iJobs v.2.0

(… continued from last week)

When it came to the architecture of the Apple I and II and later the Macs, Jobs decided the operating system and applications should run only on Apple hardware. It was a strategic mistake. PCs had not yet become mainstream and that is always a dangerous time for technology developers because the format that the market will ultimately embrace is not yet known. Remember VHS and Betamax? They were not interchangeable and since more content could be stored on the larger, bulkier VHS, it became the ultimate winner. Betamax players became relics.

Jobs’ decision to stick with an integrated design left the door open to developers who pursued modular designs. For example, when IBM decided to introduce a PC, even though its management believed the company’s future was in mainframes, it had to get into the market fast because it was a latecomer. The PC development team was sequestered in Boca Raton, Florida and told to produce a product in one year. The IBM mainframe processor, operating system, hard drive, and applications couldn’t be quickly converted to work in its PC, so IBM chose a modular design. Intel provided its processor, several suppliers provided hard drives, and Microsoft created a GUI-based Windows operating system for IBM, reserving the right to sell it to other PC manufacturers. Ironically, the Apple operating system was superior to Microsoft, but it would only run on an Apple product, whereas the Microsoft operating system was adaptable to any PC. In time the Apple equivalent of a PC – the Mac – would garner only 5% of the market because of its vertically integrated design. Third-party printers and other peripherals also wouldn’t run on Macs because they couldn’t interface to Apple’s integrated design. The market quickly recognized the restrictions of the Apple and the flexibilities of other PCs. Apple lost.

Woz had anticipated that this would happen and wanted to sell his operating system to other PC producers from the outset, even though those producers would use it compete in the market against Apple. But even then, Apple would be successful because vendors and competitors would be using the Apple operating system. Instead, that advantage shifted to Microsoft. Unwittingly, Apple put Microsoft in business. Jobs – and later John Sculley who had come to Apple as its new CEO – recognized that the integrated architecture was a mistake.

Apple became a public company in the last month of 1980. About 300 people became millionaires, multimillionaires, and several venture capitalists became billionaires. Among them, at age 25, Jobs was a multimillionaire as was Woz, barely 30. But many who should have gotten stock before the public offering were left out. Some were old friends who went back to the days when Jobs and Woz were headquartered in the Jobs’ garage. Because he was by nature a generous person, Woz began giving some of his stock options to people he thought deserved them.

One of the people denied options was Daniel Kottke. He had been a college classmate of Jobs, gone to India with him when Jobs was searching for himself, and he had helped in early trade shows for the Apple II, manning a demo table and doing the grunt work. Kottke had been Jobs’ housemate for two years. He was truly upset that he hadn’t gotten stock options and, marching to Jobs’ office, tried to talk to him about it. But confronted by Jobs’ unblinking stare, Kottke broke down in tears, turned around, and left. It bothered one of the Apple engineers so much that he told Jobs, "We have to take care of your buddy Daniel. If you will give him some stock, I’ll match whatever you give. Jobs said, "OK. I'll give zero and you give zero." So much for loyalty.

As a public company the rules of the game changed and Jobs’ cavalier management style cast doubt among the Board that he was suited to run the company’s day-to-day operations. Persuaded that he would continue to lead product design and strategy, Jobs participated in recruiting the new CEO, John Sculley, whom he enticed to leave the presidency of Pepsi Cola in 1983. With predictable Jobs bravado, he challenged Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

For a while the two were able to stay out of each other’s way, but Sculley and Jobs held different visions of the future and Apple’s role in it, so Jobs was increasingly isolated and ultimately resigned in 1985. In a fit of petulance, he sold all of his Apple shares for $70 million in a down market. But now he had the ability to finance himself and started NeXT computer, which went nowhere. He also acquired a small company from George Lucas for $5 million that would become Pixar. Creating computer-generated animation occupied Jobs’ creativity for a while but it wasn’t his first love. At one point, he put the company on the market for $25 million but there were no takers. Then came the technology breakthrough at Pixar which resulted in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, and Finding Nemo. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It was a happy ending for Jobs but not for the people who created the breakthrough. They got very little money out of the sale. Kottke redux.

Jobs had been in the wilderness for ten years when the Apple Board announced in 1996 that it was buying NeXT for $427 million, ousting its CEO, Gil Amelio, and bringing Jobs back to run the company. Apple was only months from bankruptcy. Remarkably, Jobs persuaded his arch-rival, Bill Gates, to put $150 million into Apple. Jobs performed a quick survey of the company’s product line and announced to the senior team that they were to get out of all of the product proliferation that had occurred since he left. Apple would make a desktop and a laptop for the home and professional markets – four computers. No more. Almost overnight 3,000 people were terminated and the company retrenched.

The iMac was introduced in 2000 at a time when Napster was riding high and young people (the primary market for iMacs) were ripping tunes and sharing them. A CD player/copier was added to the iMac design but there was no software to manage a music library. This led to the iPod and ultimately iTunes. Jobs negotiated a deal with the recording artists – reminding them that something is better than nothing, and nothing was what they were getting – and the iTunes store began selling the recording artists’ music by the song rather than by the album. Each song sold for 99 cents, with Apple retaining 29 cents. Overnight, the iTunes store became the biggest music retailer in the world selling a million downloads the first day it was open and eight million four months later. The songs were just a way to sell iPods with its proprietary file format and high margins. Yes, Jobs stuck with the integrated architecture.

In 2007 Jobs released the iPhone to the market, which bought over six million units in 15 months. It was a combination phone, camera, content player, and Internet client and browser, allowing emails and text messages to be sent and received. Then in 2010 the iPad was released and sold 300,000 on the first day and three million in the first 80 days. The “i” products, including those not yet released orbit around the iMac as its digital hub, which will possibly migrate to the iCloud in the future.

The integration of these satellite products around the digital hub was likely envisioned by Jobs sometime after he returned to Apple. He concluded that the age of the Internet was fast reaching maturity and that a new age of digital device integration was beginning. In his MacWorld 2001 presentation, Jobs discussed his conception of the digital hub business model – whose satellites would be digital phones, digital photograph and movie cameras, PDAs, CD players, and MP 3 music devices. It was remarkable insight for the time. The iPod/iTunes, iPhone, and iPad became those satellites, albeit in more modern formats as digital technology advanced.

It’s interesting, therefore, to hear Isaacson’s account of the iPad creation when told by Jobs and when told by one of the senior engineers also interviewed. Remember that Jobs had envisioned the PDA as a satellite to his digital hub as early as 2001. As the iPod and iPhones assumed their orbits in the Apple digital constellation, they were not single-function devices. More and more functionality was added to them both at launch and in successive versions. When it was introduced, the iPad was also not a single-function PDA. It was a digital platform for text (books, periodicals), audio (music, audio books), video (movies), games, applications, and Internet browsing.

Jobs recalled the genesis of the iPad for Isaacson. It occurred at a party he attended in 2009 at which a Microsoft engineer boasted that his company was working on a tablet PC. Afterward, Jobs said, “F--- this, let’s show him what a tablet can really do.” He called his team together and directed them to come up with a touch screen tablet with no keyboard or stylus.

Jony Ive, the head of design for Apple, recalled a different genesis story. He told Isaacson that his team had been experimenting with a touch input screen device in a sort of “skunk works” without Jobs’ knowledge or direction. Until its functionality was more or less perfected, he was loath to let Jobs’ know about it for fear that it might earn another “this is s---” summary judgment with an order to kill it. “I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important,” Ive told Isaacson. When the device was bulletproof, Ive showed it to Jobs privately with no audience to posture for and Jobs loved it.

Here again is the accursed Reality Distortion Field convincing Jobs that the ideas of others had really been his own and that things really had happened in the inflated way he later recalled them. Jobs frequently took credit for the work of others. It revealed not only a character flaw in his leadership style, if it can be called that, but also his tendency to look upon the senior executive team as personal staff rather than an organization of specialized functions, each with its own agenda. Even when he took the ideas of others and made them better, Jobs failed to give credit; he always took credit. Predictably the turnover at the top of the organization was high.

For all that he did well, Jobs was inept at human relations. Nowhere was that ineptitude more evident than in his family.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs and his on-and-off girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan. She was born in May 1978 just after Jobs and Woz formed Apple. Initially Jobs denied paternity, going so far as to file a sworn statement with the court that he was sterile and incapable of fathering a child. When Apple went public, making Jobs a multimillionaire, his daughter and former girl friend continued to live in poverty on welfare. Only because of court-ordered DNA tests was Jobs finally compelled to admit that he was Lisa’s father. The court not only ordered him to pay child support, he was ordered to repay $5,000 to the county for the welfare it had paid to Chris Ann Brennan.

Lisa was a teenager before she had any kind of a relationship with Jobs and only then when she moved in with him, his wife, and their children – Reed, Erin, and Eve. Lisa lived there for several years before she left for college, which Jobs financed. It’s odd that someone who was so hostile to his parents for abandoning him would do the same to his daughter. But that was Steve Jobs.

As many adopted children do, Jobs began to search for his biological parents. He found his mother in 1986 through the doctor who delivered him. His mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, was living in Los Angeles and revealed that Jobs had a sister by his biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali. He met his sister, Mona Simpson, and they hit it off at once. She was at his bedside when he died.

When Jobs was searching for his mother, he learned things about his father that convinced him he didn’t want to meet him. But Mona did. The man who abandoned her and her mother was managing a small café and coffee shop in Sacramento. Jandali asked about her brother, but she feigned ignorance, saying he had gone off somewhere and they would likely never hear from him again.

Her father told Mona about the “good old days” … "I wish you could've seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant. I used to run one of the best restaurants in Silicon Valley. Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to eat there. He was a great tipper.” Jandali didn’t know his son’s adopted name was Steve Jobs. Mona said nothing.

She later revealed the conversation to her brother. “Yeah, I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria,” Jobs said, “it was most certainly him. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that's all.”

Jobs was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. Tests revealed that his was a slow growing type that had a good chance of being cured, but for certain, with surgery, his life could be prolonged many years. Enter the Reality Distortion Field. Instead of surgery, Jobs chose unorthodox diets, acupuncture, fasts, purges, even a psychic. He delayed surgery for nine costly months before scheduling it. The tumor was removed and his health rebounded for a while. But the 9-month delay in surgery had crossed the tipping point and it was apparent to his public that his weight loss and increasing gauntness revealed a very sick man. He began to set his affairs in order in Apple. A successor was named to run the company. And in his own way, he began to think of his family.

My story has now come full circle. Walter Isaacson consented to write Jobs’ story. When asked why the notoriously secretive Jobs would grant such a license after all these years to write of a life filled with so many shortcomings, Jobs said he wanted his kids to know who he was. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” he said.

When Isaacson interviewed Erin Jobs, just a teenager at the time, about her father she said, “Sometimes I wish I had more of his attention, but I know the work he’s doing is very important and I think it’s really cool, so I’m fine. I don’t really need more attention.” Having four children myself, two of them girls, it’s hard for me to believe Jobs’ children didn’t need his time and attention regardless of the importance of his work to the world. Mine did. But it’s really hard for me to believe that a man who is dying and truly wanted his children to know him would choose a biographer and a book to do it.

In his last interview with Jobs, Isaacson recalls sitting with him in his backyard garden. Jobs began talking about God. "Sometimes I believe in God,” he said,

… sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

He stopped and thought. "Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone."

Then he paused again. "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."