Steve Jobs on Crisis Response

Think different, Apple's advertising slogan from 1997 to 2002, was created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day and read widely as a riposte to IBM's Think. The campaign's birth was scrappy: in 1986 chief executive John Sculley had replaced Chiat/Day with BBDO, and in 1997, under Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a brand campaign with the slogan We're back. Everyone in the room approved except the recently returned Jobs, who called the slogan stupid on the ground that Apple was not back yet. He then invited three agencies to present ideas reflecting the philosophy he wanted reinforced inside the company he had co-founded. Art director Craig Tanimoto coined the phrase, and Jobs insisted on different as a noun — think victory, think beauty, colloquial like think big — rejecting the grammatically safer think differently. The slogan was still printed on iMac packaging decades later.

The original business plan — selling the Pixar Image Computer, a high-end visualization machine — failed. Sales were inadequate, losses grew, and Jobs kept increasing his investment in exchange for a larger stake, reducing management and employee ownership until his cumulative $50 million gave him control of the entire company. In April 1990 Pixar sold its hardware division to Vicom Systems, and early 1991 brought layoffs that cut the staff to roughly forty-two people, its original size. On March 6, 1991, Jobs bought the company outright from its employees and became full owner; he contemplated folding it into NeXT, but NeXT's co-founders refused. As late as 1994 he considered selling Pixar to Hallmark Cards, to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, or to Oracle chief Larry Ellison, and only after New York critics signaled that Toy Story would be a hit did he decide to give the studio another chance, take an active leadership role, and make himself chief executive.

By the mid-1990s Apple's distress was existential. In 1995 the chief financial officer asked directors to find a buyer, judging the company no longer able to support itself, and resigned when the board refused; Fortune wrote in February 1996 that the company which invented the personal computer would likely disappear, noting that $1,000 invested in Apple a decade earlier was worth $2,900 against $22,000 in Compaq. Apple came hours from acquisition by Sun Microsystems, refused an IBM offer it later sought again, and failed to ship a modern operating system after the Copland project collapsed into feature creep. Choosing between Be's BeOS and NeXT, Apple announced on December 20, 1996, that it would purchase NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system for roughly $429 million plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, bringing Jobs back into management for the first time since 1985 and giving the Mac its next technological foundation.

At the August 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft whose terms included a five-year commitment to keep releasing Microsoft Office for the Macintosh and a $150 million investment in Apple. The long-running patent dispute over whether Windows infringed Apple's interface rights was settled, and Internet Explorer would ship as the Mac's default browser. Jobs framed the deal for the audience as the end of an era of rivalry: for Apple to win, Apple had to do a really good job, and if others helped, so much the better. The money was largely symbolic — Apple's market capitalization stood at $2.46 billion the day before, with $1.7 billion in quarterly revenue and $1.2 billion in cash reserves — but the psychological effect was immediate, signaling that the returning founder would trade pride for survival, keep Office on the platform, and refocus the company on execution rather than litigation.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, evident in the magnesium case of the NeXTcube, and the strain on the hardware division told: after selling only 50,000 machines, NeXT withdrew from hardware entirely in 1993 and transitioned to software with the release of NeXTSTEP for Intel processors, refashioning itself as NeXT Software. The company reported its first annual profit, $1.03 million, in 1994, and in 1996 released WebObjects, an early enterprise framework for building web applications that Apple would later use to run the Apple Store, MobileMe, and the iTunes Store. In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT for $427 million, returning Jobs to the company as an advisor before his elevation to chief executive. NeXTSTEP became the basis for Rhapsody and Mac OS X, whose Darwin core now underlies macOS and iOS, making the failed workstation company the software DNA of every Apple device sold since.

By early 1985 the Macintosh's failure to dent the IBM PC had strengthened Sculley's hand. In May, encouraged by director Arthur Rock, Sculley proposed reorganizing Apple to strip Jobs of the Macintosh group and park him over new-product development, a role that would have rendered the founder decorative. Jobs answered with a plan of his own to oust Sculley, but the scheme leaked; confronted, Jobs said he would leave, and the board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider, while Sculley made clear he held the votes. On September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted his letter of resignation to the board, and five senior Apple employees resigned with him to join his next venture. The ouster became the hinge of his biography: twelve years in exile, then a return with the operating system, the design taste, and the scar tissue that would save Apple.

Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded, and after the board ousted Gil Amelio as chief executive on July 9, 1997, Jobs became de facto leader, formally interim chief executive on September 16. He moved fast: in March 1998 he terminated the Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc projects to concentrate resources on returning to profitability, and employees joked darkly about sharing an elevator with him in case the doors opened without their jobs, his summary executions being rare but a handful sufficing to terrorize a company. He rewrote the Macintosh clone licensing program to make it prohibitively costly, ending the clonemakers' free ride on the Mac OS. Much of NeXT's technology, most importantly NeXTSTEP, was folded into what became Mac OS X. At Macworld in January 2000 he dropped the interim label and quipped about serving as iCEO, the pun marking a permanent restoration.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told employees he had a tumor in his pancreas — a rare, less aggressive islet-cell neuroendocrine type, distinct from the usually fatal form of the disease. Biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for nine months, trying a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and treatments found online, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004 that appeared to remove the tumor; he received no chemotherapy or radiation, and Tim Cook ran the company meanwhile. Speculation mounted as his keynotes turned gaunt, and in August 2008 Bloomberg briefly published a prepared obituary with blanks for age and cause of death, which Jobs answered by paraphrasing Mark Twain on exaggerated reports of his death, then closed another presentation with a slide reading 110/70, his blood pressure. In January 2009 he took a six-month leave; Cook, who shared his rare blood type, offered a portion of his own liver and was refused. Jobs underwent a liver transplant in Memphis that April, with a prognosis described as excellent.

On January 17, 2011, Apple announced another medical leave so Jobs could focus on his health, with Cook again running day-to-day operations while Jobs stayed involved in major strategic decisions. He still appeared at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the developers' conference on June 6, and pitched Apple's proposed new campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7. On August 24, 2011, he resigned as chief executive, writing to the board that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations, he would be the first to let them know, and that unfortunately that day had come. He became chairman and named Cook his successor, and worked for Apple until the day before his death. He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of the tumor, his sister Mona Simpson reporting that his final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables repeated three times. Flags flew at half-staff at Apple and Microsoft; California declared October 16 Steve Jobs Day.