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Snapshot of Steve Jobs Meeting an Icon before he became one |
Technology Mike Sterling for Canadian Community News To Comment on this article Click Here |
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I met Steve Jobs before he became an icon. I want to give you my mental picture of him in his prime. It was a long time ago. I met him twice. The first time was short, but the second was for a week. It was not fun. It felt like a year. The first time was briefly and I was demonstrating a new user interface for a venture capitalist named John Doerr who is now famous. I was the Chief Technical Officer for a startup company that John had financed. I can't remember why Steve was even there. Anyway, I was busy demonstrating and I felt this looming presence over my shoulder as I was talking and clicking away with my 3-button mouse. The shadow observed for a while and I thought he was just one of John's young friends. He then interrupted me by saying "Where did you get that interface?". I turned to face him because the question was aggressive and clearly was meant to be. I did not like the tone. I recognized him immediately, however. I told him we developed it. I knew why he was asking. Our interface was far better than his and the origin of both was Xerox Parc (with a c). He was very proud of his graphic user interface and the general public thought it was unique and technically advanced. It was neat, but not technically advanced and certainly not unique. It was inferior to what was then known as the Star interface and far inferior to our interface which was faster, easier to use and programmable by users. The second time I met him was after he had been replaced as Apple's head by the Board of Directors or himself as the legend says (doubtful). Apple was not doing well and thought that changing the chain of command would work miracles. They could not isolate Jobs effectively by breaking any number of links in their chain. This amounted to firing Jobs, as they brought in a guy from Pepsi Cola to run the company. I guess they thought they needed a manager and Steve was not what they deemed a true manager. The man's name was John Scully and according to what is published he was recruited by Jobs. This could be, but it means that Jobs did not know himself very well at that time. There was a penchant for doing that early on in Silicon Valley as the founders were being replaced by what was deemed "professional managers". It proved to be troublesome. Just imagine today what Apple stock would do, if Jobs was replaced by a man running a beverage company? What happened next was that the big time manager, Scully, after a Silicon Valley epic war fired the erratic and energetic Jobs. Wow....Jobs hires the guy and he then fires him! This led Jobs to go off and do other things for a while. He recruited some of his friends and started a company called NeXT for next computer platform. I was still hanging around the computer industry and John Doerr, who clearly was friendly with Jobs, asked me to come to Silicon Valley for a period of time to look at Jobs' NeXT machine. I did and I entered Jobs hurricane world of harassment, energy and form. When I got there, I was not alone. Somebody, maybe Doerr or Jobs and Doerr together had recruited about a dozen other people like me to evaluate and learn to program this new 'miracle' machine. We were supposed to be industry guru apostles or something like that. One thing to be mentioned up front. Jobs was not a computer scientist or a classic technical person, if either of those can be defined. John Doerr was not either. Both had written some minor programs, but none ever made it to what we now call production quality. They would not know what was going on in today's high quality computer science. Both these guys were much alike. They were high energy to an extreme. They were hummingbirds. So I began my week with Jobs and NeXT. Let me describe both physically. Jobs was the picture of health. He just was energy personified. I spent most all of every day with him and I got to observe him closely. His hair and eyes gleamed. He looked lean, tan and very fit, but the real image was of unstoppable energy. The NeXT machine was really a gem visually for the times. They gave me one and I still have it. It is a beauty. It was black and had a sheen to it. It was just a cube and not big at all. I liked the looks of it very much. It had a terrible flaw, however. It used a high quality black and white display rather than colour. Just a few miles away the company I worked for at the time had a good colour display going with a better user interface. Silicon Graphics had even better things going with Jim Clark pushing the technology (Jim's Geometry Engine was first fabricated at Xerox Parc) Very strange, but hype beats function for a while, but not at this time. Colour was too important. Jobs had hired a number of his technical guys away from Apple and they had put NeXT together as an object oriented machine based upon principles embodied by the computer language "Smalltalk". Steve had gone back to the well again. You guessed it, Smalltalk came from Xerox Parc! They did not write the operating system in Smalltalk, but did use the principles. I liked the idea and I had written a tidy graphics program using my own language for the Classic Mac. I had time on my hands. I demonstrated my 'language' using as an example a four bar linkage mechanism that I could activate using object oriented principles and commands. All this stuff later morphed into a language called C++ and also JAVA variants and now is part of many languages and techniques. It has become part of computer science, but gets messed up all the time The whole idea was to act like a conductor of a symphony orchestra and just gesture toward the musical components of the orchestra and they would then do their thing rather than worrying about playing violins and drums yourself. Let the violinists and percussion section do their work. They are objects in the musical schema that you are putting together. In this same way the master programmer uses debugged elements and inherits their capable attributes. Well, NeXT was supposed to make all this easy. I dove in and found that it was a good machine, but the object oriented part was not fully developed. Programming was just as hard as ever. The orchestra had not been hired, let alone rehearsed as yet. I don't know what was happening to Jobs and his staff at this time. I think they were both guilty of a little stretching of the truth and believing each other. Jobs must have been convinced by them that the heart of this machine would beat faster and louder than any other now contemplated. He was not a programmer, so he was only concerned with how users interacted with the machine and most importantly each other. This was done really well, but it was not a great leap forward for programmers. It was still a 'slog' for the working people. Later, it was not bad, but then it was too late. On the other side Jobs kept up his non-stop promotional frenzy, not just for our benefit, but for his staff too, which was very small. Understandably, the NeXT staff hovered around us trying to help us understand what was 'under the hood' What with them and Jobs too, I was getting frustrated. This was a high pressure week. Jobs was with us all the time and never stopped his hype. The documentation was primitive, so I had to pay close attention to the non-stop technical chatter. Even at meals, Jobs was with us. (He was a healthy eater) All of us after a few days could see that the machine was beautiful and had some nice features, but it was not something that would change the way people programmed and used computers. Also, it was going against the cost curve. Historically, it did establish one thing. It was part of the first Internet site in the world at CERN on the French-Swiss border. (See NeXT and the Internet) Maybe one of the few developers there sent the first message with his NeXT machine, I don't remember him, if he did. NeXT lacked a number of things:
It did have the now well known Jobs look with its sleek cube made of magnesium. He had started to look at form closely and that led to Apple's success on his return to the company. So my impression of Jobs was not what has emerged or what he really was or is, I'm sure. He certainly was a hands on manager. Some say he is the best manager ever. This is really amazing to me. He excels in attention to detail in form. He rarely errs there. I don't know about the management part of it. Near this same time he bought Pixar from Lucas Films and Toy Story was made. That suited him well. I'm sure he learned even more about form from Pixar and the Lucas people. So what happened when he came back to Apple to 'save' them? I don't have an insight in this, but I suspect that he had by this time sorted out his own role and skills. He did not change his style, but may have learned his own limitations. This has resulted in him paying more attention to the strong members of his management team They improved because he improved. So what is my prognosis for an Apple without Steve Jobs? I suspect it will do just fine because the team has been doing the heavy lifting for a long, long time. Apple is no longer a single man's vision. It has good depth. Will it keep inventing things at the same pace? Probably not, but it's amazing that Apple has reinvented themselves even once. Usually a company gets only one kick at the can. Because form is so important to Jobs and he has ingrained that in Apple's soul, they could be overtaken by function again. They want to manufacture everything in their own way and that has led to their success, but it once led to their near implosion, when they could not keep up with Intel's hardware as bundled by many suppliers. Google is doing it another way. They say we don't do our own hardware, but license our Android Operating System to others to package it in pads, computers and phones. Watch the ads and you will see this coming on strong. It's going to be interesting to see how all this plays out. Jobs' legacy will be in form and being able to carve out new business segments like music. In some ways Apple still likes to go to war with others. For example, the Apple war with Adobe has been long standing and even shows in the iPad not supporting Flash technology out of the box. This war dates back to the font wars where Adobe controlled the fonts and the rest of the world had to license from them. Their wars with Microsoft have been legendary too. Maybe with Steve Jobs stepping aside, Apple might do even better. His obsession with form will not leave the company. Maybe new things will continue to come out of the Apple team with them still remembering his obsessions for quality and look. John Doerr has continued on to finance more and more successful companies and some flops too.. I smiled when both Jobs and Doerr got so interested in what is now known as the Segway Scooter. That's the innovative 2-wheel scooter that can climb stairs. I think they both invested in it and changed the management team. It makes me smile. A friend told me that John Doerr fell in love with Segway screaming down one of San Francisco's famous hills in true hummingbird style, trusting the gyroscopic controls not to fail. Good for you, John! We all hope that Steve Jobs will continue to be an Icon. He's still got the attention to detail.
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 Young Steve Jobs.
The NeXT Machine as a cube and the ill-fated high quality black and white display. The young Steve Jobs is delighted as he looks upon his creation. He looked like this during my week with him. Notice that the NeXT ad would not pass muster with Apple today.
An older and frail Steve Jobs at one of his famous product introductions. They are staged very well.
John Doerr the Hummingbird Venture Capitalist Scrolling stops when you move your mouse inside the scroll area. You can click on the ads for more
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