Apple's Joz and John Ternus recall the 'wow' moment when Steve Jobs changed the trajectory of the company

It was 1997 and Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple after a 12-year absence. At the time, it was widely reported that Apple was just 90 days away from potential bankruptcy.

Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak, now Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, was reporting to Phil Schiller back then. The two weren't quite sure how to start their first meeting with the returning founder.

“Phil says, ‘Hey, do you want to show your product roadmaps,’ which are our plans for the product for the next couple years?” Joz said in a video interview with Tom’s Guide, alongside senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus.

The reaction from Steve Jobs has stuck with Joz for nearly 30 years. For someone who has been with Apple for four decades, that moment still stands out.

“Steve stops. He says, ‘No, let's talk about where we're going, because if we don't know where we're going, no map is going to get us there.’”

Jobs’ point was that Apple couldn’t continue on its current path through sheer inertia. The company needed to change its entire way of thinking to break through with customers.

“We started to retrench our thinking. Steve reminded us that great companies fail because they forget about creating great products, and that we were going to put the product back as the focus of everything that we do."

Joz shared that this was a “wow” moment because Apple had never had a CEO who spoke so clearly about where the company was going and how the products were going to get them there to transform the business.

The next five years at Apple are now considered a renaissance, including the iconic iMac G3 in 1998 with its translucent “Bondi Blue” design, the iBook G3 in 1999 (the first mainstream computer with Wi-Fi), and the 2001 debut of both the original iPod and Mac OS X.

None of this likely would have been possible without Jobs pressing the reset button on Apple's future in that very first encounter.

“Talk about having us at ‘hello,’” Joz shared. “When you see all the different places that thinking took us and where we are today, it’s been an incredible journey.”

For John Ternus, this “Think Different” philosophy has come full circle with the new $599 MacBook Neo, which has disrupted the computing world since its release.

“Steve talked about the Mac being the ‘bicycle for the mind.’ From the very beginning, the vision was: let's make personal computing accessible to as many people as possible,” said Ternus. “That was the mission of the MacBook Neo. You had a team of people who were so excited to bring the Mac experience to so many more people. Steve’s a big part of that.”

This is part one of our interview with Joz and John Ternus for Apple’s 50th anniversary. Stay tuned for part two.