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The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Hardcover

Deutschman, Alan

 
9780767904322: The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 076790432X ISBN 13: 9780767904322
Verlag: B&T, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A portrait of the co-founder of Apple covers his departure from the company, his business dealings with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, the return to Apple that marked the company's turnaround, and his management philosophies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Deutschman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. For the past twelve years, he has covered business and technology. He was a correspondent for Fortune for seven years, a senior writer at GQ, and a contributing editor at New York magazine. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Premiere, and Fast Company. He lives in San Francisco.

Aus dem Klappentext

laimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist--an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history.

From the emergence of Apple Computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s to its current resurgence, charismatic leader Steve Jobs has captivated the public. Both revered and reviled for his dictatorial manner and stunning successes, Jobs has transcended his legend in Silicon Valley to take on some of the heaviest hitters in Hollywood. Now, in The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Alan Deutschman presents the most revealing portrait yet of this fascinating, complex character--an in-depth look at the many layers of Steve Jobs, a man who is at turns a brilliant cult figure and an abusive, egomaniacal kid.

This story begins back in 1985 when Jobs was exiled from Apple, and then it goes on to chronicle the rise and fall of his own company, NeXT; the enormous success of Jobs's film animation studio, Pixar;

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1

Next

Andrea "Andy" Cunningham was so tired when she got home from work that she went to sleep without checking her answering machine. The following morning, around eight-thirty, she played the tape. The message was short and cryptic: Andy should show up at Steve's house at 10 a.m. for a press conference about his new company, Next.

The idea troubled her. Andy was a public relations consultant, one of the shrewdest and most insightful in the technology business. She wasn't summoned to press conferences as a last-minute thought. She was supposed to be the one who orchestrated the events following weeks of careful preparation, reflection, brainstorming, and strategizing, after thoroughly thinking through the message and exactly how it would be conveyed.

She didn't even know where Steve lived. And besides, he wasn't even her client.

She called around to get the address, then drove the five minutes from Palo Alto to the village of Woodside, which lay in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was just beyond the Stanford campus. Woodside was not far from the banal concrete sprawl of Silicon Valley but at least it felt isolated and remote, with narrow winding country roads and dozens of bridle paths but no street lamps or sidewalks. Traditionally favored by hillbillies and folksingers, it had more recently become home to a few centimillionaires, who made their money by promoting futuristic visions but, ironically, preferred to live in a semirural hamlet that evoked the romance of a lost era.

A few minutes before ten, Andy pulled through the wrought-iron gate to Steve's house. The gravel driveway was crowded with parked cars. She beheld a sprawling, dilapidated robber baron mansion in the Spanish mission style, that numbingly ubiquitous cliche of California architecture, with the de rigueur stucco walls and the sloping red adobe roofs, like tens of thousands of little anonymous tract houses throughout the valley's brutally cramped suburbs. The difference was that this crumbling monstrosity was large enough to be a real eighteenth-century Spanish mission. It had enough space for an entire order of monks to go about their daily routines.

She passed through the grand arched entrance loggia and came to a huge cavernous living room. Standing around, idle, restless, gossiping among themselves, were twenty reporters Andy knew well. The Business Week correspondent. The Newsweek writer. The reporter from USA Today. They were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot because there was simply nowhere to sit other than the cold wooden floorboards. The living room was devoid of furniture, barren, austere, unwelcoming, a hollow decaying shell like the rest of the whole empty spooky house, the maze of echo chambers where Steve lived as a solitary bachelor. The closest thing to furnishings was a clear plastic case with an architect's carefully crafted and scaled topographical model of the property--just the lush pure mountainside land, not the presumptuous robber baron manse that Steve had never gotten around to demolishing.

Andy made her way into the kitchen. Still no furniture at all, no tables or chairs, just a few computers strewn across the floor and another bunch of people huddled together. Andy recognized them as refugees from Apple. They had worked with her on the launch of the Macintosh the previous year, in January 1984. Now they were the cofounders of Steve's new company, which was going to do . . . who knew what it would do?

Steve was on his feet, talking about what he was going to tell the reporters.

Screw John Sculley, he was going to say. Screw him!

Screw the Apple board!

We are going to change the world!

Andy was appalled. There was no news for the putative news conference. There was only Steve's impulse to express his anger, his rage, his raw hurt, his need for vindication and healing and honor. He wanted to flail out against the injustices and betrayals he had suffered. It was understandable. It was human. But this wasn't the way to do it, not the time or the place. You don't summon the cynical elite of the West Coast press corps, with their notebooks open and their cassette tapes rolling, to participate in some kind of group therapy session. This wasn't an encounter group or primal scream or gestalt or est, it wasn't some kind of 1970s Californian human-potential seminar; this was business.

At first Andy didn't recognize the man sitting on the floor right beside Steve, though she quickly surmised that this was Steve's new lawyer. He was visibly starstruck, comically awed, his mouth agape, his eyes glazed by the proximity to celebrity. He clearly wasn't in the proper state of mind to offer cautious advice. No one was telling Steve what should have been obvious, a matter of the simplest common sense. No one would confront the legendary figure and play the necessary role of tough naysayer.

Well, Andy thought, I have nothing to lose. I haven't even signed the account.

"I don't think this is a good idea," she told them flatly. Apple was suing Steve and his apostates, accusing them of stealing secrets. And they had no legal strategy for defending themselves. It wasn't going to help win public opinion if Steve treated the reporters to an impassioned tirade against Apple.

She looked at Steve with seeming disbelief at his rashness and thoughtlessness.

"Why did you let all these journalists know where you live?" she wondered aloud.

***

In the summer of 1985, when Steve Jobs was stripped of power at the company he cofounded, when his office was moved to a vacant building he called Siberia, he didn't know what to do. He was thirty years old, and he owned more than $100 million worth of Apple stock. He didn't have to work, not for the money, at least, and not for the fame. He had appeared on the cover of Time and had accepted the National Technology Award at the White House. His niche in economic history was already secure as the preeminent popularizer of the personal computer. His mention in American cultural history was certain as well. In an era when commerce was equated with conformity, when industry was seen as the staid and soulless province of balding older men, he was an unprecedented phenom. He was a businessman posing as an idealistic revolutionary, striving for social change. He was a capitalist who appropriated the rhetoric of the commune where he had lived. He was a barefooted chairman of the board who took his girlfriend to Grateful Dead concerts and quoted an entire verse of Bob Dylan lyrics at a shareholders meeting. He was a "young industrialist," as he preferred to call himself, an epithet that sounded delightfully unlikely. He was a pop-culture icon, a media hero, a role model, a sex symbol, and teen heartthrob.

Born at the midpoint of the postwar baby boom, Steve Jobs was one of the most enduring symbols of his generation, reflecting all of its virtues and failings and self-delusions. He was the figure who turned business leaders into rock stars, objects of public fascination. And like so many actual rock stars, he could have quit, or faded, after a brief, spectacular career.

Steve told his closest friends that he was thinking of cultivating his garden. He wasn't alluding to Voltaire's famous line. He didn't mean it in the metaphorical sense of exploring his own mind and spirit rather than trying to change the world. He had already explored his mind and spirit in a whirlwind of eclectic experimentation in his late teens and early twenties, when he dabbled in bizarre diets and Eastern mystics and rural communes and primal screams and hallucinogenic drugs. For that matter, he had already changed the world. No, he was thinking of cultivating his garden in the literal sense: he would devote his extraordinary intelligence and his frighteningly...

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Verlag
B&T
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
076790432X
ISBN 13 
9780767904322
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar