We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

The campaign, which played out in posters, billboards, TV spots, and print ads, received unanimous critical praise. The brilliance of “Think Different” is that it celebrated a counterculture philosophy in a way that allowed almost everyone to feel part of the celebration. Its message was the advertising equivalent of an ideal Apple product—bold and aspirational and accessible all at the same time. It was heartfelt. The language, which Steve worked on along with Clow and others at TBWA\Chiat\Day, focused outward, defining the quality of an Apple buyer, rather than of a particular machine itself. There’s no computer mentioned, in fact. Just “tools,” created for the creative. The campaign’s clarity and simplicity stood out prominently from the morass of other computer advertising and reminded people of the fresh spirit so many had once loved about Apple. The $100 million campaign began the polishing up of Apple’s image, a necessary task that would take years.

It paid off in two immediate ways. First, Think Different started a process of bringing pride back to Apple’s employees. Billboards and posters went up across the Cupertino campus. Steve’s narrated version was featured in a video promoting the whole campaign inside the company, and later, after Apple won the Emmy Award for the best television ad campaign for 1998, the company gave a fifty-page commemorative book to all its employees. “Our audience was the employees as much as anyone else,” says Clow. Inspiring them was challenging, especially when Steve was shuttering divisions of the company and laying off thousands of workers. But Think Different gave the surviving employees a sense that they might see better days ahead, for the first time in years.

Think Different also bought Apple some precious time at a moment when the company had little of tangible value to show off. Steve knew, of course, that he would eventually have to deliver products that lived up to the campaign. But he didn’t have them in the fall of 1997. The campaign offered cover while Steve and his team began the hard slog ahead.

Even without Steve’s own voiceover some in the press did indeed view Think Different as yet another moment of Steve’s grandiosity, and as such, cause for more concern than applause. But in retrospect, it seems clear that it was the exact opposite of grandiose: it was the first step of a leader who would now progress only in steps, not by leaps and bounds. “He was so focused,” remembers Fred Anderson. “He was intense and both patient and impatient at the same time.” Steve had begun to move incrementally.

WHILE THE THINK DIFFERENT campaign captured the public’s attention, Steve was busy throwing out all kinds of pieces of the old Apple. The restructuring touched every corner of the company. Out went the Newton and eMate product lines, and the stores and engineering and marketing groups that supported them. (In an odd twist of fate, ex-CEO Amelio came back to visit Steve at Apple headquarters late in 1998 with an offer to buy the assets and intellectual property of the mothballed Newton operations. A few days after the meeting, Steve told me he was flabbergasted that Amelio would have any interest in trying to make a go of it with the Newton. But selling it to him would have been “a cruel joke,” he told me. “I can be mean, but I could never be that mean. No way would I let him further humiliate himself—or Apple.” So the Newton stayed dead. Many of its key engineers were retained, however.)

Out went the contracts that licensed the MacOS to the clone manufacturers. Steve hated the idea of having his operating system in the hands of others, and he had refused to sign on as iCEO without the promise that he could shut down the clones. This was the most expensive of the many decisions Steve made in the course of stabilizing the company. To avoid the litigation that would naturally arise from Apple abrogating the contracts, the company had to pay the clonemakers to disappear quietly. The most successful of these was Power Computing, which had commandeered a 10 percent share of the market for MacOS-compatible computers. Apple paid $110 million in cash and stock to acquire the company and hire some of its engineers.

Out went the inventory. Tim Cook became a new member of the team in March 1998 when he was hired away from Compaq—where he had been called “the Attila the Hun of inventory”—to be Apple’s chief of operations. Cook was a wiry bird of a southerner, thin and bookish-looking despite his athleticism—he biked and ran long distances regularly. Cook spoke quietly, with a soft Alabama drawl, but he may have been the toughest executive at Apple. Cook’s work drew no public attention, but it was crucial to trimming the company. In the nine months after he arrived, Apple reduced its inventory from $400 million worth of unsold, unwanted Macs down to $78 million. Cook was responsible for perhaps the most dramatic example of Steve’s hurry to rid himself of the burdens of Apple’s recent past: the bulldozing of tens of thousands of unsold Macs into a landfill in early 1998.

Finally, out went another 1,900 employees. This was the last tranche of Anderson’s resizing of the company. All in all, Anderson had taken the company from 10,896 full-time employees down to 6,658. Steve told me that being a father made firing people much harder than it had been. “I still do it,” he said, “because that’s my job. But when I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being five years old, kind of like I look at my kids. And I think that that could be me coming home to tell my wife and kids that I just got laid off. Or that it could be one of my kids in twenty years. I never took it so personally before.”

But if he had perhaps grown more sensitive, he had also grown more focused. As Steve pushed through the downsizing, Anderson discerned a profound difference between the iCEO and his predecessors: Steve kept the greater needs of the company first and foremost, whatever the cost. Sometimes his ability to do so could seem almost cruel, as when, in 1998, he decided that 3,600 layoffs wasn’t enough and ordered 400 more people to be let go. But he was determined to lead a company staffed by the best people possible—he wanted Apple’s staff to brim with the exceptionalism he had witnessed at Pixar. “When I returned to Apple, I was blown away by the fact that a third of the people there really were A to A-plus people—the kind you’d do anything to hire,” he told me. “Despite Apple’s troubles, they’d stayed, which was the miracle. That was the good karma of Apple. It was carried through by those people deciding to stay through it all. Another third were very good—you know, the really solid kind of people every company needs. And then there was another third who were unfortunate. I don’t know whether they’d ever been good or not, but it was time for them to leave. Unfortunately, a lot of those people were in management. Not only were they not doing the right things, but they were instructing everybody else to do the wrong things, too.” Steve’s narrow determination was critical: the core team could unite around Steve, knowing that he would do absolutely whatever it would take to turn this company around. He was all in, and working as hard as anyone. “It was pretty bleak those first six months,” he told me later. “I was running on vapor.”

Still, even though Steve had been disciplined about cutting the company down to its proper size, nobody could really be sure that he was the man to lead Apple forward. Despite ostentatiously declining to receive a salary, Steve was an expensive, unproven bet. Some $450 million of Apple’s $816 million loss for 1997 could be attributed to the acquisitions of NeXT and to the purchase and liquidation of Power Computing. One way to understand that number is to realize that Apple had paid out more than a half billion dollars for two acquisitions whose asset value, mere months after the deals were concluded, was just one-fifth that number. A more revealing way to think of it is that Apple had shelled out more than a half billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs.