Steve Jobs on Apple’s Comeback: The making of a legend

Seven years ago, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time magazine, if he would write his biography. Isaacson, who has done books about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, thought the request presumptuous and premature since Jobs was still a young man. What Isaacson didn't know at the time, and only a few people did, was that Jobs was about to undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer and was feeling his mortality. It speaks to the secrecy with which Jobs conducted his life and his business, adding mystery to an already compelling figure. In 2009, with Jobs already gravely ill, Isaacson began the first of more than 40 interviews with him.

The last was conducted a few weeks before his death. Some of them were tape-recorded, and you will hear parts of them tonight. I have no skeletons in my closet that can't be allowed out, Jobs said, and like a well-timed Apple launch, the book, titled simply Steve Jobs, will be in stores tomorrow, just two and a half weeks after he died. The story will continue in a moment. When Walter Isaacson first began working on the book, which is published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS, Steve Jobs' wife, Lorene Powell, told him, Be honest with his failings, as well as his strengths. There are parts of his life and his personality that are extremely messy.

You shouldn't whitewash it. I'd like to see that it's all told truthfully. And to do it, Isaacson interviewed more than a hundred people, Jobs' friends, family, co-workers and competitors. I think it's a tough book. It's a book that's fair. I mean, this is a real human being. He had lots of flaws. He was very petulant. He was very brittle. He could be very, very mean to people at times, whether it was to a waitress in a restaurant or to a guy who had stayed up all night coding. He could just really just go at them and say, you're doing this all wrong. It's horrible. And you'd say, why did you do that? Why weren't you nicer? And he'd say, I really want to be with people who demand perfection.

This is who I am. Isaacson believes that much of it can be traced to the earliest years of his life and to the fact that Jobs was born out of wedlock, given up by his birth parents and adopted by a working class couple from Mountain View, California. Paul Jobs was a salt of the earth guy who was a great mechanic. And he taught his son, Steve, how to make great things. And once they were building a fence and he said, you've got to make the back of the fence that nobody will see just as good looking as the front of the fence, even though nobody will see it. You will know. And that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect. Jobs always knew he was adopted, but it still had a profound effect on him. He told Isaacson this story from his early childhood during one of their many taped interviews.

I remember right here on the lawn telling Lisa McMorler, who lived across the street, that I was adopted. And she said, so does that mean your real parents didn't want you? Ooh, lightning bolts in my eye. I remember running into the house, I think I was probably crying, asking my parents. And they sat me down. They said, no, you don't understand. They said, we specifically picked you out. They said from then on, I realized that I was not just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special. And I think that's the key to understanding Steve Jobs. Another factor was geography. Jobs grew up in Northern California, not far from Palo Alto. He was a gifted child who tested off the charts in a neighborhood populated by engineers.

He was raised in a place that was just learning how to turn silicon into gold. It had not yet been named Silicon Valley, but you had the defense industry, you had Hewlett-Packard, but you also had the counterculture, the Bay Area. That entire brew came together in Steve Jobs. He was sort of a hippie-ish, rebel kid, loved listening to Dylan music, dropped acid, but also he loved electronics. Jobs would eventually cross paths with a computer wizard at Berkeley five years his senior named Steve Wozniak. They became fast friends, sharing a love of high-tech pranks and a disdain for authority. One of the things they did was to copy and improve an illicit device called a blue box, which reproduced the tones that the phone company used and allowed users to make free long-distance phone calls.

Wozniak loves a blue box, he's doing it as a prank. Steve says, we can sell them, we can market them. And they sold about a hundred of them, and Jobs said to me, that's the beginning of Apple. When we started doing that blue box, I knew that with Wozniak's brilliant designs and my marketing skills, we could sell anything. That was still a few years off. Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, at a time when Timothy Leary was telling students across the country to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Jobs did, after one semester. The time we grew up in was a magical time. It was also a very, you know, spiritual time in my life. Definitely taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life, and not the most important, but right up there.

He eventually drifted back to his parents' house and became one of the first 50 employees to work for the video game maker, Atari. But he was not a big hit with his co-workers. Never wore shoes. Had very long hair. Never bathed. In fact, when he went to work for Atari, they put him on the night ships because people said he smelled so bad that they didn't want to work with him. You know, he believed that his vegan diet and the way he lived made it so he didn't have to use deodorant or shower that often. It was an incorrect theory, as people kept pointing out to him at Atari. You know, he was a pretty abrasive and in some ways, you know, cantankerous character. But these people at Atari, they kind of get him. And they say, well, we don't want you to leave, but how about working the night shift?

Jobs took a leave from Atari and spent seven months wandering across India looking for spiritual enlightenment. And it turned out not to be a waste of time. And when he comes back, he says the main thing I've learned is intuition. That the people in India are not just pure rational thinkers, that the great spiritual ones also have an intuition. Likewise, the simplicity of Zen Buddhism really informed his design sense. That notion, that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When he returned from his trek, Jobs and Wozniak started building and peddling a primitive computer for hobbyists. With a $1,300 investment, they founded Apple Computer in his parents' garage. Explain to me how somebody who was a hippie, a college dropout, somebody who drops LSD and marijuana, goes off to India and comes back deciding he wants to be a businessman.

Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict, between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic, but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board, wanting to create a business. And I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business. So we don't have to work for somebody else. Right. And Steve Jobs wasn't all that eager to be an employee at Hewlett Packard. He was never much of an engineer. Isaacson said he didn't know how to write code or program a computer. That was Wozniak's department. But Jobs understood their importance and their future. He was obsessed with making an attractive, simple, inexpensive computer, the Apple II, marketed as the first home computer.

It really didn't do much, but tech-savvy people snapped them up, along with school systems. And as he tells Isaacson on tape, he was soon worth millions of dollars. It wasn't very many years before, on paper, we were worth a lot of money. I was like 25 when we were worth maybe $50 million. I knew I never had to worry about money again. And so I went from not worrying about money, because I was pretty poor, to not worrying about money, because I had a lot of money. Jobs becomes rich. Jobs becomes wildly rich, makes about 100 people millionaires when Apple goes public. One of the things he does, though, that still caused a little ill will. They were old friends. He used to be with them in the garage, his parents' garage.

And they were working at Apple, but they hadn't quite gotten to the level of chief engineer. So they got no stock options. Wozniak, being incredibly generous, is giving away his stock options, trying to make everybody a millionaire. And Steve Jobs is, like, very strict on who can get the stock options. One of the people who didn't get them was Daniel Kotke, who had been with Jobs at Reed College in India, and in the garage where Apple was founded. And at one point, tries to go to Steve, and just starts crying. But Steve can be very cold about these things. Finally, one of the engineers at Apple said, you know, we have to take care of your buddy Daniel. I'll give him some stock if you match it, or whatever. And Jobs says, yeah, I'll match it. I'll give zero. You give zero. It was not the only instance of this callous behavior during that time period.

Just before Apple went public, his long-time girlfriend became pregnant, producing a daughter. Jobs, who had himself been born out of wedlock and abandon, denied paternity and refused to pay support until the courts intervened. Behavior was typical of a phenomenon that Apple employees openly referred to as Steve's reality distortion field, a term out of Star Trek. The ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything, using his indomitable will and charisma to bend any fact to suit his purpose. When he was creating the original Macintosh, Steve Jobs would come in and he would say, we need to have this done by next month. People would say, no, no, you can't actually write this much code by next month.

And he would say, yes, you can do it. And in the end, he would not take no for an answer. And he would sort of make the dent in the universe he wanted to. He would bend reality and they would accomplish it. The reality distortion field. It seems like sometimes you use it that that phrase to speak to what you see is sort of a self delusion. He could drive himself by magical thinking, by believing something that the rest of us couldn't possibly believe. And sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. And at the root of this reality distortion theory, Isaacson says, was Jobs belief that he was special and chosen and that the rules didn't apply to him. He had a great Mercedes sports coupe with no license plate on it.

That was his affectation. No license plate. He always believed. I said, why don't you have a license plate? At one point he said, well, I don't want people following me. I don't want people. And I said, well, having no license plate is actually more noticeable. He said, yeah, you're probably right. You know why I don't have a license plate. I said, why? He said, because I don't have a license plate. And I think he felt the normal rules just shouldn't apply to him. And he had his little everyday acts of rebellion that were showing, hey, I'm a little bit different. Parking in handicapped spots. Yeah. I mean, he always kind of felt I don't succumb to authority. So, you know, that's just who he is. That disregard for the establishment helped him achieve some of his biggest successes, allowing him to see products and applications that no one else imagined.

So in 1984, Apple introduced a truly revolutionary product, the Macintosh. It used graphics, icons, a mouse and the point and click technology that is still standard. It was innovative and influential, but sales were disappointing and jobs. Confrontational management style became even more brittle. He would try and rationalize it in this taped interview with Isakson. I feel totally comfortable going in front of everybody else. You know, God, we really fucked up the engineering on this, didn't we? That's the ante for being in the room. So we're brutally honest with each other and all of them can tell me they think I'm full of shit. And I can tell anyone I think they're full of shit. And we've had some rip roaring arguments where we're yelling at each other.

Jobs loved the arguments, but not everybody else did. And Isakson writes that some of his top people began defecting. He was not the world's greatest manager. In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers. You know, he was always, you know, upending things and, you know, throwing things into turmoil. This made great products, but it didn't make for a great management style. Jobs would eventually provoke a boardroom showdown with Apple president John Sculley over who should lead the company. The board chose Sculley. So he was out of his own company, kicked out of his own company. And, you know, he always had that feeling of abandonment. There was nothing worse than being abandoned by Apple. He sold his stock and used the company to start a new venture called Next Computer, which made great products that no one bought.

But Jobs would be saved by a tiny company that he acquired from George Lucas for $5 million. Pixar Studios would eventually revolutionize movie animation and make Jobs a multi-billionaire. Apple hadn't done so well. And a decade after Jobs left, it decided to buy Next Computer and the services of Jobs as a consultant. But he would soon take over as CEO. And when he goes back, it's almost bankrupt. It's like 90 days away from bankruptcy. They're totally out of money. And it's lost its way totally. So he says, here's a 27, 30 things you're making, printers or whatever. And he draws a chart that just has four squares. He says, professional, home consumer, laptop, desktop.

We're going to make four computers. He retrenched, firing 3,000 people and launched a new advertising campaign. Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. Steve Jobs helped write that himself. He edited it. He put in, they changed the world. By the end, Jobs, along with four or five other people, have written this not as ad copy, but as a manifesto. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

The campaign announced what would become the biggest comeback in business history. And it did change the world. That, Steve Jobs' search for his birth parents, and his battle with cancer, when 60 Minutes returns.