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

The Microsoft Pact
The climax of Jobs’s August 1997 Macworld appearance was a bombshell announcement, one that 
made the cover of both 
Time
and 
Newsweek.
Near the end of his speech, he paused for a sip of 
water and began to talk in more subdued tones. “Apple lives in an ecosystem,” he said. “It needs 
help from other partners. Relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody in this industry.” 
For dramatic effect, he paused again, and then explained: “I’d like to announce one of our first 
new partnerships today, a very meaningful one, and that is one with Microsoft.” The Microsoft 
and Apple logos appeared together on the screen as people gasped.
Apple and Microsoft had been at war for a decade over a variety of copyright and patent issues, 
most notably whether Microsoft had stolen the look and feel of Apple’s graphical user interface. 
Just as Jobs was being eased out of Apple in 1985, John Sculley had struck a surrender deal: 
Microsoft could license the Apple GUI for Windows 1.0, and in return it would make Excel 
exclusive to the Mac for up to two years. In 1988, after Microsoft came out with Windows 2.0, 
Apple sued. Sculley contended that the 1985 deal did not apply to Windows 2.0 and that further 
refinements to Windows (such as copying Bill Atkinson’s trick of “clipping” overlapping 
windows) had made the infringement more blatant. By 1997 Apple had lost the case and various 
appeals, but remnants of the litigation and threats of new suits lingered. In addition, President 
Clinton’s Justice Department was preparing a massive antitrust case against Microsoft. Jobs 
invited the lead prosecutor, Joel Klein, to Palo Alto. Don’t worry about extracting a huge remedy 
against Microsoft, Jobs told him over coffee. Instead simply keep them tied up in litigation. That 
would allow Apple the opportunity, Jobs explained, to “make an end run” around Microsoft and 
start offering competing products.
Under Amelio, the showdown had become explosive. Microsoft refused to commit to 
developing Word and Excel for future Macintosh operating systems, which could have destroyed 
Apple. In defense of Bill Gates, he was not simply being vindictive. It was understandable that he 
was reluctant to commit to developing for a future Macintosh operating system when no one, 
including the ever-changing leadership at Apple, seemed to know what that new operating system 
would be. Right after Apple bought NeXT, Amelio and Jobs flew together to visit Microsoft, but 
Gates had trouble figuring out which of them was in charge. A few days later he called Jobs 
privately. “Hey, what the fuck, am I supposed to put my applications on the NeXT OS?” Gates 
asked. Jobs responded by “making smart-ass remarks about Gil,” Gates recalled, and suggesting 
that the situation would soon be clarified.
When the leadership issue was partly resolved by Amelio’s ouster, one of Jobs’s first phone 
calls was to Gates. Jobs recalled:
I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. 
We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for 
the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If 
we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, 
and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out 
how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the 
Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success.”
When I recounted to him what Jobs said, Gates agreed it was accurate. “We had a group of people 
who liked working on the Mac stuff, and we liked the Mac,” Gates recalled. He had been 
negotiating with Amelio for six months, and the proposals kept getting longer and more 
complicated. “So Steve comes in and says, ‘Hey, that deal is too complicated. What I want is a 
simple deal. I want the commitment and I want an investment.’ And so we put that together in just 
four weeks.”

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Gates and his chief financial officer, Greg Maffei, made the trip to Palo Alto to work out the 
framework for a deal, and then Maffei 
returned alone the following Sunday to work on the details. When he arrived at Jobs’s home, 
Jobs grabbed two bottles of water out of the refrigerator and took Maffei for a walk around the 
Palo Alto neighborhood. Both men wore shorts, and Jobs walked barefoot. As they sat in front of a 
Baptist church, Jobs cut to the core issues. “These are the things we care about,” he said. “A 
commitment to make software for the Mac and an investment.”
Although the negotiations went quickly, the final details were not finished until hours before 
Jobs’s Macworld speech in Boston. He was rehearsing at the Park Plaza Castle when his cell 
phone rang. “Hi, Bill,” he said as his words echoed through the old hall. Then he walked to a 
corner and spoke in a soft tone so others couldn’t hear. The call lasted an hour. Finally, the 
remaining deal points were resolved. “Bill, thank you for your support of this company,” Jobs said 
as he crouched in his shorts. “I think the world’s a better place for it.”
During his Macworld keynote address, Jobs walked through the details of the Microsoft deal. 
At first there were groans and hisses from the faithful. Particularly galling was Jobs’s 
announcement that, as part of the peace pact, “Apple has decided to make Internet Explorer its 
default browser on the Macintosh.” The audience erupted in boos, and Jobs quickly added, “Since 
we believe in choice, we’re going to be shipping other Internet browsers, as well, and the user can, 
of course, change their default should they choose to.” There were some laughs and scattered 
applause. The audience was beginning to come around, especially when he announced that 
Microsoft would be investing $150 million in Apple and getting nonvoting shares.
But the mellower mood was shattered for a moment when Jobs made one of the few visual and 
public relations gaffes of his onstage career. “I happen to have a special guest with me today via 
satellite downlink,” he said, and suddenly Bill Gates’s face appeared on the huge screen looming 
over Jobs and the auditorium. There was a thin smile on Gates’s face that flirted with being a 
smirk. The audience gasped in horror, followed by some boos and catcalls. The scene was such a 
brutal echo of the 1984 Big Brother ad that you half expected (and hoped?) that an athletic woman 
would suddenly come running down the aisle and vaporize the screenshot with a well-thrown 
hammer.
But it was all for real, and Gates, unaware of the jeering, began speaking on the satellite link 
from Microsoft headquarters. “Some of the most exciting work that I’ve done in my career has 
been the work that I’ve done with Steve on the Macintosh,” he intoned in his high-pitched 
singsong. As he went on to tout the new version of Microsoft Office that was being made for the 
Macintosh, the audience quieted down and then slowly seemed to accept the new world order. 
Gates even was able to rouse some applause when he said that the new Mac versions of Word and 
Excel would be “in many ways more advanced than what we’ve done on the Windows platform.”
Jobs realized that the image of Gates looming over him and the audience was a mistake. “I 
wanted him to come to Boston,” Jobs later said. “That was my worst and stupidest staging event 
ever. It was bad because it made me look small, and Apple look small, and as if everything was in 
Bill’s hands.” Gates likewise was embarrassed when he saw the videotape of the event. “I didn’t 
know that my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions,” he said.
Jobs tried to reassure the audience with an impromptu sermon. “If we want to move forward 
and see Apple healthy again, we have to let go of a few things here,” he told the audience. “We 
have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. . . . I think if we want 
Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of 
gratitude.”
The Microsoft announcement, along with Jobs’s passionate reengagement with the company, 
provided a much-needed jolt for Apple. By the end of the day, its stock had skyrocketed $6.56, or 
33%, to close at $26.31, twice the price of the day Amelio resigned. The one-day jump added 
$830 million to Apple’s stock market capitalization. The company was back from the edge of the 
grave.

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