He explained that Apple's ads were going to convey an image and an attitude rather than simply describing a product. As a model, he talked about how Nike's ads projected a sense of athleticism and success without even showing its shoes.

"Apple spends $100 million a year on advertising," Steve said, "and it hadn't done us much good." They were going to continue spending $100 million a year, but now they were going to spend it better, he said, because now they realized that the Apple brand was one of the most valuable things they had going for them.

One of the employees in the audience was a young woman named Kate Adams. It was the first time she had seen Steve speak close up, and she was very excited. "It was a good -- no, great -- speech, delivered in a 'I might sound like I'm musing but I'm damned sure of what I'm saying' tone," she wrote in an e-mail message to a friend.

Her friend turned out to be a software entrepreneur, Dave Winer, who wrote DaveNet, a column that he e-mailed to hundreds of the most influential people in the industry, including CEOs like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. To Kate's surprise, Dave published her e-mail in its entirety: a long, detailed account of Steve's talk.

The next day, Kate received a voice-mail message.

"Hi, this is Steve Jobs. I'd like to get together and chat with you."

Steve's voice sounded cheerful. What did he want? Was this some management theory of his, calling random midlevel employees and picking their brains for a while? Or was he pissed off by the DaveNet column?

Kate called Steve's secretary and made an appointment. She didn't sleep well that night. The next morning at 10 she entered Steve's office. He was in the corner, typing on his Next computer. Steve relied on three computers, and none of them was a Macintosh. He had black Next machines at his home and office and a Toshiba Tecra as his notebook.

With his back turned away from her, Steve waved and told her to sit down.

Kate eyed a pile of "Think Different" T-shirts as she waited for four minutes.

Steve turned to her.

"Hi, how ya doing?" he said amiably. Then he held up a printout of her message. "Can you tell me what this is?"

Steve had "sniffing" software that could screen and search his employees' e-mail.

"I was encouraged by your talk, and I just wanted to tell my friend Dave."

"You realize this is the kind of thing that can be published?" he asked.

"Well, it already has," she said.

"Do you realize this $100 million figure is proprietary?" he continued. His tone was serious and confrontational but not outright hostile.

As she was walking out, he said:

"By the way, what do you do in the Quicktime group?"

"I'm on the engineering team," she said.

"OK."

She escaped. She knew that if she had said "marketing," she would have been fired. He still needed Apple's engineers, but he had no respect for its marketing people.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Before Steve's takeover, Apple people loved to leak. They did so partly because the company really did have lackluster marketing. If you were proud of your work, the only way to let other people in the industry know about it was to leak it yourself. A number of Web sites, like "Mac OS Rumors," were devoted exclusively to Apple gossip.

Steve insisted on his old "loose lips sink ships" policy. At first the employees were incensed. Before long, though, they began to trust Steve to do Apple's marketing for them.

Still, the Apple rank-and-file remained fearful of the Bad Steve persona. Word got around about Steve going into meetings, saying, "This is shit," and firing people on the spot. People worried about getting trapped with him in an elevator for a few seconds, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Steve's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims is enough to terrorize a whole company.

For a while there was an elevator in Steve's building that had protective coverings on its walls because construction was going on, and someone said: "This must be Steve's elevator since it's padded." Another employee responded: "Is it for him or for us?"

Apple needed some kind of shake-up. It was filled with people who had virtually ignored and ultimately outlasted three CEOs as they did their own things. "I don't know if the previous CEOs at Apple had any effect on that company," says John Warnock of Adobe, which is Apple's biggest software provider. "We would have meetings with all those CEOs and nothing would happen, no traction, unless the group responsible went for the idea. The energy just dissipated into the organization, where the first person capable to make a decision is the one who makes it. But with Steve, he comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way. You have to run Apple that way -- very direct, very forceful. You can't do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the Next years and he's not so mellow anymore."

Before Steve's takeover, the campus had a leisurely atmosphere. Staffers loved to hang around smoking and chatting in the courtyard of the R&D complex, which always had ashtrays stocked at the outside and inside doors of all six of its buildings. Some employees seemed to spend most of their time throwing Frisbees to their dogs on the lawns.

Steve enforced new rules. He decreed that there would be no smoking anywhere on the Apple property. Then he banned dogs on campus, ostensibly because canines were messy and some people were allergic to them.

The employees were outraged: Why didn't Steve understand them? Smoking in the courtyard was how they networked with their colleagues from other departments. It was a vital form of communications! Steve's prohibitionism forced them to take long walks to De Anza Boulevard so they would be off the Apple property. It wasted a lot of time.

And their dogs were essential to productivity, too. A lot of people worked very long hours at Apple, even nights and weekends. They were hardly ever home. If they couldn't care for and feed their dogs at the office, they would never get to see the pets.

It seemed as though Steve were pushing his own lifestyle on 10,000 others. At a company meeting, someone asked Steve what he thought was the worst thing about Apple.

"The cafeteria," Steve said.

Steve proceeded to replace the entire food-service staff. He hired the chef from Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. Before long, tofu was prominent in the menu offerings.

And yet, somehow, the reign of terror was beginning to work. Apple had long been like a civil-service bureaucracy, with thousands of entrenched employees who did pretty much whatever they wanted regardless of which political appointees were temporarily at the top. Now that was changing. People started to realize that Steve could assert his authority over seemingly any aspect of the company's life. Apple was going to follow the vision of a single person, from the no-smoking rules and the healthy cuisine to the editing of the TV advertisements. Steve was clearly in charge, and Steve was seemingly everywhere.

The Free Software Project
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