this, he wanted to reorganize Apple and put someone other than
Jobs in charge of the Macintosh division, which had swelled to
over seven hundred people.
Jobs rebelled against this plan. He tried to get the company’s
board of directors to fire Sculley and make him the CEO. But this
did not happen. The board voted against Jobs.
Jobs lost control of the Macintosh division. Although he was
given the title of chairman of Product Development, he was
stripped of any real power. In 1985, his office was moved off the
main Apple campus to a building where he rarely came in contact
with other Apple employees. He recalls:
I was asked to move out of my office. They leased a little
building across the street from most of the other Apple
buildings. I nicknamed it Siberia. So I moved across the
street, and I made sure that all of the executive staff had my
home phone number . . . I wanted to be useful in any way
I could . . . but none of them ever called. So I used to go
to work. I’d get there, and I would have one or two phone
calls to perform, a little bit of mail to look at. But most of
the corporate management reports stopped flowing by my
desk. A few people might see my car in the parking lot and
come over and commiserate. And I would get depressed
and go home in two or three or four hours, really depressed.
I did that a few times, and I decided that it was mentally
unhe althy. So I just stopped going in. 45
NeXT Computers
Jobs spent his newfound spare time at the Stanford University
Library. Here, he met Paul Berg, a biochemist studying gene ther-
apy. When Jobs learned that it often took Berg two weeks to run
a single test, he got the idea of building a computer in which
students and researchers could simulate experiments. From this
idea, NeXT computers was born. The company, he proclaimed,
would make: “A radically new machine that might enable some
60 Steve Jobs