Hello Again

How did he begin the task? First by making peace with Apple's former blood enemy, Bill Gates. Coexistence with the dominant player was Apple's only survival strategy. The deal announced last August assured that Microsoft would continue writing Mac software, a vital prerequisite to any recovery. Then, in an even more controversial move, Jobs ended the policy of licensing Apple's software to other computer makers, contending that those ""clones'' sucked up profits that were rightfully Apple's.

But most important, he says, ""Apple needed a plan.'' Jobs believed that there was sufficient talent at Apple to regain glory, but no coherent strategy. (Amelio disputes this, insisting that many of Jobs's initiatives are carry-overs from his tenure.) To demonstrate this, Jobs scrawls the names of Apple's mid-1997 product line on a whiteboard. There's the 1400, the 3400, the 6500 . . . 15 in all. ""And you know how many we make now?'' he asks. ""Zero.'' The idea was to concentrate efforts on Apple's key markets: publishing, education and consumer. Ultimately the product list would be winnowed to four: desktop and laptops for the consumer and the professional.

But it would not be easy. ""Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no,'' Jobs says. ""I was Dad. And that was hard.'' But Jobs's do-it-and-move-on style is well suited for crisis management. He eliminated some of Apple's work force and, according to Fred Anderson, cut operating expenses virtually in half.

Another streamlining took place in the retail channel. ""Our [Apple] business was almost nothing--we felt they would just dwindle away,'' says CompUSA exec Hal Compton. But when Jobs arrived, CompUSA made a courtesy call, and, says Compton, ""soon we were the exclusive national Apple dealer.'' The Mac's share of computer sales at CompUSA has now risen from 3 percent to 15 percent.

Jobs also revamped the company's image making. ""We had 25 different campaigns running around the world, none of them getting enough media dollars so you'd see any of them,'' Jobs says. He rehired Chiat/Day, the agency from Apple's glory days, and the result was the instantly memorable ""Think Different'' campaign, showing ""what we stand for and who our heroes are,'' says Jobs. (The only setback came when it leaked out that Apple advertised different in Asia, deleting a potentially controversial Dalai Lama.)

Another key decision was to base all of Apple's new products on the speedy G3 PowerPC chip, allowing the company to boast that it made competing Pentium machines look snail-like. Apple has sold 500,000 desktop G3s, a key factor in giving the company, to Wall Street's astonishment, not one but two profitable quarters, putting the company $100 million in the black for that period. ""I don't care how cool the computer is,'' says Apple senior VP of worldwide sales Mitch Mandich. ""If we're losing money, this won't work. Because you have to be viable.''