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Not everyone is bowled over by the machine. William Gates,
chairman of the software giant Microsoft, argues that NeXT doesn't
break any new technological ground. "He's put a microprocessor in a
box," says Gates. "So what? It's got a graphic interface, like
everything these days, and a mouse, like everything these days."
Gates dismisses the machine as "a 48-rpm record." Yet other industry
heavyweights with similar reservations emerged from the rollout as
converts. "I was all ready to rain on his parade," says Richard
Shaffer, publisher of the Computer Letter. "[Now] I'm working hard
to say something bad about it. It's a machine I yearn to own."
 The birth of
the new machine also marks the rebirth of Steven Paul Jobs, the
adopted son of a California machinist who grew up to be the most
famous college dropout in Silicon Valley. After his humiliating
ouster from Apple, he lured five disciples from his former company
and retreated to start NeXT. Jobs kicked in $7 million of his own
money, and later added $5 million. He started courting the academic
community early, giving Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon a
total of about 1 percent of the stock in exchange for investments of
$1.3 million. Jobs came away from Apple a bit wiser, at least in one
respect. "Steve once told me," says a former Apple engineer, "that
the one lesson he learned from Apple was to keep 51 percent of your
company, so you can't get kicked out." The boss has kept 63 percent
of NeXT.
To finance the rest of his venture, Jobs made some new friends.
He persuaded Texas billionaire Ross Perot to invest $20 million in
NeXT and sit on its board of directors, bringing respectability and
expertise to the fledgling company. Even more impressive, Jobs cut a
deal with International Business Machines, Jobs' archenemy during
his Apple years. Big Blue has licensed a NeXT program that gives a
friendly interface [what a user sees on the screen] to the decidedly
unfriendly Unix, which IBM will be offering in its high-end personal
computers and workstations. IBM's blessing gives the NeXT effort
even greater legitimacy.
As always with Jobs, style was a top priority. Before there was
even a machine, Jobs paid nearly $100,000 for a jaunty multicolor
logo by designer Paul Rand--who also designed the logo for IBM. When
Jobs moved into the Palo Alto building that now houses NeXT's
executive headquarters, he started by remodeling it top to bottom.
He tore out the interior and installed polished wood floors, stylish
white furniture, 10 foot-tall cactus plants and a Sub-Zero
refrigerator filled with juice for employees.
In assembling his team, Jobs turned on his legendary charm. One
former employee recalls receiving a recruiting call that began:
"Hey, I hear you're the hottest designer on the planet." Then, once
he had wooed them, Jobs pushed his employees to the limit. In one
classic display of meticulousness, Jobs demanded that all the robots
in the NeXT manufacturing plant be painted in coordinated shades of
gray and black. Two of his top manufacturing engineers worked
through a weekend to paint the assembly line, repeating the process
four times until they got the finish just right.
That kind of sacrifice became part of NeXT's odd corporate
culture. "The employees are really well coached," says one engineer
familiar with the company. "When I hang out there, it's almost like
this Hare Krishna thing. There's none of the rebel spirit." Before
they were hired, employees weren't even allowed to see the new
machine. It wasn't just a matter of security, explains chief
financial officer Susan Barnes. Jobs believes that coming to work
there should involve a "leap of faith," Barnes says. "We want people
to join because of the quality of people they'll be working with,
not because of the product."
During the months of secretive work, Jobs displayed a quality he
had rarely shown before: the ability to listen. He immersed himself
in manufacturing, traveling to Japan to study robot technology. He
visited universities to ask what they wanted in a learning computer.
Jobs says he tried to be more of a consensus manager than he was at
Apple. (Former NeXT employees have a joke about that: "You put in
your two cents' worth. Jobs puts in his $50 worth.")
But if the new Jobs was calmer, he wasn't that calm. He
lived up to his reputation as a skinflint, bargaining relentlessly
with suppliers. (The Canon optical drive that he bundles with his
$6,500 machine retails for $6,000.) He continued to harangue
employees he thought weren't doing their best. One engineer says he
left NeXT because "I was tired of riding the hero-shithead roller
coaster." Yet even employees who feel that Jobs burned them retain a
measure of respect for their boss. An Apple engineer gripes that
Jobs has lied to him on numerous occasions. Then he asked that his
name not be used. Why? "I want to work for him again, because he
makes the most exciting computers in the world."
Jobs also kept up his image as a man who lives to work. He moved
into a sprawling white mansion in Woodside, Calif., four years ago,
but has yet to furnish it completely. A young couple takes care of
the house, where Jobs is joined occasionally by his on-and-off
girlfriend of four years. But he often comes home just to sleep and
eat. He maintains a fierce sense of privacy. Two unauthorized
biographies have been written about him; the first time he saw one
of them in a Palo Alto bookstore, he says, he felt robbed. Jobs
insists he hasn't read the books, but "I assume they're not very
flattering. I picked up one, and they had my birth date wrong on the
first page." When told that the books have been optioned for a
possible movie, Jobs shakes his head: "I think they'd lose a lot of
money."
Photograph: John
Akers, the chairman of IBM. Photograph by: Louie Psihoyos -
Matrix
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