Between Jobs

This is part of our package about Apple’s 50th anniversary, read more here.

It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

Victories of the interregnum

Foremost among Apple’s achievements in the first post-Steve era was the Mac itself.

Yes, Jobs was the one who took over the Mac project in 1982 (from the originator of the project, Jef Raskin) and molded it into the adorable original beige all-in-one Macintosh with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. But when it came time to build the Mac into a thriving platform and business, Apple’s cofounder resisted most suggestions because they conflicted with his idealized notion of what the Mac could be.

Specifically, Jobs resisted the idea of adding Apple II-like slots to the Mac. Once Jobs was gone, replaced by former Apple Europe director Jean-Louis Gassée, the Mac business took off, finally eclipsing the sales of the Apple II. The introduction of the slot-laden Mac II series in 1987 led to dramatically increased sales to businesses, allowing Apple to entrench itself in the fields of design and publishing. Similarly, the Mac SE, also introduced in 1987, revised the original Mac design to add an optional internal hard drive, making it a much more viable computer than the old Mac, with its endless requirement to swap floppy disks in and out.

In 1991, the original PowerBooks were created — possibly the crowning achievement of this entire era. Apple’s first laptop, the Macintosh Portable, released two years earlier, was a disastrous “luggable” that combined poor performance with an ungainly heavy design. But for the follow-up, Apple’s engineers completely rethought the laptop. Early PC laptops had their keyboards pushed all the way up to the front edge, and if you needed a pointing device (which, let’s face it, PC laptops running DOS often didn’t), it would be an afterthought sticking off the side.

On the Mac, a mouse (or trackball / trackpad equivalent) was mandatory. So Apple got creative, pushing the keyboard back while placing palm rests and a pointing device closer to the front edge. It was a huge hit, and if that’s not enough of a win, it’s what literally every laptop still looks like to this day.

PowerBook mania may have reached its peak when it appeared at the center of a 1993 New Yorker profile of media mogul Barry Diller: “The PowerBook went with him everywhere,” wrote Ken Auletta. “[It] became for him a means of looking into the future.” Having a PowerBook on the table was the sign of the ultimate power lunch.

There was one other huge achievement from this period: Apple successfully changed the processor used by Macs from the Motorola 68000 series to the PowerPC series, without any major growing pains or breaks to compatibility. Switching chips without breaking compatibility is difficult and risky, since widespread software incompatibility can destroy all the momentum and loyalty existing customers feel for a platform. If Apple had botched the PowerPC transition, there would have been no reason for users to keep buying Macs over Windows PCs.

It’s a game plan the company has repeated twice more, in its moves from PowerPC to Intel and then on to Apple’s own processors. These seamless upgrades serve as proof positive that users are in capable hands.

But for all that’s worth crediting about this era, it all started to spin out of control in the mid-’90s. There were many different reasons why Apple fell apart, as the saying goes, gradually and then all at once. Microsoft shipping Windows 95, which entirely imported the user-friendly Mac interface paradigm to the PC, might have been the biggest body blow, but there was more.

The building of the original Mac operating system in the first half of the 1980s was groundbreaking in its introduction of the entire desktop metaphor that PCs still use, but that software was not really built to last. In short, it was hacked together; its fundamentals were more akin to the very limited, hand-built software stacks of the early PC era than they were to the modern operating systems being developed in the mid-’90s. Memory wasn’t protected, which led to devastating instability — a single bug anywhere in the system would crash everything. And even the act of running more than one program at once was basically hacked into the operating system and had severe limitations.

Apple knew it had to do something to address the Mac’s deficiencies, especially with Windows 95 on the horizon. It tried, and tried again, and failed each time spectacularly. An advanced OS project got spun off into Taligent, a joint venture with IBM (which also failed). The next-generation operating system codenamed Copland was announced and even demoed to developers in 1996 before new Apple CEO Gil Amelio realized that it was more a collection of features in pieces than a real, functional system that might ship.

Meanwhile, Apple’s desperation to grow its business in the face of competition from the Microsoft-Intel cabal led it down the path of licensing Mac OS to clone-makers from 1995 to 1997. The idea was to expand the Mac market by allowing the Mac OS to run on computers that weren’t produced by Apple, theoretically reaching different audiences. In the end, these clones mostly cannibalized Apple’s own customer base.

While Mac users benefited from the cheaper, faster systems made by clone-makers such as Power Computing, it was a disastrous business decision for Apple itself. Worse, it was a fundamental betrayal of one of Apple’s core concepts that dated from the earliest days of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Apple had always been a company that made the entire product, from hardware to software, integrated. A lot of late-’70s personal computers were like that, but by the mid-’90s, everyone but Apple was just cranking out PC clones that ran Windows. Apple’s dalliance with clone licensing showed just how confused and desperate the company had become. It had forgotten what it was and what it stood for: making an integrated product that traded compatibility for the unique benefits that came with one company building the entire widget.

Other disasters were happening in parallel during that period. Attempts to sell more Macs to consumers led to a confusing array of Macintosh Performa computers, with dozens of individual models tied to specific retailers or even magazines. After he returned as CEO in 1997, Jobs famously responded to this glut by drawing a four-quadrant grid and declaring that the company would focus on four products: professional and consumer desktops and professional and consumer laptops. That’s it.

While decreasing revenue was really the cause of Apple’s business falling apart, it’s worth noting that the Apple of this period also spent an awful lot of money on projects that never went anywhere. There are all sorts of stories about how the more egalitarian hippie-flavored company of the ’70s became one with exclusive executive dining rooms and a much more corporate attitude befitting the ’80s. The company also spent money on a lot of pie-in-the-sky R&D projects that didn’t really go anywhere. My favorite was Project X, which let you fly through internet links! In 3D!

When Jobs came back, he focused the entire company on building and shipping products. Wilder ideas from Apple’s Advanced Technology Group were off the table — if you weren’t building something that made a real product better, he wasn’t interested.

Breathe on the glowing embers

For all the mess, the final move of the interregnum period was also its masterstroke. Desperate for a new operating system to replace the doddering old Mac OS, Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock decided to purchase NeXT for $400 million and use NeXTSTEP as the basis for the next-generation Mac operating system.

This decision was huge, and not just because it brought Jobs back to Apple. NeXTSTEP offered all the features that classic Mac OS lacked, from memory protection to multitasking, as well as a system of tools that made app development easy. The core of NeXTSTEP (combined with a couple of compatibility layers that let classic Mac apps also make the transition) became Mac OS X. And Mac OS X is what Apple used to build all of its other operating systems running every iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.

That alone would’ve been a great deal for Apple, but of course, some of the people working at NeXT were also fated to become superstars. Not just Jobs, but his hardware lead, Jon Rubinstein, and the NeXT software development group led by Avie Tevanian. While Jobs ended up engineering the departures of Amelio and Hancock and taking the reins himself, nobody can deny that the last move of the old regime was the thing that kicked off the legendary revitalization of Apple that followed.

When Jobs returned to Apple, he also discovered that, as dysfunctional as the company had become without him, there were still a lot of people there who would “bleed six colors.” These were dedicated employees who truly believed in what Apple stood for, even if it had fallen on hard times. One of them was Jonathan Ive, who designed the eMate, a weird laptop based on the handheld Newton project, and added a very tiny bit of translucent blue plastic to an otherwise beige Power Mac G3. A lot of people at Apple were talented and frustrated, just like Ive, who famously went on to design the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and most of Apple’s other products over the next couple of decades. Jobs set a lot of those people free to do their best work.

So on the occasion of Apple’s 50th anniversary, let’s not forget those weird years when Steve Jobs was off running a different computer company. They were years with some great innovations and successes, without which Apple probably wouldn’t have even made it to 1997. Even Apple’s greatest failure of the period — not properly building a replacement for Mac OS — ended up leading to the best acquisition Apple has ever made: buying NeXT (and bringing Jobs back as a part of the deal).

Perhaps it’s fair to say that Apple has led a charmed life. After all, even some of its worst failures somehow led it to even greater successes.