In some of these cases, the perceived moral transgressions were likely overstated, or failed to take into account all the circumstances. But Steve exacerbated many contentious situations with behavior that ranged from rude to insouciant to arrogant. Even for those of us who knew Steve well enough to have seen the significant mellowing in his personality over the years, his continued penchant for antisocial behavior was obvious, and a subject for debate. No one I have spoken to has a unified theory for the staying power of Steve’s childish behavior, not even Laurene. But it’s possible to understand the separate parts of Steve’s personality well enough to go deeper than simply characterizing him as wholly good, bad, or binary.
So when Steve spat his expletives about Neil Young, I just laughed. I wasn’t surprised. He could hold on to grudges for decades. Even after Steve had gotten what he wanted from Disney, Eisner remained a curse word to him. Gassée’s “sin” of telling Sculley that Jobs intended to oust him as CEO occurred way back in 1985; a quarter century later, Steve still snarled whenever the Frenchman’s name came up.
His grudges could even extend to companies that Steve believed had wronged Apple. His passionate antipathy for Adobe, for instance, was based in part on the fact that founder John Warnock had decided to also support Windows with his company’s software at a time when Apple was foundering. It was a perfectly rational decision at the time, when Macs held less than 5 percent of the personal computer market. But Steve saw it as a betrayal.
So when Steve himself was back on top of the world, he stuck it to Adobe by refusing to have the iPhone support a program called Flash. Flash was the leading software for viewing video and other interactive or animated content online. Adobe had done a good job with Flash, which was easy for developers to work with. But it had security holes, and could crash unexpectedly. Adobe had not been as diligent about correcting those problems as Steve would have liked. The iPhone was a brand-new networked-computing platform, and the last thing he wanted was to leave it vulnerable to hacking or security problems, especially in its infancy. So he left the program off the iPhone, and eventually off the iPad as well. Flash had been such a popular piece of software that Apple was deluged with complaints. But Steve was adamant, and in 2010 he issued a lengthy statement with six reasons he had not supported Flash. His reasoning was sound, but his words nonetheless smacked of revenge. Apple’s power was such that Adobe paid a price for its supposed betrayal. Flash survives, but Adobe has begun to focus more energy and investment on other streaming media technologies.
Steve’s biggest grudge of his later years was directed toward Google. There were many reasons for Steve to feel personally betrayed when Google introduced Android, the mobile operating system that mimicked many of the features of Apple’s own iOS, in 2008. What really galled him was that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and chairman, had been a board member and a friend for years. Now his company was releasing an able, direct competitor to the product Apple had been working on intensely during Schmidt’s years on the board.
Even harder for Steve to accept was the fact that Google decided to make Android available to handset manufacturers for free, thus guaranteeing that phones made by Samsung, HTC, LG, and others could undercut Apple in the new marketplace it had created with their cheaper devices. Steve was downright livid. Google was pulling a page from the first chapter of Microsoft’s handbook for dominating the world. Clearly, Steve believed, Google’s intent in offering a free operating system was to propagate a standard across all cellphones and mobile devices, leading to nothing less than a replay of what Gates had done to Apple’s Macintosh with the release of Windows two decades before.
Determined not to let that happen again, Steve was not content to rely only on great products. In 2011, just months before he died, Apple unleashed a torrent of litigation seeking damages from Samsung, the leading maker of Android-based phones and tablets, and even asking for an injunction to prevent the Korean manufacturer from selling its phones in the United States. Steve didn’t sue Google directly, since the company was getting little direct financial benefit from Android, which was free. But he could go after the device manufacturers. (Apple also sued HTC and Motorola Mobility, a handset maker that Google bought in 2012.) He accused the companies of copying outright many of the key user-interface features of Apple’s iOS, launching a panoply of suits that were not settled until 2014. Apple won a major victory in U.S. courts, but the company still has not actually collected any money from Samsung. Meanwhile, both sides agreed to drop all Android-related lawsuits outside the United States in 2014. It seemed an acknowledgment that the litigation had become an albatross for all involved. Venting Steve’s anger against Google had cost the company at least $60 million in lawyers’ fees. Steve, whose intense focus was a huge competitive advantage, had created a massive legal effort that will likely prove, in the long run, to have been nothing but a distraction.
EVERYTHING ABOUT WORK was personal for Steve. Over the years, he had learned to trust this passion, and that trust had led him to intuitive leaps that had moved the whole industry forward. But the passion had a flip side, too.
For one thing, deriving so much of his own sense of personal identity from work meant that Steve, a man who could really dish it out, was surprisingly sensitive to criticism. Like most great public figures, Steve had fundamentally inured himself to the envious admonishments of others. But he did feel he deserved the occasional pat on the back for his contributions to modern life. More than once, after some of the tougher stories I wrote in Fortune criticized him personally, he emailed or called to say, “You hurt my feelings.” I had half expected him to be nonplussed, after some of those stories. But personally wounded? He didn’t always take the criticism so personally, however. When I wrote a column snarkily suggesting that the first version of Apple TV would make a great doorstop, and wondering if it might be of some actual use as a modernistic sushi tray, Steve emailed me as soon as he’d read it to say, “I can’t disagree with anything in this one.” He was the only CEO—with the possible exception of Gil Amelio—who ever reacted so personally to my coverage.
Steve brought an unguarded and painfully blunt version of his personality to his relationships at work. That helped him inspire a unique kind of loyalty that was the glue that held together the great teams that ran Apple with him. But his persona also presented a challenge when he had to make changes in the team, as he did a few times during his last decade. Steve would not indulge any laziness, entitlement, or overreaching ambition from members of his core team. He regularly pitted one against another in order to see whose ideas or intelligence would prevail. Everyone had to be in top form, solidly contributing and fully engaged, or they would find themselves subtly marginalized by Steve. His relationships with Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell, among others, demonstrated how quickly Steve could revoke the special insider status that was his to grant.
Anderson was the first to leave the executive team. He was ten years Steve’s senior and old enough to be the father of some of the newcomers. He’d had a great run as CFO and was widely recognized in the company as the man who had kept Apple alive long enough to bring Steve back. He had operated as one of the most autonomous members of the executive team, since Steve wasn’t expert in his field. There was symbolic significance in the fact that his office was just a couple of doors down from Steve’s. If the CEO wanted to make a big change to the budget, he’d just walk over and ask Fred to help him find the money. “Steve and I had a mutual, genuine respect for each other as business partners. It was genuine,” remembers Anderson. “So if he wants five million or ten million dollars more for this great idea or marketing program, he wouldn’t just haul off and do it. He’d walk down the hall and see me, and use his persuasive powers. ‘Fred, come on, can’t you find room for this?’ You know? That’s the way we worked.”
Fred had stayed on longer than he had intended, despite feeling a little weary. In fact, he’d thought he was ready to move on or ret
ire as early as 2001. That year, Dell Computer had recruited him. Steve responded by convincing the board to make a onetime special award to Fred of options for one million shares, just to let him know how much he was appreciated. Steve also requested options grants of the same size for Avie, Ruby, and Tim Cook, and smaller amounts for other members of the executive team. It was a gesture that would come back to haunt Steve—and Anderson—but at the time it was welcome and enriching. Anderson stayed on three more years, despite the fact that Steve wouldn’t let him join the board of directors of any other companies. “Steve liked to control you. He liked to have you under his sphere of influence,” says Anderson. Eventually, Steve did let Fred join the boards of 3Com and eBay, and when Fred finally did retire, Steve asked him to join Apple’s own board.
When Fred’s retirement was announced in June 2004, Ed Woolard, the former Apple chairman, sent him a note thanking him for, among many other things, serving as “Chief Tantrum Controller of Steve.” At the last Top 100 meeting of Apple management that Fred attended as an employee, Steve broke down and cried during a video he showed in Fred’s honor. In his remarks at a going-away party at Cafe Macs, the company commissary, Steve reflected on the warmth everyone felt for Fred. Anderson still keeps two mementos from his retirement in his office at venture capital firm Elevation Partners: a plaque from Steve calling him “The World’s Greatest CFO” and a commissioned caricature portrait signed by all his closest coworkers, including Steve.
Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian were the next members of the “Save Apple” team to depart. Ruby and Avie had been a buddy act of sorts, managing the hardware and software sides of Apple’s whole widget. Says Ruby, “There’s as much of the turnaround team’s DNA in Apple as there is of Steve’s, and you can still see it today.” They had been involved in every key decision at Apple since 1997. And before they left they helped pull off a move that they’d been talking about with Steve and with Tim Cook for years—switching the microprocessors that powered every Apple personal computer from the PowerPC chip to one made by Intel.
The primary buyers of the PowerPC chip were IBM and Apple. This was a customer base that paled next to Intel’s enormous market for Windows PCs and servers—millions of units a year for the PowerPC versus hundreds and hundreds of millions for Intel. Motorola could not match Intel’s manufacturing prowess. Intel reinvested much of the profit from selling all those processors into building more state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities (called “fabs”), which had come to cost in excess of $1 billion each. The bottom line was that switching to Intel held irresistible price and performance advantages, especially after Steve negotiated yet another sweetheart deal, this time with Intel CEO Paul Otellini.
The whole executive team at Apple anticipated that the switch would be difficult. For starters, the change would infuriate some customers, because users who wanted the latest and greatest software would eventually be forced to replace their older iMacs, PowerMacs, MacBooks, and PowerBooks. Second, Avie and his team had to make sure there would be no software glitches, so that buyers of the new Intel-powered Macs would be able to use the OS X–ready software they’d purchased for their older machines. Despite all that, the move was far smoother than anyone had anticipated. Since Avie’s team had ported the NeXT operating system to run on Intel-based systems years and years earlier, they were very familiar with the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the Intel’s microprocessors. The first Apple machines switched over in February 2006. The rest made the transition by that summer. The operation came off without any noticeable glitches.
This was the kind of technological excellence Avie and Ruby had helped ensure throughout their time at Apple. Nevertheless, neither one could see an interesting career path forward there, especially now that the iPod and other mobile devices had become Apple’s growth engines. Steve saw Avie and Ruby as, first and foremost, “old-time” computer guys. Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall were early members of the post-PC generation, and seemed destined to be the key leaders of the iPhone hardware and software efforts. The wheel was turning for Avie and Ruby, just as it had for Fred.
“Steve kept people in a box,” says Avie. Tevanian had talked to his boss several times about his itch to do something new, and in 2003, Steve had moved him into a role as the company’s “chief software technology officer.” It was unquestionably a promotion, but it turned out to be a job without much of a portfolio. Tevanian found himself with little concrete responsibility. He felt out of the loop, and realized that his new role would not work. “Being a pseudo individual staff person working for Steve doesn’t work, because he already has all the answers. He didn’t like it when I would be in a meeting where he was reviewing a product, and I would have an opinion. He just didn’t like it. And he grew to not like that I could be a senior person like that without having day-to-day responsibilities to deliver something,” he says.
Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’ ” Another time, shortly after Steve had learned that Tevanian had taken up golf, Steve carped to Cook that something was really amiss. “Golf?!” he thundered incredulously. “Who has time for golf?”
Rubinstein, meanwhile, noticed that he too was getting less and less attention after Steve returned from his cancer operation in 2004. “In the beginning at Apple, it was a pleasure because we were all really in it together. I mean, it was really a team, we were partners,” he says. “But once Apple started getting really successful, Steve moved himself to the next level and started separating himself from all of us. It started to become all about him versus about the team. Over time it changed, where you were much less working with Steve and much more working for Steve.”
Ruby saw himself as CEO material, and envied Cook’s growing role. He also had started clashing with Ive, who had once reported to him but now reported directly to Steve. And he couldn’t stand Tony Fadell, the lead engineer for the iPod. Ruby and Fadell would resent one another for years, long after they’d each left Apple, each claiming responsibility for the iPod’s success, and each demeaning the other’s contribution. (Some wags took to calling Fadell “Tony Baloney.”)
Finally, it all got to be too much. Ruby says he went in to Steve’s office one day and told him he was tired, that he was ready to quit and go build his dream house in Mexico. He left on March 14, 2006—just a few weeks before Avie’s own departure. “It was a great experience,” Ruby says. “I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. It was wonderful in so many dimensions. I mean, it changed my life in so many different ways and I learned a lot from Steve. Steve could be a real jerk, no question about it, but I feel very warmly about him. I really do.”
Steve had considered himself friends with both men. But that personal level of involvement made their departures personally fraught. Every personable executive must confront this problem, but it was especially tough for Steve. While he had changed over the years, he still didn’t have a natural soft touch when it came to discussing career options with his closest colleagues. So things ended badly with both Avie and Ruby. Steve’s relationship with Avie, who had organized his bachelor party back in 1991, just petered out. His relationship with Ruby, on the other hand, ended with a bang.
Ruby built his dream house after leaving, but he was still ambitious. In late 2007 he was hired by Palm Computing, which remained a significant player in the handheld market. Ruby sent Steve an email to give him a heads-up that he was heading to Palm. Steve called him back about four seconds later, according to Ruby, and started saying things that left him flabbergasted. “He couldn’t understand,” Rubinstein remembers. “He said, ‘You’ve got plenty of money, why are you going to Palm?’ I’m like, ‘Steve
, what are you talking about? I mean, you’ve got orders of magnitude more money than I have and you’re asking me? Are you joking?’ ”
To Steve, Ruby’s move was akin to treason. By taking another job, at an ostensible competitor to Apple, Ruby had, “failed the loyalty test,” to cite the words of Susan Barnes.
Ruby tried to reason with Steve, even suggesting that Apple and Palm “didn’t necessarily have to compete.” That wasn’t realistic, of course, given the clear faceoff between Palm’s handheld devices and the iPhone. In fact, it may have been just wishful thinking. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Palm fizzled out, unable to compete with the iPhone either on its own or as a division within Hewlett-Packard, which bought the company but closed it shortly thereafter. Ruby and Steve only spoke to each other a few times again.
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