Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

  By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. In the future, he believed, your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for your content. Instead the hub would move to “the cloud.” In other words, your content would be stored on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and it would be available for you to use on any device, anywhere. It would take him three years to get it right.

  He began with a false step. In the summer of 2008 he launched a product called MobileMe, an expensive ($99 per year) subscription service that allowed you to store your address book, documents, pictures, videos, email, and calendar remotely in the cloud and to sync them with any device. In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.

  Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”

  By 2010 it was clear that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others were aiming to be the company that could best store all of your content and data in the cloud and sync it on your various devices. So Jobs redoubled his efforts. As he explained it to me that fall:

  We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data. Apple was the first to have the insight about your computer becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad, and it’s worked brilliantly. But over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have access to your content and you won’t have to sync.

  It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to make syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina. We can provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.

  Jobs discussed this vision at his Monday morning meetings, and gradually it was refined to a new strategy. “I sent emails to groups of people at 2 a.m. and batted things around,” he recalled. “We think about this a lot because it’s not a job, it’s our life.” Although some board members, including Al Gore, questioned the idea of making MobileMe free, they supported it. It would be their strategy for attracting customers into Apple’s orbit for the next decade.

  The new service was named iCloud, and Jobs unveiled it in his keynote address to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. He was still on medical leave and, for some days in May, had been hospitalized with infections and pain. Some close friends urged him not to make the presentation, which would involve lots of preparation and rehearsals. But the prospect of ushering in another tectonic shift in the digital age seemed to energize him.

  When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black turtleneck, and he had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked more gaunt than ever. The crowd gave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That always helps, and I appreciate it,” he said—but within minutes Apple’s stock dropped more than $4, to $340. He was making a heroic effort, but he looked weak.

  He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new operating systems for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off iCloud himself. “About ten years ago, we had one of our most important insights,” he said. “The PC was going to become the hub for your digital life. Your videos, your photos, your music. But it has broken down in the last few years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of your content synced to each of your devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on your iPad, a picture you’ve taken on your iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your computer, you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned switchboard operator as you plug USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a solution. It’s our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we are going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”

  Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed he joked about Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously. “Let me just say it wasn’t our finest hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it was clear that it would be better. Mail, contacts, and calendar entries synced instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and documents. Most impressively, Jobs and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music companies (unlike the folks at Google and Amazon). Apple would have eighteen million songs on its cloud servers. If you had any of these on any of your devices or computers—whether you had bought it legally or pirated it—Apple would let you access a high-quality version of it on all of your devices without having to go through the time and effort to upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.

  That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always, Apple’s competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for more than a year, and three years earlier its chief software architect, the legendary Ray Ozzie, had issued a rallying cry to the company: “Our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license their media once, and use any of their . . . devices to access and enjoy their media.” But Ozzie had quit Microsoft at the end of 2010, and the company’s cloud computing push was never manifested in consumer devices. Amazon and Google both offered cloud services in 2011, but neither company had the ability to integrate the hardware and software and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every link in the chain and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the content.

  Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and stayed within Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple: customer stickiness. Once you began using iCloud, it would be difficult to switch to a Kindle or Android device. Your music and other content would not sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It was the culmination of three decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about whether we should do a music client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next morning. “We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.”

  A New Campus

  When Jobs was thirteen, he had looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book, called him to score a part he needed for a frequency counter he was trying to build, and ended up getting a summer job at the instruments division of Hewlett-Packard. That same
year HP bought some land in Cupertino to expand its calculator division. Wozniak went to work there, and it was on this site that he designed the Apple I and Apple II during his moonlighting hours.

  When HP decided in 2010 to abandon its Cupertino campus, which was just about a mile east of Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters, Jobs quietly arranged to buy it and the adjoining property. He admired the way that Hewlett and Packard had built a lasting company, and he prided himself on having done the same at Apple. Now he wanted a showcase headquarters, something that no West Coast technology company had. He eventually accumulated 150 acres, much of which had been apricot orchards when he was a boy, and threw himself into what would become a legacy project that combined his passion for design with his passion for creating an enduring company. “I want to leave a signature campus that expresses the values of the company for generations,” he said.

  He hired what he considered to be the best architectural firm in the world, that of Sir Norman Foster, which had done smartly engineered buildings such as the restored Reichstag in Berlin and 30 St. Mary Axe in London. Not surprisingly, Jobs got so involved in the planning, both the vision and the details, that it became almost impossible to settle on a final design. This was to be his lasting edifice, and he wanted to get it right. Foster’s firm assigned fifty architects to the team, and every three weeks throughout 2010 they showed Jobs revised models and options. Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives.

  When he first showed me the models and plans in his living room, the building was shaped like a huge winding racetrack made of three joined semicircles around a large central courtyard. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the interior had rows of office pods that allowed the sunlight to stream down the aisles. “It permits serendipitous and fluid meeting spaces,” he said, “and everybody gets to participate in the sunlight.”

  The next time he showed me the plans, a month later, we were in Apple’s large conference room across from his office, where a model of the proposed building covered the table. He had made a major change. The pods would all be set back from the windows so that long corridors would be bathed in sun. These would also serve as the common spaces. There was a debate with some of the architects, who wanted to allow the windows to be opened. Jobs had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. “That would just allow people to screw things up,” he declared. On that, as on other details, he prevailed.

  When he got home that evening, Jobs showed off the drawings at dinner, and Reed joked that the aerial view reminded him of male genitalia. His father dismissed the comment as reflecting the mind-set of a teenager. But the next day he mentioned the comment to the architects. “Unfortunately, once I’ve told you that, you’re never going to be able to erase that image from your mind,” he said. By the next time I visited, the shape had been changed to a simple circle.

  The new design meant that there would not be a straight piece of glass in the building. All would be curved and seamlessly joined. Jobs had long been fascinated with glass, and his experience demanding huge custom panes for Apple’s retail stores made him confident that it would be possible to make massive curved pieces in quantity. The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome. One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”

  By June 2011 the plans for the four-story, three-million-square-foot building, which would hold more than twelve thousand employees, were ready to unveil. He decided to do so in a quiet and unpublicized appearance before the Cupertino City Council on the day after he had announced iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

  Even though he had little energy, he had a full schedule that day. Ron Johnson, who had developed Apple’s stores and run them for more than a decade, had decided to accept an offer to be the CEO of J.C. Penney, and he came by Jobs’s house in the morning to discuss his departure. Then Jobs and I went into Palo Alto to a small yogurt and oatmeal café called Fraiche, where he talked animatedly about possible future Apple products. Later that day he was driven to Santa Clara for the quarterly meeting that Apple had with top Intel executives, where they discussed the possibility of using Intel chips in future mobile devices. That night U2 was playing at the Oakland Coliseum, and Jobs had considered going. Instead he decided to use that evening to show his plans to the Cupertino Council.

  Arriving without an entourage or any fanfare, and looking relaxed in the same black sweater he had worn for his developers conference speech, he stood on a podium with clicker in hand and spent twenty minutes showing slides of the design to council members. When a rendering of the sleek, futuristic, perfectly circular building appeared on the screen, he paused and smiled. “It’s like a spaceship has landed,” he said. A few moments later he added, “I think we have a shot at building the best office building in the world.”

  The following Friday, Jobs sent an email to a colleague from the distant past, Ann Bowers, the widow of Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce. She had been Apple’s human resources director and den mother in the early 1980s, in charge of reprimanding Jobs after his tantrums and tending to the wounds of his coworkers. Jobs asked if she would come see him the next day. Bowers happened to be in New York, but she came by his house that Sunday when she returned. By then he was sick again, in pain and without much energy, but he was eager to show her the renderings of the new headquarters. “You should be proud of Apple,” he said. “You should be proud of what we built.”

  Then he looked at her and asked, intently, a question that almost floored her: “Tell me, what was I like when I was young?”

  Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned out to be true.”

  “Yes,” Jobs answered. “I did learn some things along the way.” Then, a few minutes later, he repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really did.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  ROUND THREE

  The Twilight Struggle

  Family Ties

  Jobs had an aching desire to make it to his son’s graduation from high school in June 2010. “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate, and that got me through 2009,” he said. As a senior, Reed looked eerily like his father at eighteen, with a knowing and slightly rebellious smile, intense eyes, and a shock of dark hair. But from his mother he had inherited a sweetness and painfully sensitive empathy that his father lacked. He was demonstrably affectionate and eager to please. Whenever his father was sitting sullenly at the kitchen table and staring at the floor, which happened often when he was ailing, the only thing sure to cause his eyes to brighten was Reed walking in.

  Reed adored his father. Soon after I started working on this book, he dropped in to where I was staying and, as his father often did, suggested we take a walk. He told me, with an intensely earnest look, that his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making.

  After Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, Reed began spending his summers working in a Stanford oncology lab doing DNA sequencing to find genetic markers for colon cancer. In one experiment, he traced how mutations go through families. “One of the very few silver linings about me getting sick is that Reed’s gotten to spend a lot of time stu
dying with some very good doctors,” Jobs said. “His enthusiasm for it is exactly how I felt about computers when I was his age. I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”

  Reed used his cancer study as the basis for the senior report he presented to his class at Crystal Springs Uplands School. As he described how he used centrifuges and dyes to sequence the DNA of tumors, his father sat in the audience beaming, along with the rest of his family. “I fantasize about Reed getting a house here in Palo Alto with his family and riding his bike to work as a doctor at Stanford,” Jobs said afterward.

  Reed had grown up fast in 2009, when it looked as if his father was going to die. He took care of his younger sisters while his parents were in Memphis, and he developed a protective paternalism. But when his father’s health stabilized in the spring of 2010, he regained his playful, teasing personality. One day during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but Reed said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his father asked. Reed resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she could outfit a tepee in their garden and she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a romantic meal there. Reed stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other time, he promised.

  One Saturday Reed was one of the four contestants on his school’s Quiz Kids team competing on a local TV station. The family—minus Eve, who was in a horse show—came to cheer him on. As the television crew bumbled around getting ready, his father tried to keep his impatience in check and remain inconspicuous among the parents sitting in the rows of folding chairs. But he was clearly recognizable in his trademark jeans and black turtleneck, and one woman pulled up a chair right next to him and started to take his picture. Without looking at her, he stood up and moved to the other end of the row. When Reed came on the set, his nameplate identified him as “Reed Powell.” The host asked the students what they wanted to be when they grew up. “A cancer researcher,” Reed answered.