Although Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Steve Jobs revealed a great deal of information about the late Apple co-founder, the period during which Jobs was exiled from Apple (from 1985-1996) still isn’t very well documented.
Fortunately, Wall Street Journal and Fortune journalist Brent Schlender has uncovered a fantastic stash of information about that period. Schlender collected around 3 dozed cassette tapes full of interview material taken during Jobs’ lost years – years which Schlender refers to as the “Wilderness Years.”
In a lengthy article posted at Fast Company (via Gizmodo), Schlender fills in many of the details from this period, including Steve Jobs’ purchase of Pixar, and his involvement in helping craft it into the highly successful animation studio that was eventually purchased by Disney.
Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from the article:
Over all the years Jobs was away from Apple, I can’t recall him saying one good thing about the company’s brass. Early on, he whined about how CEO John Sculley had “poisoned” the culture of the place. As the years went by, and Apple’s fortunes dimmed, Jobs’s attacks became more pointed: “Right now it’s like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz: ‘I’m melting. I’m melting,’ ” he told me in the mid-1990s. “The jig is up. They can’t seem to come out with a great computer to save their lives. They need to spend big on industrial design, reintroduce the hipness factor. But no, they hire [Gil] Amelio [as CEO]. It’s as if Nike hired the guy that ran Kinney shoes.”
“We’ve done so many hardware products where Jony and I have looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know how to make it any better than this, we just don’t know how to make it,’ ” Jobs told me. “But we always do; we realize another way. And then it’s not long after the new thing comes out that we look at the older thing and go, ‘How can we ever have done that?’ “
At NeXT, Jobs was damn well going to deliver a great computer. He was going to do it with massive resources, raising well over $100 million from the likes of H. Ross Perot, Japanese printer maker Canon, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was going to do it with an astonishing automated factory in Fremont, California, where every surface and piece of equipment would be painted in specific shades of gray, black, and white. He was going to do it in style, working with a full-time architect to give the corporate headquarters in Redwood City a distinctive, austere aesthetic; NeXT HQ looked much like the interior of one of today’s Apple Stores. The centerpiece was a staircase that seemed to float in air.
Fascinated, Jobs tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Apple’s board to buy the group. “These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead,” Jobs remembered. “They were way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important.” After getting bounced from Apple, Jobs went back to Lucas and drove a hard bargain. He paid $5 million for the group’s assets and provided another $5 million in working capital for the company, which was christened Pixar.
I don’t think anybody’s going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.
I highly recommend reading through the entire article if you get the chance – it’s a fascinating read. The full story, which will include many more insights, will appear in the May Issue of Fast Company.