ONE OF STEVE’S great failures during his first tenure at Apple had been his inability to deliver strong sequels to the Mac or even the Apple II. But that wasn’t the case with the iMac. Just one year after its introduction, the company started to sell a new version in five gumdrop colors. They were even cooler than the Bondi blue machines, because they came with a simple slot drive for CDs, replacing the clunkier drawer that came with the first ones. And their optimistic, brilliant colors played well into Apple’s marketing, which kept redefining the Apple brand as forward-looking, lively, and creative.
But Steve didn’t just focus on the flashy iMacs—that too was a mistake the old Steve would have made. He made sure that his team did an equally excellent job filling the other three quadrants of the grand plan. The so-called towers, as the desktop computers for professionals were known, were the machines that paid the bills. Loaded with faster chips, more memory, better graphics, and slots for adding hard drives and CD burners and other accessories, the towers were engineered for power users—hence their name, the Power Mac. These big machines sat under your desk, linked to a monitor on your desktop, and were so fast that Apple marketed them as the first “personal supercomputers.” They were hefty, but Ive’s design gave the impression that they were sleek and manageable—they even had dual handles that mimicked the iMac’s, and one side that opened up to make tinkering with the innards easier. The base model cost at least a thousand dollars more than the iMac, but it also carried much higher profit margins.
Here, too, Steve avoided a mistake Apple had made the first time around. He didn’t claim that the Power Mac was the computer for all businesses, and in so doing try to push Wintel-based PCs out of the market. Instead, he targeted the Power Macs at the new, more entrepreneurial class of small businesses emerging with the rise of the Internet economy: engineers, architects, publishers, advertising agencies, website designers, and so on. This was a world that could tolerate and even celebrate “Think Different,” while the dominant class of big corporations looked on fearfully at the radical and potentially undermining change the Internet seemed to promise.
The design and engineering genius that was applied to the iMacs and towers was applied to the laptops as well. The personal models, called iBooks, mimicked the fun of the iMac with a beguiling, bright orange clamshell design that echoed the shape of the old eMate. The higher-end PowerBooks for professionals were curvy, too, but they were sheathed in a rubbery-feeling black shell and powered by a PowerPC microprocessor that briefly allowed Apple to claim the somewhat dubious title of “fastest laptop in the world.” The cumulative effect of these revitalized iMacs was simple but profound: just three years removed from near death, Apple had reestablished itself as the most, if not the only, truly creative company in the computer business. “When we returned to Apple,” Steve told me around this time, “our industry was in a coma. There was not a lot of innovation. At Apple we’re working hard to get that innovation kickstarted again. The rest of the PC industry reminds one of Detroit in the seventies. Their cars were boats on wheels. Since then, Chrysler innovated by inventing the mini-van and popularizing the Jeep, and Ford got itself back in the game with its Taurus. Near-death experiences can help one see more clearly sometimes.”
The turnaround, however, did not come without expensive failures. Apple had done a good job embracing the Internet, by making the process of getting access to the Web as simple as any other function of an iMac. But Apple’s eWorld, a proprietary online subscription service bundled with new iMacs, was a flop, despite a friendly interface that suggested that going online could be as easy as walking from one neighborhood to the next. All it really offered was email services and a way to download software, and in practice it wasn’t any easier to use than bigger services like EarthLink and AOL, which came bundled on Wintel PCs.
A costlier failure was a pet project that Ruby and Steve worked on together and argued about endlessly, the so-called Power Mac “Cube,” which was introduced in 2000. Harking back to the design of the NeXTcube, but one-eighth the size, Apple’s G4 Cube was such a stunning, clean design that it too wound up in the Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, it didn’t wind up in many homes or offices.
Steve loved the Cube. It packed a lot of power—although not quite enough to qualify as a true power user’s computer—into a translucent cube just seven inches by seven inches all around. Its cables plugged into Apple’s first super-wide flat-screen monitor for the desktop. My monitor measured twenty-five inches diagonally, and it rested on my office desk next to the Cube like a minimalist sculpture. But in this case, Steve made similar mistakes to ones he made at NeXT. He overlooked some of the engineering idiosyncrasies necessitated by the stark design he loved. Worse yet, the Cube seemed snakebit by a host of manufacturing problems. Its clear plastic shell cracked on many machines, a flaw that ruined what had seemed a design masterpiece. My Cube never cracked, but the monitor developed its own, strange, aesthetic problem: ants and other insects were somehow attracted to squeeze through seams in the clear plastic frame that surrounded the screen, and once inside they couldn’t get out. Over time, the two transparent “feet” of the screen filled up with bug carcasses, but the effect was not as pleasing as when a prehistoric fly is trapped in amber. I teased Steve about the bug-friendly screen he’d developed a couple of times, but he never found it all that amusing. He pulled the plug on the Cube early, and it never sold anything near the numbers he had forecast.
STEVE HAD SURROUNDED himself with a mature, experienced, and disciplined team, made up of people who could argue back fiercely. And for once, he allowed them significant authority—Apple was simply too big for him to make all the decisions himself. Gradually, the organization developed in a way that allowed him to get the details he needed without micromanaging those areas of the company where he added a lot less. He primarily managed through his inner circle (although he convened meetings of the top one hundred people from time to time), and the Monday morning executive team meeting became the linchpin of the week. His attempt to delegate worked well, for the most part. In matters of finance, for instance, “I would get him involved when I needed him,” remembers Anderson. Steve was trying to keep his fingers on the pulse of a growing company without stifling it.
He also liked having a confidant—someone he could banter with outside the formal lines responsibility of daily corporate life. In the early years of Steve’s return, Mike Slade served that function. Slade, by his own admission, isn’t any kind of creative “genius,” like Lee Clow or Woz. But he had lots of real-world experience, he spoke his mind, and was both easygoing and independent enough to engage in spirited repartee with Steve without any qualms. He also had made it clear he did not want an executive position at Apple, which made it easier for him to have a good personal relationship with Steve. They would sometimes jog together in the early morning, and he even went Rollerblading with Steve and Laurene.
Slade showed up in Cupertino on Mondays and Tuesdays, flying down from Seattle. No one reported to him, and Steve had told the group that he had no particular authority. But when he was at Apple he almost never left Steve’s side. Their Mondays would begin with the executive management team meeting. After that the two would usually go eat in the cafeteria, and later venture into the Design Lab. Slade tried to participate in their discussions. “Jony would say stuff like, ‘Steve, I’m not sure the design language and the way it’s joining with this is quite right. What do you think?’ ” says Slade, laughing. “And I’m going, ‘Yeah, it’s cool. Can I have a Coke now?’ They’d ask me, ‘Do you think we’ve got the right degree of opacity,’ and all I can think is, ‘Why am I here?’ ” Of course, Slade knew more than he’ll admit. But his sense of humor and realism appealed to Steve. Steve didn’t allow himself to relax with his inner circle the way he would with Slade. “Slade was the court jester,” says Ruby, who also became good friends with Slade over the years.
Most Mondays, their visit to Ive would be followed by one to Avi
e and the team working on Apple’s new operating system, which would eventually be called OS X. The radical new operating system would be the flywheel of all the extraordinary developments that would follow over the next decade, from Apple’s suite of iLife applications, to iOS—the slimmed-down operating system that would give life to the iPhone and iPad—to the entirely new software industry that emerged to produce the millions of apps written for those devices.
While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.
Without a new operating system that could outshine Windows, the revival of the Macintosh could never be complete. The existing one was based on technology that had been developed fifteen years earlier for the original Mac, and the look and feel on the screen had come to seem passé.
Back at NeXT, Avie had developed a version of Unix that presented a friendlier face to nontechnical users, while also retaining its bona fides as a serious, world-class computing environment. There, too, the goal had been to create the whole widget, so he designed it to dovetail nicely with the NeXTcube. But when the company was forced to refocus solely on software, Avie and his team knew that the only way they could sell the NeXT OS was to make it attractive to users of workstations made by other manufacturers, like Sun, IBM, or Sony, and perhaps even to users of standard PCs. That’s why they had created experimental working versions on Sun workstations using SPARC microprocessors, on other personal computers and engineering workstations using Intel’s best Pentium PC microprocessors, and even on the PowerPC chip that was now the heart of Apple’s latest Macintoshes. This experience of “porting” NeXT OS to other machines would pay off in two ways for Apple. For starters, Tevanian and his crew walked in the door at Cupertino with the code base and the know-how to support the troubled company no matter which microprocessor would be at the core of future Macintoshes. Apple had already switched Macintosh microprocessors once before, and Steve wanted the flexibility to do so again if it made sense. Since his old NeXT programmers had learned the technological idiosyncrasies of several computing platforms, they could help him make a much more objective decision when it came time to switch again. Technologically agnostic, they would push for the architecture that would get the most out of their operating system—in other words, the one that would help them build the best whole widget possible. This was an ace up Steve’s sleeve, one he would play to great effect several years down the road.
Second, and more immediately important, the travails at NeXT had turned Tevanian’s crew into a first-rate team. The primary task they faced was to turn the NeXT operating system into something that remained robust but had a modernized look and feel that bore enough similarity to the original Apple system for Mac users to migrate over with as little discomfort as possible. Another priority was to preserve compatibility with software applications that ran on the old Mac OS 9, at least in the short run. Finally, they had to build tools for software developers to help them adapt their old applications to OS X or even rewrite them altogether to take full advantage of its capabilities.
The challenges in developing any new operating system are many and varied, and even though OS X was essentially a modified version of a proven, existing operating system, the “Apple-ization” of it was still an enormous job. Steve understood this, and he didn’t create unreasonable deadlines for his programmers. Instead, he oversaw them with a mix of patience and impatience that allowed him to be forceful and yet respectful. What eventually resulted was an operating system that mixed the best of Steve’s intuitive understanding of the needs of regular people with deep, robust, and flexible code written by some of the greatest programmers in the world. It preserved the winsome onscreen personality that had made Apple customers so loyal through thick and thin.
Steve was particularly obsessed with the operating system’s look and feel. In the afternoon OS X meetings that Slade would attend with Steve, each of Avie’s direct reports would be admitted into a locked conference room to demonstrate the latest developments on whatever aspect of OS X they were handling. “We went over OS X again and again,” remembers Slade, “pixel by pixel, feature by feature, screen by screen. Should the genie effect look like this? How big should the dock icons magnify? What’s the type style? Why does this dial look the way it does? Every week, the agenda was to get Steve to approve the look and feel of each item.
“There is nothing in the operating system that he didn’t approve,” continues Slade. “It was the opposite of how things were done at Microsoft, where they relied on these five-hundred-page specs [documents laying out in detail every feature to be created by the software developers]. We had specs, too, but Steve never looked at them. He just looked at the product.”
When Steve saw something he didn’t like, he would tell a user interface designer by the name of Bas Ording to mock it up the way he wanted it. “Bas was a wizard,” says Slade. “He’d take ninety seconds pecking away, he’d hit a button, and there it was—a picture of whatever Steve had asked for. The guy was a god. Steve just laughed about it. ‘Basification in progress!’ he’d announce.”
What made the OS X development even harder was ensuring that the new operating system wouldn’t instantly render users’ old applications useless. This backwards-compatibility is one of the most difficult challenges a computer company can face—it was a real problem for Apple back in the early 1980s, when Apple II customers found that their software didn’t work particularly well on an Apple III.
Steve believed that Apple’s consumers would adapt more easily than conventional wisdom suggested, since they were far more enthusiastic about their Macs than Microsoft’s customers were about their PCs. He believed they would be quite willing to make a big leap to a new operating system, even if it also required eventually buying all-new hardware and software. And he was right. Over the next decade, in its quest to keep the OS lean and modern, Apple would slowly stop supporting for a variety of carryover features from previous generations of hardware and software that were dearly beloved by a sometimes-vocal minority. Most Mac customers figured the trade-offs involved in a steadily improving computer platform were worth it, however.
Still, Steve and Avie did everything they could to make the transition to OS X as benign as possible for customers. One thing they exploited was a new way of delivering software updates. With more and more computers constantly connected to the Web, Apple could update users’ software frequently by delivering improvements, modifications, and bug fixes directly over the Internet. This applied not just to operating system software but to all manner of applications, and made sense both for the customers and for the software developers, who by nature love to continue tweaking their work once it is “finished.” Avie and his team were among the first mainstream operating system developers to take full advantage of this capability, and their approach would change the expectations of hundreds of millions of people, from corporate IT managers all the way down to the individual smartphone user who wants the very latest version of his favorite game.
Indeed, when Apple first released OS X in September 2000, the company called it a “public beta” version, implying that it was a work in progress. The price was $29.95—about a fifth of what was typically charged for a significant operating system upgrade. It was shrewd marketing, because it implied that early adopters would effectively be putting OS X through a shakedown cruise, and thus some bugs and glitches were to be expected. It also gave Apple a test period during which it could work out how to manage those online software upgrades. And during that period Avie’s team used the Internet to provide numerous updates that improved the software. T
his way of maintaining and fixing software would quickly become the industry norm. It also transformed customers’ expectations: no longer would they be willing to wait months for their software providers to fix a problem.
Given the breathing room that the success of the iMac had bought them, the UNIX core upon which they built their system, and their own coding expertise, Avie and his programmers had been able to shoot for the moon. So when OS X was finally ready to go, it could make the Mac do things no PC had ever been able to do. Users reveled in the obvious cosmetic improvements, like the ability to have video continue to play even as you used a mouse to move a window around the screen. And OS X was truly beautiful to behold, creating a screen with the illusion of three dimensions, where windows appeared to cast shadows on the layers of objects “behind” them. It still ran most old Mac programs, especially when their makers made a few slight modifications that could be downloaded and installed easily. But underneath it all was Unix, the core operating system that geeks love to tweak.
With OS X, then, Apple finally had a genuinely industrial-strength computing framework. Macs crashed far less than Wintel PCs. A single haywire program wouldn’t take down the whole system. The machines seemed almost immune to software viruses. And its basic file system was easy to navigate and gave users the choice of three different ways to view and locate files in a list format. Under the hood, OS X was the state-of-the-art software foundation for everything Steve would want to create in the years ahead.
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 27