Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary - Hardcover

Cain, Geoffrey

 
9780593716694: Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593716698 ISBN 13: 9780593716694
Verlag: Portfolio, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

The Untold Story of Steve Jobs's Wilderness Years—and the Creation of a Legend

In 1985, Steve Jobs—the brilliant, volatile founder of Apple Computer—walked out of his company's headquarters, driven from the very corporation he had created. What happened next would transform not only his life and career, but the future of technology itself.

For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.

Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs's "lost decade"—the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew. With unprecedented access to unbroadcast footage of Jobs in NeXT meetings, private company documents, and interviews with his closest colleagues, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a brash wunderkind into a true business genius.

This is the story of how Steve Jobs learned to lead, how he discovered the power of discipline, and how a spectacular failure became the foundation for one of the greatest comebacks in business history. It is nothing less than the missing piece in the legend of Steve Jobs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning author and correspondent who sits down with world leaders, tech founders, and dissidents. His book Samsung Rising was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, and The Perfect Police State was named NPR’s “Book of the Day.” He appears in The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Economist, and Wired and has been featured on CNN and Bloomberg TV. He also advises executives and government officials on innovation.

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1

Siberia

I'm asking Steve to step down," Apple CEO John Sculley told the company's board of directors, "and you can back me on it . . . or you're going to have to find yourselves a new CEO."

It was April 11, 1985, and long-simmering tensions between John Sculley and Steve Jobs had finally erupted. It marked a stunning reversal. Just two years earlier, Steve had handpicked and personally recruited John from PepsiCo. Apple had grown into a billion-dollar company, and Steve, along with the board, felt that John would be the right person to provide the company with "adult supervision" as its CEO. After John joined, Steve remained chairman of the board and head of the Macintosh unit, where he led the development of the company's flagship personal computer.

John's working relationship with Steve began as trusting and close. The two shared private talks and meals. They seemed preternaturally aligned on most parts of Apple's corporate strategy.

But the relationship soured as the company's fortunes declined. Apple computers weren't selling. John struggled to put forward a clear vision to boost sales. And Steve-convinced of his own brilliance-was impossible to manage. He had recently told an executive, "I am the board."

But the duly elected members of Apple's board begged to differ-they dressed down both John and Steve over the situation. Now John wanted Steve out entirely. He asked that Steve be removed from his operational role and stripped of all decision-making authority.

Steve was livid. He reminded the board members that Apple was his baby-the company he had built from nothing out of his parents' garage. He remained indispensable, he told them, as nothing less than Apple's beating heart and its intellectual force. But only one person could lead Apple, and John wanted it to be him. "I had given Steve greater power than he ever had and I had created a monster," John recounted later.

Just over a year before, on January 24, 1984, Steve had launched his brainchild into the world: the Macintosh. Steve called it the “computer for the rest of us” and claimed that its simplicity and ease of use would revolutionize the personal computer industry. For the first one hundred days, it posted strong shipments and looked poised to succeed.

But regular customers were put off by the Mac's serious limitations. Though simple to use, the Mac had no hard drive, extremely limited functionality, and was priced at a jaw-dropping $2,495 (almost $8,000 in 2026 dollars). By 1985, Apple had run through early adopters, and the remaining shoppers turned to the lower-priced alternative, the Apple II. Mac inventory piled up, budgets spun out of control, and the company struggled to come up with a dazzling new product. An industry-wide slump made the problem worse.

For the first time in its short history, Apple was in real trouble. By early 1985, IBM-the computing giant that dominated corporate America-and its imitators had captured nearly half the personal computer market, up from about a third just months earlier. These "clone" computers ran the same software as IBM's machines but cost far less. Apple's market share remained stuck in place, exposing the failure of the company's Macintosh gamble.

Things got so bad that Steve and John entered secret talks to sell the company to General Electric. According to journalist Frank Rose, the conglomerate hired Texas-based businessman H. Ross Perot to meet with Apple's leadership and investigate the company as an acquisition target. In the end, GE decided against buying. But Ross was impressed with Steve, a connection that would later prove important when Steve needed investors.

Ross's fascination with Steve followed a pattern. Many in Apple's orbit lavished attention on Steve while overlooking John's contributions to the company, fueling an emerging rivalry between the two that was exacerbated by Apple's shaky market position.

To fix the problem, Steve told employees that he believed Apple should play in the big leagues. So far, the company had focused on the consumer market. If Apple made a more powerful computer for corporate customers, Steve believed it could take on IBM. So he began to develop the Macintosh Office, an upgraded version of the Mac specially designed for office settings.

John was not on board. He thought Steve's plans were unrealistic. The Mac was designed to be a simple device for drawing and typing at home. Its architecture was not built for pressure-cooker corporate environments with complex demands. Even engineers in Steve's own department argued that the project lay beyond their capabilities. Steve forged ahead anyway.

Steve also liked that releasing the Macintosh Office would give Apple a chance to recreate its 1984 commercial from the year before, which had introduced the original Mac and become an instant classic. Apple tasked Chiat/Day, the same firm behind the 1984 spot, to develop a follow-on.

Chiat/Day's concept: convince business leaders that they were on a slow march off a cliff if they didn't buy the Macintosh Office. On Super Bowl Sunday, January 20, 1985, Steve and John went to Stanford Stadium to watch the premiere of their new commercial together.

The ad, titled "Lemmings," aired during a break in the fourth quarter. The dystopian spot opens on a line of blindfolded, suit-clad office workers marching toward the edge of a cliff as they whistle an eerie, minor-key version of "Heigh-Ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. One by one, the lemmings step off the edge and fall to their deaths. The last lemming in the line stops just before the edge, removes his blindfold and gazes over the abyss.

"You can look into it," announces a somber voice, "or you can go on with business as usual." Text flashes: The Macintosh Office.

As the lemmings fell, the eighty-four thousand fans in Stanford Stadium went uncomfortably silent. Apple's top duo began to experience a sinking feeling themselves. John felt certain the reaction portended hard times for the product.

Sure enough, Apple released the Macintosh Office three days later to muted press coverage and weak sales. Worse, John's fears about Apple's capacity to deliver the product were realized. The technical heart of the product-Apple's much-hyped file server-was severely delayed and not yet ready to ship.

The bad sales numbers drove further division behind the scenes as Apple employees began splintering into factions. At one point, a contingent supporting John stormed the Human Resources Department to complain about Steve overstepping his area of control. Meanwhile Steve undermined John at every turn, badmouthing him to colleagues and challenging his every decision. Steve's acolytes accused John of lacking vision and misunderstanding technology products. They felt that he was turning Apple into yet another boring, bureaucratic corporation.

With so much open dissension, no one knew who was really running the company.

In response, John-the Wharton-trained, former PepsiCo president-made a plan to reshape Apple's corporate hierarchy. From its earliest days as a start-up, the company had relied on flat management. This had facilitated scrappiness and the creative exchange of ideas when Apple was young. But as it grew, John watched the lack of structure fuel chaos and infighting. He believed that a mature Apple needed centralized leadership to succeed. So he moved to combine the product divisions under one C-suite that would report up to him.

The plan sounded simple enough. But John faced one big obstacle: bringing Steve to heel. Under his proposed reshuffle, Steve would become one of three coequal product executives. On the back side of his office door, John hung a graphic outlining his mission: a simple pyramid with himself perched at the top.

Steve wasn't having it, particularly as...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593716698
ISBN 13 
9780593716694
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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