The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then working for Rolling Stone, came to interview Jobs, who urged him to convince the magazine"s publisher to put the Macintosh team on the cover of the magazine. "The chances of Jann Wenner agreeing to displace Sting in favor of a bunch of computer nerds were approximately one in a googolplex," Levy thought, correctly. Jobs took Levy to a pizza joint and pressed the case: Rolling Stone was "on the ropes, running crummy articles, looking desperately for new topics and new audiences. The Mac could be its salvation!" Levy pushed back. Rolling Stone was actually good, he said, and he asked Jobs if he had read it recently. Jobs said that he had, an article about MTV that was "a piece of s.h.i.t." Levy replied that he had written that article. Jobs, to his credit, didn"t back away from the a.s.sessment. Instead he turned philosophical as he talked about the Macintosh. We are constantly benefiting from advances that went before us and taking things that people before us developed, he said. "I t"s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge."
Levy"s story didn"t make it to the cover. But in the future, every major product launch that Jobs was involved in-at NeXT , at Pixar, and years later when he returned to Apple-would end up on the cover of either Time, New sw eek, or Business Week.
January 24, 1984.
On the morning that he and his teammates completed the software for the Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to stay in bed for at least a day. But that afternoon, after only six hours of sleep, he drove back to the office. He wanted to check in to see if there had been any problems, and most of his colleagues had done the same. They were lounging around, dazed but excited, when Jobs walked in. "Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you"re not done yet!" he announced. "We need a demo for the intro!" His plan was to dramatically unveil the Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it show off some of its features to the inspirational theme from Chariots of Fire. "I t needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals," he added. They all groaned, Hertzfeld recalled, "but as we talked we realized that it would be fun to cook up something impressive."
The launch event was scheduled for the Apple annual stockholders" meeting on January 24-eight days away-at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College. The television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem like an epochal moment in world history. The third component was the public unveiling of the product itself, amid fanfare and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful mixed with journalists who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.
Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a music player in two days so that the computer could play the Chariots of Fire theme. But when Jobs heard it, he judged it lousy, so they decided to use a recording instead. At the same time, Jobs was thrilled with a speech generator that turned text into spoken words with a charming electronic accent, and he decided to make it part of the demo. "I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to introduce itself!" he insisted.
At the rehearsal the night before the launch, nothing was working well. Jobs hated the way the animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he kept ordering tweaks. He also was dissatisfied with the stage lighting, and he directed Sculley to move from seat to seat to give his opinion as various adjustments were made. Sculley had never thought much about variations of stage lighting and gave the type of tentative answers a patient might give an eye doctor when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The rehearsals and changes went on for five hours, well into the night. "He was driving people insane, getting mad at the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation," Sculley recalled. "I thought there was no way we were going to get it done for the show the next morning."
Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation. Sculley fancied himself a good writer, so he suggested changes in Jobs"s script. Jobs recalled being slightly annoyed, but their relationship was still in the phase when he was lathering on flattery and stroking Sculley"s ego. "I think of you just like Woz and Markkula," he told Sculley. "You"re like one of the founders of the company. They founded the company, but you and I are founding the future." Sculley lapped it up.
The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. "This is the most important moment in my entire life," he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to begin. "I "m really nervous.
You"re probably the only person who knows how I feel about this." Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered "Good luck."
As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage first to start the shareholders" meeting. He did so with his own form of an invocation. "I "d like to open the meeting," he said, "with a twenty-year-old poem by Dylan-that"s Bob Dylan." He broke into a little smile, then looked down to read from the second verse of "The Times They Are a-Changin"." His voice was high-pitched as he raced through the ten lines, ending with "For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin"." That song was the anthem that kept the multimillionaire board chairman in touch with his counterculture self-image. He had a bootleg copy of his favorite version, which was from the live concert Dylan performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964 at Lincoln Center"s Philharmonic Hall.
Sculley came onstage to report on the company"s earnings, and the audience started to become restless as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal note. "The most important thing that has happened to me in the last nine months at Apple has been a chance to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs," he said. "For me, the rapport we have developed means an awful lot."
The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage and launched into a dramatic version of the battle cry he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. "I t is 1958," he began. "IBM pa.s.ses up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since." The crowd laughed. Hertzfeld had heard versions of the speech both in Hawaii and elsewhere, but he was struck by how this time it was pulsing with more pa.s.sion. After recounting other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward the present: I t is now 1984. I t appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and-controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?
As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a frenzy of cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell question, the auditorium went black and the "1984" commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over, the entire audience was on its feet cheering.
With a flair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across the dark stage to a small table with a cloth bag on it. "Now I "d like to show you Macintosh in person," he said. He took out the computer, keyboard, and mouse, hooked them together deftly, then pulled one of the new 3-inch floppies from his shirt pocket. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play. Jobs held his breath for a moment, because the demo had not worked well the night before. But this time it ran flawlessly. The word "MACINTOSH" scrolled horizontally onscreen, then underneath it the words "Insanely great"
appeared in script, as if being slowly written by hand. Not used to such beautiful graphic displays, the audience quieted for a moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill Atkinson"s QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays of different fonts, doc.u.ments, charts, drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh.
When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat. "We"ve done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently," he said. "But today, for the first time ever, I "d like to let Macintosh speak for itself." With that, he strolled back over to the computer, pressed the b.u.t.ton on the mouse, and in a vibrato but endearing electronic deep voice, Macintosh became the first computer to introduce itself. "h.e.l.lo. I "m Macintosh. I t sure is great to get out of that bag," it began. The only thing it didn"t seem to know how to do was to wait for the wild cheering and shrieks that erupted. Instead of basking for a moment, it barreled ahead. "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I "d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can"t lift." Once again the roar almost drowned out its final lines. "Obviously, I can talk. But right now I "d like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who"s been like a father to me, Steve Jobs."
Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd jumping up and down and pumping their fists in a frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad smile on his face, then looked down and started to choke up. The ovation continued for five minutes.
After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized with a plaque. "Steve presented them one at a time to each team member, with a handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering," Hertzfeld recalled. I t had been a grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs"s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
GATES AND JOBS.
When Orbits Intersect.
The Macintosh Partnership.
In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked because of their gravitational interaction. There have been a.n.a.logous situations in history, when an era is shaped by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in twentieth- century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age, beginning in the late 1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of technology and business, had very different personalities and backgrounds. Gates"s father was a prominent Seattle lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of prestigious boards. He became a tech geek at the area"s finest private school, Lakeside High, but he was never a rebel, hippie, spiritual seeker, or member of the counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip off the phone company, Gates created for his school a program for scheduling cla.s.ses, which helped him get into ones with the right girls, and a car-counting program for local traffic engineers. He went to Harvard, and when he decided to drop out it was not to find enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a computer software company.
Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined, and abundant in a.n.a.lytic processing power.
Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a pa.s.sion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding, and he managed by charisma and scattershot intensity. Gates was more methodical; he held tightly scheduled product review meetings where he would cut to the heart of issues with lapidary skill. Both could be rude, but with Gates- who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek"s flirtation with the fringes of the Asperger"s scale-the cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding intensity; Gates sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.
"Each one thought he was smarter than the other one, but Steve generally treated Bill as someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style," said Andy Hertzfeld. "Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn"t actually program." From the beginning of their relationship, Gates was fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on people. But he also found him "fundamentally odd" and "weirdly flawed as a human being," and he was put off by Jobs"s rudeness and his tendency to be "either in the mode of saying you were s.h.i.t or trying to seduce you." For his part, Jobs found Gates unnervingly narrow. "He"d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger," Jobs once declared.
Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what would become the fundamental divide in the digital age.
Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a seamless package. Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic a.n.a.lyst of business and technology; he was open to licensing Microsoft"s operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers.
After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. "He really never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works," he said. But Jobs never reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates"s real strengths. "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he"s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology," Jobs said, unfairly. "He just shamelessly ripped off other people"s ideas."
When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office near Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple I I , including a spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates"s conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a computer for the ma.s.ses, with a friendly interface, which would be churned out by the millions in an automated California factory. His description of the dream factory sucking in the California silicon components and turning out finished Macintoshes caused the Microsoft team to code-name the project "Sand." They even reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for "Steve"s amazing new device."
Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming language, for the Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh, because Wozniak-despite much prodding by Jobs-had never enhanced his version of the Apple I I "s BASIC to handlefloating-point numbers. In addition, Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software-such as word processing and spreadsheet programs-for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982 Apple"s annual sales were $1 billion, while Microsoft"s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on to do graphical versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called Word, and BASIC.
Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating system, and he was not very impressed. "I remember the first time we went down, Steve had this app where it was just things bouncing around on the screen," he said. "That was the only app that ran." Gates was also put off by Jobs"s att.i.tude. "I t was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve was saying, "We don"t really need you and we"re doing this great thing, and it"s under the cover." He"s in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales mode that also says, "I don"t need you, but I might let you be involved.""
The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. "You could tell that Bill Gates was not a very good listener. He couldn"t bear to have anyone explain how something worked to him-he had to leap ahead instead and guess about how he thought it would work," Hertzfeld recalled. They showed him how the Macintosh"s cursor moved smoothly across the screen without flickering. "What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?" Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took great pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using software, replied, "We don"t have any special hardware for it!" Gates insisted that it was necessary to have special hardware to move the cursor that way. "So what do you say to somebody like that?" Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh engineers, later said. "I t made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh."
Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that Microsoft would create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take personal computing into a new realm, and they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon dedicated a large team to the task. "We had more people working on the Mac than he did," Gates said. "He had about fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on it." And even though Jobs thought that they didn"t exhibit much taste, the Microsoft programmers were persistent.
"They came out with applications that were terrible," Jobs recalled, "but they kept at it and they made them better." Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain with Gates: I f Microsoft would make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years, and not make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team working on a version of BASIC for the Macintosh and instead indefinitely license Microsoft"s BASIC. Gates smartly took the deal, which infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in future negotiations.
For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a conference hosted by the industry a.n.a.lyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where n.o.body knew about the graphical interfaces that Apple was developing. "Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we"ve got something," Gates recalled. "And he"s kind of leaking, but n.o.body actually caught on." Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. "I went to every luau," said Gates. "I was part of the crew."
Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino, where he got to watch Jobs interact erratically with his employees and display his obsessions.
"Steve was in his ultimate pied piper mode, proclaiming how the Mac will change the world and overworking people like mad, with incredible tensions and complex personal relationships." Sometimes Jobs would begin on a high, then lapse into sharing his fears with Gates. "We"d go down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve would just be promoting that everything is great. Then the second day, without fail, he"d be kind of, "Oh s.h.i.t, is this thing going to sell, oh G.o.d, I have to raise the price, I "m sorry I did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.""
Gates saw Jobs"s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was launched. At a joint team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many Stars had been sold thus far. Gates said six hundred. The next day, in front of Gates and the whole team, Jobs said that three hundred Stars had been sold, forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was actually six hundred. "So his whole team starts looking at me like, "Are you going to tell him that he"s full of s.h.i.t?"" Gates recalled. "And in that case I didn"t take the bait." On another occasion Jobs and his team were visiting Microsoft and having dinner at the Seattle T ennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how the Macintosh and its software would be so easy to use that there would be no manuals. "I t was like anybody who ever thought that there would be a manual for any Mac application was the greatest idiot," said Gates. "And we were like, "Does he really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people who are actually working on manuals?""
After a while the relationship became b.u.mpier. The original plan was to have some of the Microsoft applications-such as Excel, Chart, and File -carry the Apple logo and come bundled with the purchase of a Macintosh. "We were going to get $10 per app, per machine," said Gates. But this arrangement upset competing software makers. In addition, it seemed that some of Microsoft"s programs might be late. So Jobs invoked a provision in his deal with Microsoft and decided not to bundle its software; Microsoft would have to scramble to distribute its software as products sold directly to consumers.
Gates went along without much complaint. He was already getting used to the fact that, as he put it, Jobs could "play fast and loose," and he suspected that the unbundling would actually help Microsoft. "We could make more money selling our software separately," Gates said. "I t works better that way if you"re willing to think you"re going to have reasonable market share." Microsoft ended up making its software for various other platforms, and it began to give priority to the IBM PC version of Microsoft Word rather than the Macintosh version. In the end, Jobs"s decision to back out of the bundling deal hurt Apple more than it did Microsoft.
When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs and Gates unveiled it together at a press dinner at New York"s T avern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would make a version of it for IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal the bargain he had made with Jobs but merely answered that "in time" that might happen. Jobs took the microphone. "I "m sure "in time" we"ll all be dead," he joked.
The Battle of the GUI.
At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating system, known as DOS, which it licensed to IBM and compatible computers. I t was based on an old-fashioned command line interface that confronted users with surly little prompts such as C:>. As Jobs and his team began to work closely with Microsoft, they grew worried that it would copy Macintosh"s graphical user interface. Andy Hertzfeld noticed that his contact at Microsoft was asking detailed questions about how the Macintosh operating system worked. "I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac," he recalled.
They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future, and that Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had been developed at Xerox PARC. As he freely admitted later, "We sort of say, "Hey, we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto too.""
In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would not create graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in January 1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights when, in November 1983, he revealed that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for IBM PCs featuring a graphical interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-click navigation. I t would be called Windows. Gateshosted a Jobs-like product announcement, the most lavish thus far in Microsoft"s history, at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York.
Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he could do about it-Microsoft"s deal with Apple not to do competing graphical software was running out-but he lashed out nonetheless. "Get Gates down here immediately," he ordered Mike Boich, who was Apple"s evangelist to other software companies. Gates arrived, alone and willing to discuss things with Jobs. "He called me down to get p.i.s.sed off at me," Gates recalled. "I went down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I told him, "We"re doing Windows." I said to him, "We"re betting our company on graphical interfaces.""
They met in Jobs"s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss a.s.sail him. Jobs didn"t disappoint his troops. "You"re ripping us off!" he shouted. "I trusted you, and now you"re stealing from us!" Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a cla.s.sic zinger. "Well, Steve, I think there"s more than one way of looking at it. I think it"s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Gates"s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs"s emotional responses and manipulation techniques. I t also made clear that the Apple- Microsoft symbiosis had become a scorpion dance, with both sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either could cause problems for both.
After the confrontation in the conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was being planned for Windows. "Steve didn"t know what to say," Gates recalled. "He could either say, "Oh, this is a violation of something," but he didn"t. He chose to say, "Oh, it"s actually really a piece of s.h.i.t."" Gates was thrilled, because it gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment. "I said, "Yes, it"s a nice little piece of s.h.i.t."" So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions. "During the course of this meeting, he"s just ruder than s.h.i.t," Gates said. "And then there"s a part where he"s almost crying, like, "Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off."" Gates responded by becoming very calm. "I "m good at when people are emotional, I "m kind of less emotional."
As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested they go on a long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to De Anza college, stopping at a diner and then walking some more. "We had to take a walk, which is not one of my management techniques," Gates said. "That was when he began saying things like, "Okay, okay, but don"t make it too much like what we"re doing.""
As it turned out, Microsoft wasn"t able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. I t lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.
Jobs never got over his anger. "They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame," Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, "I f he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields." In a legal sense, Gates was right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it was inevitable that other companies would develop similar graphical interfaces. As Apple found out, the "look and feel" of a computer interface design is a hard thing to protect.
And yet Jobs"s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft created a crudely copied series of products, it would end up winning the war of operating systems. This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don"t always win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don"t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don"t think of original ideas and they don"t bring much culture into their product."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
ICARUS.
What Goes Up ...
Flying High.
The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984 propelled Jobs into an even higher orbit of celebrity, as was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the time. He went to a party that Yoko Ono threw for her son, Sean Lennon, and gave the nine-year-old a Macintosh. The boy loved it. The artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were there, and they were so enthralled by what they could create with the machine that the contemporary art world almost took an ominous turn. "I drew a circle," Warhol exclaimed proudly after using QuickDraw. Warhol insisted that Jobs take a computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived at the rock star"s townhouse, Jagger seemed baffled. He didn"t quite know who Jobs was. Later Jobs told his team, "I think he was on drugs. Either that or he"s brain-damaged." Jagger"s daughter Jade, however, took to the computer immediately and started drawing with MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.
He bought the top-floor duplex apartment that he"d shown Sculley in the San Remo on Manhattan"s Central Park West and hired James Freed of I . M. Pei"s firm to renovate it, but he never moved in. (He would later sell it to Bono for $15 million.) He also bought an old Spanish colonialstyle fourteen-bedroom mansion in Woodside, in the hills above Palo Alto, that had been built by a copper baron, which he moved into but never got around to furnishing.
At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking ways to curtail Jobs"s authority, Sculley gave him more: The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded together, with Jobs in charge. He was flying high, but this did not serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there was a memorable display of his brutal honesty when he stood in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to describe how they would be merged. His Macintosh group leaders would get all of the top positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. "You guys failed," he said, looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. "You"re a B team. B players. T oo many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley."
Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but unfair. "These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers," he said. But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. "I t"s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players," he recalled. "The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can"t indulge B players."
For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to convince themselves that their friendship was still strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display. The first anniversary of Sculley"s arrival came in May 1984, and to celebrate Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton Noir, an elegant restaurant in the hills southwest of Cupertino. T o Sculley"s surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As they all congratulated him during c.o.c.ktails, Sculley recalled, "a beaming Steve stood in the background, nodding his head up and down and wearing a Cheshire Cat smile on his face." Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. "The happiest two days for me were when Macintosh shipped and when John Sculley agreed to join Apple," he said. "This has been the greatest year I "ve ever had in my whole life, because I "ve learned so much from John." He then presented Sculley with a montage of memorabilia from the year.
In response, Sculley effused about the joys of being Jobs"s partner for the past year, and he concluded with a line that, for different reasons, everyone at the table found memorable. "Apple has one leader," he said, "Steve and me." He looked across the room, caught Jobs"s eye, and watched him smile. "I t was as if we were communicating with each other," Sculley recalled. But he also noticed that Arthur Rock and some of the others were looking quizzical, perhaps even skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was completely rolling him. They had hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control. "Sculley was so eager for Steve"s approval that he was unable to stand up to him,"
Rock recalled.
Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart strategy to Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs"s nature to share control. Deference did not come naturally to him. He began to become more vocal about how he thought the company should be run. At the 1984 business strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the company"s centralized sales and marketing staffs bid on the right to provide their services to the various product divisions. (This would have meant, for example, that the Macintosh group could decide not to use Apple"s marketing team and instead create one of its own.) No one else was in favor, but Jobs kept trying to ram it through. "People were looking to me to take control, to get him to sit down and shut up, but I didn"t," Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard someone whisper, "Why doesn"t Sculley shut him up?"
When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to manufacture the Macintosh, his aesthetic pa.s.sions and controlling nature kicked into high gear. He wanted the machinery to be painted in bright hues, like the Apple logo, but he spent so much time going over paint chips that Apple"s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, finally just installed them in their usual beige and gray. When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working properly and was dubbed "Steve"s folly." Finally Carter quit. "I t took so much energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough," he recalled.
Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the s.p.u.n.ky but good-natured Macintosh financial officer who had once won the team"s annual award for the person who best stood up to Jobs. But she knew how to cater to his whims when necessary. When Apple"s art director, Clement Mok, informed her that Jobs wanted the walls to be pure white, she protested, "You can"t paint a factory pure white. There"s going to be dust and stuff all over." Mok replied, "There"s no white that"s too white for Steve." She ended up going along. With its pure white walls and its bright blue, yellow, and red machines, the factory floor "looked like an Alexander Calder showcase," said Coleman.
When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said it was a way to ensure a pa.s.sion for perfection:I "d go out to the factory, and I "d put on a white glove to check for dust. I "d find it everywhere-on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I "d ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debi up the wall.
She didn"t understand why. And I couldn"t articulate it back then. See, I "d been very influenced by what I "d seen in j.a.pan. Part of what I greatly admired there-and part of what we were lacking in our factory-was a sense of teamwork and discipline. I f we didn"t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren"t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.
One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had always been fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and his tools in order, and his son was proud to show that he could do the same. Coleman came along to give the tour. "Steve was, like, beaming," she recalled. "He was so proud to show his father this creation." Jobs explained how everything worked, and his father seemed truly admiring. "He kept looking at his father, who touched everything and loved how clean and perfect everything looked."
Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-admiring wife of France"s socialist president Francois Mitterrand asked a lot of questions, through her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about overtime pay. He was annoyed, so he described how automation helped him keep down labor costs, a subject he knew would not delight her.
"Is it hard work?" she asked. "How much vacation time do they get?" Jobs couldn"t contain himself. "I f she"s so interested in their welfare," he said to her translator, "tell her she can come work here any time." The translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment Rossmann stepped in to say, in French, "M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and your interest in the factory." Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator looked very relieved.
Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand"s att.i.tude. At one point he was going just over 100 miles per hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After a few minutes, as the officer scribbled away, Jobs honked. "Excuse me?" the policeman said. Jobs replied, "I "m in a hurry." Amazingly, the officer didn"t get mad. He simply finished writing the ticket and warned that if Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would be sent to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. "He absolutely believed that the normal rules didn"t apply to him," Rossmann marveled.
His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a few months after the Macintosh was launched. "He was just completely obnoxious and thinking he could get away with anything," she recalled. In Paris she had arranged a formal dinner with French software developers, but Jobs suddenly decided he didn"t want to go. Instead he shut the car door on Hoffman and told her he was going to see the poster artist Folon instead. "The developers were so p.i.s.sed off they wouldn"t shake our hands," she said.
In I taly, he took an instant dislike to Apple"s general manager, a soft rotund guy who had come from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was not impressed with his team or his sales strategy. "You don"t deserve to be able to sell the Mac," Jobs said coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen. Jobs demanded a vegan meal, but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce filled with sour cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She whispered that if he didn"t calm down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.
The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn"t give them any allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. "By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably," Hoffman recalled.
I t was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Ga.s.see, Apple"s manager in France. Ga.s.see was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. "He has his own way with the truth," Ga.s.see later remarked. "The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him."