Who Was Steve Jobs? (4 page)

It was a big change for Steve. He and Woz had worked together so closely. Working with other engineers wasn’t nearly as satisfying. Steve wasn’t happy with the company’s next computer. It was too big and too expensive. Nobody wanted to pay $10,000 for a computer.

Steve had already set his sights on a new idea: It was a computer called the Macintosh. A Macintosh is a type of apple. The Macintosh would change the world. Steve was sure of it. He handpicked a team of engineers to build it. They worked in a separate building. A pirate flag flew on top. “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy,” he said. By this, he meant sometimes it was good to break rules and think in a different way.

Steve broke all sorts of rules. He didn’t like to wear shoes. He only ate fruit. He thought his diet made him so clean that he didn’t need to bathe often. A lot of people didn’t like to work with him because he smelled bad.

Despite his strange ways, Steve could convince people to do things that seemed impossible. An Apple employee made up a name for Steve’s power. He called it the “reality distortion field (RDF).” Steve’s RDF made people believe that anything Steve wanted was possible if they worked hard enough.

One thing Steve really wanted was to hire a smart businessman at Apple. He thought the best
person was John Sculley. Sculley was the head of the Pepsi-Cola company. He wasn’t sure if he should go to Apple. So Steve asked him, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Here was Steve’s RDF at work! Like many before him, Sculley ended up doing what Steve wanted. He came to work for Apple.

In 1984, Steve introduced the Macintosh to the world. It was the computer “for the rest of us,” according to the ads. That meant it was not just for scientists and superbrainy “tech” nerds. It was easy to use and friendly to look at. It incorporated everything Steve had learned about sleek design—it even used the knowledge of calligraphy he’d learned about back at Reed. When people typed on their Mac computers, Steve wanted the letters to be beautiful. He spent a lot of time choosing how much space would be in between letters. The Mac offered several different fonts, or writing styles. Each one had slightly different letters. This made typing on the Mac fun.

The Macintosh was far from perfect. It didn’t have very much memory, and there was no way of adding on more. One man at Apple called it “a Honda with a one-gallon gas tank.” But in Steve’s words, the Macintosh computer was “insanely great.”

The first Macintosh commercial ran during the Super Bowl in 1984. By the end of the game, everyone wanted to know more about the Mac.

The Mac sold amazingly well—for a short time.

Why wasn’t it a giant hit?

People were just not as interested in buying home computers as Steve had expected. And not all customers who did want a home computer bought Apple computers. Many bought computers from IBM or Microsoft.

John Sculley was not happy at Apple. For him, the disappointing Macintosh sales were proof that Steve’s ideas were wrong. Regular people would never need or want home computers. If Apple was to survive, Sculley said it should make computers for businesses. They should make Apple computers that worked with products made by other computer companies.

Steve hated that idea. He wanted customers to run Apple products on Apple computers. He didn’t want outside programs anywhere near the Macintosh.

Steve didn’t like someone else telling him what to do. He had hired Sculley hoping that the older man would teach him how to run a big company. After that, Steve expected Sculley to hand the reins back to him. Instead, Sculley wanted to make more changes.

Every big company has a group of outside people that give advice to the company. This kind of group is called a board. A company’s board can also hire and fire the head of the company. Steve tried to get Apple’s board to fire Sculley. That didn’t happen. Instead, the board replaced Steve as head of the Macintosh!

It was May 1985. Steve Jobs lost all the power he had at Apple. He was moved to a new office across the street from most of the other Apple buildings. He rarely saw other employees. Steve nicknamed nicknamed his new office “Siberia,” which is a remote part of Russia. It made him so unhappy, he started spending less time at work. In September of that year, Steve left Apple.

What would Steve Jobs do next?

By 1985, families were starting to buy computers for their homes. College students regularly worked on computers to do schoolwork. Steve Jobs wasn’t finished with the computer business. He wanted to show the people at Apple that they were wrong about him. He started a new company. He called it NeXT because it was going to be the next step in computers. He hoped to sell his new computers to colleges across the country. Students and professors would work with them.

But Steve’s plan for the perfect computer was expensive. He hired a famous designer to create a logo for his new company. The logo cost one hundred thousand dollars! NeXT lost ten million dollars in three years. Steve put more and more of his own money into the company. But nobody was buying the computers he made. They were too expensive. Colleges couldn’t afford computers that cost sixty-five hundred dollars a piece.

Nothing at NeXT was going the way Steve hoped. But he struggled on. He tried to run the company in a different way from Apple. He called employees “members” of the NeXT “community.” He paid people according to how long they had worked at NeXT. He gave frequent raises. Steve could be generous, but he was still the same demanding boss he had always been.

Steve’s family life was changing. In 1986, his mother died. Although Steve considered the Jobses to be his real parents, he was interested to know about the couple who gave birth to him.

A doctor’s name was on Steve’s birth certificate. Through that doctor, he learned that his mother’s maiden name was Joanne Schieble. She had married his father Abdulfattah Jandali in 1956 and had a daughter, Mona. They weren’t married for long. Joanne then married a man whose last name was Simpson. Her daughter went by the name Mona Simpson. Steve met his mother and new sister. Mona was a novelist. Even though Steve and Mona hadn’t grown up together, they became close. Mona also encouraged Steve to be a part of his daughter Lisa’s life. Lisa was seven now.