Besides creating a schedule that accommodated Steve’s heavy workload, the couple did everything they could to try to give their children what Steve himself defined as a “normal” life. He and Laurene created an environment that hewed to what can best be described as upper-middle-class norms. Over the years, their neighborhood was increasingly populated by the rich and famous (Larry Page of Google lived nearby, and Steve Young, the famous San Francisco 49ers quarterback, was a neighbor), but Steve and Laurene did everything they could to make their house feel as homey as possible. It was not a walled compound. The front door opened right to the street. The children roamed the neighborhood. The family biked around the area together.
Very slowly, Steve and Laurene even added furniture. “Those stories are true,” Laurene sighs, albeit with a chuckle. “He truly could take forever to decide on stuff like that, but then so could I.” While you could see the telltale signs of children around, it usually was far neater than my own house—having a staff can help with that. As lovely as it was inside, I always thought the heart of the place was the rambling vegetable and flower garden outside the kitchen door. It was the property’s most distinct feature and completely unlike the landscaping that graced other homes in the area. When I visited I’d sometimes catch Steve having just finished up in the garden, or Laurene walking in with one of the kids and a basket of freshly picked veggies and flowers.
This was his refuge. Although colleagues occasionally would visit him there, he tried to keep his home and family life completely sequestered from the press. As he did with other journalists who knew him well, it was understood that any discussions we ever had about his family were off the record—when I wrote in Fortune about my own kids coming over to see Toy Story with his son, Reed, I cleared it with him first.
But Steve and Laurene didn’t make any effort to hide away from their neighbors. They were regulars in downtown Palo Alto. Fortune had its Silicon Valley bureau offices on Emerson Street, just up the street from a building Steve had bought to use as an office closer to home. He didn’t use it all that much, but when he did it wasn’t unusual to see him out for a walk with a colleague, or running a personal errand by himself. (When Fortune eventually closed the bureau as part of a series of cost-cutting moves, I told Laurene about it, and she leased the space as the headquarters of a nonprofit she was starting, which she called the Emerson Collective.) Once when I ran into Steve we wound up shopping for a new bicycle for Laurene’s upcoming birthday. Steve had done his research, so it didn’t take long. We were in and out of Palo Alto Bicycles on University Avenue in ten minutes. He said, “I’d never have Andrea do something like this,” referring to his longtime administrative assistant. “I like buying presents for my family myself.”
These normal encounters with someone who, to repeat Catmull’s pithy phrase, “veered so far from the mean,” were memorable enough that dozens of people, after Steve’s death, wrote about such meetings on Quora, an online query site popular with Silicon Valley types. A designer named Tim Smith described the time his old Sunbeam Alpine sports car stalled in front of the Jobs driveway. Laurene came out and brought him a beer while he tried to figure out what to do, and then she offered to call a friend of theirs who knew a lot about Sunbeams. When the friend came by—dressed in a tuxedo for a night out—Steve emerged from the house with Reed. Steve got in the car and tried to crank it while his friend worked under the hood trying to get the thing going, but nothing worked. As Smith writes online: “I have to stop here—it’s a Kodak moment—something you want to remember. It’s a beautiful Fall evening in Palo Alto. Your car’s broken. A formally dressed close friend of Steve Jobs is under the hood working on your engine. You are talking with Steve’s absolutely lovely and down-to-earth wife. Steve is in the car, with his kid, trying to crank it. You don’t often get close to people like Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people. They’re normal, funny, charitable, real people. Not the people the press talks about. Steve is not the maniacal business and design despot the media loves to portray—well he is, but not always.”
This was a side of Steve’s life that was seldom seen, and he made no attempt to publicize it. The general myth of Steve as a brilliant and driven egotist, who would sacrifice or shove aside anything or anyone for his career, carried the unfortunate corollary that he must have been a bad father and friend, and a man incapable of caring and love. It was a stereotype that never came close to gibing with my own experience of him.
Contrary to that caricature, and unlike most other CEOs I had interviewed at Fortune and the Wall Street Journal, Steve always seemed human and spontaneous with a penchant for honesty that stung and yet rung. True, some of this could turn negative: he could be scathing when he disagreed with something Fortune had published, and more than once I heard him sneer condescendingly at certain colleagues of mine with unreserved arrogance. But he could also be goofy: Once, when he was telling me that a new software interface was “good enough to lick,” he actually leaned forward and licked the screen of the 27-inch cinema-display monitor in front of a whole room full of engineers. And he could be deeply funny in the most disarming ways: One time I came to interview him wearing a loud silk shirt with wavy vertical navy blue stripes separating rows of dozens of large, blossomy, bloodred figures, each about three inches across. Those splotches really leaped from that shirt. When I walked into the conference room, Steve looked me up and down and quipped, “Did you have a meeting with a firing squad before you came to see me?” He paused for effect and then cackled. He would cut loose with a good belly laugh when he was truly amused; according to Laurene, she heard it most when he was cracking wise with the kids around the house.
It isn’t that I looked at Steve and saw a model father. I knew how hard he worked, and that his relentless drive carried a personal cost. But I had been given a look inside his home life over the years, and it seemed every bit as authentic as that of my own friends and colleagues. These stories on Quora, and the moments I experienced with him around Palo Alto or at his house, are mundane. But as time went on I came to realize that this was exactly the point: he craved a certain normalcy in his life, and he was able to get that most at home. With his family. They provided a therapeutic—and very human—outlet that he needed, especially in contrast to Apple, where he was gearing up to dive head-first into an uncertain future.
IF IMOVIE HAD been a sort of exploratory mission into the world of digital applications for consumers, iTunes would prove to be the expedition itself. Armed with a leadership team he trusted more and more, his keen aesthetic sensibility, a belief that the intersection of the arts and technology could lead to amazing things, and the growing understanding that great ideas develop in fits and starts, Steve was ready to see what Apple could bring to the world of music. In hindsight, of course, this seems like such an obvious course of action. But as in all of the most challenging and eventually rewarding journeys, there was little certainty at the outset of where they would end up. Steve would just have to follow his nose.
He had always loved music, but like many people in their forties, the playlist he returned to was pretty well established. Steve and I talked about the Beatles and Dylan, and sometimes one or the other of us would carp about something new we didn’t like so much. You can come to seem like an old fogey pretty fast when it comes to music, and in this way Steve was no different from anyone else.
This might help explain why Steve did not react earlier to the explosion, in the late 1990s, of digital sound formats for storing and playing music on a personal computer. During that period, several startup companies started dabbling with “jukebox” applications to manage MP3s—the shorthand term for digital files that contained, in compressed form, recorded music that had been “ripped” (in other words, copied) from an audio CD onto a PC’s hard disk. Others developed their own encrypted compression algorithms in hopes of convincing the recording industry to adopt their technology and build
a new business model for music to be sold directly to consumers online. Two, in fact, had been started or financed by Microsoft alumni—RealNetworks and Liquid Audio.
Then there was Napster, the brainchild of a Massachusetts teenager named Shawn Fanning. Napster was the software application that really blew the lid off things. In the summer of 1999, Fanning concocted a “peer-to-peer” file-sharing service that allowed individuals around the world—conceivably anyone with a computer and an Internet connection—to upload and download MP3s, creating a way for people to share their own music collections with one another. Since the files were in digital form, the free copies were practically indistinguishable from the originals. It was one of the first truly “viral” Internet applications, a genuine killer app, that attracted tens of millions of users within months. It also was illegal. Napster facilitated the widespread piracy of recorded music, triggering a wholesale behavioral shift among music consumers that would eventually all but wreck the recording industry’s traditional business model. The courts would shut down Napster in 2001, but not before it had become a cultural sensation, and Shawn Fanning a celebrity worthy of the cover of Time magazine.
All this had gotten rolling while Steve had been busy stabilizing Apple. He had been preoccupied attacking problems that were directly in front of him: rationalizing inventory, stabilizing cash flow, trimming head count, assembling a new management team, and reviving advertising and marketing, not to mention supervising the design of new products. Steve’s intense focus had been on Apple’s internal needs and issues. Music hovered on the periphery of his narrowed field of vision. But now he realized that Apple had to move into music, and fast.
The story of Apple’s move into digital music is the tale of a man, and a team, learning how to adapt over and over again on the fly. Steve had solidified the company by narrowing its product lines so that Apple could once again produce distinctive computers. He had reaffirmed the company’s mission, for employees and for customers, with ingenious marketing and respectable financial results. But Apple’s product portfolio was still built around computers. Now that Steve was beginning to sense that the merger of consumer electronics and computers was emerging as a critical growth market, Apple’s metabolism, and many of Steve’s old habits, would have to shift. Starting with the creation of iTunes, Apple had to become a far more nimble company than it had ever been in the past. Steve had displayed a newfound openness by agreeing that the company had to move quickly past iMovie and into digital music. Now he’d have to maintain that same willingness to be flexible, and to follow his nose, wherever it led.
Historically, Steve had always preferred that Apple create its own software from scratch—he didn’t trust anyone as much as he trusted his own people. But since Apple was coming so late to digital music, it would not have time to develop a music management program on its own. So Steve decided to go shopping for an existing jukebox app that Apple could adapt to its own style.
Three independent developers had already created jukeboxes for the Macintosh. The best of the bunch was a forty-dollar application called SoundJam, which happened to be developed by two former Apple software engineers. SoundJam was also of interest to Steve because at its heart was a sophisticated database program that would allow music to be cataloged by more than a dozen attributes. It was a favorite of so-called power users who had large libraries of thousands of music tracks to manage. It was simple to navigate and operate, and it could import music files directly from audio CDs and compress them in a variety of formats into smaller chunks of digital data.
In March 2000, Apple bought SoundJam and attached some unusual terms: the authors of SoundJam would come to work for Apple, but their software distributor could continue selling the existing SoundJam product until Apple had reengineered it into iTunes. The other catch was that the whole transaction be kept secret for two years. There would be no public indication that anything had changed at SoundJam, the distributor and the SoundJam programmers would continue to make money, and Apple could keep its designs on building a jukebox application under wraps. Secrecy was key, since so many parties—studios, consumer electronics manufacturers, tech companies, broadcasters—were trying to find a way to lead digital music. Apple had been a leaky ship during its early years and throughout the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era. But Steve had eradicated that problem by making it more than clear that anyone caught leaking company information or plans would be fired immediately. So the transaction stayed a secret, as he wished.
Tamaddon’s applications division, which had learned a lot from the development of iMovie, moved with speed and a minimum of fuss. The SoundJam team was integrated in seamlessly. Its developers worked directly with Avie and Sina to improve some attributes of the old program, including Steve’s favorite—a psychedelic “visualizer” feature that generated trippy, colorful, abstract moving full-screen images derived from whatever music was playing. More important, they simplified the software, eliminating options and complexity whenever they could. This, too, it turns out, would become a hallmark of the new Apple that Steve was creating. Saying no—to software features, new projects, new hires, boondoggle conferences, all kinds of press queries, even to Wall Street’s desire for better guidance on future earnings, and anything else deemed extraneous or distracting. Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered. The sheer simplicity of the quadrant strategy had laid the foundation for an organization that would say no again and again—until it said yes, at which point it would attack the new project with fierce determination.
The iTunes team moved remarkably fast. A mere nine months after having purchased SoundJam, and just a year after Bill Gates’s public christening of the concept of a world of connected computers, consumer electronics devices, and applications, Steve was able to unveil iTunes at the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco on January 9, 2001. He had a strong set of products to show off besides iTunes, including the Titanium PowerBook, the first of what would become Apple’s exceedingly popular laptops to be clad in metal rather than plastic, and OS X, which would finally ship as a finished product in March.
But iTunes turned out to be the real star of the show, because it was something that practically everyone in the room knew that they wanted. Steve demonstrated how the software would allow you to rip an entire library of music CDs into a digital archive on your Mac’s hard drive, and how the iTunes database would help you easily find and play particular tracks. You could mix tracks into a personal playlist of music that could be stored in the app or burned back onto a recordable, portable CD. And unlike OS X, which wouldn’t ship until late March, iTunes was available for download immediately, for free. Steve then showed a television ad with a stage full of recognizable pop music stars that concluded with the slogan that would soon show up on billboards across the country: Rip. Mix. Burn. He may have been in his forties, but the campaign was totally cool.
Also, for the first time in public, Steve took his first steps on the path to publicly co-opting Gates’s promised future. In classic Apple style, he began by reworking the language of Gates’s vision, trading “consumer-electronics-plus” for the much more felicitous “digital hub.” Energetically pacing the stage, he walked the audience through an enormous screen shot showing a Mac in the middle of six spokes extending to a digital still camera, a PDA, a DVD player, a CD Walkman, a video camcorder, and something called a digital music player. It was an image that updated his old principle of a computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” The Mac, Jobs explained, would be the ideal tool for managing, editing, and organizing content from all these devices, as well as a central repository for software updates, contacts, music and video files, and anything else you needed on your mobile devices. The computer industry’s P. T. Barnum made it all seem so much friendlier than the intimidating future Gates had painted. He made it seem accessible and human and simple. Apple promised to deliver software and hardware that you could manage and bend to your will. T
hat was the power of the “I” in iTunes. You ruled this future, not Microsoft, or even Apple. Such was the power of Steve’s elocution.
Two days earlier, Gates had once again waxed on about what he now was calling the “digital living room” at CES. Microsoft’s booth there was tricked out to resemble a series of rooms in a typical home. Nothing about it was very realistic. When it came to the consumer’s future, Gates was the one offering the airy visions of a breakthrough future, while Steve was inching ahead with real products. It was almost as if the two men had reversed roles from that interview I’d conducted at Steve’s house a decade before.
During the first week after iTunes was introduced and made available online for free, 275,000 copies were downloaded. That was just a slice of the 20 million Macs installed around the world, but it already exceeded the number of actual users of iMovie, which had been available for download for fifteen months. There was just one problem: other than the iMac sitting in the center of the octopus-like digital hub diagram Steve had shown at MacWorld, none of the connected devices had been made by Apple. That had to change.
EARLY IN 2001, toward the end of a meeting with Steve, Eddy Cue, a young software engineer with a good head for business who would come to play a key role in Steve’s executive team, bellyached. “We can’t make things better than we’re making them,” he said. “Yet we’re at the same place we were at back in 1997.” Indeed, while annual sales had reached $7.9 billion in 2000, they were projected to drop well below $6 billion in 2001. “You’ve just got to hang on,” Steve told him. “People will come around.” His patience was admirable, but then again, Steve had believed since the 1980s that the world would eventually come to recognize the superiority of Apple products. Here he was in a new millennium, still waiting on humanity. His company was stable, but it wasn’t yet strong. It needed something to get it growing. It needed a new kind of product.
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 29