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The Prophet |
Dinner with Steve Jobs by Mike Sterling |
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The charismatic head and founder of APPLE is not well and did not give his annual address before Macworld this year. In 2004 he had a bout of pancreatic cancer that was treated by an operation. He bounced back and was leading the charge at APPLE, which has a ton of cash and exciting new products.. Lately, he has lost a lot of weight and announced that he will go on medical leave. He looks very thin and frail. A long time ago ... 22 years or so, I had dinner with him after seeing him constantly for about a week. He had done wonderful things at APPLE, but had hired a guy named John Scully from Pepsi-Cola to come in and run APPLE so he could concentrate. The marriage of the pure manager and the gifted and obsessive marketing genius did not work and there was a power struggle, which Scully won in the short term by 'fandangling' the Board, Wall Street and the power brokers in Silicon Valley. Already fabulously rich, Jobs left APPLE and started a company called NeXT. (small e intentional) He had a rancorous start with the huge APPLE putting law suits at the door of the visionary Jobs to stop him from making anything NeXT. They said in effect that his brain was a trade secret belonging to them. He and 6 other former APPLE guys built the NeXT machine and I was one of the first trained users of it. Steve held a class for about 10 of us from various parts of the science, technology and computer industry. During that time, I got a good idea about Steve Jobs the man. He was the healthiest human being I've ever seen. He just glowed with energy. He had dark hair that looked like it came out of some shampoo ad. It was like he must have eaten everything good and exercised well. I guess he was just fine tuned. His brain was working hard and full speed all the time.
The NeXT Machine... the Duesenberg of early computers He gave me a NeXT machine that I still have. It was a beauty. The machine itself was a perfect, modest sized black cube. It played chess very well too. It was just beautiful, just wonderful. It is still beautiful. Even the finish on it was just so. It was made out of Magnesium too. Who builds a magnesium case except Steve Jobs? The machine was way, way advanced over anything that anybody had as a work station. For example, some people at CERN where part of the Internet was born used it as the WORLD's first Internet Server. Now that's just a great thing, isn't it? 16/01/2009 12:42 AM |
Jobs last year showing one of his creations... the brain still as powerful as ever. Later Jobs went back to Apple and Scully was out and the rest is history with the music and phone revolution due much to him. Scully left because he should never have come. Jobs is a genius because he just forces people to do things right. He drove those close to him nuts with his energy. I could feel the pressure wave around him. Take a look at the Apple hardware as compared to an ordinary PC. You can argue the merits, but the style is hands down Steve Jobs. He has style. The night I had a long dinner with him was fun. It was in Palo Alto or Menlo Park near the power base of Silicon Valley. He talked about the future, nothing but the future. I worked for a company that had an office nearby in Menlo Park. Jobs talked about his ideas and hopes for the industry. The whole NeXT operating system was built upon object oriented programming that is common place now and was started at XEROX Park as a language called 'Small Talk'. I got interested in this style of programming and so I wrote an entire new language just as an exercise because I thought that if Jobs was enthused by it, then I should be too. It worked very well. At this time we were working with Lucas Film Graphics Division, which George Lucas saw as the future of film making for his great ideas. They had a zany group of guys up there and we worked with them on some common problems. Way ahead of everybody Jobs saw the beauty in everything and he bought the division from Lucas, renamed it Pixar which resulted in Toy Story and of course Disney in the world of computer animation. He knew what he was doing and was seeing so far into the future, that whatever he thought was good became an overnight sensation. He could change an entire industry with his thoughts. He has simple and beautiful ideas. People who did not understand what he was doing called him an egomaniac. It was not ego, he just wanted people to see what he saw as obvious. He could not stomach stupid people and just got rid of them. He would get furious at lack of insight and hard work and explode. He was just a great person to be around. He was a fun guy, but the word 'driven' hardly is a strong enough tag for him. To be close to that pressure wave he generated might be hard. A week of it was enough to make me remember him as one of the most memorable characters I've ever met. For the future, we need Steve Jobs. |
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