Steve Jobs: Apple's Anti-Gates

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Steve Jobs was still running Apple Computer from his father's garage in Los Altos, Calif., in 1976 when he got his first call from Microsoft--offering to sell him a version of the BASIC computer language for the prototype Apple I. No thanks, Jobs said. His pal Steve Wozniak had already written a BASIC, and if they needed a better one, they could do it themselves over the weekend.

It was typical Jobs: quick, dismissive and at least half wrong. Jobs ended up licensing Microsoft's BASIC after all (on terms that turned out to be, as usual, very advantageous to Apple). And though he went on to become, for a time, the golden boy of Silicon Valley--in 1981 Apple's $334 million in sales dwarfed Microsoft's puny $15 million--it was Bill Gates who became the emperor of all computerdom.

Jobs is, in a sense, the anti-Gates: a master of hardware, not software; a trailblazer, not a follower; a creator, not a cloner; an iconoclast, not a consolidator of industry standards.

Dashing, mercurial, impetuous and given to wild bouts of infectious enthusiasm--Microsoft employees were warned to beware of his "reality-distortion field"--Jobs drove Apple's engineers to build not just good but "insanely great" products that would "make a dent in the universe." He lured PepsiCo's designated heir to his Cupertino, Calif., headquarters with what may have been history's craftiest job pitch. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water," he asked John Sculley, "or do you want a chance to change the world?"

Never as hard-core as Wozniak (who actually built the Apple I and II) or even Gates, it was Jobs, nonetheless, who made the key decisions that shaped the company and the PC industry in its formative years: to name his computer after a fruit; to package it in a molded plastic case; to hire world-class p.r. and marketing firms; and, most incredibly, to drop everything to build the industry-incompatible but user-friendly Macintosh after visiting Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and seeing its icons, its windows, its mouse. Jobs made us choose sides.

In the summer of 1981, IBM announced the PC that would break open the computer business and eventually marginalize Apple. Jobs took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal headlined "Welcome, IBM. Seriously." Shortly afterward, he flew a small entourage to Redmond, Wash., to tell Microsoft about the Mac and persuade the programmers to write for it. Bill Gates didn't need much prodding. He agreed to produce the software--and then promptly launched a copycat project that would become Microsoft Windows.

Even in an industry noted for brilliant eccentrics, Jobs couldn't last. A notoriously erratic manager (he never bothered to write a budget, and he categorized employees by their "bozo bit," set at either 0 or 1), he was ousted in 1985 in a Cupertino palace coup by his own sugar-water CEO.

Apple floundered for the next decade or so, its market share dwindling to single digits. Jobs resigned himself to swimming in smaller and smaller ponds, founding NeXT, which made an elegant jet-black computer for the university market, but not much money, and buying Pixar, which eventually produced such computer-animated film masterpieces as Toy Story and A Bug's Life. In 1995, just after Toy Story's release, Jobs took Pixar public in an exquisitely timed IPO that made him, for the first time, a billionaire.

Today, in a neat twist of fate, Jobs is running Apple again, an interim chairman who seems to be in no hurry to find a replacement. Brought back in a kind of Hail Mary play by a company running out of time, Jobs staged a remarkable turnaround. He signed a peace pact with his nemesis in Redmond, killed off the Apple clones, launched an eye-catching ad campaign ("Think Different"), streamlined his product line, slashed inventory and turned a surprisingly large profit. Suddenly, Apple is cool again, thanks to a sexy, blue, Internet-friendly machine--the iMac--that is almost as hot as the original Macintosh. He may not run the computer world, but he sure can make a dent.

--By Philip Elmer-DeWitt