At a trade conference on October 6, 1997, exactly three weeks after Steve announced that he was taking on the title of iCEO, Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of his eponymous build-to-order PC clone business, was asked what he would do if he were put in charge of Apple Computer. “What would I do?” brayed the CEO, who was a decade younger than Steve. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.” Steve shot back an email: “CEOs are supposed to have class,” he wrote. But just a year and a half earlier he had told me pretty much the same thing: “Apple ain’t worth anything like the price of its stock,” he’d said. CEO应该有教养,哈哈哈 我骂可以,Dell骂不行 Yet here in the fall of 1997, facing a corporate mess that would have challenged the world’s greatest managers, Steve slowly started to show what he had learned in the eleven years since he was last at Apple. He had developed some discipline as he salvaged NeXT and negotiated a deal and an IPO for Pixar. He had learned the value of patie