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I have no way of knowing how Steve talked to his team during Apple's darkest days in 1997 and 1998, when the company was on the brink and he was forced to turn to archrival Microsoft for a rescue. He certainly had a nasty, mercurial side to him, and I expect that, then and later, it emerged inside and outside the company Steve Jobs is "one of the two or three leading historical figures of the tech revolution," says WSJ personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg. For our fifth All Things Digital Conference, both Steve and his longtime rival, the brilliant Bill Gate, surprisingly agreed to a joint appearance, their first extended onstage joint interview ever. But it almost got derailed.
But I can honestly say that, in my many conversations with him, the dominant tone he struck was optimism and certainty, both for Apple and for the digital revolution as a whole. Even when he was telling me about his struggles to get the music industry to let him sell digital songs, or griping about competitors, at least in my presence, his tone was always marked by patience and a long-term view. This may have been for my benefit, knowing that I was a journalist, but it was striking.
At times in our conversations, when I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he'd surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.
This quality was on display when Apple opened its first retail store. It happened to be in the Washington, DC, suburbs, near my home. He conducted a press tour for journalists, as proud of the store as a father is of his first child. I commented that, surely, there'd only be a few stores, and asked what Apple knew about retailing. He looked at me like I was crazy, said there'd be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood. He said he had, of course.
The Product Unveilings
Sometimes, not always, he'd invite me in to see certain big products before he unveiled them to the world. He may have done the same with other journalists. We'd meet in a giant boardroom, with just a few of his aides present, and he'd insist—even in private— on covering the new gadgets with cloths and then uncovering them like the showman he was, a gleam in his eye and passion in his voice. We'd then often sit down for a long, long discussion of the present, the future, and industry gossip.
I still remember the day he showed me the first iPod. I was amazed that a computer company would branch off into music players, but he explained, without giving any specifics away, that he saw Apple as a digital products company, not a computer company. It was the same with the iPhone, the iTunes music store, and later the iPad, which he asked me to his home to see, because he was too ill at the time to go to the office.
Ice Water in Hell
He quipped: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell."
When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged. In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs "so I guess I'm the representative from hell."
Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.
The Walk
After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, Steve invited me to catch up. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.
He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn't know CPR and could visualize the headline: "Helpless reporter lets Steve Jobs die on the sidewalk."
But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses. (I had had a heart attack some years earlier.) He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.
Steve Jobs didn't die that day, to my everlasting relief. But now he really is gone, much too young, and it is the world's loss.
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