All this standardization left an opening, of course. An opening for someone who preferred creating machines that delighted real people, rather than primarily serve the needs of business. An opening for someone just like Steve Jobs. At the time of our interview, Steve was still a confused fellow. His lingering resentment of the way he had been treated by Sculley and the Apple board, his frustration about the misfortunes and secondary importance of NeXT, and his egotistical need to matter in an industry whose direction was being dictated by someone else made it impossible for him then to see a way out of his dilemma. For the next few years, he would press ahead with his goal of making winners of NeXT and Pixar. But eventually he would sense his way to the opening that Gates had left behind—the opening for a company that could once again make insanely great computing machines for you and me. And when he found that opening, and made the most of it, he was rewarded with a kind of adulation that Gates would never come close to receiving.
Chapter 7
Luck
WOODY
Oh, Buzz, you’ve had a big fall. You must not be thinking clearly.
BUZZ
No, Woody, for the first time I am thinking clearly.
(looking at himself)
You were right all along. I’m not a Space Ranger.
I’m just a toy. A stupid little insignificant toy.
WOODY
Whoa, hey—wait a minute. Being a toy is a lot better than being a Space Ranger.
BUZZ
Yeah, right.
WOODY
No, it is. Look, over in that house is a kid who thinks you are the greatest, and it’s not because you’re a Space Ranger, pal, it’s because you’re a toy! You are his toy.
(from Toy Story)
A few months after that 1991 interview with Bill and Steve, I moved to Tokyo with my family to be Fortune’s Asia bureau chief. Part of the reason I jumped at the Tokyo assignment was that the computer industry in the early 1990s had grown a bit dull now that Microsoft and Intel, collectively known as Wintel, had basically won the personal computer wars. Innovation seemed at a standstill, and the future seemed to be merely a game of cutting costs and optimizing the various PC clones that were being offered by the likes of Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and HP. Apple had pretty much fallen into irrelevancy.
By the time I returned to Silicon Valley three years later, however, much had changed. Bill Clinton had unseated George H. W. Bush as president, after a single term. Bill Gates’s net worth had surpassed $10 billion, and he had edged out Warren Buffett to become the richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine. John Sculley had been fired from Apple (but the company was still irrelevant). And, the computing world was starting to get interesting again. Netscape Communications had released beta versions of the first commercial Internet browser, which it would eventually call Navigator, and the terms World Wide Web and dot-com and URL were creeping into the vernacular. The Internet was clearly something that could change everything in computing, and that was a good thing for a technology and business journalist.
In July 1994, I emailed Steve to tell him that Fortune had moved my family and me back from Tokyo, and that I’d call on him sometime to catch up, once I had leased an office and gotten settled in. A few weeks later the phone rang in our new home, on a Saturday morning when I was there alone refinishing the wood floors.
“Hi, Brent, this is Steve,” he said, in the singsongy, laid-back, California-cool voice he often used on the phone, so pseudo-cheery that it almost sounded like a recording. Then he fell back into character. “So you’re back. What happened? Did Fortune get embarrassed when they put John Sculley on the cover as a savior the very same week he got fired?” He cackled. Here we go again, I thought. He’s interviewing me.
“You should come over,” he said. “We can take a walk or something.” I said I had to finish what I was doing, but that I could get over to the house in an hour or so. “Okay,” he said, and promptly hung up.
When I arrived at his home, Steve was fussing around in the kitchen, wearing his usual summertime garb: threadbare cutoffs with the white front-pocket linings sticking out of worn-through areas, and a faded, long-sleeved NeXT T-shirt. (He hadn’t yet started wearing the black mock turtlenecks custom-made by Issey Miyake.) His feet were bare, of course. A big, luxurious Japanese chow was lounging quietly under an expansive, rustic worktable in the middle of the room. The dog clearly had noticed me, but he wasn’t very interested.
“I guess he isn’t a watchdog,” I said, hoping to get Steve’s attention. Steve turned around, and for one of but a handful of times in dozens of meetings and encounters over the years, engaged in a few minutes of small talk. Enough to let me know that the dog was really old, that Laurene was pregnant again, and that she and Reed weren’t around.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m feeling really good about Pixar’s first animated film,” he said as he hooked a stool with his foot and pulled it underneath him. Then he motioned for me to sit down. “It’s called Toy Story and it will be another year before it’s finished. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’ll be unlike anything anybody has ever seen before. Disney is considering making it the big holiday release next year.”
WHEN PEOPLE LIST the many industries that Steve is said to have revolutionized, they often include the movies, since Pixar brought a whole new art form to the big screen. I’m not of that mind. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull are the men who brought 3-D computer graphics to the movies, and revived the art of animated storytelling.
That said, Steve did play a critical role in Pixar’s success. His influence was constrained, because Catmull and Lasseter were the ones shaping Pixar, not he. But that constraint, ironically, freed him up to do what only he could do best, and he did it brilliantly.
Just as significant for the trajectory of his life is what he learned by watching Lasseter, Catmull, and their incredibly talented employees cobble together their magic. At Pixar, especially when the company started down the path of actually making movies, Steve started absorbing an approach to management that helped make him much more effective when he returned to Apple in 1997. These are the years where his negotiating style gained new subtlety—without losing its ballsy brashness. This is when he first started understanding the meaning of teamwork as something that’s far more complicated than simply rallying small groups—without losing his capacity to lead and inspire. And this is where he started to develop patience—without losing any of his memorable, and motivating, edge.
Steve was certainly lucky that things went this way for him at Pixar, a sideline outfit that he bought on something of a whim, that succeeded in a business he didn’t intend for it to pursue, and that made him far wealthier than the company that was his life’s true work. Ed Catmull has thought a lot about the role luck plays at a great company, and how businesspeople manage that luck. It’s all in the preparedness, he says, and in creating a culture that can adapt to the unexpected. “These things are always going to happen. What separates you is your response,” he says. Steve responded well, and that’s in part because of his greatest piece of luck: getting to work with Lasseter and Catmull. In many ways, his response to the principles he gleaned from them would be a catalyst for his later success at Apple.