Raskin envisioned a machine that would sell for $1,000 and be a simple appliance, with screen and keyboard and computer all in one unit. T o keep the cost down, he proposed a tiny five-inch screen and a very cheap (and underpowered) microprocessor, the Motorola 6809. Raskin fancied himself a philosopher, and he wrote his thoughts in an ever-expanding notebook that he called "The Book of Macintosh." He also issued occasional manifestos. One of these was called "Computers by the Millions," and it began with an aspiration: "I f personal computers are to be truly personal, it will have to be as likely as not that a family, picked at random, will own one."
Throughout 1979 and early 1980 the Macintosh project led a tenuous existence. Every few months it would almost get killed off, but each time Raskin managed to cajole Markkula into granting clemency. I t had a research team of only four engineers located in the original Apple office s.p.a.ce next to the Good Earth restaurant, a few blocks from the company"s new main building. The work s.p.a.ce was filled with enough toys and radio- controlled model airplanes (Raskin"s pa.s.sion) to make it look like a day care center for geeks. Every now and then work would cease for a loosely organized game of Nerf ball tag. Andy Hertzfeld recalled, "This inspired everyone to surround their work area with barricades made out of cardboard, to provide cover during the game, making part of the office look like a cardboard maze."
The star of the team was a blond, cherubic, and psychologically intense self-taught young engineer named Burrell Smith, who worshipped the code work of Wozniak and tried to pull off similar dazzling feats. Atkinson discovered Smith working in Apple"s service department and, amazed at his ability to improvise fixes, recommended him to Raskin. Smith would later succ.u.mb to schizophrenia, but in the early 1980s he was able to channel his manic intensity into weeklong binges of engineering brilliance.
Jobs was enthralled by Raskin"s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises to keep down the cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him instead to focus on building what he repeatedly called an "insanely great" product. "Don"t worry about price, just specify the computer"s abilities," Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo. I t spelled out everything you would want in the proposed computer: a high-resolution color display, a printer that worked without a ribbon and could produce graphics in color at a page per second, unlimited access to the ARPA net, and the capability to recognize speech and synthesize music, "even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon tabernacle choir, with variable reverberation." The memo concluded, "Starting with the abilities desired is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today"s and the immediate future"s technology." In other words, Raskin had little patience for Jobs"s belief that you could distort reality if you had enough pa.s.sion for your product.
Thus they were destined to clash, especially after Jobs was ejected from the Lisa project in September 1980 and began casting around for someplace else to make his mark. I t was inevitable that his gaze would fall on the Macintosh project. Raskin"s manifestos about an inexpensive machine for the ma.s.ses, with a simple graphic interface and clean design, stirred his soul. And it was also inevitable that once Jobs set his sights on the Macintosh project, Raskin"s days were numbered. "Steve started acting on what he thought we should do, Jef started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the outcome would be," recalled Joanna Hoffman, a member of the Mac team.
The first conflict was over Raskin"s devotion to the underpowered Motorola 6809 microprocessor. Once again it was a clash between Raskin"s desire to keep the Mac"s price under $1,000 and Jobs"s determination to build an insanely great machine. So Jobs began pushing for the Mac to switch to the more powerful Motorola 68000, which is what the Lisa was using. Just before Christmas 1980, he challenged Burrell Smith, without telling Raskin, to make a redesigned prototype that used the more powerful chip. As his hero Wozniak would have done, Smith threw himself intothe task around the clock, working nonstop for three weeks and employing all sorts of breathtaking programming leaps. When he succeeded, Jobs was able to force the switch to the Motorola 68000, and Raskin had to brood and recalculate the cost of the Mac.
There was something larger at stake. The cheaper microprocessor that Raskin wanted would not have been able to accommodate all of the gee- whiz graphics-windows, menus, mouse, and so on-that the team had seen on the Xerox PARC visits. Raskin had convinced everyone to go to Xerox PARC, and he liked the idea of a bitmapped display and windows, but he was not as charmed by all the cute graphics and icons, and he absolutely detested the idea of using a point-and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. "Some of the people on the project became enamored of the quest to do everything with the mouse," he later groused. "Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There"s a reason why humans invented phonetic languages."
Raskin"s former student Bill Atkinson sided with Jobs. They both wanted a powerful processor that could support whizzier graphics and the use of a mouse. "Steve had to take the project away from Jef," Atkinson said. "Jef was pretty firm and stubborn, and Steve was right to take it over. The world got a better result."
The disagreements were more than just philosophical; they became clashes of personality. "I think that he likes people to jump when he says jump," Raskin once said. "I felt that he was untrustworthy, and that he does not take kindly to being found wanting. He doesn"t seem to like people who see him without a halo." Jobs was equally dismissive of Raskin. "Jef was really pompous," he said. "He didn"t know much about interfaces. So I decided to nab some of his people who were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of my own, take the thing over and build a less expensive Lisa, not some piece of junk."
Some on the team found Jobs impossible to work with. "Jobs seems to introduce tension, politics, and ha.s.sles rather than enjoying a buffer from those distractions," one engineer wrote in a memo to Raskin in December 1980. "I thoroughly enjoy talking with him, and I admire his ideas, practical perspective, and energy. But I just don"t feel that he provides the trusting, supportive, relaxed environment that I need."
But many others realized that despite his temperamental failings, Jobs had the charisma and corporate clout that would lead them to "make a dent in the universe." Jobs told the staff that Raskin was just a dreamer, whereas he was a doer and would get the Mac done in a year. I t was clear he wanted vindication for having been ousted from the Lisa group, and he was energized by compet.i.tion. He publicly bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. "We can make a computer that"s cheaper and better than the Lisa, and get it out first," he told the team.
Jobs a.s.serted his control of the group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin happened to go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred people there waiting to hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify anyone else about his cancellation order. So Raskin went ahead and gave a talk.
That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo to Mike Scott, who once again found himself in the difficult position of being a president trying to manage a company"s temperamental cofounder and major stockholder. I t was t.i.tled "Working for/with Steve Jobs," and in it Raskin a.s.serted: He is a dreadful manager. . . . I have always liked Steve, but I have found it impossible to work for him. . . . Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be almost a running joke... . He acts without thinking and with bad judgment... . He does not give credit where due... . Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own.
That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of Markkula. Jobs started crying. He and Raskin agreed on only one thing: Neither could work for the other one. On the Lisa project, Scott had sided with Couch. This time he decided it was best to let Jobs win. After all, the Mac was a minor development project housed in a distant building that could keep Jobs occupied away from the main campus. Raskin was told to take a leave of absence. "They wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which was fine," Jobs recalled. "I t was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control."
Raskin"s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it ended up being good for the Macintosh. Raskin wanted an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a ca.s.sette tape, no mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike Jobs, he might have been able to keep the price down to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple win market share. But he could not have pulled off what Jobs did, which was to create and market a machine that would transform personal computing. In fact we can see where the road not taken led. Raskin was hired by Canon to build the machine he wanted. "I t was the Canon Cat, and it was a total flop," Atkinson said. "n.o.body wanted it. When Steve turned the Mac into a compact version of the Lisa, it made it into a computing platform instead of a consumer electronic device."
Texaco Towers.
A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a young engineer on the Apple I I team, who had a cherubic face and impish demeanor similar to his pal Burrell Smith"s. Hertzfeld recalled that most of his colleagues were afraid of Jobs "because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his proclivity to tell everyone exactly what he thought, which often wasn"t very favorable." But Hertzfeld was excited by him. "Are you any good?" Jobs asked the moment he walked in. "We only want really good people working on the Mac, and I "m not sure you"re good enough."
Hertzfeld knew how to answer. "I told him that yes, I thought that I was pretty good."
Jobs left, and Hertzfeld went back to his work. Later that afternoon he looked up to see Jobs peering over the wall of his cubicle. "I "ve got good news for you," he said. "You"re working on the Mac team now. Come with me."
Hertzfeld replied that he needed a couple more days to finish the Apple I I product he was in the middle of. "What"s more important than working on the Macintosh?" Jobs demanded. Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple I I DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. "You"re just wasting your time with that!" Jobs replied. "Who cares about the Apple I I? The Apple I I will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you"re going to start on it now!" With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld"s Apple I I , causing the code he was working on to vanish. "Come with me," Jobs said. "I "m going to take you to your new desk." Jobs drove Hertzfeld, computer and all, in his silver Mercedes to the Macintosh offices. "Here"s your new desk," he said, plopping him in a s.p.a.ce next to Burrell Smith. "Welcome to the Mac team!" The desk had been Raskin"s. In fact Raskin had left so hastily that some of the drawers were still filled with his flotsam and jetsam, including model airplanes.
Jobs"s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a pa.s.sion for the product. He would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch.
"I f their eyes lit up, if they went right for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them," recalled Andrea Cunningham. "He wanted them to say "Wow!""
Bruce Horn was one of the programmers at Xerox PARC. When some of his friends, such as Larry T esler, decided to join the Macintosh group,Horn considered going there as well. But he got a good offer, and a $15,000 signing bonus, to join another company. Jobs called him on a Friday night. "You have to come into Apple tomorrow morning," he said. "I have a lot of stuff to show you." Horn did, and Jobs hooked him. "Steve was so pa.s.sionate about building this amazing device that would change the world," Horn recalled. "By sheer force of his personality, he changed my mind." Jobs showed Horn exactly how the plastic would be molded and would fit together at perfect angles, and how good the board was going to look inside. "He wanted me to see that this whole thing was going to happen and it was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don"t see that kind of pa.s.sion every day. So I signed up."
Jobs even tried to reengage Wozniak. "I resented the fact that he had not been doing much, but then I thought, h.e.l.l, I wouldn"t be here without his brilliance," Jobs later told me. But as soon as Jobs was starting to get him interested in the Mac, Wozniak crashed his new single-engine Beechcraft while attempting a takeoff near Santa Cruz. He barely survived and ended up with partial amnesia. Jobs spent time at the hospital, but when Wozniak recovered he decided it was time to take a break from Apple. Ten years after dropping out of Berkeley, he decided to return there to finally get his degree, enrolling under the name of Rocky Racc.o.o.n Clark.
In order to make the project his own, Jobs decided it should no longer be code-named after Raskin"s favorite apple. In various interviews, Jobs had been referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind; the ability of humans to create a bicycle allowed them to move more efficiently than even a condor, and likewise the ability to create computers would multiply the efficiency of their minds. So one day Jobs decreed that henceforth the Macintosh should be known instead as the Bicycle. This did not go over well. "Burrell and I thought this was the silliest thing we ever heard, and we simply refused to use the new name," recalled Hertzfeld. Within a month the idea was dropped.
By early 1981 the Mac team had grown to about twenty, and Jobs decided that they should have bigger quarters. So he moved everyone to the second floor of a brown-shingled, two-story building about three blocks from Apple"s main offices. I t was next to a T exaco station and thus became known as T exaco T owers. In order to make the office more lively, he told the team to buy a stereo system. "Burrell and I ran out and bought a silver, ca.s.sette-based boom box right away, before he could change his mind," recalled Hertzfeld.
Jobs"s triumph was soon complete. A few weeks after winning his power struggle with Raskin to run the Mac division, he helped push out Mike Scott as Apple"s president. Scotty had become more and more erratic, alternately bullying and nurturing. He finally lost most of his support among the employees when he surprised them by imposing a round of layoffs that he handled with atypical ruthlessness. In addition, he had begun to suffer a variety of afflictions, ranging from eye infections to narcolepsy. When Scott was on vacation in Hawaii, Markkula called together the top managers to ask if he should be replaced. Most of them, including Jobs and John Couch, said yes. So Markkula took over as an interim and rather pa.s.sive president, and Jobs found that he now had full rein to do what he wanted with the Mac division.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD.
Playing by His Own Set of Rules.
When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud Tribble, the other software designer, about the huge amount of work that still needed to be done. Jobs wanted it finished by January 1982, less than a year away. "That"s crazy," Hertzfeld said. "There"s no way." Tribble said that Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. "The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek," Tribble explained. "Steve has a reality distortion field." When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. "In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. I t wears off when he"s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."
Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the "Menagerie" episodes of Star Trek, "in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force." He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: "I t was dangerous to get caught in Steve"s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality."
At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. "The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand," he said.
There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered. "Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature." After Jobs decreed that the sodas in the office refrigerator be replaced by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made. "Reality Distortion Field," they said on the front, and on the back, "I t"s in the juice!"
T o some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He would a.s.sert something-be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting-without even considering the truth. I t came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself. "He can deceive himself," said Bill Atkinson. "I t allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it."
A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for accomplishing something. Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could be. "His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it can"t be true, but he somehow makes it true."
When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. "He reminded me of Rasputin," said Debi Coleman. "He laser-beamed in on you and didn"t blink. I t didn"t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it." But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: I t enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. "I t was a self-fulfilling distortion," she claimed. "You did the impossible, because you didn"t realize it was impossible."
At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs"s belief that the rules didn"t apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. "He thinks there are a few people who are special-people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India-and he"s one of them," said Hertzfeld. "He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. I t"s almost like Nietzsche."
Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher"s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the uberman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world." I f reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped s.p.a.ces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.
Another key aspect of Jobs"s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were either "enlightened" or "an a.s.shole." Their work was either "the best" or "totally s.h.i.tty." Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the good side of these dichotomies, described what it was like: I t was difficult working under Steve, because there was a great polarity between G.o.ds and s.h.i.theads. I f you were a G.o.d, you were up on a pedestal and could do no wrong. Those of us who were considered to be G.o.ds, as I was, knew that we were actually mortal and made badengineering decisions and farted like any person, so we were always afraid that we would get knocked off our pedestal. The ones who were s.h.i.theads, who were brilliant engineers working very hard, felt there was no way they could get appreciated and rise above their status.
But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs could rapidly reverse himself. When briefing Hertzfeld about the reality distortion field, Tribble specifically warned him about Jobs"s tendency to resemble high-voltage alternating current. "Just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn"t necessarily mean he"ll feel that way tomorrow," Tribble explained. "I f you tell him a new idea, he"ll usually tell you that he thinks it"s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he"ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."
The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev. "I f one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another," Hertzfeld said. "Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently." That happened repeatedly to Bruce Horn, the programmer who, with T esler, had been lured from Xerox PARC. "One week I "d tell him about an idea that I had, and he would say it was crazy," recalled Horn. "The next week, he"d come and say, "Hey I have this great idea"- and it would be my idea! You"d call him on it and say, "Steve, I told you that a week ago," and he"d say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah" and just move right along."
I t was as if Jobs"s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the extreme spikes of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind.
So in dealing with him, the Mac team adopted an audio concept called a "low pa.s.s filter." In processing his input, they learned to reduce the amplitude of his high-frequency signals. That served to smooth out the data set and provide a less jittery moving average of his evolving att.i.tudes.
"After a few cycles of him taking alternating extreme positions," said Hertzfeld, "we would learn to low pa.s.s filter his signals and not react to the extremes."
Was Jobs"s unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the opposite. He was very emotionally attuned, able to read people and know their psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something. This made him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading, flattering, and intimidating people. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe," Joanna Hoffman said. "I t"s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you."
Ann Bowers became an expert at dealing with Jobs"s perfectionism, petulance, and p.r.i.c.kliness. She had been the human resources director at Intel, but had stepped aside after she married its cofounder Bob Noyce. She joined Apple in 1980 and served as a calming mother figure who would step in after one of Jobs"s tantrums. She would go to his office, shut the door, and gently lecture him. "I know, I know," he would say. "Well, then, please stop doing it," she would insist. Bowers recalled, "He would be good for a while, and then a week or so later I would get a call again."
She realized that he could barely contain himself. "He had these huge expectations, and if people didn"t deliver, he couldn"t stand it. He couldn"t control himself. I could understand why Steve would get upset, and he was usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. I t created a fear factor. He was self-aware, but that didn"t always modify his behavior."
Jobs became close to Bowers and her husband, and he would drop in at their Los Gatos Hills home unannounced. She would hear his motorcycle in the distance and say, "I guess we have Steve for dinner again." For a while she and Noyce were like a surrogate family. "He was so bright and also so needy. He needed a grown-up, a father figure, which Bob became, and I became like a mother figure."
There were some upsides to Jobs"s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please. "His behavior can be emotionally draining, but if you survive, it works," Hoffman said. You could also push back-sometimes-and not only survive but thrive. That didn"t always work; Raskin tried it, succeeded for a while, and then was destroyed. But if you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized you up and decided that you knew what you were doing, he would respect you. In both his personal and his professional life over the years, his inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies.
The Mac team knew that. Every year, beginning in 1981, it gave out an award to the person who did the best job of standing up to him. The award was partly a joke, but also partly real, and Jobs knew about it and liked it. Joanna Hoffman won the first year. From an Eastern European refugee family, she had a strong temper and will. One day, for example, she discovered that Jobs had changed her marketing projections in a way she found totally reality-distorting. Furious, she marched to his office. "As I "m climbing the stairs, I told his a.s.sistant I am going to take a knife and stab it into his heart," she recounted. Al Eisenstat, the corporate counsel, came running out to restrain her. "But Steve heard me out and backed down."
Hoffman won the award again in 1982. "I remember being envious of Joanna, because she would stand up to Steve and I didn"t have the nerve yet," said Debi Coleman, who joined the Mac team that year. "Then, in 1983, I got the award. I had learned you had to stand up for what you believe, which Steve respected. I started getting promoted by him after that." Eventually she rose to become head of manufacturing.
One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of Atkinson"s engineers and uttered his usual "This is s.h.i.t." As Atkinson recalled, "The guy said, "No it"s not, it"s actually the best way," and he explained to Steve the engineering trade-offs he"d made." Jobs backed down. Atkinson taught his team to put Jobs"s words through a translator. "We learned to interpret "This is s.h.i.t" to actually be a question that means, "T ell me why this is the best way to do it."" But the story had a coda, which Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the engineer found an even better way to perform the function that Jobs had criticized. "He did it better because Steve had challenged him," said Atkinson, "which shows you can push back on him but should also listen, for he"s usually right."
Jobs"s p.r.i.c.kly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on budget. "He could not make trade-offs well," said Atkinson. "I f someone didn"t care to make their product perfect, they were a bozo." At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981, for example, Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. I t was not great-it had a five-inch screen and not much memory-but it worked well enough. As...o...b..rne famously declared, "Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous." Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. "This guy just doesn"t get it," Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. "He"s not making art, he"s making s.h.i.t."
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. "I f it could save a person"s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture."
The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs"s pa.s.sion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the compet.i.tion, or to make a lot of money. I t was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit ofTiffany gla.s.s at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany"s example of creating great art that could be ma.s.s-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, "Hey, if we"re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.""
Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not, nor was it justified. There were other ways to have motivated his team.
Even though the Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over budget because of Jobs"s impetuous interventions.
There was also a cost in brutalized human feelings, which caused much of the team to burn out. "Steve"s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks," Wozniak said. "I like being more patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. I f the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had been a mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it."
But even though Jobs"s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. I t infused Apple employees with an abiding pa.s.sion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts made that read "90 hours a week and loving it!" Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong urge to impress him, they exceeded their own expectations. "I "ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don"t have to baby them," Jobs later explained. "By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don"t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain."
Most of them agree. "He would shout at a meeting, "You a.s.shole, you never do anything right,"" Debi Coleman recalled. "I t was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him."
CHAPTER TWELVE.
THE DESIGN.
Real Artists Simplify.
A Bauhaus Aesthetic.
Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why they were so wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the ma.s.ses. He also loved listening to his father describe the styling intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning at Apple, he believed that great industrial design-a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the Apple I I-would set the company apart and make its products distinctive.
The company"s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a small building it shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its signature style and memorable product designs, so Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. "He would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features," said Dan"l Lewin, who worked there. "Every now and then, he would ask, "Can I take this brochure?"" By 1980, he had hired Lewin.
His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981, when he began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that year focused on I talian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli. "I had come to revere the I talian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Aw ay reveres the I talian bikers," recalled Jobs, "so it was an amazing inspiration."
In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans serif font typography, and furniture on the Aspen Inst.i.tute campus. Like his mentors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no distinction between fine art and applied industrial design. The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. I t emphasized rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius were "G.o.d is in the details" and "Less is more." As with Eichler homes, the artistic sensibility was combined with the capability for ma.s.s production.
Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design conference, the theme of which was "The Future Isn"t What I t Used to Be." He predicted the pa.s.sing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. "The current wave of industrial design is Sony"s high-tech look, which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it," he said. "I t"s easy to do that. But it"s not great." He proposed an alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that was more true to the function and nature of the products. "What we"re going to do is make the products high- tech, and we"re going to package them cleanly so that you know they"re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics."
He repeatedly emphasized that Apple"s products would be clean and simple. "We will make them bright and pure and honest about being high- tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black, black, black, black, like Sony," he preached. "So that"s our approach. Very simple, and we"re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we"re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let"s make it simple. Really simple." Apple"s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to use. Those goals do not always go together. Sometimes a design can be so sleek and simple that a user finds it intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. "The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious," Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For example, he extolled the desktop metaphor he was creating for the Macintosh.
"People know how to deal with a desktop intuitively. I f you walk into an office, there are papers on the desk. The one on the top is the most important. People know how to switch priority. Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have."
Speaking at the same time as Jobs that Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller seminar room, was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted into fame the previous November when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. They struck up a close friendship, and Jobs invited her to visit Apple. "I came to work with Steve for a week," Lin recalled. "I asked him, "Why do computers look like clunky TV sets? Why don"t you make something thin? Why not a flat laptop?"" Jobs replied that this was indeed his goal, as soon as the technology was ready.
At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial design, Jobs felt. He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and he also liked the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter Rams. But there were no towering figures energizing the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy and Herbert Bayer had done. "There really wasn"t much going on in industrial design, particularly in Silicon Valley, and Steve was very eager to change that," said Lin. "His design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it"s playful. He embraced minimalism, which came from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to make his products cold. They stayed fun.
He"s pa.s.sionate and super-serious about design, but at the same time there"s a sense of play."
As Jobs"s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the j.a.panese style and began hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I . M. Pei. His Buddhist training was a big influence. "I have always found Buddhism, j.a.panese Zen Buddhism in particular, to be aesthetically sublime," he said. "The most sublime thing I "ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto. I "m deeply moved by what that culture has produced, and it"s directly from Zen Buddhism."
Like a Porsche.
Jef Raskin"s vision for the Macintosh was that it would be like a boxy carry-on suitcase, which would be closed by flipping up the keyboard over the front screen. When Jobs took over the project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn"t take up much s.p.a.ce on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that it shouldn"t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and T erry Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a keyboard that was detachable.One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to find Jobs hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the creative services director, James Ferris. "We need it to have a cla.s.sic look that won"t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle," Jobs said. From his father he had developed an appreciation for the contours of cla.s.sic cars.
"No, that"s not right," Ferris replied. "The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari."