FoRK Archive: Steve Jobs [NYT Mag profile by Lohr]Steve Jobs [NYT Mag profile by Lohr]Rohit Khare (khare@mci.net)Sat, 09 Aug 1997 17:39:32 -0400 Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ] Next message: Dan Kohn: "FW: 2 gems on MSFT AAPL investment" Previous message: Rohit Khare: "A recent XML paper I wrote"google_ad_client = 'pub-4972454464538707';google_ad_width = 160; google_ad_height = 600; google_ad_format = '160x600_as'; google_ad_type = 'text_image'; google_ad_channel ='';google_color_bg=google_color_border='FFFFFF';google_color_link='0000FF';google_color_url='666666';google_color_text='000000'; _uacct = 'UA-128892-1';urchinTracker(); [Old, but EXCELLENT bits]January 18, 1997Creating Jobs: Apple's Founder Goes Home AgainBy STEVE LOHRThis article was originally published in the New York Times Magazine onSunday, January 12, 1997.=20On a soft November day in Northern California, Steve Jobs is guiding hisgray Porsche convertible out of San Francisco, and he is talking aboutApple Computer Inc. That, of course, is what Jobs is famous for: as aco-founder of Apple in 1976, he was a leader of the computer revolution,until he was ousted in 1985 in a board-room coup. Jobs was 30, and hewalked away with $150 million but no small measure of hurt.=20As he negotiates the Friday afternoon traffic on Route 101, Jobs keepsinsisting that he does not want to talk about Apple. Then he goes on atlength about how the company needs to reinvent itself, how it needs toregain its lost mantle as the personal computer industry's leadinginnovator. He is intimate but elusive, and extremely articulate. He recallshis years at Apple fondly, then makes it clear that he is doing nothingmore than reminiscing. After all, he has other things to worry about, likerunning Pixar, the digital animation studio that created "Toy Story," andmanaging Next, the computer software company he started when he left Apple.==20Still, Apple clearly exerts a lingering pull on Jobs. "It was like thefirst adult love of your life," he confesses, "something that is alwaysspecial to you, no matter how it turns out."=20In less than three weeks Jobs would be offered the chance to return to hisfirst love. And he jumped, setting off a frenzy of late-night meetings,negotiations and soul-searching throughout Silicon Valley. On Dec. 20,Apple's C.E.O. and chairman, Gilbert F. Amelio, announced that the companywould buy Next Software Inc. for $400 million. For that price, Apple alsogets Steven P. Jobs, or at least a piece of him, in a role to bedetermined. So Jobs becomes the computer era's prodigal son: his return toApple after more than a decade in exile is an extraordinary act ofcorporate reconciliation, a move laden with triumph, vindication andopportunity. And it is a particularly dramatic finale to an alreadydramatic second act in Jobs's life, both personally and professionally.=20At 41, Jobs looks pretty much as he did at 30, or even 25. He still wearsjeans every day, usually with a black turtleneck and running shoes. ButJobs says that he is a different person than he was when he left Apple in1985, and that Apple is a different company. He insists that he is comingback to lend a hand, not to try to be the struggling company's savior.=20What Jobs brings to Apple, he says, is "a lot of experience and scar= tissue."=20The deepest old wound is surely the way he left the company he founded. In1984, the team he led created the Apple Macintosh, a sleek machine whoseunique operating program turned the personal computer into a user-friendlymachine. Although the Macintosh was breakthrough technology, it took timeto attract buyers, and Jobs was forced out before the sales materialized.Apple would make a good living off the Macintosh technology for years, butas an innovator, the company all but stood still. Meanwhile, the MicrosoftCorporation began its inexorable march toward domination, modeling itsWindows operating software on the Mac's point-and-click system.=20There is a certain personal edge to Jobs's return to Apple and thecompetition with Microsoft, lopsided as that rivalry appears today. Whilethe personal computer industry has become a global $150-billion-a-yearbusiness, it remains a remarkably tiny community in some respects, ruled bya few hundred people who came of age together. Think of it as a close-knithigh-school class brimming with friendship, admiration, envy andresentment, and then add fame and vast wealth to people who are barelyadults. The two most prominent members of this class are Jobs, now seen asa pioneer and pop icon of computing whose fortunes have waned, andMicrosoft's William H. Gates 3d, who has become the nation's richest man,dubbed the Rockefeller of the information age.=20Both are 41, brilliant and driven, but their backgrounds and personalitiescontrast sharply. Gates is the scion of an old, affluent Seattle family;Jobs is the adopted son of a machinist in Northern California. Gatesdropped out of Harvard University to become an entrepreneur; Jobs droppedout of Reed College, the artsy Bennington of the West, to trek around Indiain search of spiritual enlightenment before starting Apple. If Gates, atleast for a time, seemed the classic nerd, Jobs was the enigmatic renegadein a leather jacket.=20Jobs bridles at any suggestion that Gates and Microsoft amount to his whitewhale. But he must wonder how differently things in the computer industrymight have turned out had he not been expelled from Apple.=20He is already talking about his return to Apple in ambitious, competitiveterms. "I think we have an opportunity to take the next big technologicalstep, and leapfrog Microsoft and everybody else," he said two weeks ago.Apple, to Jobs, has suddenly become "we" again.=20The trip back to Apple began just before Thanksgiving. It is a textbookstudy of Steve Jobs in action, part hustling opportunist and parttechnology visionary.=20Apple was known to be casting about for a next-generation operatingprogram, the software that serves as the computer's master-control panel.Apple's in-house development effort, code-named Copland, had collapsed. ForApple, shopping for an operating system was a humiliation akin to GeneralMotors's having to buy engines from another company.=20-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =20When Jobs found Mona Simpson, a sister who had grown up in entirelydifferent circumstances, it was as if they had been part of somenature-versus- nurture experiment. He was struck by the similarity in theirintensity, traits and appearance. =20-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =20Seeing an opening, Jobs did what he had not done in years: he called Apple.Gilbert Amelio was out of the country, so Jobs left a message for EllenHancock, Apple's chief technology officer. "I was startled to see SteveJobs had called," Hancock says, "but I returned it immediately."=20During their conversation, Hancock and Jobs discussed computer operatingsystems and Apple's predicament. At the time, Apple was not consideringNext, and Jobs made no sales pitch. But he did ask to drop by when Amelioreturned the following week.=20A few days later, on Nov. 27, Jobs was working in his tiny office at Pixarin Point Richmond, north of Berkeley. He made a routine call to Next, whoseoffices are in Redwood City. What he heard stunned him: two Apple engineersand an Apple manager were at that very moment huddled with a couple of Nextmanagers, who had called Apple on their own.=20Jobs arranged to meet with Amelio, Hancock and Doug Solomon, an Applestrategy executive, at Apple's offices in Cupertino on Dec. 2. "It was thefirst time I had set foot on an Apple campus since I left in 1985," Jobssays. He felt a twinge, but it wasn't all that emotional; nearly everythinghad changed, even the buildings.=20Jobs and the three Apple executives gathered in an eighth-floor conferenceroom next to Amelio's office. Jobs paced the room and scribbled withcolored markers on a white board, tracing the evolution of computeroperating systems and prescribing their future. This time, Jobs did makehis pitch, explaining why Next's operating system was Apple's best choice.The Apple executives were impressed -- or, as critics of the deal would saylater, seduced -- by Jobs's salesmanship, and agreed to take a close lookat Next.=20In recent years, Next had become a company with excellent technology butshrunken ambitions. The company had started out manufacturing both hardwareand software, with Jobs dreaming it would outdistance Apple and take onMicrosoft. But even though computer sophisticates loved Next, it couldn'tbreak into the mainstream, and the company was scaled back to providesoftware for computer programmers, especially geared to those designingInternet sites. Even as a niche company, Next wasn't yet profitable.=20Last year, Jobs started making plans to take the company public, and hehired Goldman, Sachs & Company to handle the deal. But Wall Street hadbegun to grow cautious about Internet companies. Besides, a stock sale ofNext would hardly be helped when Jobs disclosed, as he would have to infinancial documents, that he was planning to spend less time at Next andmore at Pixar.=20So Jobs also considered simply selling Next. The Apple opportunity, when itsurfaced, was ideal, since Apple, seeking a new engine, was attracted tothe Next operating system, a technology without a market.=20At an Apple board meeting on Dec. 4, Hancock reviewed the handful ofcompanies in the running, including Next and Be Inc., a start-up headed byJean-Louis Gass=E9e, another Apple alumnus. On Dec. 9 and 10, four companiesgathered at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto to demonstrate theirsoftware to eight of Apple's senior managers, including Amelio. Since theGarden Court and Il Fornaio, an adjacent restaurant, are favored gatheringplaces of the computer elite, word began to spread that Jobs was talking toApple.=20In a small conference room ringed by Apple executives, Jobs himself gavethe Next demonstration and proved that he was still a spellbinding salesmanof technology. On a desktop computer, he showed four video clipssimultaneously, including Apple advertisements. His message: Next'sorphaned operating system was still five to seven years ahead of its time.It would especially appeal to Internet and applications programmers, avital constituency if Apple were to prosper, for consumers will only buycomputers for which top-drawer programmers are eager to write software.=20After the demonstration, as a good faith gesture, Jobs handed over to Applethe financial disclosure documents Next had been preparing for its stocksale. And Jobs invited Amelio to his home to get acquainted and discussstrategy. "My advice," Jobs recalls, "was that if Apple was going to gowith our technology, they should buy the company instead of licensing thesoftware. You need the people for something as vital as an operating= system."=20After much testing, Apple's engineers chose Next's technology over theother companies'. Then Apple executives decided they could also use Jobs'shelp. From early in the merger talks, Hancock says: "We always talked abouthim being on the inside. We're hoping he can show us where to go from herein emerging markets and technologies."=20For Jobs, the Apple deal provides a fresh start for Next and a sense ofpersonal vindication. He sees business as a passion, the pursuit ofsomething worthy; his friends talk of his "need to do something big."Suddenly, with an Apple deal, Next might indeed do something big. "JoiningApple," Jobs says, "fulfills the spiritual reasons for starting Next."=20Just how much Jobs and Next can do for Apple probably cannot be fairlyjudged for a year or two. Apple's new operating system, based on Nexttechnology, is due in late 1997, but software products are chronicallylate. For now, Apple seems intent on keeping Jobs focused on helping Apple,and prevailed upon him to make an appearance at its Mac World trade show onJan. 7. The $200 million he received for Next includes 1.5 million Appleshares, which he cannot sell for at least a year. In the meantime, much ofWall Street and Silicon Valley will be watching closely, and without atrace of nostalgia. "It's very romantic going back to your first love,"observes the industry analyst Esther Dyson, "but it rarely works out."=20Just over a year ago, Jobs pondered a very different kind of return toApple. In December 1995, Jobs and his family were vacationing in Hawaiiwith his close friend Lawrence J. Ellison, the billionaire softwareentrepreneur who is chairman of the Oracle Corporation. Jobs and Ellisonstrolled the beach and weighed making a takeover bid for Apple.=20At the time, just a few months before Amelio took over as chief executive,Apple was being battered by product problems and management turmoil. Thetakeover plan, Ellison recently revealed, was nearly complete. A handful ofcorporate investors, including Oracle, had arranged financing of nearly $3billion. Their plan called for Jobs to play a management role. "We camevery, very close to doing it," Ellison says. "Steve is the one who decidedagainst it."=20Jobs now says he balked partly because trying to rehabilitate Apple wouldhave meant so much time away from his family and Pixar, which has become aconsuming interest. But mostly, "I decided I'm not a hostile-takeover kindof guy," Jobs says. "If they had [asked] me to come back, it might havebeen different."=20Now that they've asked him, he is looking anew at Apple's problems. Notlong ago, Jobs agreed with analysts who said that Apple was doomed. "That'sover," he said. "Apple lost." Not surprisingly, he's turned optimistic. "Alot of people have written Apple off," he says now. "I was discouraged inthe past as well. But Apple is still relevant. It has a base of 25 millionusers. Next to Microsoft, Apple is the only one that still matters." Jobsinsists that an improved operating system will enable Apple to challengeMicrosoft, much as the Macintosh challenged I.B.M. technology 10 years ago."If anything," he says, "I.B.M. was more powerful than Microsoft is today."==20Today, more than 85 percent of all personal computers run on MicrosoftWindows; the Mac is next, with 10 percent or less. Still, those millions ofusers give Apple a base to build from that Next never had. And Next has adevoted following among sophisticated computer programmers.=20(Tim Berners-Lee, a British programmer, created the World Wide Web on theNext system.)=20Apple couldn't hope for a better candidate for pitchman than Jobs, whosegenius for infecting others with his enthusiasm is known, by critics andadmirers alike, as the "reality distortion field." "Steve Jobs ispassionate about technology, and he can convey that sense of excitement topeople who are inherently excitable about technology -- and Silicon Valleyis full of them," says Richard Shaffer, a principal of TechnologicPartners, a research firm. "If Jobs can help instill in developers a sensethat Apple will rise again, then it can rise again."=20It is widely agreed that Jobs still stirs commitment and enthusiasm fromhis employees, but in a less frenetic style than he did years ago. In thepast few years, he has spent most of his time at Pixar, which occupies anondescript low brick building near the waterfront in Point Richmond.=20The atmosphere at Pixar is loose and playful, but the computer scientists,animators and artists there work long hours and talk about being on thefrontier of a new kind of film making. Jobs bought Pixar from the directorGeorge Lucas in 1986 for less than $10 million. At the time, Pixar waslittle more than a small collection of adventuresome computer scientistsand a gifted young animator, John Lasseter, formerly of Disney, Jobsproceeded to invest $50 million of his own money in Pixar. It began to payoff when Pixar signed a deal to make three computer-animated films withDisney, the first being "Toy Story," which was the No. 1 box-office film of1995. (Pixar's next film, an animated adventure story about insects called"Bugs," isn't scheduled for release until Thanksgiving of 1998.)=20But "Toy Story" took four years to make, during which time Pixar struggled.Jobs never let up on his colleagues. "You need a lot more than vision --you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,"says Edwin Catmull, a 51-year-old computer scientist and a co-founder ofPixar. "In Steve's case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make thenext big step forward. It's built into him."=20In the old days at Apple, some people found Jobs's prodding style inspiringand others found it maddening, with Jobs meddling in the tiniest corporatedetails. His early days at Pixar were much the same. Pamela Kerwin, whojoined the company in 1989 and is now a vice president, recalls how Jobswould run a meeting: "After the first three words out of your mouth, he'dinterrupt you and say, 'O.K., here's how I see things.' It isn't like thatanymore. He listens a lot more, and he's more relaxed, more mature."=20Jobs himself acknowledges the change, and offers a simple explanation: "Itrust people more." =A0As remarkable as his return to Apple may be, it is no more so than some ofthe quiet steps of reconciliation and discovery Steve Jobs has recentlymade in his personal life, most of them having to do with his family.=20During his Apple years, Jobs says he spent "150 percent" of his time andenergy on the company. His oldest daughter, Lisa, was born when Jobs was 23and totally immersed in starting the computer revolution. She lived withher mother, whom Jobs never married. When Lisa was about 7, Jobs graduallybegan to build a relationship with her, and she lived with him during herteen-age years.=20-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =20I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bitnarrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off on anashram when he was younger.=20Steve Jobs on Bill Gates=20-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =20Now 18, she is a freshman at an East Coast university.=20On a recent sunny Friday afternoon, Jobs's house in Palo Alto was teemingwith family and children. His young son was climbing a tree in thebackyard, overseen by a watchful nanny; a couple of neighborhood childrenarrived, accompanied by baby sitters. In the kitchen, Jobs was sitting in afavorite rocking chair with his toddler daughter bouncing on his lap. Hiswife, Laurene, returned from errands and a jog. She and Jobs met aboutseven years ago, when Laurene was doing graduate work at Stanford'sbusiness school. Jobs came to speak to a class and sat next to her. Theyexchanged telephone numbers, but he had a business dinner scheduled forthat evening.=20After the class, Jobs recalls, "I was in the parking lot, with the key inthe car, and I thought to myself, If this is my last night on earth, wouldI rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran acrossthe parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, wewalked into town and we've been together ever since."=20Several years before he met Laurene, Jobs made another deep familyconnection, this one a good bit more dramatic. Adopted as a baby, Jobs wasreared in a middle-class household in Los Altos by Clara, an accountant,and Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers. (Both of themare deceased.) Steve remembers Paul as a "genius with his hands." He boughtjunkyard cars for $50, fixed them up and sold them to students for aprofit. "That was my college fund," Jobs says. He was clearly close to hisadoptive father. Asked what he wants to pass onto his children, Jobsanswers: "Just to try to be as good a father to them as my father was tome. I think about that every day of my life."=20But, Jobs says, since he was a teen-ager he had made occasional efforts tolocate his biological family. He had nearly given up when he discovered, atthe age of 27, that his biological parents had another child later whomthey had kept, his younger sister. For reasons of privacy, Jobs explains,he won't discuss his biological parents or how he ultimately tracked downhis sister.=20As it turns out, his sister is the novelist Mona Simpson, whose new book,"A Regular Guy," is about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bears astriking resemblance to Steve Jobs. After they met, Jobs forged arelationship with her, often visiting her in Manhattan, where she lived andstill maintains an apartment. Theirs is a connection that, to this day,neither Jobs nor Simpson have discussed in the press, and now do sosparingly. "My brother and I are very close," Simpson says. "I admire himenormously."=20Jobs says only: "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. Icall her and talk to her every couple of days."=20For years, the two kept their relationship to themselves. Then, in 1986,George Plimpton, for whom Simpson had worked at The Paris Review, gave aparty for her first novel, "Anywhere but Here." Simpson arrived with hermother, Joanne, and Steve Jobs. "I had known Mona for quite a while,"recalls Amanda Urban, Simpson's literary agent. "She had said she had abrother who worked in the computer industry. But that party was the firsttime I learned that her brother was Steve Jobs."=20Simpson and Jobs decline to discuss the circumstances that led theirbiological parents to put Steve up for adoption. When he was born, hisparents were unmarried; they had married by the time Mona was born, two anda half years later. She grew up in Green Bay, Wis.; according to abiographical blurb in a literary magazine, her father was a politicalscience professor and her mother was a speech therapist. Simpson's novelstend to be populated by eccentric mothers and absent fathers (her secondbook is "The Lost Father"); her parents separated when she was 10, and shemoved to Los Angeles with her mother as a teen-ager.=20Jobs will say nothing about his biological father, but says that he doeskeep in touch with Joanne Simpson and invites her to some of his familygatherings. (She declined to comment for this article.) He seems gratefulfor her long-ago decision to have him and put him up for adoption. "Therewas never any acrimony between us," he says. Yet, biological roots aside,Jobs holds a firm belief that Paul and Clara Jobs were his true parents. Amention of his "adoptive parents" is quickly cut off. "They [were] myparents," he says emphatically.=20Whatever it may say about the question of nature versus nurture, Simpsonhas also had considerable professional success. "Anywhere but Here" wasapplauded by critics and sold remarkably well for a literary novel by anunknown writer; when "The Lost Father" was published in 1992, MichikoKakutani of The New York Times wrote that it "should galvanize MonaSimpson's reputation as one of the most accomplished writers of hergeneration."=20"A Regular Guy," published last fall by Knopf, has received mixed reviews.It is about a Silicon Valley biotech entrepreneur named Tom Owens whobecomes wealthy and famous and then loses control of his company to morepractical business types. But the novel is primarily a dissection ofrelationships, the central one being the uncertainly developing bondbetween Owens and Jane, his out-of-wedlock daughter who shows up at hisdoorstep, unbidden, at the age of 10. Owens is an eccentric egotist: he'stoo busy to flush toilets, doesn't believe in deodorant and lives in acouple rooms in a sprawling mansion. He treats people, including Jane, withan emotional coolness that borders on cruelty. Eventually, though, Owensslows down, marries and embraces family life. "It's a lot more importantthan work," he says.=20Given the similarities between Tom Owens and Steve Jobs, most of the book'sreviewers have mentioned the Simpson-Jobs family tie. (Though neverofficialy confirmed, the relationship has been well known in publishingcircles.) It would be hard not to notice: Owens is a vegetarian,blue-jeans-wearing iconoclast who believes in the virtues of marketcompetition in business, education and elsewhere; ditto Jobs.=20How much of himself does Jobs see in Tom Owens? "About 25 percent of it istotally me, right down to the mannerisms," he says. "And I'm certainly nottelling you which 25 percent." Simpson must have known that people wouldmake the comparison, often to Jobs's detriment; does he feel she exploitedor betrayed him? "Of course not," he says with a dismissive wave. "It's anovel."=20His adulthood discovery of his sister forced Jobs to rethink why people'slives turn out as they do. For years, he considered himself "anenvironmentalist," believing that a person's success or failure is largelygoverned by circumstance, upbringing, timing and luck. As a world view, itseemed logical enough to the young Steve Jobs. He happened to grow up inSilicon Valley at a time when the ingredients of the personal computerindustry came together. As a 12-year-old, on a whim -- and with an earlydisplay of characteristic chutzpah -- Jobs called William Hewlett, thenpresident of Hewlett-Packard, at his home in Palo Alto. Jobs was building afrequency counter and needed some parts. Hewlett chatted with Jobs for 20minutes, agreed to send him the parts and gave him a summer job atHewlett-Packard, the company regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.In 19tk, Jobs met Stephen Wozniak, a gifted young engineer, and togetherthey started Apple in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos.=20When he found Mona Simpson, who had grown up in entirely differentcircumstances, Jobs felt as if they had been part of some geneticsexperiment. He was struck by the similarity in their intensity, traits andappearance. As he was growing close to Simpson, he was also getting to knowhis daughter Lisa, whose early years were spent apart from Jobs, andwatching his two younger children grow up. "I used to be way over on thenurture side, but I've swung way over to the nature side," he says. "Andit's because of Mona and having kids. My daughter is 14 months old, andit's already pretty clear what her personality is."=20The effect of all this on Jobs seems to be a certain sense of calmingfatalism -- less urgency to control his immediate environment and a greatertrust that life's outcomes are, to a certain degree, wired in the genes.=20Today, Jobs lives in a red-brick house built in the 1930's. It isuncluttered but comfortable, with exposed brick walls and furniture that ismostly wood. In November, the living-room chairs were still arranged asthey had been for a dinner in August that Jobs gave for President Clinton,which was attended by a dozen Silicon Valley executives and John Lasseter,the director of "Toy Story." "We don't entertain much," he says about theundisturbed chairs.=20The house is large and the yard is spacious. In affluent Palo Alto it wouldprobably go for $3 million to $5 million. But for a man worth an estimated$700 million, the house seems a statement of restraint. Esthetically, Jobsis a modernist, a believer in simple elegance. Over the years, he hasapplied his taste in design to his products as well: Jobs once rejected aproposed Macintosh circuit board because it looked ugly, even though onlyservice technicians would ever see the innards.=20The notion of "taste" -- he uses the word frequently -- looms large in thebusiness philosophy of Steve Jobs. His is a very specific sensibility,honed by a breadth of experience and by his constant immersion in thepopular culture of the time. When he graduated from high school in LosAltos in 1972, he says, "the very strong scent of the 1960's was stillthere." In his 20's, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30thbirthday party. When discussing the Silicon Valley's lasting contributionsto humanity, he mentions the invention of the microchip and "The WholeEarth Catalog" in the same breath.=20Great products, according to Jobs, are a triumph of taste, of "trying toexpose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying tobring those things into what you are doing." The Macintosh, he has said,turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians,artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computerscientists.=20And so Jobs's return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce certainstandards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown ugly. Jobs hasnever hidden his longstanding objection to Microsoft -- not, he says,because of its dominance, or even Bill Gates's billions. "The only problemwith Microsoft is they just have no taste," he said last year in "Triumphof the Nerds," a television documentary about the history of the computerindustry. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, inthe sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring muchculture into their products. I have no problem with their success --they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with thefact that they just make really third-rate products."=20The statement was quintessential Jobs: arrogant, frank, insightful andperhaps more than half right, though brutally overstated. Those same traitswere both his strength and his weakness at Apple.=20After the documentary was televised, Jobs called Gates to apologize, sortof. "I told him I believed every word of what I'd said but that I nevershould have said it in public," Jobs says. "I wish him the best, I reallydo. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guyif he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."==20Even in apology mode, Jobs can be cutting, perhaps too much so for whatcorporate computer culture has become. Apple Computers, after 11 yearswithout him, is a vastly different company, with an entirely new set ofneeds and goals. The question is whether Steve Jobs has become a differentSteve Jobs than the one who created it in the first place.=A0Steve Lohr covers technology for The Times.=20---Rohit Khare /// MCI Internet Architecture (BOS) /// khare@mci.netVoice+Pager: (617) 960-5131 VNet: 370-5131 Fax: (617) 960-1009 Next message: Dan Kohn: "FW: 2 gems on MSFT AAPL investment" Previous message: Rohit Khare: "A recent XML paper I wrote" |
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