Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type. As they began to experiment with multi-touch, they found that they could do all kinds of things that were both effective and fun. The new approach was useful for editing and retouching photographic images, for making drawings, and even for annotating spreadsheets and word-processing documents. The more they worked with multi-touch, the more Ording and Christie believed they were onto something big.

  Having five different projects sprout up around similar technological possibilities wasn’t unusual at Apple. Steve didn’t issue a “Let there be the iPad” command one day, and wake up the next to find the whole enterprise devoting itself to his single wish. Instead, the place was always bubbling with possibilities. His most important job was to sort through them and imagine how they could point the way to something entirely new.

  STEVE HAD ANOTHER critical decision to make during this period: how to treat the cancer that had been discovered in his pancreas. The fact that the islet cell neuroendocrine carcinoma was slow-growing and potentially treatable had given Laurene and him some hope. But the key word was potentially. Steve had always taken great care of his body in ways that may have seemed quirky to others but that made sense to him. At one point in his younger days, he had been a fruitarian. He eventually settled into a vegetarian—primarily vegan—diet, as did Laurene, and he had no significant health problems. Now that he had a big one, he wanted to make sure for himself that the tumor was treated in the best way possible. In typical Jobsian fashion, that meant exploring all the alternatives.

  He started out talking to close advisers like Larry Brilliant, Andy Grove, Arthur Levinson, the Genentech CEO who was on Apple’s board, and the physician/​author Dean Ornish. His Stanford doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the tumor. In fact, the team of doctors included a surgeon who had pioneered a promising new surgical method for just this type of pancreatic cancer. But Steve wasn’t immediately convinced that this was the best approach, so he told his doctors he first wanted to try something less invasive, namely treating it through his diet.

  There certainly seems to have been a psychological component to his decision to temporarily avoid surgery. Years later, according to his authorized biography, Steve told Walter Isaacson, “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work.” It’s natural to fear such an invasive operation, but for someone like Steve, who believed so strongly in the value of having control, it must have been especially complicated.

  But there were also intellectual reasons to investigate and try to understand his cancer. Steve’s particular kind of tumor is a rare one. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), only about one thousand cases a year are discovered in the United States. As a result, research on pancreatic islet cell neuroendocrine carcinomas is not buttressed by the kind of massive database available to doctors studying breast or lung cancer, to cite two more common forms, or even other forms of cancer of the pancreas. (His own oncologist/surgeon admitted to me privately that not enough was known at that time to determine statistically what the best treatment should be—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, something else, or a combination of treatments.) So Steve’s indecision about what to do was not completely off-base. “I don’t understand,” says Brilliant, “how writers can portray him, on the one hand, as this tough-ass businessman, very materialistic, with no mention of the spiritual side. But when it comes to his cancer, they claim that he had this crazy, spiritual belief that he was in a messianic situation to heal it himself.”

  Steve conducted his research with the same inquisitiveness he applied to understanding what would make a great new product. He scoured the globe for other options, and made surreptitious trips to see doctors in Seattle, Baltimore, and Amsterdam. He was interested primarily in dietary treatments that might work, and alternative cures that meshed more with his inclination toward an organic lifestyle. But he also talked to many expert mainstream doctors. At one point he even convened a conference call where he was able to discuss his cancer with at least a half dozen of the best cancer doctors in the United States.

  But he found nothing that was more promising than surgery. The few people who knew intimately of Steve’s cancer grew ever more exasperated as his “research” dragged on for months, and his doctors started to feel that the window for a successful operation that would get all the cancer was closing. Finally, in the summer of 2004, Steve acceded and checked into Stanford University Medical Center. On Saturday, July 31, he spent most of the day on an operating table. The surgeons opened him up and removed the tumor.

  It was an extremely invasive surgery. Months later, Steve would show me his scar—a squarish semicircle nearly two feet long, starting at the bottom of one side of his rib cage, swooping down to his navel, and curving back up the other side. “The pancreas is back behind your gastrointestinal organs, so the surgeons have to have enough room to pull some of them up and out of the way to get at it,” he told me, gesturing with both hands as if he were doing it himself. “They actually took only a small part of my pancreas,” Steve continued. “Just getting to it was the hard part.”

  August 1, the day after his marathon surgery, was a Sunday. Although he was still in the intensive care unit and more than a little logy from anesthesia and painkillers, he asked for his PowerBook so he could put the finishing touches on a letter to Apple employees to inform them of his illness and surgery. In some ways the letter was a marketing challenge: How can you put positive spin on the fact that you have had surgery to treat pancreatic cancer, a disease that in most cases is a death sentence? Here’s what he wrote:

  Team,

  I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me. This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

  The far more common form of pancreatic cancer is called adenocarcinoma, which is currently not curable and usually carries a life expectancy of around one year after diagnosis. I mention this because when one hears “pancreatic cancer” (or Googles it), one immediately encounters this far more common and deadly form, which, thank god, is not what I had.

  I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September. While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.

  Steve

  PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.

  Knowing that the letter would probably wind up being made public, he had even made sure to get a plug in for some Apple products. What he didn’t reveal—and it is quite possible that he hadn’t been told yet—was that when the surgeons opened him up, they also spotted some incipient cancerous metastases on Steve’s liver.

  There is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened to Steve if he hadn’t delayed his surgery by ten months. According to the National Cancer Institute, people who have Steve’s kind of tumor entirely removed soon after an early diagnosis have a 55 percent chance of still being alive five years later.

  Steve would survive for seven years, and those years would prove to be the most astounding and most productive of his life.

  RECOVERING FROM A radical abdominal surgery is hellish. A massive incision like Steve’s generally guarantees a lengthy and difficult convalescence, mainly because so much soft tissue and muscle must heal without too much stress or stretch
ing at a location where your body bends and flexes every time you sit or stand. As Steve tersely told me, “The healing process really sucked.” At first, he could hardly move without unleashing a cascade of pain radiating out from his gut all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. When he finally got home from the two-week hospital stay, it was all he could do to sit upright in a rocking chair. He didn’t like his painkillers, because they dulled his brain. Still, he was determined to get back to the office before the end of September.

  Many of us would react to a disease like Steve’s by taking it slow at the office or by tackling a “bucket list” of things we’ve always wanted to do. Steve became even more focused on work. “He was doing what he loved,” recalls Laurene. “If anything, he doubled down.” So he spent much of that seven-week convalescence thinking deeply about Apple, the computer business, and the trajectory of digital technology. He assembled an ambitious to-do list of what he wanted to accomplish once he returned to the office. “When he came back from that surgery he was on a faster clock,” remembers Tim Cook. “The company is always running on a fast-moving treadmill that doesn’t stop. But when he came back there was an urgency about him. I recognized it immediately.”

  The first thing Steve did was spend time with each member of the executive team, catching up on what was going on and explaining to each how he intended to approach his work going forward. He told them that he would now focus even more of his attention on things like product development, marketing, and the retail stores, and less attention on manufacturing, operations, finance, and human resources matters. He knew he had less stamina than before, although that wasn’t easy to detect. Moreover, his doctors were keeping him on a short leash, he told them, insisting that he come in for regular checkups to make sure he was healing properly and monitoring for any other signs of cancer. He did not tell his senior staff that the cancer had likely spread, nor that he was going to have to endure rounds of chemotherapy. But he had come to accept that his business life would never again be like what it was, and he wanted them to know how that might change things at Apple. When he was done catching up, he turned his attention back to the big decision, which now seemed more urgent than ever. What would come next?

  OUT OF THE five cellphone- and tablet-related projects that had been percolating, only one was dead by the fall of 2004. Not surprisingly, the Wi-Fi team had failed to come up with anything of note.

  Motorola had inched ahead with its iTunes-ready ROKR phone, but the handset was starting to look like what things designed by committee usually resemble—a turkey. For one thing, Motorola opted to build a chunky, so-called candy-bar-style phone, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to its far more stylish forebears, the RAZR flip phone and the iPod. The iTunes MP3s song files would be stored on removable MicroSD flash memory cards—smaller, more fragile versions of the ones that had just begun to show up in most pocket digital cameras. Inexplicably, Motorola decided that those cards would accommodate no more than one hundred songs, even though they could easily hold many times more. And despite the fact that the phone could provide Internet access, you couldn’t use it to buy and download music from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, any unlucky ROKR buyer would have to use his computer to buy music via iTunes, and then transfer those tracks to the ROKR via cable. This wasn’t any improvement over the existing iPods—which, unlike the ROKR, couldn’t boast of having direct Internet access. The more they learned about the ROKR, the more Fadell and Apple’s other star engineers dreaded the thing. Motorola would wind up taking eighteen months to deliver it (during that same time, Apple would refresh its entire iPod product line twice), so it was no surprise that when Steve finally introduced the ROKR at Apple’s September 2005 MacWorld, it was an afterthought. Apple’s own sleek new compact iPod, called the Nano, was the star of the show.

  Fadell’s musicphone prototypes, which he worked on all through 2004, were far more interesting. His first version incorporated the iPod’s distinctive thumb-wheel interface as a sort of dialer. Steve liked Fadell’s moxie, but there was an obvious problem. The thumb-wheel that worked so elegantly on the iPod turned out to be a serious hindrance on a musicphone. While it was fine for scrolling through a list of music or contacts, “thumb-dial” was awkward for actually dialing a new phone number. It was a gimmick. This prototype aimed too low with its technology and user interface design. Fadell’s second prototype, which did away with the thumb-wheel and put more emphasis on being a video player, showed great imagination, and was a manifestation of Fadell’s irrepressible ambition. It couldn’t overcome an external problem—the cellular networks of that time weren’t fast or reliable enough to provide consistent video streams. Even though Fadell’s videophone could have been produced within a year with the right telecom partner, Steve chose not to go ahead. This prototype had aimed too high, since it depended upon cellular infrastructure that was not yet in place.

  The Project Purple team was running into a different set of problems. In their desire to repurpose and yet maintain compatibility with traditional Macintosh hardware and software, Project Purple’s engineers were running into the bugaboos that Microsoft and the others had encountered with their tablet PCs: bulk, weight, battery life, and cost. Even a relatively small ten-inch screen would guzzle power and quickly exhaust the tablet’s rechargeable batteries when operating untethered. Wi-Fi technology, which was the best means for connecting a mobile computer to the Internet or to other computer networks, also sucked power, as did traditional PC microprocessors—even those tailored for laptops. The power demands of a tablet seemed like an intractable problem, given that existing batteries were big and heavy.

  So, while the discrete technologies to build an iPad derived from Mac technology were coming together, the actual device you could make would be heavy and impractical, and would carry just about the same price tag as a conventional MacBook. Steve knew that would be a hard sell. Still, he didn’t shutter the operation. Until he had a plan B, he wouldn’t pull the plug on Purple.

  Greg Christie and Bas Ording, meanwhile, had spent several months in 2004 putting together and playing with a rather funky, but working, prototype of a multi-touch screen. The pair projected the live video image of a computer screen on a touch-sensitive surface the size of a conference room table. Using two hands, you could “move” folders around, activate icons, shrink and enlarge documents, and “scroll” around the screen horizontally and vertically with somewhat intuitive dexterity. The multi-touch gestures they had contrived to do all of this were rudimentary at this point, but “Jumbotron,” as design chief Jony Ive eventually dubbed their prototype, was intriguing enough to offer a sense of how engaging it would be to control a touch-screen computer with your fingers. Ive, who had become a self-appointed scout for game-changing user interface technologies in Apple’s own labs, had been following Christie and Ording’s work all along and was mesmerized when he saw the Jumbotron demo in action. He wanted Steve to see this. He believed Apple could make multi-touch the basis of a new kind of device, and he believed it should be a tablet computer.

  STEVE, TOO, HAD been thinking that Apple’s next step would probably involve some kind of fundamental reconfiguration of the traditional personal computer. He had always been leaning toward making a tablet. That’s why he gave the green light to Project Purple in the first place. But shortly after he returned from surgery, during one of their regular brainstorming walks around the Apple campus, Steve told Jony Ive that he was beginning to think differently. “Steve wanted to shelve the project,” Ive recalls. “I was so surprised because I was so excited about it. But one of the observations he made—and this is classically brilliant Steve—was that, ‘I don’t know that I can convince people that a tablet is a product category that has real value. But I know that I can convince people they need a better phone.’ ” This suggestion wasn’t made in glorious ignorance of the engineering it would require. He knew absolutely that building a phone was much, much harder than doing a tablet, because it had to
be so small, and because it had to be a good phone and a good computer and a good music player. What he really wanted was to try to sell a whole new category of device. That, to him, was worth the risk.

  When Steve finally checked out the Jumbotron multi-touch demonstration prototype by Greg Christie and Bas Ording, “he was completely underwhelmed,” says Ive. “He didn’t see that there was any value to the idea. And I felt really stupid because I had perceived it to be a very big thing. I said, ‘Well, for example, imagine the back of a digital camera. Why would it have a small screen and all of these buttons? Why couldn’t it be all display?’ That was the first application that I could think of on the spot, which is a great example of just how early this was. Still he was very, very dismissive. It was another example of one of those times when what he says and the way he says it is not personal. You could take it that way, but it wasn’t.”

  After mulling over multi-touch for a few days, however, Steve changed his mind. Perhaps multi-touch really was the user-interface leap he had been looking for. He started to pick the brains of people he respected. He called Jony to talk about it further. He conferred with Steve Sakoman, another former Newton and Palm engineer who now worked for Avie Tevanian as the VP of software technology, and who had been pushing for Apple to make the move into phones. And he wanted to hear what the iPod guys thought about multi-touch, since they’d already built the two musicphone prototypes. He asked Tony Fadell to come check out the Jumbotron, since he had the hardware engineering expertise to judge what it might take to build such a technology into a much smaller device that could be mass-produced. Once he saw it, Fadell agreed that the technology was really interesting, but allowed that it wouldn’t be easy to shrink that demo the size of a Ping-Pong table down to something functional that could fit into a pocket-sized device. So Steve gave him exactly that challenge. “You’ve figured out how to blend music and a phone,” he told Fadell. “Now go figure out how to add this multi-touch interface to the screen of a phone. A really cool, really small, really thin phone.”