So for us, this is an entirely new story. One that is in part recycled from the old, but also augmented with fresh observations and reflections from those who were closest to our subject; people who shared particular memories that have had a chance to settle and steep into a deeper understanding of who their friend or colleague or rival Steve Jobs really was. With these source notes, we attempt to provide more specific information about the breadth of sourcing of information and analysis that helped to inform various passages throughout the book.
Prologue
Most of the prologue is based upon my own recollections and notes from my first interview with Steve Jobs, which took place in Palo Alto on April 17, 1986. Other observations were drawn from the cumulative experience of my more than one hundred fifty meetings, interviews, phone calls, emails, and informal conversations with him between that date and his death on October 5, 2011. All the quotations from him throughout this book are from those meetings, phone calls, or email exchanges, unless otherwise noted. Some of the quotations have appeared previously, in whole or in part, in feature articles that I wrote that were published by Fortune or the Wall Street Journal. None of those articles is reprinted or excerpted in any form in this prologue, however, or elsewhere in the book, unless specifically noted.
Steve Jobs’s birthdate is February 24, 1955; mine is April 9, 1954. Both of us graduated from high school in the spring of 1972. Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, this chapter also drew from an interview with Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012, and another with Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014.
Chapter 1: Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
This chapter establishes a baseline from which Steve Jobs would evolve over the rest of his life. The central anecdote of this chapter was provided by Dr. Larry Brilliant, then CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and a close friend of Jobs since the mid-1970s. We interviewed him on two occasions—August 23, 2013, and again on January 17, 2014. We also visited the Garden of Allah in Mill Valley, California, with Brilliant and his wife, Girija, who was a cofounder of the Seva Foundation. Other key interviews included one with Laurene Powell Jobs on October 14, 2013, one with Lee Clow on October 14, 2013, and one with Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012.
Biographical dates and details for the chapter were culled from many published sources, including Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s “authorized” biography, and The Little Kingdom, Michael Moritz’s history of early Apple. Details about Stephen Wozniak’s life and contributions to Apple came primarily from his memoir iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, which he wrote with the help of Gina Smith. This is also a source for many of the details about the collaboration between Wozniak and Jobs on the Blue Box digital telephone dialers.
For background information on the Homebrew Computer Club we relied primarily upon iWoz, by Wozniak with Smith, although we also drew from Moritz’s The Little Kingdom and other sources. I also discussed the club with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on several occasions during meetings during the past twenty years.
The filing of the prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission for Apple Computer Inc.’s initial public offering on December 12, 1980, provided the statistics about Apple’s early growth—“Apple sold approximately 570, 7,600, 35,100, and 78,100 Apple II computer mainframes during the six-month period ending September 30, 1977, and during the fiscal years ending September 30, 1978, September 30, 1979, and September 26, 1980, respectively.”
We also relied upon the following online sources: The Seva Foundation website at www.seva.org; the Ralston White Retreat (the current official name of the Garden of Allah) website at www.ralstonwhiteretreat.org/history.asp; Fortune’s “Most Admired Company in the World” 2008–2014 compendium, published online at www.time.com/10351/fortune-worlds-most-admired-company-2014; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Oral and Video Histories interview of Steve Jobs on April 20, 1995, posted at http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html. Another useful resource for this chapter was a website called foundersatwork.com, www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html, an online adjunct to Klaus Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days.
Chapter 2: “I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”
This chapter explains Jobs’s idiosyncratic early attitudes toward being a business executive and drew many of its details from books and magazine articles about the early days of Apple Computer Inc., informal reminiscences of Jobs himself during one of our many meetings, and the recollections of other people who worked with him at that time. Of particular value were the reminiscences and personal archives of Regis McKenna, who generously shared his collection of notes, drawings, advertising copy, annual reports, and correspondence from this period. We also relied upon our interviews with him in the summer of 2012, and upon his book Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer. In all, we interviewed him at length on three occasions in 2012 and 2013.
Other books we consulted were Wozniak and Smith’s iWoz; Moritz’s The Little Kingdom; Swimming Across: A Memoir, by Andrew S. Grove; Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, by Richard S. Tedlow; The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution, by T. R. Reid; and The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin. We also quoted at length from “Digitization,” an article in the Talk of the Town department of The New Yorker magazine that was published on November 14, 1977. And we also culled information from the 1980 SEC prospectus for Apple Computer’s initial public offering.
Chapter 3: Breakthrough and Breakdown
This chapter describes the circumstances that led to Steve Jobs being stripped of executive authority and eventually quitting under pressure from the board of directors. Once again we synthesized information from many different sources, from books to our own interviews and government filings, such as annual reports, and Jobs’s own episodic reminiscences during our many meetings over the years after we first met in 1986. The narrative of the sequence of events leading to Jobs’s demotion in April 1985 and the ultimate conflict with Apple’s board that led to his resignation also benefitted from many recent interviews of people who were there at the time, as well as published reports from the time of the event.
Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Lee Clow on October 14, 2013; Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012; Bill Gates on June 15, 2012; Mike Slade on July 23, 2012; and Jean-Louis Gassée on October 17, 2012.
We also relied on passages from the following books: Gates, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews; Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future, by John Sculley; The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs, by Chrisann Brennan; Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, by Owen W. Linzmayer; Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik; and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, by Steven Levy; as well as Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, and Wozniak and Smith’s iWoz.
Other journalistic sources included “The Fall of Steve” by Bro Uttal, published in Fortune on August 5, 1985; and the PBS television documentary The Entrepreneurs, broadcast in 1986. The Golden Gate Weather website, http://ggweather.com/sjc/daily_records.html#September, provided the precise weather data for the day of Jobs’s visit to the Garden of Allah. And statistical data on unit sales were drawn from Apple Computer’s annual reports from 1980 to 1984.
Chapter 4: What’s Next?
This chapter marks the beginning of my frequent meetings with Jobs, first as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and later as Fortune’s Silicon Valley writer. Ironically, I didn’t write all that many stories about Steve or his
two pet entrepreneurial projects, NeXT and Pixar, for the first three years because neither company was publicly held and hence neither was a high priority for the Journal. After moving to Fortune in 1989, however, I made it a point to write about Steve with much greater frequency, and tried to cultivate what was becoming a closer personal relationship. Much of what is described in this chapter is drawn from my own notes and interview transcripts and recollections of events. Lengthy recent interviews with Jobs’s colleagues at that time provided valuable background for the chapter.
Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Dan’l Lewin on July 26, 2012; Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Avie Tevanian on November 12, 2012; and Jon Rubinstein on July 25, 2012. We also benefitted from lengthy email correspondence with Allison Thomas on January 20, 2014.
We relied for some additional general background about NeXT on two books: Randall Stross’s Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing; and Owen W. Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential 2.0.
The descriptions of the rapid growth of Sun Microsystems and the competitive landscape for computer workstations were drawn from reporting for my own stories in Fortune from 1998 to 2004 (see bibliography). The narrative details of the introduction of the NeXTcube is drawn primarily from my own experience at the event and my reporting for a Wall Street Journal front-page story that followed it on October 13, 1988, titled “Next Project: Apple Era Behind Him, Steve Jobs Tries Again, Using a New System.”
Statistics about the relative capacities of hard drives and the transistor counts of semiconductors were drawn from two primary sources: For our descriptions of semiconductor transistor densities we relied upon Pat Gelsinger’s article “Moore’s Law—The Genius Lives On,” which appeared in the Solid State Circuits newsletter, July 13, 2007; and our data on trends in hard drive densities came from Chip Walter’s “Kryder’s Law,” which appeared in Scientific American’s July 25, 2005, issue.
Other magazine articles we found helpful were a Newsweek story from October 24, 1988, by John Schwartz, titled “Steve Jobs Comes Back,” and we refer at length to a magazine article by Joe Nocera from the December 1986 issue of Esquire titled “The Second Coming of Steven Jobs.” We also refer again to the PBS television documentary The Entrepreneurs broadcast in 1986.
Online resources for this chapter include the digital archive of the National Mining Hall of Fame, Leadville, Colorado, http://www.mininghalloffame.org/inductee/jackling; Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Inside Steve’s Teardown Mansion,” April 27, 2009, Fortune.com, http://fortune.com/2009/04/27/inside-steve-jobs-tear-down-mansion/; and http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=sun+microsystems&owner=exclude&action=get company for financial information about Sun Microsystems gleaned from the company’s SEC filings.
Chapter 5: A Side Bet
This chapter describes the origin of Jobs’s purchase of what eventually came to be called Pixar. Once again, this chapter draws primarily from my own extensive previous reporting for stories that appeared in Fortune from 1989 to 2006 (see bibliography). We also benefitted from recent interviews with Ed Catmull and from Catmull’s recently published book about his experiences at Pixar, Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. For verification of some of the historical facts we also relied upon Karen Paik’s book To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios.
Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Susan Barnes on July 24, 2012; Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014; John Lasseter on May 8, 2014; Bob Iger on May 14, 2014; and Laurene Powell Jobs on October 25, 2013.
Chapter 6: Bill Gates Pays a Visit
This unusual chapter is based upon a single historic meeting, one of only two “on the record” lengthy encounters between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As such, there aren’t many outside sources beyond my interview transcripts, my notes, and my own recollections and analysis of the industry at that time.
We retrieved statistical information from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Affairs, Annual Industry Accounts—1976–2012, which can be found at https://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2005/01January/0105_Industry_Acct.pdf.
For background information on Gates we consulted an article by Bro Uttal, published in Fortune on July 21, 1986, called “The Deal That Made Bill Gates, Age 30, $350 Million”; an interview with Mike Slade on July 23, 2012; and an exclusive, more recent interview with Gates himself on June 15, 2012.
Chapter 7: Luck
This chapter describes how Pixar evolved into a maker of computer animated feature films. It is based in large part on our own recent interviews with Pixar’s principals, and is supplemented by the many feature stories I had written over the years about Pixar’s remarkable run as a maker of animated feature films (see bibliography). Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were both very generous with their time for profile stories I had written about each, and made themselves available again during our research for this book. We also drew from my previous interviews with Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks and Michael Eisner of Disney in the late 1990s. Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc. also provided lots of useful background information.
Other published sources included two books: Karen Paik’s official corporate history, To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios; and The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, by David A. Price. And for information on how it was his investment in Pixar that eventually made Steve Jobs a genuine billionaire, we consulted the website for Forbes; specifically an interactive article called “Two Decades of Wealth,” located at www.forbes.com/static_html/rich400/2002/timemapFLA400.html.
We also relied upon the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to confirm details of Netscape Communications Inc.’s initial public offering on August 9, 1995. The company offered 3.5 million shares at a price of $28 a share, generating proceeds of $98 million.
Above all, however, we benefitted from our lengthy interviews with Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014; John Lasseter on May 8, 2014; and my many encounters over the years with Jobs.
Chapter 8: Bozos, Bastards, and Keepers
This chapter reflects an unusual period in my relationship with Jobs because it coincides with a time that Jobs, who was CEO of both NeXT and Pixar, was calling me seemingly out of the blue to talk about what was going on at Apple Computer. Previously, we hadn’t talked much about his original entrepreneurial fling, mainly because he wasn’t one to look in the rearview mirror. But he seemed genuinely alarmed at what appeared to be the beginnings of a death spiral for Apple. I spent the better part of a year reporting off and on to prepare what was supposed to be a cover story about the breadth and depth of Apple’s troubles, informed not only by what Steve whispered in my ear, but also by grumblings from other people inside and outside the company. The story, called “Something’s Rotten in Cupertino,” wasn’t published until the March 3, 1997, issue of Fortune, more than two months after Apple’s hasty decision to acquire NeXT Computer. The reporting that went into that particular story, plus other stories I reported and wrote about Microsoft, NeXT, and Pixar during 1995 through 1997, informed much of this chapter. Numerical data about Apple came from Apple’s annual reports during this period. Two lengthy interviews with Fred Anderson in August 2012 were particularly helpful in explaining how he was able to mastermind Apple’s escape from a dire fiscal situation when he arrived there in the spring of 1996.
Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from those interviews with Anderson; and others with Mike Slade on July 23, 2012; Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014; Jean-Louis Gassée on October 17, 2012; Avie Tevanian on November 12, 2012; Andy Grove on June 20, 2012; and Bill Gates on June 15, 2012.
Other sources o
f information include archival video of Jobs addressing MacWorld Boston, August 6, 1997, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEHNrqPkefI; and an article in the New York Times of March 19, 1992, titled “Business People: NeXT Finds a President in Telephone Industry,” by Lawrence Fisher, which provided background information about Peter van Cuylenberg.
Chapter 9: Maybe They Had to Be Crazy
This chapter covers the first four years after Steve Jobs had returned to the helm of Apple, and relies primarily upon my own reporting and writing about Apple during the time period that it covers, 1997 through 2001. Despite Apple’s precarious situation and widespread skepticism, there was tremendous interest among techies and businesspeople of all stripes in what Jobs might have up his sleeve that could turn things around at the iconic company. Jobs knew it was in his interest to be fairly open with me about his initial strategies to stabilize things, and by this time we had developed solid trust. Consequently, he was not nearly as secretive during these first few years back at Apple than he would be after the turn of the century.
Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Lee Clow on October 14, 2013; Jon Rubinstein on July 25, 2012; Avie Tevanian on November 12, 2012; Rubinstein and Tevanian together on October 12, 2012; Jony Ive on June 10, 2014; Bill Gates on June 16, 2012; and Mike Slade on July 23, 2012.
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