In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan.
In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart.
Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way. A photography buff, he became involved in making sure they had the perfect iconic portraits. “This is not the right picture of Gandhi,” he erupted to Clow at one point.
Clow explained that the famous Margaret Bourke-White
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 435
photograph of Gandhi at the spinning wheel was owned by Time-Life Pictures and was not available for commercial use. So Jobs called Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and badgered him into making an exception. He called Eunice Shriver to convince her family to release a picture that he loved, of her brother Bobby Kennedy touring Appalachia, and he talked to Jim Henson’s children personally to get the right shot of the late Muppeteer.
He likewise called Yoko Ono for a picture of her late husband, John Lennon. She sent him one, but it was not Jobs’s favorite. “Before it ran, I was in New York, and I went to this small Japanese restaurant that I love, and let her know I would be there,” he recalled.
When he arrived, she came over to his table. “This is a better one,” she said, handing him an envelope. “I thought I would see you, so I had this with me.” It was the classic photo of her and John in bed together, holding flowers, and it was the one that Apple ended up using. “I can see why John fell in love with her,” Jobs recalled.
The narration by Richard Dreyfuss worked well, but Lee Clow had another idea. What if Jobs did the voice-over himself? “You really believe this,” Clow told him. “You should do it.” So Jobs sat in a studio, did a few takes, and soon produced a voice track that everyone liked. The idea was that, if they used it, they would not tell people who was speaking the words, just as they didn’t caption the iconic pictures. Eventually people would figure out it was Jobs. “This will be really powerful to have it in your voice,” Clow argued. “It will be a way to reclaim the brand.”
Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with Dreyfuss. Finally, the night came when they had to ship the ad; it was due to air, appropriately enough, on the television premiere of Toy
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 436
Story. As was often the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make a decision. He told Clow to ship both versions; this would give him until the morning to decide. When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”
Ever since he left the apple commune, Jobs had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture. In ads such as “Think Different” and
“1984,” he positioned the Apple brand so that it reaffirmed his own rebel streak, even after he became a billionaire, and it allowed other baby boomers and their kids to do the same. “From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he wants his brand to have on people,” said Clow.
Very few other companies or corporate leaders—
perhaps none—could have gotten away with the brilliant audacity of associating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people are proud to have—Porsche, Ferrari, Prius—because what I drive says something about me.
People feel the same way about an Apple product.”
Starting with the “Think Different” campaign, and continuing through the rest of his years at Apple, Jobs held a freewheeling three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top agency, marketing, and communications people to kick around messaging strategy. “There’s not a CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does,” said Clow. “Every Wednesday he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard.” At the end of the meeting, he would
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 437
often take Clow and his two agency colleagues, Duncan Milner and James Vincent, to Apple’s closely guarded design studio to see what products were in the works. “He gets very passionate and emotional when he shows us what’s in development,” said Vincent. By sharing with his marketing gurus his passion for the products as they were being created, he was able to ensure that almost every ad they produced was infused with his emotion.
iCEO
As he was finishing work on the “Think Different”
ad, Jobs did some different thinking of his own. He decided that he would officially take over running the company, at least on a temporary basis. He had been the de facto leader since Amelio’s ouster ten weeks earlier, but only as an advisor. Fred Anderson had the titular role of interim CEO. On September 16, 1997, Jobs announced that he would take over that title, which inevitably got abbreviated as iCEO. His commitment was tentative: He took no salary and signed no contract. But he was not tentative in his actions. He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus.
That week he gathered his top managers and staff in the Apple auditorium for a rally, followed by a picnic featuring beer and vegan food, to celebrate his new role and the company’s new ads. He was wearing shorts, walking around the campus barefoot, and had a stubble of beard. “I’ve been back about ten weeks, working really hard,” he said, looking tired but deeply determined. “What we’re trying to do is not highfalutin.
We’re trying to get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution. Apple has drifted away from doing the basics really well.”
For a few more weeks Jobs and the board kept looking for a permanent CEO. Various names surfaced
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 438
—George M. C. Fisher of Kodak, Sam Palmisano at IBM, Ed Zander at Sun Microsystems—but most of the candidates were understandably reluctant to consider becoming CEO if Jobs was going to remain an active board member. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Zander declined to be considered because he
“didn’t want Steve looking over his shoulder, second-guessing him on every decision.” At one point Jobs and Ellison pulled a prank on a clueless computer consultant who was campaigning for the job; they sent him an email saying that he had been selected, which caused both amusement and embarrassment when stories appeared in the papers that they were just toying with him.
By December it had become clear that Jobs’s iCEO status had evolved from interim to indefinite. As Jobs continued to run the company, the board quietly deactivated its search. “I went back to Apple and tried to hire a CEO, with the help of a recruiting agency, for almost four months,” he recalled. “But they didn’t produce the right people. That’s why I finally stayed.
Apple was in no shape to attract anybody good.”
The problem Jobs faced was that running two companies was brutal. Looking back on it, he traced his health problems back to those days: It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life.
I had a young family. I had Pixar. I would go to work at 7
a.m. and I’d get back at 9 at night, and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate. It got close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and down to Apple in a black Porsche convertible, and I started to get kidney stones. I would rush to the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of Demerol in the butt and eventually I would pass it.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 439
Despite the grueling schedule, the more that Jobs immersed himself in Apple, the more he realized that he would not be able to walk away. When Michael Dell was asked at a computer trade show in October 1997
what he would do if he were Steve Jobs and taking over Apple, he replied, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Jobs fired off an email to Dell. “CEOs are supposed to have class,” it said. “I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.” Jobs liked to stoke up rivalries as a way to rally his team—he had done so with IBM and Microsoft—and he did so with Dell. When he called together his managers to institute a build-to-order system for manufacturing and distribution, Jobs used as a backdrop a blown-up picture of Michael Dell with a target on his face. “We’re coming after you, buddy,” he said to cheers from his troops.
One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company,” he recalled. “The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that’s why I decided to stay and rebuild it.”
Killing the Clones
One of the great debates about Apple was whether it should have licensed its operating system more aggressively to other computer makers, the way Microsoft licensed Windows. Wozniak had favored that approach from the beginning. “We had the most beautiful operating system,” he said, “but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was calculate an
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 440
appropriate price to license the operating system.” Alan Kay, the star of Xerox PARC who came to Apple as a fellow in 1984, also fought hard for licensing the Mac OS software. “Software people are always multiplatform, because you want to run on everything,”
he recalled. “And that was a huge battle, probably the largest battle I lost at Apple.”
Bill Gates, who was building a fortune by licensing Microsoft’s operating system, had urged Apple to do the same in 1985, just as Jobs was being eased out. Gates believed that, even if Apple took away some of Microsoft’s operating system customers, Microsoft could make money by creating versions of its applications software, such as Word and Excel, for the users of the Macintosh and its clones. “I was trying to do everything to get them to be a strong licensor,” he recalled. He sent a formal memo to Sculley making the case. “The industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the resulting credibility of, other personal computer manufacturers,” he argued. “Apple should license Macintosh technology to 3–5 significant manufacturers for the development of ‘Mac Compatibles.’” Gates got no reply, so he wrote a second memo suggesting some companies that would be good at cloning the Mac, and he added, “I want to help in any way I can with the licensing. Please give me a call.”
Apple resisted licensing out the Macintosh operating system until 1994, when CEO Michael Spindler allowed two small companies, Power Computing and Radius, to make Macintosh clones.
When Gil Amelio took over in 1996, he added Motorola to the list. It turned out to be a dubious business strategy: Apple got an $80 licensing fee for each computer sold, but instead of expanding the market, the
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 441
cloners cannibalized the sales of Apple’s own high-end computers, on which it made up to $500 in profit.
Jobs’s objections to the cloning program were not just economic, however. He had an inbred aversion to it. One of his core principles was that hardware and software should be tightly integrated. He loved to control all aspects of his life, and the only way to do that with computers was to take responsibility for the user experience from end to end.
So upon his return to Apple he made killing the Macintosh clones a priority. When a new version of the Mac operating system shipped in July 1997, weeks after he had helped oust Amelio, Jobs did not allow the clone makers to upgrade to it. The head of Power Computing, Stephen “King” Kahng, organized pro-cloning protests when Jobs appeared at Boston Macworld that August and publicly warned that the Macintosh OS would die if Jobs declined to keep licensing it out. “If the platform goes closed, it is over,”
