Schmidt, Ellison, Mossberg, Carr, Wozniak and others agree that on top of his fantastic intuition, timing, guts, sense of perfection, brilliance, marketing talents, user design sense, loyal employees, and ferocity, Steve Jobs’ greatest asset was a capacity to combine technology with design in a convincing way. His vision of the future was so strong that it would become part of everyone’s vision.And if he didn’t like an idea, he didn’t hide it. One anecdote that isn’t in this Charlie Rose special belongs to Kevin O’Leary, who ran the Learning Company, which produced Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. In the mid 1980s, O’Leary asked Jobs for a meeting to talk about flagging Mac sales. When Jobs entered, he writes at MacLean’s, the room went silent. The Apple boss quickly dispensed with pleasantries – he didn’t have time to chit chat about the weather, he said – and O’Leary got right down to it: "I want you to give me $50 million to pay to keep my brand in the market supporting your hardware."He looked at me for 10 seconds—a very uncomfortable pause. And then he went absolutely nuts. He berated me: "The aura of the Apple brand is worth $50 million to you. You are nothing. Your brand is nothing compared to my brand." I said, "Excuse me, Steve, I own 80 per cent of the market. I am the educational market. You need me more than I need you."
But he didn't stop. He continued to go nuts. "You're out of your mind," he said, along with a number of foul words. I was trying to not lose face in front of my people and he was doing the same thing. He was yelling at me all the way to my Hertz rental car.But as O’Leary writes, Jobs ferocious strategy of controlling all the hardware as a bundle, and thus controlling the margins — a strategy abandoned by Apple after Jobs left — proved to be Apple’s killer app. “Snap forward 20 years. Windows has stopped growing. Microsoft stock has been dead money for 10 years. Apple has gone from $11 to $400. Jobs was right. He has the highest margin ever in the computer business. The same thing you buy in Windows today at $600 is $2,300 for the Apple.”