Abstract :
Flash back ten years. Apple is a company bleeding money, thought by many to be in a death spiral. Its head of hardware development, a 41¿year-old electrical engineer named Jon Rubinstein, is busy cutting projects and people and launching the G3 and iMac computers. He¿s living in Palo Alto, Calif., with a cat for companionship, working seven days a week, and subsisting on take-out food at the office. Then came the iPod.