Book excerpt: "Apple: The First 50 Years" by David Pogue

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article."CBS Sunday Morning" correspondent David Pogue's new book, "Apple: The First 50 Years" (to be published March 10 by Simon & Schuster), examines how, in its first half-century, the company founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs remade the culture – and then, incredibly, remade itself.

Read the excerpt below, and don't miss David Pogue's report on the first 50 years of Apple on "CBS Sunday Morning" March 8!"Apple: The First 50 Years" by David Pogue $46 at Amazon Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.Try Audible for free Steve Jobs had been away from the company he founded for 11 years.

When he returned on July 6, 1997, Apple had been through three CEOs in four years, and it was in desperate shape.Morale was at zero.

Talented people were leaving in droves.There were too many divisions, too many fiefdoms.

At one point, lawyers from two different Apple divisions showed up in the Patent and Trademark Office to sue each other.The company had no CEO, no strategy, and, Jobs felt strongly, no soul.Jobs tackled all of it at once.

He threw himself fully, relentlessly, exhaustingly, into his nameless and unpaid role."It was pretty bleak those first six months," he said.

"I was running on vapor."He fired most of the board.He drastically simplified the company's structure.

And he slashed the company's 70 different Mac models down to only four: two laptops and two desktops."There was huge turmoil, because you were killing products that people were working on," says Eddy Cue, now senior VP of services.

"It's like: 'We're gonna go from all these different products for everybody to, like, two? Are you guys crazy?'" But Jobs was emphatic.A very focused product line, he pointed out, meant that "we could put the A-team on every single one of them."Think Diff...