One of the first phone calls Tim Cook made when he joined Apple Inc. in 1998 was to Jeff Williams, a colleague he worked with for more than a decade at International Business Machines Corp. Cook had recently joined Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ effort to turn around the then-struggling company and invited Williams out to California for an interview.
"I stopped by here out of courtesy to him but I had no interest in joining Apple," Williams, 52, said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last year. "Apple had just lost $1 billion."
