After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle

While at Compaq, he had gotten to know Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group. The Taiwanese entrepreneur had built one of the world’s most reliable assemblers of electronics. With $2,500 borrowed from his mother in 1974, he had set up a factory in Taipei to make plastic knobs to change TV channels before expanding into PCs in the 1980s. He had transformed computer manufacturing by setting up factories in China, where land and labor were cheap. Production contracts with Dell, Compaq, and others had increased the company’s workforce to thirty thousand and its sales to $3 billion. Known to work sixteen-hour days, he demanded that products be released on schedule and in line with customers’ specifications. He would personally step in to solve production problems. His demanding, hands-on style appealed to Cook,