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

Apple Falling
For a few years after Jobs was ousted, Apple was able to coast comfortably with a high profit 
margin based on its temporary dominance in desktop publishing. Feeling like a genius back in 
1987, John Sculley had made a series of proclamations that nowadays sound embarrassing. Jobs 
wanted Apple “to become a wonderful consumer products company,” Sculley wrote. “This was a 
lunatic plan. . . . Apple would never be a consumer products company. . . . We couldn’t bend 
reality to all our dreams of changing the world. . . . High tech could not be designed and sold as a 
consumer product.”
Jobs was appalled, and he became angry and contemptuous as Sculley presided over a steady 
decline in market share for Apple in the early 1990s. “Sculley destroyed Apple by bringing in 
corrupt people and corrupt values,” Jobs later lamented. “They cared about making money—for 
themselves mainly, and also for Apple—rather than making great products.” He felt that Sculley’s 
drive for profits came at the expense of gaining market share. “Macintosh lost to Microsoft 
because Sculley insisted on milking all the profits he could get rather than improving the product 
and making it affordable.” As a result, the profits eventually disappeared.
It had taken Microsoft a few years to replicate Macintosh’s graphical user interface, but by 
1990 it had come out with Windows 3.0, which began the company’s march to dominance in the 
desktop market. Windows 95, which was released in 1995, became the most successful operating 
system ever, and Macintosh sales began to collapse. “Microsoft simply ripped off what other 
people did,” Jobs later said. “Apple deserved it. After I left, it didn’t invent anything new. The 
Mac hardly improved. It was a sitting duck for Microsoft.”
His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club 
at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he 
could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and 
pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, 
F3 . . . function keys. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he deadpanned. Then he 
signed the mutilated keyboard.
During his 1995 Christmas vacation in Kona Village, Hawaii, Jobs went walking along the 
beach with his friend Larry Ellison, the irrepressible Oracle chairman. They discussed making a 
takeover bid for Apple and restoring Jobs as its head. Ellison said he could line up $3 billion in 
financing: “I will buy Apple, you will get 25% of it right away for being CEO, and we can restore 
it to its past glory.” But Jobs demurred. “I decided I’m not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,” he 
explained. “If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.”
By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. 
Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced 
Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, 

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and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was 
CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock 
price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other 
stocks into the stratosphere.
Amelio was not a fan of Jobs. Their first meeting had been in 1994, just after Amelio was 
elected to the Apple board. Jobs had called him and announced, “I want to come over and see 
you.” Amelio invited him over to his office at National Semiconductor, and he later recalled 
watching through the glass wall of his office as Jobs arrived. He looked “rather like a boxer, 
aggressive and elusively graceful, or like an elegant jungle cat ready to spring at its prey.” After a 
few minutes of pleasantries—far more than Jobs usually engaged in—he abruptly announced the 
reason for his visit. He wanted Amelio to help him return to Apple as the CEO. “There’s only one 
person who can rally the Apple troops,” Jobs said, “only one person who can straighten out the 
company.” The Macintosh era had passed, Jobs argued, and it was now time for Apple to create 
something new that was just as innovative.
“If the Mac is dead, what’s going to replace it?” Amelio asked. Jobs’s reply didn’t impress him. 
“Steve didn’t seem to have a clear answer,” Amelio later said. “He seemed to have a set of one-
liners.” Amelio felt he was witnessing Jobs’s reality distortion field and was proud to be immune 
to it. He shooed Jobs unceremoniously out of his office.
By the summer of 1996 Amelio realized that he had a serious problem. Apple was pinning its 
hopes on creating a new operating system, called Copland, but Amelio had discovered soon after 
becoming CEO that it was a bloated piece of vaporware that would not solve Apple’s needs for 
better networking and memory protection, nor would it be ready to ship as scheduled in 1997. He 
publicly promised that he would quickly find an alternative. His problem was that he didn’t have 
one.
So Apple needed a partner, one that could make a stable operating system, preferably one that 
was UNIX-like and had an object-oriented application layer. There was one company that could 
obviously supply such software—NeXT—but it would take a while for Apple to focus on it.
Apple first homed in on a company that had been started by Jean-Louis Gassée, called Be. 
Gassée began negotiating the sale of Be to Apple, but in August 1996 he overplayed his hand at a 
meeting 
with Amelio in Hawaii. He said he wanted to bring his fifty-person team to Apple, and he asked 
for 15% of the company, worth about $500 million. Amelio was stunned. Apple calculated that Be 
was worth about $50 million. After a few offers and counteroffers, Gassée refused to budge from 
demanding at least $275 million. He thought that Apple had no alternatives. It got back to Amelio 
that Gassée said, “I’ve got them by the balls, and I’m going to squeeze until it hurts.” This did not 
please Amelio.
Apple’s chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, argued for going with Sun’s UNIX-based 
Solaris operating system, even though it did not yet have a friendly user interface. Amelio began 
to favor using, of all things, Microsoft’s Windows NT, which he felt could be rejiggered on the 
surface to look and feel just like a Mac while being compatible with the wide range of software 
available to Windows users. Bill Gates, eager to make a deal, began personally calling Amelio.
There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier