So when Steve spat his expletives about Neil Young, I just laughed. I wasn’t surprised. He could hold on to grudges for decades. Even after Steve had gotten what he wanted from Disney, Eisner remained a curse word to him. Gassée’s “sin” of telling Sculley that Jobs intended to oust him as CEO occurred way back in 1985; a quarter century later, Steve still snarled whenever the Frenchman’s name came up.
His grudges could even extend to companies that Steve believed had wronged Apple. His passionate antipathy for Adobe, for instance, was based in part on the fact that founder John Warnock had decided to also support Windows with his company’s software at a time when Apple was foundering. It was a perfectly rational decision at the time, when Macs held less than 5 percent of the personal computer market. But Steve saw it as a betrayal.
So when Steve himself was back on top of the world, he stuck it to Adobe by refusing to have the iPhone support a program called Flash. Flash was the leading software for viewing video and other interactive or animated content online. Adobe had done a good job with Flash, which was easy for developers to work with. But it had security holes, and could crash unexpectedly. Adobe had not been as diligent about correcting those problems as Steve would have liked. The iPhone was a brand-new networked-computing platform, and the last thing he wanted was to leave it vulnerable to hacking or security problems, especially in its infancy. So he left the program off the iPhone, and eventually off the iPad as well. Flash had been such a popular piece of software that Apple was deluged with complaints. But Steve was adamant, and in 2010 he issued a lengthy statement with six reasons he had not supported Flash. His reasoning was sound, but his words nonetheless smacked of revenge. Apple’s power was such that Adobe paid a price for its supposed betrayal. Flash survives, but Adobe has begun to focus more energy and investment on other streaming media technologies.
Steve’s biggest grudge of his later years was directed toward Google. There were many reasons for Steve to feel personally betrayed when Google introduced Android, the mobile operating system that mimicked many of the features of Apple’s own iOS, in 2008. What really galled him was that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and chairman, had been a board member and a friend for years. Now his company was releasing an able, direct competitor to the product Apple had been working on intensely during Schmidt’s years on the board.
Even harder for Steve to accept was the fact that Google decided to make Android available to handset manufacturers for free, thus guaranteeing that phones made by Samsung, HTC, LG, and others could undercut Apple in the new marketplace it had created with their cheaper devices. Steve was downright livid. Google was pulling a page from the first chapter of Microsoft’s handbook for dominating the world. Clearly, Steve believed, Google’s intent in offering a free operating system was to propagate a standard across all cellphones and mobile devices, leading to nothing less than a replay of what Gates had done to Apple’s Macintosh with the release of Windows two decades before.
Determined not to let that happen again, Steve was not content to rely only on great products. In 2011, just months before he died, Apple unleashed a torrent of litigation seeking damages from Samsung, the leading maker of Android-based phones and tablets, and even asking for an injunction to prevent the Korean manufacturer from selling its phones in the United States. Steve didn’t sue Google directly, since the company was getting little direct financial benefit from Android, which was free. But he could go after the device manufacturers. (Apple also sued HTC and Motorola Mobility, a handset maker that Google bought in 2012.) He accused the companies of copying outright many of the key user-interface features of Apple’s iOS, launching a panoply of suits that were not settled until 2014. Apple won a major victory in U.S. courts, but the company still has not actually collected any money from Samsung. Meanwhile, both sides agreed to drop all Android-related lawsuits outside the United States in 2014. It seemed an acknowledgment that the litigation had become an albatross for all involved. Venting Steve’s anger against Google had cost the company at least $60 million in lawyers’ fees. Steve, whose intense focus was a huge competitive advantage, had created a massive legal effort that will likely prove, in the long run, to have been nothing but a distraction.
EVERYTHING ABOUT WORK was personal for Steve. Over the years, he had learned to trust this passion, and that trust had led him to intuitive leaps that had moved the whole industry forward. But the passion had a flip side, too.
For one thing, deriving so much of his own sense of personal identity from work meant that Steve, a man who could really dish it out, was surprisingly sensitive to criticism. Like most great public figures, Steve had fundamentally inured himself to the envious admonishments of others. But he did feel he deserved the occasional pat on the back for his contributions to modern life. More than once, after some of the tougher stories I wrote in Fortune criticized him personally, he emailed or called to say, “You hurt my feelings.” I had half expected him to be nonplussed, after some of those stories. But personally wounded? He didn’t always take the criticism so personally, however. When I wrote a column snarkily suggesting that the first version of Apple TV would make a great doorstop, and wondering if it might be of some actual use as a modernistic sushi tray, Steve emailed me as soon as he’d read it to say, “I can’t disagree with anything in this one.” He was the only CEO—with the possible exception of Gil Amelio—who ever reacted so personally to my coverage.
Steve brought an unguarded and painfully blunt version of his personality to his relationships at work. That helped him inspire a unique kind of loyalty that was the glue that held together the great teams that ran Apple with him. But his persona also presented a challenge when he had to make changes in the team, as he did a few times during his last decade. Steve would not indulge any laziness, entitlement, or overreaching ambition from members of his core team. He regularly pitted one against another in order to see whose ideas or intelligence would prevail. Everyone had to be in top form, solidly contributing and fully engaged, or they would find themselves subtly marginalized by Steve. His relationships with Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell, among others, demonstrated how quickly Steve could revoke the special insider status that was his to grant.
Anderson was the first to leave the executive team. He was ten years Steve’s senior and old enough to be the father of some of the newcomers. He’d had a great run as CFO and was widely recognized in the company as the man who had kept Apple alive long enough to bring Steve back. He had operated as one of the most autonomous members of the executive team, since Steve wasn’t expert in his field. There was symbolic significance in the fact that his office was just a couple of doors down from Steve’s. If the CEO wanted to make a big change to the budget, he’d just walk over and ask Fred to help him find the money. “Steve and I had a mutual, genuine respect for each other as business partners. It was genuine,” remembers Anderson. “So if he wants five million or ten million dollars more for this great idea or marketing program, he wouldn’t just haul off and do it. He’d walk down the hall and see me, and use his persuasive powers. ‘Fred, come on, can’t you find room for this?’ You know? That’s the way we worked.”
Fred had stayed on longer than he had intended, despite feeling a little weary. In fact, he’d thought he was ready to move on or retire as early as 2001. That year, Dell Computer had recruited him. Steve responded by convincing the board to make a onetime special award to Fred of options for one million shares, just to let him know how much he was appreciated. Steve also requested options grants of the same size for Avie, Ruby, and Tim Cook, and smaller amounts for other members of the executive team. It was a gesture that would come back to haunt Steve—and Anderson—but at the time it was welcome and enriching. Anderson stayed on three more years, despite the fact that Steve wouldn’t let him join the board of directors of any other companies. “Steve liked to control you. He liked to have you under his sphere of influence,” says Anderson. Eventually, Steve did let Fred join the boards of 3Com and eBay, and when Fred finally did retire, Steve asked him to join Apple’s own board.