A FEW MONTHS before Steve came back to Apple, I asked him what he thought Apple’s top priority should be. Should it be a new operating system, now that Avie Tevanian was there to create it? “Not at all,” he replied, with a forcefulness I hadn’t been expecting. “What Apple needs more than anything is to ship a great new product, not necessarily some new technology. The trouble is, I don’t think they even know how to make a great product anymore.” He paused as if he realized how damning that statement sounded, and abruptly added, “That doesn’t mean they can’t.”
This time, Steve didn’t immediately set out to solve everything with the introduction of some groundbreaking new machine. This was a big change from what he’d attempted at NeXT and at Apple the first time around. Instead, he laid out a plan in broad strokes for the company’s entire product line. Before Steve would ask his engineers to come up with a particular new product, he wanted to be sure they understood how it would fit into Apple’s overall plan. He wanted everyone working from the same playbook, and he wanted that game plan to be crystal clear. He couldn’t afford any of the strategic confusion that had hampered the development of the NeXT computer.
The key was to simplify Apple’s ambitions so that the company could sharply focus its substantial engineering talent and brand equity on a few key products and broad markets. To understand why Steve could pare down Apple’s offerings so drastically in 1997, it helps to think of personal computers as protean devices that can be programmed to be any of a number of tools—a word processor, a supercalculator, a digital easel, a searchable library of research materials, an inventory control system, a tutor, you name it. There’s no need for the machine to have a different physical form to perform each different service. All it needs is powerful, adaptable software within. And in the mid-1990s, the capability of software was expanding faster than ever, thanks to the advent of local area networks and the burgeoning Internet. When software can link you to other people, and to databases housed on other computers far away from yours, it becomes much more powerful than an application that is limited strictly to whatever is stored on your own personal computer.
Steve set out to show how Apple could transform itself into a profitable company while offering no more than four basic products: two separate models of desktop PCs, one for consumers and one for professionals; and two separate laptop versions aimed at those same constituencies. That’s it. Four quadrants, four product lines. No more redundant engineering efforts, extraneous manufacturing processes, or sales pitches aimed at tricking consumers into buying unnecessary features. With only four basic products to design, Apple’s engineers and industrial designers could invest the time and effort to make their hardware and their software distinctive.
This critical decision was as controversial as anything Steve did during this period. Employees were outraged that their pet projects, including some truly valuable technologies that Apple had been developing for years, were being cast aside. Some technologies provided consumers with a tangible benefit, but if they didn’t fit into Steve’s quadrant structure, they had to go—the institution, he decided, could only focus on so much.
The core executive team understood the necessity of the quadrant structure, even though it meant killing projects that were dear to staffers they respected. And eventually the rest of the company came around. They could see that the quadrants put Apple on the exact opposite course of the Windows PC manufacturers, who were busy churning out all manner of unremarkable, albeit faster and more powerful boxes. The quadrants returned Apple to its historic mission—to serve the high end of the consumer and professional markets with leading-edge products.
What the quadrant strategy wasn’t is equally important. It was not an effort to solve all problems with one insanely great machine. Steve had been twice burned by that strategy. He had developed enough cautious wisdom to see that breakthroughs were not the solution now. Apple’s customers—past, present, and potential—would first have to be shown that the company would survive, that it knew how to consistently produce and deliver distinctive products, and that it could reliably turn a profit. Only after that was accomplished—and Steve was the first to admit that it would take several years—could he think about how to exploit emerging technologies to break new ground again.
“SAVE APPLE WAS the mission,” remembers Jon Rubinstein. “When we came in the company was almost dead. So let’s save Apple—it’s worth saving. It was that simple.”
Steve ran the new Apple through a remarkably strong, remarkably motivated core group, consisting of Anderson, Cook, Rubinstein, and Tevanian, as well as sales head Mitch Mandich from NeXT; marketing chief Phil Schiller, a former Apple guy whom Steve brought back from Adobe; and Sina Tamaddon, a software guy from NeXT who also engineered several key deals. This group—minus Mandich, who would leave in 2000, and with the eventual addition of design chief Jony Ive—would drive operations at the company well through the mid-2000s. Given Steve’s volatile reputation and track record as a manager, it’s remarkable that they remained together for so many years.
Steve didn’t do the kinds of things that leaders often do to cement a strong group. He didn’t take the guys out to dinner. “We had good relationships within the senior executive team,” remembers Tevanian, “but we built them ourselves. It wasn’t through Steve. I can count on one hand the times, in the eight years that I was there, that we went to dinner together, mostly to an Indian restaurant nearby.”
Steve didn’t give his team much formal feedback. “During the U.S. versus Microsoft antitrust case,” says Tevanian, “Microsoft subpoenaed all my personnel records at Apple. So I’m sitting down with our lawyer, George Riley, and he says, ‘I’ve gotten your file from HR.’ He pulls it out and there’s one piece of paper in it, something meaningless. He’s like, ‘Avie, where is your file? Where’s your annual reviews and all that?’ I told him that I’d never had an annual review!”
“Steve didn’t believe in reviews,” remembers Jon Rubinstein. “He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, ‘I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’ At one point I hired an executive coach so I could do three-sixty reviews with my own team. He was a really good guy, and I tried to get Steve to talk to him, but he wouldn’t. In fact, he asked me, ‘What do you need that for? That’s a waste of time!”
Steve didn’t lavish anyone with praise, or make them available to reporters who wanted to get behind the scenes of what would become a remarkable comeback. This was not because Steve was hungry for personal press coverage. He wasn’t, anymore. In his twenties, he had craved the limelight during his first flush of celebrity: “friendships” with Yoko Ono and Mick Jagger, the heady feeling of things like owning a penthouse suite in the San Remo in Manhattan, and attention from Time and Rolling Stone and Playboy confirmed that he had left his prosaic, middle-class upbringing in the suburbia of Northern California far behind. When he started NeXT, he had for a brief time courted the press to help give his startup a boost. But by the mid-nineties, playing up his celebrity held little appeal to Jobs. While he craved recognition for the quality of his work, he didn’t desire fame in and of itself. He directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets, including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.