Steve didn’t know it at the time, but his indecisiveness was actually a kind of breakthrough. Steve was developing a more nuanced, measured approach to decision making. Steve had grown more comfortable with waiting—not always patiently—to see what developed, rather than jumping impulsively into some new venture where he thought he could once again astound the world. When he needed to—as when the opportunity arose to sell NeXT to Apple—he could strike quickly. But from now on he would act with a piquant combination of quick, committed actions and careful deliberation.

He told Woolard he did not want the job, at least for now, and he offered to help him recruit someone else. Unable to sleep that night, Steve called his friend and confidant Andy Grove at 2 a.m. Steve told Grove that he was torn about whether or not to return as Apple’s CEO, and wound his way through his tortured deliberations. As the conversation dragged on, Grove, who wanted to get back to sleep, broke in and growled, “Steve, look. I don’t give a shit about Apple. Just make up your mind.”

AFTER STEVE REJECTED Woolard’s offer, the board announced that Fred Anderson would be in charge of operations, effectively making him the acting CEO. Anderson didn’t want the permanent job, but unlike Steve he was certain that there was still much worth saving at Apple. For one thing, he’d been able to move the company out of its financial crisis. More important, in his fifteen months there he had gotten to know all the key players, including a few who felt comfortable complaining to him about Amelio. One of those was Apple’s young design chief, a Brit by the name of Jonathan “Jony” Ive, who felt that he was wasting his talent at Apple. He invited Anderson to come by the industrial design lab, which Amelio had not visited. “There was incredible stuff going on there,” remembers Anderson. “That was a big part of how I had come to worry about Amelio and his lack of leadership.” Anderson knew that he himself was not the answer. “I was really good at business and, I’d say, finance and operations, but I wasn’t a product guy. I’m not an engineer,” he says. Like Woolard, Anderson had enjoyed his crash course in Steve Jobs—even though their relationship had gotten off to a rocky start. “I started dealing with him during the period when we were acquiring NeXT,” says Anderson. “One night during the negotiation he called me at home at one a.m., irate and cussing and ranting and raving. I was in bed with my wife, and I’m thinking, This is crazy. So when he wouldn’t calm down, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Steve, it’s one o’clock in the morning, so I’m hanging up.’ And I hung up.” As was so often the case, Steve respected the pushback. He and Anderson developed such a mutual respect that the CFO would become a key member of the team that would revive Apple. “Even though Steve was not an engineer,” Anderson recalls, “he had this great aesthetic taste and he was a visionary, and he had the power of personality to rally the troops. I came to the conclusion that the only person who could truly lead Apple back to prominence was Steve. He understood the soul of Apple. We needed a spiritual leader that could bring Apple back as a great product and marketing company. And nobody else great, who had those skills, was going to take on Apple at that time. So we had to have Steve.”

When Woolard announced Anderson’s appointment, he also noted that Steve was coming on as “an adviser leading the team.” The terminology was odd, but it proved to be accurate. “Now he really rolled up his sleeves,” says Anderson. The core of the new Apple—Anderson, Tevanian, Rubinstein, Jobs, and Woolard, who led a real search for a new CEO—felt under intense pressure, in large part because MacWorld Expo in Boston was exactly just one month away, on August 6. By then the company would have to be in a position to present some kind of clear strategy to its developers, or else the feeling that Apple was forever in chaos might replace the feelings of goodwill engendered by Steve’s return. And given Steve’s history, empty promises and airy visions wouldn’t be enough. Thanks to all the hot air that had wafted out of NeXT over the years, Steve had lost much of his credibility. This time he needed to show the capacity to make smart, sensible, surgical moves quickly; if not, the market, the press, the developers, and Apple’s customers might collectively respond with a sneering sense of déjà vu.

Steve understood this. His first move was to insist that the board reprice all employee stock options to $13.81—the closing price on July 7, the day Amelio’s firing was made public. Steve’s signature, not Anderson’s, was at the bottom of the “all hands” memo from management announcing the change. It was a dramatic gesture, because most employees’ options had sunk so deeply underwater that there seemed no hope that they would ever have any value. Overnight, the prospect of someday achieving actual wealth resurfaced for many of the eight thousand Apple employees who had survived the first two rounds of layoffs. (The move did nothing financially for Steve, who had no options.)

Steve’s second big move was to convince Woolard to allow him to replace virtually the entire board of directors—the same one that had just ousted Amelio and brought Steve in to play a big role. Steve felt no gratitude. He was convinced that the group was as much to blame as Amelio for Apple’s woes. He wanted a board that would give him the backing he needed to start making some real changes at Apple. Originally he sought the resignations of everyone except Woolard, but Woolard persuaded him to also keep Gareth Chang, the CEO of Hughes Electronics. The others would be replaced by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former IBM and Chrysler CFO Jerry York, Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, and Steve himself. Steve kept these changes under wraps, however. He wanted to announce the move during the MacWorld keynote speech in Boston, where he’d be able to put his own distinctive spin on the news.

While he worked with the team on new product planning and yet another round of restructuring, Steve also took on a unique project he’d been handed by Anderson: to convince Bill Gates to continue to support the Macintosh with new versions of the company’s productivity applications, like Excel and Word, which Microsoft would soon begin to bundle into a suite of productivity programs to be called Office.

Earlier in 1997, Gates had said that he couldn’t guarantee that Microsoft would build a new version of Office for the Mac. His reluctance made sense. With Macintosh sales in a tailspin following the introduction of Windows 95, it was more difficult for Gates to justify the expense of supporting the Mac. Microsoft made good money from its Macintosh software, but as Mac sales tanked, so too did Gates’s enthusiasm for supporting Apple.

“Reaching an agreement with Microsoft was absolutely critical to laying the foundation for Apple to be saved,” recalls Anderson. “But Amelio couldn’t get it done.” If Gates said no to Steve, Apple could have found itself in the same position as NeXT had been back in 1988. Without Microsoft’s applications, which had become the de facto standard tools used in most businesses, Apple, like NeXT, might cease to be relevant.

Apple did bring a stick to the negotiations. The company had a long-standing patent suit against Microsoft alleging that Windows, which largely replicated the conventions of the Mac’s graphical user interface, infringed on Apple’s own intellectual property. Many observers thought Apple had a good case, and Gates really wanted it settled. But Amelio had insisted on a variety of ancillary agreements and never could close the deal.

When Steve called on Gates, he kept things simple. He explained that he would be willing to drop the patent litigation, but for a price. Not only did he want Microsoft to publicly announce a five-year commitment to provide Office for the Mac; he also wanted his powerful rival to publicly, and financially, make clear that this was an endorsement of Apple’s new direction by purchasing $150 million in nonvoting shares. In other words, Steve wasn’t asking for a loan, he was asking Bill to put his money where his mouth was.