As mentioned in a previous post, Steve's death inspired me to write a new book titled "One More Thing" which will be both an insider's view of Apple that tells what it was like at Apple before, during and after Steve's return, as well as details of my own personal journey. This post is just the first few paragraphs of that book. I'm looking for any guidance, help, or feedback to make this better. If you like what you see (or you don't) please let me know!
One More Thing By Steve Chazin
Chapter 1. Near Death Experiences
I’d like to tell you the story, largely unknown, of how Apple went from the brink of bankruptcy to changing the way the whole world experiences music, movies, the Internet, even our mobile phones.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Apple. For more than 30 years Apple has defined, reshaped and cajoled the staid PC market with one innovation after the other. It is no overstatement to say that the entire modern computer experience we enjoy today was perfected by Apple. And yet in the 1990s, amid a huge worldwide expansion of computer technology, Apple was less than 2 weeks from bankruptcy. Its products were overpriced and underpowered. It experienced an epic defection of developers and talent. It had no product roadmap or strategy to deal with the Windows 95 juggernaut. Then, in a fairytale turnaround business schools will teach for decades -the company found itself managed by its previously disgraced co-founder.
In order to tell that story, we have to wind the clock back to a time when Apple was a bit player in the backwoods of a sleepy personal computer industry. A time when Microsoft Windows had caught up and largely eliminated the gap between what differentiated a Mac from a PC. A time when Apple nearly died. We’ll learn that Apple’s brush with death was precisely what it needed to wake it out of its self-inflicted near mortality and return its mercurial founder to emerge phoenix-like to the man he became. But before I can tell that story, you need to know something else about me. In the same year Apple nearly died, I nearly died.
Next: My Near Death in Cancun.
