When Jobs started as interim CEO in 1997, the company had just come off a quarter in which its sales fell 30 percent. Jobs quickly assessed that Apple’s problem was connected to its sprawling product lines. (In response to retailer demands, the company had developed numerous different variations of its core computers, including a dozen different versions of its once-vaunted Macintosh.) According to Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, Jobs began asking top managers a simple question: “Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?”15 When they couldn’t provide a clear answer, he made the decision to
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