Geoffrey Cain

It was failing.

It was just not going to be good.

He wanted to stay at Pixar.

So I think that you raise an interesting point about all the counterfactuals that could happen here.

Even Jean-Louis Gasset, you know, remarked later on that, you know, Steve Jobs was the right choice to return to Apple.

So I don't think

Gasset knew that, didn't know what was gonna happen at the time, obviously, but I think looking back on it, Gasset realized, oh, look, well, maybe I wasn't the right choice after all.

Maybe I would not have saved Apple.

One of the interesting things about writing this book is that I found that there were so many touch points, so many forks in the road, where I could see that if anybody involved in this story had made any decision that were just slightly different

the entire world of Apple technology today would look vastly different.

I mean, it's like, you know, it's like if you shoot an arrow, they say that, you know, you shoot it at like 0.5 degrees differently, but when it lands at that angle far away, it can fly off in any direction.

And I saw that repeatedly in this book.

I mean, I could give all kinds of examples, but... Give me one.

Well, the most obvious one is the deal with IBM that Next Computer was lining up.

So Steve's second-in-command during this time, Daniel Lewin, who went on to a fabulous career, he lined up a deal with IBM for Steve Jobs.

And he said, what we're going to do is we're going to port Next Step, our operating system, to IBM machines.

And remember that IBM was the giant of the time, and so it was going to be all over America, all over the world, just ported onto these machines, and people would use this beautiful software, kind of in a way comparable to Windows today, loaded on every PC.

This was a pivotal moment.

This would have just done wonders.

I mean, if this deal had gone through...