Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  That’s why “That’s shit!” was as common a response from Steve as a pointed question or a thoughtful discussion. He wanted smart answers, and he didn’t want to waste time on niceties when it was simpler to be clear, no matter how critical his response. “The reason you sugarcoat things is that you don’t want anyone to think you’re an asshole. So, that’s vanity,” explains Jony Ive, a crisply articulate Brit with the muscled frame of a boxer and a tendency to hunch forward over a table as he leans in to speak to you. As design chief, Ive was on the receiving end of Steve’s blunt criticisms as much as anyone. Whenever he felt abused, he would tell himself that someone who sugarcoats his true opinions “might not really even be all that concerned about the other person’s feelings. He just doesn’t want to appear to be a jerk. But if he really cared about the work he would be less vain, and would talk directly about the work. That’s the way Steve was. That’s why he’d say ‘That’s shit!’ But then the next day or the day after, he also would just as likely come back saying, ‘Jony, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you showed me, and I think it’s very interesting after all. Let’s talk about it some more.’ ”

  Steve put it this way: “You hire people who are better than you are at certain things, and then make sure they know that they need to tell you when you’re wrong. The executive teams at Apple and Pixar are constantly arguing with each other. Everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves at Pixar. Everybody’s totally straight with what they think, and the same is beginning to happen at Apple.” His inner circle understood that Steve’s acerbic criticism wasn’t personal. They’d all learned how to, as Susan Barnes said, “get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling.” Steve expected them to do that, and he expected them to push back when he was wrong. “I fought with him for sixteen years,” remembers Rubinstein. “I mean, it was almost comedic. I remember one Christmas morning, we’re on the phone screaming at each other and both of our significant others are in the background, saying, ‘Come on, we have to get going, get off the damn phone.’ He was always screaming about something or other. Once, we were in this huge fight. And I’m standing, I think, in Target down in Cupertino, pushing my cart around buying toilet paper or whatever the hell it was, right? And Steve and I are on the phone, yelling at each other. It’s just how we operate. I grew up in New York City. My family was out of a Woody Allen movie, you know that scene in Annie Hall where they’re underneath the Thunderbolt roller coaster? That’s my family. So fighting all the time didn’t bother me. That was probably one of the reasons we were successful together.”

  From 850 miles up the Pacific Coast, Bill Gates watched with great interest as the limping company he had helped with that $150 million investment and a commitment to make software for the Mac struggled to survive. “It was a much more mature group,” he observes. “With the Mac team or even at NeXT, when Steve went on a jag everybody just scattered into their own corner. But this Apple management team would push back and coalesce as a group. When Steve would pull any one individual out of the pack and say, ‘Your work is such shit and you’re such an idiot,’ the pack had to decide, okay, are we going to let this one go or do we really like this guy. And they could go to Steve afterwards and say, ‘Hey, come on, there aren’t that many people we can hire that are near as good as that guy, go back and apologize.’ And he would, even though his intensity was still just incredible.

  “That is a really crack team that has gone through hell, and bonded with each other in toughness,” Gates continues, falling into the present tense. “I mean, you can point to everybody on that team and say, okay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay, he earned his pay. There’s no weakness in that team, nor is there a backup plan or a forward-looking alternative team. It’s just this one team.”

  Steve had assembled a group that was strong enough to deal with who he was, and autonomous enough to compensate for his weaknesses. They developed their own tactics for managing him. “It was like we had a common enemy,” says Rubinstein. Members of the team would meet regularly with one another to plan how to get Steve to authorize the decisions they felt would be best, to figure out a way through or around Steve’s more imperious or ill-considered decisions or prejudices, and to try to anticipate where Steve would steer things next. They had the sense that Steve knew this was going on behind his back. “He knew that he could count on us to make things work,” says Tevanian, “even when there was friction or problems. We faced some really hard problems, you know, and he knew he could trust us to do the right thing.”

  I watched Steve closely, both as he steadily and patiently composed his strategies and as he cajoled this stable, impressive team to execute them. I was skeptical because of his past failures as a manager, but intrigued. One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. “Uh, no,” he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn’t enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. “The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products.

  “The company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans, this abstract construct that’s incredibly powerful. Even so, for me, it’s about the products. It’s about working together with really fun, smart, creative people and making wonderful things. It’s not about the money. What a company is, then, is a group of people who can make more than just the next big thing. It’s a talent, it’s a capability, it’s a culture, it’s a point of view, and it’s a way of working together to make the next thing, and the next one, and the next one.” A talent, a capability, a culture, and a point of view: the Apple he was in the midst of re-creating would have all these things, as would the products it would create.

  STEVE KNEW HE had to deliver Apple’s first new product in 1998. He certainly couldn’t expect Apple’s millions of investors to wait around for years and years, as Perot and Canon had been forced to do at NeXT. But Apple didn’t have any great software applications ready to unveil, and Steve had no desire to offer any hardware that had been in the Amelio pipeline. He needed something new, and it had to have enough of his DNA to signal that serious changes were afoot. The personal computer business had been bereft of creativity and excitement for so long that it was now simply known as the “box” business. Steve needed a lot more than just another box.

  He found his answer in the skunkworks of a building several blocks away from the corporate offices. That’s where Jony Ive, the designer who had so impressed Fred Anderson, was toiling away.

  Ive, Apple’s head designer, was not yet a member of Steve’s inner circle. An unassuming self-starter who turned thirty at about the time that Steve arrived in 1997, Ive had signed on with Apple as a contract designer in 1992 when he still lived in London, working for a design consultancy called Tangerine. The son of a silversmith who taught at the local college in the London suburb of Chingford, Ive gravitated toward industrial design at an early age, and went on to study at what is now called Northumbria University in Newcastle. There he became an admirer of Dieter Rams, the legendary onetime chief of design for Braun, the German small appliance maker, who in the 1970s was one of the pioneers of what is now called sustainable design, and who railed against the industrial practice of planned obsolescence. Rams, who still designs furniture for a Danish company called Vitsœ, had become known for his “Ten Principles of Good Design.” According to Rams, Good Design is:

  1. innovative

  2. what makes a product useful

  3. aesthetic

  4. what makes a product understandable

  5. unobtrusive

  6. honest

  7. long-lasting

  8. thorough down to the last detail

  9. environmentally friendly

  10. as lit
tle design as possible

  During Amelio’s short tenure I had visited Jony in his workspace, called the Design Lab. After Steve returned, the lab would be moved into the main headquarters complex on Infinite Loop, and would become as off-limits as Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. But under Amelio it was accessible on the late Friday afternoon when I visited. Ive was the only employee still around that day. The space was piled high with gray plastic or Styrofoam mockups of the multitudes of previous, rather ordinary Macs he and his team had designed. Back then, his objective was to repackage computers in an artfully austere way, more than to create radically new designs. There were just two exceptions, both vivid in their own way.

  The first one that he showed me was the eMate, his counterintuitive version of the Newton Message Pad for elementary school students. The clamshell-type device really did look somewhat like a mussel. Its subtle curves gave it a playful look, but what really grabbed your eyes was its translucent aquamarine plastic shell—a throbbing color that seemed to glow as if lit from within.

  The other brilliant design Jony showed me was his prototype of a limited-edition machine Apple would release belatedly to commemorate the company’s twentieth anniversary. The 20th Anniversary Macintosh was his pride and joy at the time. It was a striking piece of out-of-the-box industrial design thinking. Jony and his team had placed the guts of a top-of-the-line laptop inside a svelte and slightly curved vertical slab, which had on the top half of its surface a color LCD monitor, and on the bottom half a vertical CD-ROM drive, all of which was framed by specially designed Bose stereo speakers. It was packed with state-of-the-art technology, including cable television and FM tuners and the circuitry necessary for the computer to double as TV set or a radio. Finally, Ive and his team had concocted a conch-shaped floor module to house the power supply, a subwoofer, and a powerful hi-fi audio amplifier so that the computer would supply the sonic fullness of a high-powered stereo system without generating too much heat or seeming bulky. The whole package looked as if it belonged on display in the sculpture gallery of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (In fact, one did wind up in the museum’s industrial design section.) Technovores lusted after the machines.

  The first time Steve made the long trek over to the Design Lab, Ive was nervous and apprehensive. “That very first time we met, he had already started to talk about reengaging Harmut Esslinger [the founder of Frog Design, who had designed the first Mac],” Ive says. “He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me. And he should have done that, based on the products that we were shipping at the time, which weren’t very good at all.” The products and the prototypes didn’t thrill Steve, but Ive himself made a bigger impression. He is quiet and earnest, and can be beguilingly engaging when describing what he is trying to accomplish with his designs, in his proper British accent. Like Steve, Jony has a gift for clearly explaining complex ideas. Steve was impressed. “You know Jony. He’s kind of a cherub,” Steve told me in late 1997. “I liked him right away. And I could tell after that first meeting that Amelio had wasted his talent.”

  Just as important, Jony was impressed by Steve. Thousands of Apple employees had scattered their résumés across Silicon Valley as they tried to abandon Amelio’s leaky ship, and Jony had resolved to look around himself. But he quickly saw that Steve and Amelio couldn’t have been more different. “Amelio described himself as the turnaround king,” Ive remembers. “So he was focused on turnaround, which is mainly about not losing money. The way you don’t lose money is you don’t spend it. But Steve’s focus was completely different, and it never changed. It was exactly the same focus from the first time I met him to right to the very end: the product. We trust if we do a good job and the product’s good, people will like it. And we trust that if they like it, they’ll buy it. If we’re competent operationally, we will make money.” It was that simple. So Jony decided not to leave Apple, a choice that would lead to the closest and most fruitful creative collaboration of Steve’s entire career, even more symbiotic than his original partnership with Steve Wozniak.

  Nonetheless, Steve killed both of Jony’s pet projects. The eMate disappeared along with all other traces of the Newton (save a few key patents), and the 20th Anniversary bit the dust after selling just 12,000 units. The products didn’t fit into his quadrants. Besides, he told me one day, “I just don’t like television. Apple will never make a TV again.” This was Jony’s introduction to Steve’s coldhearted decision-making. Like Avie and Ruby and Fred and Tim, he had come to understand that Apple’s best chance forward was with Steve, and that if you were in with Steve, you were in all the way, bumps and all.

  THERE WAS ONE thing that especially intrigued Steve at the Design Lab: the odd texture and eerie translucence of the eMate’s plastic shell. That detail became a seed idea for the iMac, the first product of the new Steve Jobs era at Apple.

  Technologically, the iMac was not a radical departure from the past. But working closely with Steve, Ive designed a cosmetic standout that, for the first time in years, gave the personal computer some personality. The iMac was a dramatically rounded shell made of material similar to the eMate’s. Through its “Bondi blue” (named for the evocative tropical waters of Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia) translucent plastic exterior, a buyer could see the inner workings of the computer, its rigorously arranged wires and circuit boards loaded with chips that looked like 3-D maps of cities. The computer and monitor were housed in a single bulbous module with a circular hatch on the back that doubled as a handle, to allow access for repairs or modifications. Steve loved the handle despite its impracticality, because it was a throwback to the original Mac. The machine weighed thirty-eight pounds, so it wasn’t likely that anyone would actually treat it like a laptop to be carried around from one workspace to another. But the handle, the shape, and the translucence combined to make the iMac seem like a bottle of blue fun. It was exactly the kind of hot new product he needed to once again differentiate Apple from the “box” crowd—the Dells and Compaqs and HPs and IBMs.

  Two other decisions—one technological, one driven by marketing—also made the iMac stand out from that crowd of putty-colored rectangular slabs. Steve and Jon Rubinstein opted for developing a CD-ROM drive for loading software, rather than a standard floppy disk drive, despite the fact that most people at the time still stored their data on floppy disks. You could buy a separate, external floppy disk drive to plug into the iMac, but Steve reasoned that most software would soon be delivered on CD-ROM optical discs—a technology that was already fast displacing vinyl and tape cassettes as the primary medium for recorded music. He also felt certain that within a year or two, recordable CD-ROM drives would render floppy disk drives redundant. As he had before, he was betting that users would accept a slightly uncomfortable move into the future, one that would force them to convert their data to a new format. This time he got it right.

  Steve’s other noteworthy decision was to slot the letter i in before Mac. The iMac was built to be plugged into the Internet, via sockets that could handle either a phone line or, for those lucky enough to have access, a connection to a full-fledged Ethernet network. It sported a built-in telephone modem as standard equipment, while most computer makers sold those only as an optional add-on. Steve had foreseen that buyers would see this “Internet” Mac as a forward-looking computer with an eye toward the future of personal computing, which was clearly going to revolve around the Internet. But the i did more than that. The i was personal, in that this was “my” computer, and even, perhaps, an expression of who “I” am. And what a bold expression it was, fresh and transparent and different. It seemed like the kind of computer that an individual who could “think different” would use.

  Many critics in the burgeoning computer press sneered that the iMac was neither faster nor more powerful than machines from its competitors. After all, for a decade speed and power had been the only way personal computers differentiated themselves. Those same critics disliked the fact that this
blue, rotund thing looked more like a toy than a computer. But they had missed the point completely. The iMac’s radical design sent exactly the kind of reassuring, friendly, and differentiating message that Steve wanted to send. With one product, Apple had reinforced its position as the “personal” computer company. The iMac was a vivid reminder that personal computers are tools for people, and that they should both reflect and amplify an individual’s own personality. That’s why the iMac was an instant success, selling nearly two million units in the first twelve months of production, and becoming Apple’s first bona fide hit in years.

  Its success was critical to Steve’s plans for a rebound. Steve had returned to Apple believing strongly that design could be a significant part of Apple’s resurrection; the iMac supported his theory. “When we did the first iMac,” he later told me, “there was such resistance in hardware engineering. A lot of people thought it wasn’t a Mac, that it would fail. But the minute that everybody saw it succeed in the marketplace, a lot of the people started to turn around and go, ‘Okay, this design stuff is important I guess.’ They felt the thrill of success again.” Steve and Jony’s iMac enabled Apple to make a bold first step toward recovery, buying Apple some precious time at a moment when most observers thought it was headed to its grave.