Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

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.
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.”

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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 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 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,” Kahng said. “Total destruction. Closed is the kiss of 
death.”
Jobs disagreed. He telephoned Ed Woolard to say he was getting Apple out of the licensing 
business. The board acquiesced, and in September he reached a deal to pay Power Computing 
$100 million to relinquish its license and give Apple access to its database of customers. He soon 
terminated the licenses of the other cloners as well. “It was the dumbest thing in the world to let 
companies making crappier hardware use our operating system and cut into our sales,” he later 
said.