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

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE SECOND COMING
What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .
Steve Jobs, 1996
Things Fall Apart
When Jobs unveiled the NeXT computer in 1988, there was a burst of excitement. That fizzled 
when the computer finally went on sale the following year. Jobs’s ability to dazzle, intimidate, and 
spin the press began to fail him, and there was a series of stories on the company’s woes. “NeXT 
is incompatible with other computers at a time when the industry is moving toward 
interchangeable systems,” Bart Ziegler of Associated Press reported. “Because relatively little 
software exists to run on NeXT, it has a hard time attracting customers.”
NeXT tried to reposition itself as the leader in a new category, personal workstations, for 
people who wanted the power of a workstation and the friendliness of a personal computer. But 
those customers were by now buying them from fast-growing Sun Microsystems. Revenues for 
NeXT in 1990 were $28 million; Sun made $2.5 billion that year. IBM abandoned its deal to 
license the NeXT software, so Jobs was forced to do something against his nature: Despite his 
ingrained belief that hardware and software should be integrally linked, he agreed in January 1992 
to license the NeXTSTEP operating system to run on other computers.
One surprising defender of Jobs was Jean-Louis Gassée, who had bumped elbows with Jobs 
when he replaced him at Apple and subsequently been ousted himself. He wrote an article 
extolling the creativity of NeXT products. “NeXT might not be Apple,” Gassée argued, “but Steve 
is still Steve.” A few days later his wife answered a knock on the door and went running upstairs 
to tell him that Jobs was standing there. He thanked Gassée for the article and invited him to an 
event where Intel’s Andy Grove would join Jobs in announcing that NeXTSTEP would be ported 
to the IBM/Intel platform. “I sat next to Steve’s father, Paul Jobs, a movingly dignified 
individual,” Gassée recalled. “He raised a difficult son, but he was proud and happy to see him 
onstage with Andy Grove.”
A year later Jobs took the inevitable subsequent step: He gave up making the hardware 
altogether. This was a painful decision, just as it had been when he gave up making hardware at 
Pixar. He cared about all aspects of his products, but the hardware was a particular passion. He 
was energized by great design, obsessed over manufacturing details, and would spend hours 
watching his robots make his perfect machines. But now he had to lay off more than half his 

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workforce, sell his beloved factory to Canon (which auctioned off the fancy furniture), and satisfy 
himself with a company that tried to license an operating system to manufacturers of uninspired 
machines.
By the mid-1990s Jobs was finding some pleasure in his new family life and his astonishing 
triumph in the movie business, but he despaired about the personal computer industry. “Innovation 
has virtually ceased,” he told Gary Wolf of 
Wired
at the end of 1995. “Microsoft dominates with 
very little innovation. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages.”
He was also gloomy in an interview with Tony Perkins and the editors of 
Red Herring
. First, he 
displayed the “Bad Steve” side of his personality. Soon after Perkins and his colleagues arrived, 
Jobs slipped out the back door “for a walk,” and he didn’t return for forty-five minutes. When the 
magazine’s photographer began taking pictures, he snapped at her sarcastically and made her stop. 
Perkins later noted, “Manipulation, selfishness, or downright rudeness, we couldn’t figure out the 
motivation behind his madness.” When he finally settled down for the interview, he said that even 
the advent of the web would do little to stop Microsoft’s domination. “Windows has won,” he 
said. “It beat the Mac, unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2. An inferior product won.”