the wings as Amelio droned on and on. Gripping the podium at an odd angle, the CEO rambled for more than an hour through a scripted pitch that made little mention of the company’s continuing financial predicament. Even though he relied on a Teleprompter, he lost his place. At one point, in a display of pseudo-casualness, he removed his jacket, and you could see large dark circles of perspiration emanating from his armpits, like the actor Albert Brooks in the famous scene from Broadcast News.
Steve was greeted with rapturous applause when Amelio finally got around to introducing him. It had been six long years since he had made a corporate strategy presentation to an audience of any meaningful size, and he seized the moment. In contrast to Amelio, he kept his remarks short, cool, and crisp. He promised to “help Gil in any way he asks me to,” and vowed to help make Apple’s products exciting again. Speaking without notes, he calmly worked the front of the stage so people could get a good look at him. He was encouraging and forceful, yet purposefully vague. He didn’t want to make any specific promises; after all, he still wasn’t sure he really wanted to have anything to do with Apple.