Steve Jobs - To the Finish line #2

STEVE JOBS - TO THE FINISH LINE #2


Visitors

When his 2011 medical leave was announced, the situation seemed
so dire that Lisa Brennan-Jobs got back in touch after more than
a year and arranged to fly from New York the following week. Her
relationship with her father had been built on layers of
resentment. She was understandably scarred by having been pretty
much abandoned by him for her first ten years. Making matters
worse, she had inherited some of his prickliness and, he felt,
some of her mother's sense of grievance. "I told her many times
that I wished I'd been a better dad when she was five, but now
she should let things go rather than be angry the rest of her
life," he recalled just before Lisa arrived.

The visit went well. Jobs was beginning to feel a little better,
and he was in a mood to mend fences and express his affection for
those around him. At age thirty-two, Lisa was in a serious
relationship for one of the first times in her life. Her
boyfriend was a struggling young filmmaker from California, and
Jobs went so far as to suggest she move back to Palo Alto if they
got married. "Look, I don't know how long I am for this world,"
he told her. "The doctors can't really tell me. If you want to
see more of me, you're going to have to move out here. Why don't
you consider it?" Even though Lisa did not move west, Jobs was
pleased at how the reconciliation had worked out. "I hadn't been
sure I wanted her to visit, because I was sick and didn't want
other complications. But I'm very glad she came. It helped settle
a lot of things in me.

Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to
repair fences. Google's cofounder Larry Page, who lived less than
three blocks away, had just announced plans to retake the reins
of the company from Eric Schmidt. He knew how to flatter jobs: He
asked if he could come by and get tips on how to be a good CEO.
Jobs was still furious at Google. "My first thought was, `Fuck
you,"' he recounted. "But then I thought about it and realized
that everybody helped me when I was young, from Bill Hewlett to
the guy down the block who worked for HP So I called him back and
said sure." Page came over, sat in Jobs's living room, and
listened to his ideas on building great products and durable
companies. Jobs recalled:

"We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know
who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count
on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to
keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B
players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what
Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map.
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the
rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into
Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are
adequate but not great. I tried to be as helpful as I could. I
will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too.
That's how I'm going to spend part of the time I have left. I can
help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies
here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very
supportive of me. I should do my best to repay."

The announcement of Jobs's 2011 medical leave prompted others to
make a pilgrimage to the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton, for
example, came by and talked about everything from the Middle East
to American politics. But the most poignant visit was from the
other tech prodigy born in 1955, the guy who, for more than three
decades, had been Jobs's rival and partner in defining the age of
personal computers.

Bill Gates had never lost his fascination with Jobs. In the
spring of 2011 I was at a dinner with him in Washington, where he
had come to discuss his foundation's global health endeavors. He
expressed amazement at the success of the iPad and how jobs, even
while sick, was focusing on ways to improve it. "Here I am,
merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and
Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," he said
wistfully. "Maybe I should have stayed in that game." He smiled
to make sure that I knew he was joking, or at least half joking.
Through their mutual friend Mike Slade, Gates made arrangements
to visit Jobs in May. The day before it was supposed to happen,
Jobs's assistant called to say he wasn't feeling well enough. But
it was rescheduled, and early one afternoon Gates drove to Jobs's
house, walked through the back gate to the open kitchen door, and
saw Eve studying at the table. "Is Steve around?" he asked. Eve
pointed him to the living room.

They spent more than three hours together, just the two of them,
reminiscing. "We were like the old guys in the industry looking
back," Jobs recalled. "He was happier than I've ever seen him,
and I kept thinking how healthy he looked." Gates was similarly
struck by how Jobs, though scarily gaunt, had more energy than he
expected. He was open about his health problems and, at least
that day, feeling optimistic. His sequential regimens of targeted
drug treatments, he told Gates, were like "jumping from one lily
pad to another," trying to stay a step ahead of the cancer.
Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out
his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with
students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while
using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving.
They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little
impact on schools-far less than on other realms of society such
as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said,
computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering
more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.
They also talked a lot about the joys of family, including how
lucky they were to have good kids and be married to the right
women. "We laughed about how fortunate it was that he met
Laurene, and she's kept him semi-sane, and I met Melinda, and
she's kept me semi-sane," Gates recalled. "We also discussed how
it's challenging to be one of our children, and how do we
mitigate that. It was pretty personal." At one point Eve, who in
the past had been in horse shows with Gates's daughter Jennifer,
wandered in from the kitchen, and Gates asked her what jumping
routines she liked best.

As their hours together drew to a close, Gates complimented Jobs
on "the incredible stuff" he had created and for being able to
save Apple in the late 1990s from the bozos who were about to
destroy it. He even made an interesting concession. Throughout
their careers they had adhered to competing philosophies on one
of the most fundamental of all digital issues: whether hardware
and software should be tightly integrated or more open. "I used
to believe that the open, horizontal model would prevail," Gates
told him. "But you proved that the integrated, vertical model
could also be great."Jobs responded with his own admission. "Your
model worked too," he said.

They were both right. Each model had worked in the realm of
personal computers, where Macintosh coexisted with a variety of
Windows machines, and that was likely to be true in the realm of
mobile devices as well. But after recounting their discussion,
Gates added a caveat: "The integrated approach works well when
Steve is at the helm. But it doesn't mean it will win many rounds
in the future." Jobs similarly felt compelled to add a caveat
about Gates after describing their meeting: "Of course, his
fragmented model worked, but it didn't make really great
products. It produced crappy products. That was the problem. The
big problem. At least over time."

"That Day Has Come"

Jobs had many other ideas and projects that he hoped to develop.
He wanted to disrupt the textbook industry and save the spines of
spavined students bearing backpacks by creating electronic texts
and curriculum material for the Tad. He was also working with
Bill Atkinson, his friend from the original Macintosh team, on
devising new digital technologies that worked at the pixel level
to allow people to take great photographs using their iPhones
even in situations without much light. And he very much wanted to
do for television sets what he had done for computers, music
players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. "I'd like to
create an integrated television set that is completely easy to
use," he told me. "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your
devices and with iCloud." No longer would users have to fiddle
with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. "It will
have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally
cracked it."

But by July 2011, his cancer had spread to his bones and other
parts of his body, and his doctors were having trouble finding
targeted drugs that could beat it back. He was in pain, sleeping
erratically, had little energy, and stopped going to work. He and
Powell had reserved a sailboat for a family cruise scheduled for
the end of that month, but those plans were scuttled. He was
eating almost no solid food, and he spent most of his days in his
bedroom watching television.

In August, I got a message that he wanted me to come visit. When
I arrived at his house, at mid-morning on a Saturday, he was
still asleep, so I sat with his wife and kids in the garden,
filled with a profusion of yellow roses and various types of
daisies, until he sent word that I should come in. I found him
curled up on the bed, wearing khaki shorts and a white
turtleneck. His legs were shockingly sticklike, but his smile was
easy and his mind quick. "We better hurry, because I have very
little energy," he said.

He wanted to show me some of his personal pictures and let me
pick a few to use in the book. Because he was too weak to get out
of bed, he pointed to various drawers in the room, and I
carefully brought him the photographs in each. As I sat on the
side of the bed, I held them up, one at a time, so he could see
them. Some prompted stories; others merely elicited a grunt or a
smile. I had never seen a picture of his father, Paul Jobs, and I
was startled when I came across a snapshot of a handsome
hardscrabble 1950s dad holding a toddler. "Yes, that's him," he
said. "You can use it." He then pointed to a box near the window
that contained a picture of his father looking at him lovingly at
his wedding. "He was a great man," Jobs said quietly. I murmured
something along the fines of "He would have been proud of you."
Jobs corrected me: "He was proud of me."

For a while, the pictures seemed to energize him. We discussed
what various people from his past, ranging from Tina Redse to
Mike Markkula to Bill Gates, now thought of him. I recounted what
Gates had said after he described his last visit with jobs, which
was that Apple had shown that the integrated approach could work,
but only "when Steve is at the helm." Jobs thought that was
silly. "Anyone could make better products that way, not just me,"
he said. So I asked him to name another company that made great
products by insisting on endto-end integration. He thought for a
while, trying to come up with an example. "The car companies," he
finally said, but then he added, "Or at least they used to."
When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and
politics, he offered a few sharp opinions about the lack of
strong leadership around the world. "I'm disappointed in Obama,"
he said. "He's having trouble leading because he's reluctant to
offend people or piss them off." He caught what I was thinking
and assented with a little smile: "Yes, that's not a problem I
ever had."

After two hours, he grew quiet, so I got off the bed and started
to leave. "Wait," he said, as he waved to me to sit back down. It
took a minute or two for him to regain enough energy to talk. "I
had a lot of trepidation about this project," he finally said,
referring to his decision to cooperate with this book. "I was
really worried."

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

"I wanted my kids to know me," he said. "I wasn't always there
for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I
did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write
about me if I died, and they wouldn't know anything. They'd get
it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had
to say."

He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was
putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he
looked at me and said, "I know there will be a lot in your book I
won't like." It was more a question than a statement, and when he
stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was
sure that would be true. "That's good," he said. "Then it won't
seem like an in-house book. I won't read it for a while, because
I don't want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year-if I'm
still around." By then, his eyes were closed and his energy gone,
so I quietly took my leave.

As his health deteriorated throughout the summer, Jobs slowly
began to face the inevitable: He would not be returning to Apple
as CEO. So it was time for him to resign. He wrestled with the
decision for weeks, discussing it with his wife, Bill Campbell,
Jony Ive, and George Riley. "One of the things I wanted to do for
Apple was to set an example of how you do a transfer of power
right," he told me. He joked about all the rough transitions that
had occurred at the company over the past thirty-five years.
"It's always been a drama, like a third-world country. Part of my
goal has been to make Apple the world's best company, and having
an orderly transition is key to that."

The best time and place to make the transition, he decided, was
at the company's regularly scheduled August 24 board meeting. He
was eager to do it in person, rather than merely send in a letter
or attend by phone, so he had been pushing himself to eat and
regain strength. The day before the meeting, he decided he could
make it, but he needed the help of a wheelchair. Arrangements
were made to have him driven to headquarters and wheeled to the
boardroom as secretly as possible.

He arrived just before 11 a.m., when the board members were
finishing committee reports and other routine business. Most knew
what was about to happen. But instead of going right to the topic
on everyone's mind, Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer, the chief
financial officer, went through the results for the quarter and
the projections for the year ahead. Then Jobs said quietly that
he had something personal to say. Cook asked if he and the other
top managers should leave, and Jobs paused for more than thirty
seconds before he decided they should. Once the room was cleared
of all but the six outside directors, he began to read aloud from
a letter he had dictated and revised over the previous weeks. "I
have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer
meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the
first to let you know," it began. "Unfortunately, that day has
come."

The letter was simple, direct, and only eight sentences long. In
it he suggested that Cook replace him, and he offered to serve as
chairman of the board. "I believe Apple's brightest and most
innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching
and contributing to its success in a new role."

There was a long silence. Al Gore was the first to speak, and he
listed Jobs's accomplishments during his tenure. Mickey Drexler
added that watching Jobs transform Apple was "the most incredible
thing I've ever seen in business," and Art Levinson praised
Jobs's diligence in ensuring that there was a smooth transition.
Campbell said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as the
formal resolutions transferring power were passed.

Over lunch, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller came in to display
mockups of some products that Apple had in the pipeline. Jobs
peppered them with questions and thoughts, especially about what
ca pacities the fourth-generation cellular networks might have
and what features needed to be in future phones. At one point
Forstall showed off a voice recognition app. As he feared, Jobs
grabbed the phone in the middle of the demo and proceeded to see
if he could confuse it. "What's the weather in Palo Alto?" he
asked. The app answered. After a few more questions, Jobs
challenged it: "Are you a man or a woman?" Amazingly, the app
answered in its robotic voice, "They did not assign me a gender."
For a moment the mood lightened.

When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense
of triumph that HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to
compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared that
it was actually a sad moment. "Hewlett and Packard built a great
company, and they thought they had left it in good hands," he
said. "But now it's being dismembered and destroyed. It's tragic.
I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at
Apple." As he prepared to leave, the board members gathered
around to give him a hug.

After meeting with his executive team to explain the news, Jobs
rode home with George Riley. When they arrived at the house,
Powell was in the backyard harvesting honey from her hives, with
help from Eve. They took off their screen helmets and brought the
honey pot to the kitchen, where Reed and Erin had gathered, so
that they could all celebrate the graceful transition. Jobs took
a spoonful of the honey and pronounced it wonderfully sweet.
That evening, he stressed to me that his hope was to remain as
active as his health allowed. "I'm going to work on new products
and marketing and the things that I like," he said. But when I
asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the
company he had built, his tone turned wistful, and he shifted
into the past tense. "I've had a very lucky career, a very lucky
life," he replied. "I've done all that I can do."
..........

To be continued