Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  Jobs was able to build a new management team that was less contentious and a bit more subdued. Its main players, in addition to Cook and Ive, were Scott Forstall running iPhone software, Phil Schiller in charge of marketing, Bob Mansfield doing Mac hardware, Eddy Cue handling Internet services, and Peter Oppenheimer as the chief financial officer. Even though there was a surface sameness to his top team—all were middle-aged white males—there was a range of styles. Ive was emotional and expressive; Cook was as cool as steel. They all knew they were expected to be deferential to Jobs while also pushing back on his ideas and being willing to argue—a tricky balance to maintain, but each did it well. “I realized very early that if you didn’t voice your opinion, he would mow you down,” said Cook. “He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.”

  The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies.

  Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland’s farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”

  In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.

  In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, “Memento mori”: Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility. Jobs’s memento mori had been delivered by his doctors, but it did not instill humility. Instead he roared back after his recovery with even more passion. The illness reminded him that he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full speed. “He came back on a mission,” said Cook. “Even though he was now running a large company, he kept making bold moves that I don’t think anybody else would have done.”

  For a while there was some evidence, or at least hope, that he had tempered his personal style, that facing cancer and turning fifty had caused him to be a bit less brutish when he was upset. “Right after he came back from his operation, he didn’t do the humiliation bit as much,” Tevanian recalled. “If he was displeased, he might scream and get hopping mad and use expletives, but he wouldn’t do it in a way that would totally destroy the person he was talking to. It was just his way to get the person to do a better job.” Tevanian reflected for a moment as he said this, then added a caveat: “Unless he thought someone was really bad and had to go, which happened every once in a while.”

  Eventually, however, the rough edges returned. Because most of his colleagues were used to it by then and had learned to cope, what upset them most was when his ire turned on strangers. “Once we went to a Whole Foods market to get a smoothie,” Ive recalled. “And this older woman was making it, and he really got on her about how she was doing it. Then later, he sympathized. ‘She’s an older woman and doesn’t want to be doing this job.’ He didn’t connect the two. He was being a purist in both cases.”

  On a trip to London with Jobs, Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel. He picked the Hempel, a tranquil five-star boutique hotel with a sophisticated minimalism that he thought Jobs would love. But as soon as they checked in, he braced himself, and sure enough his phone rang a minute later. “I hate my room,” Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit, let’s go.” So Ive gathered his luggage and went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told the shocked clerk what he thought. Ive realized that most people, himself among them, tend not to be direct when they feel something is shoddy because they want to be liked, “which is actually a vain trait.” That was an overly kind explanation. In any case, it was not a trait Jobs had.

  Because Ive was so instinctively nice, he puzzled over why Jobs, whom he deeply liked, behaved as he did. One evening, in a San Francisco bar, he leaned forward with an earnest intensity and tried to analyze it:

  He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable. I can understand why people who are thick-skinned and unfeeling can be rude, but not sensitive people. I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, “But I don’t stay mad.” He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.

  Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who I am,” he would say.

  One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.

  For their All Things Digital conference in May 2007, the Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher worked to get them together for a joint interview. Mossberg first invited Jobs, who didn’t go to many such conferences, and was surprised when he said he would do it if Gates would. On hearing that, Gates accepted as well.

  Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a debate, but that seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft during a solo interview earlier that day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

  So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their joint session that evening, Mossberg was worried. Gates got there first, with his aide Larry Cohen, who had briefed him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day. When Jobs ambled in a few minutes later, he grabbed a bottle of water from the ice bucket and sat down. After a moment or two of silence, Gates said, “So I guess I’m the representative from hell.” He wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave him one of his impish grins, and handed him the ice water. Gates relaxed, and the tension dissipated.

  The result was a fascinating duet, in w
hich each wunderkind of the digital age spoke warily, and then warmly, about the other. Most memorably they gave candid answers when the technology strategist Lise Buyer, who was in the audience, asked what each had learned from observing the other. “Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste,” Gates answered. There was a bit of nervous laughter; Jobs had famously said, ten years earlier, that his problem with Microsoft was that it had absolutely no taste. But Gates insisted he was serious. Jobs was a “natural in terms of intuitive taste.” He recalled how he and Jobs used to sit together reviewing the software that Microsoft was making for the Macintosh. “I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow.”

  Jobs stared at the floor. Later he told me that he was blown away by how honest and gracious Gates had just been. Jobs was equally honest, though not quite as gracious, when his turn came. He described the great divide between the Apple theology of building end-to-end integrated products and Microsoft’s openness to licensing its software to competing hardware makers. In the music market, the integrated approach, as manifested in his iTunes-iPod package, was proving to be the better, he noted, but Microsoft’s decoupled approach was faring better in the personal computer market. One question he raised in an offhand way was: Which approach might work better for mobile phones?

  Then he went on to make an insightful point: This difference in design philosophy, he said, led him and Apple to be less good at collaborating with other companies. “Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people,” he said. “And I think if Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE iPHONE

  Three Revolutionary Products in One

  An iPod That Makes Calls

  By 2005 iPod sales were skyrocketing. An astonishing twenty million were sold that year, quadruple the number of the year before. The product was becoming more important to the company’s bottom line, accounting for 45% of the revenue that year, and it was also burnishing the hipness of the company’s image in a way that drove sales of Macs.

  That is why Jobs was worried. “He was always obsessing about what could mess us up,” board member Art Levinson recalled. The conclusion he had come to: “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.” As he explained to the board, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them. “Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary.”

  His first strategy was to do something that he had admitted in front of Bill Gates was not in his DNA: to partner with another company. He began talking to Ed Zander, the new CEO of Motorola, about making a companion to Motorola’s popular RAZR, which was a cell phone and digital camera, that would have an iPod built in. Thus was born the ROKR. It ended up having neither the enticing minimalism of an iPod nor the convenient slimness of a RAZR. Ugly, difficult to load, and with an arbitrary hundred-song limit, it had all the hallmarks of a product that had been negotiated by a committee, which was counter to the way Jobs liked to work. Instead of hardware, software, and content all being controlled by one company, they were cobbled together by Motorola, Apple, and the wireless carrier Cingular. “You call this the phone of the future?” Wired scoffed on its November 2005 cover.

  Jobs was furious. “I’m sick of dealing with these stupid companies like Motorola,” he told Tony Fadell and others at one of the iPod product review meetings. “Let’s do it ourselves.” He had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to. “We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones,” he recalled. “They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was just Byzantine.” George Riley, an outside lawyer for Apple, remembers sitting at meetings to go over legal issues, and Jobs would get bored, grab Riley’s mobile phone, and start pointing out all the ways it was “brain-dead.” So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect of building a phone that they would want to use. “That’s the best motivator of all,” Jobs later said.

  Another motivator was the potential market. More than 825 million mobile phones were sold in 2005, to everyone from grammar schoolers to grandmothers. Since most were junky, there was room for a premium and hip product, just as there had been in the portable music-player market. At first he gave the project to the Apple group that was making the AirPort wireless base station, on the theory that it was a wireless product. But he soon realized that it was basically a consumer device, like the iPod, so he reassigned it to Fadell and his teammates.

  Their initial approach was to modify the iPod. They tried to use the trackwheel as a way for a user to scroll through phone options and, without a keyboard, try to enter numbers. It was not a natural fit. “We were having a lot of problems using the wheel, especially in getting it to dial phone numbers,” Fadell recalled. “It was cumbersome.” It was fine for scrolling through an address book, but horrible at inputting anything. The team kept trying to convince themselves that users would mainly be calling people who were already in their address book, but they knew that it wouldn’t really work.

  At that time there was a second project under way at Apple: a secret effort to build a tablet computer. In 2005 these narratives intersected, and the ideas for the tablet flowed into the planning for the phone. In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.

  Multi-touch

  One of the engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend of Laurene and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth birthday he wanted to have a dinner party that included them along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went, a bit reluctantly. “Steve was actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,” Gates recalled, but he “wasn’t particularly friendly” to the birthday guy.

  Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he had developed for Microsoft. “He’s our employee and he’s revealing our intellectual property,” Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had just the consequence that Gates feared. As Jobs recalled:

  This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

  Jobs went into the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, “I want to make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.” Users would be able to type by touching the screen with their fingers. That meant the screen needed to have a feature that became known as multi-touch, the ability to process multiple inputs at the same time. “So could you guys come up with a multi-touch, touch-sensitive display for me?” he asked. It took them about six months, but they came up with a crude but workable prototype.

  Jony Ive had a different memory of how multi-touch was developed. He said his design team had already been working on a multi-touch input that was developed for the trackpads of Apple’s MacBook Pro, and they were experimenting with ways to transfer that capability to a computer screen. They used a projector to show on a wall what it would look like. “This is going to change everything,” Ive told his team. But he was careful not to show it to Jobs right away, especially since his people were working on it in their spare time and he didn’t want to quash their enthusiasm. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I don’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Ive recalled. “He mig
ht say, ‘This is shit,’ and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important.”

  Ive set up the demonstration in his conference room and showed it to Jobs privately, knowing that he was less likely to make a snap judgment if there was no audience. Fortunately he loved it. “This is the future,” he exulted.

  It was in fact such a good idea that Jobs realized that it could solve the problem they were having creating an interface for the proposed cell phone. That project was far more important, so he put the tablet development on hold while the multi-touch interface was adopted for a phone-size screen. “If it worked on a phone,” he recalled, “I knew we could go back and use it on a tablet.”

  Jobs called Fadell, Rubinstein, and Schiller to a secret meeting in the design studio conference room, where Ive gave a demonstration of multi-touch. “Wow!” said Fadell. Everyone liked it, but they were not sure that they would be able to make it work on a mobile phone. They decided to proceed on two paths: P1 was the code name for the phone being developed using an iPod trackwheel, and P2 was the new alternative using a multi-touch screen.

  A small company in Delaware called FingerWorks was already making a line of multi-touch trackpads. Founded by two academics at the University of Delaware, John Elias and Wayne Westerman, FingerWorks had developed some tablets with multi-touch sensing capabilities and taken out patents on ways to translate various finger gestures, such as pinches and swipes, into useful functions. In early 2005 Apple quietly acquired the company, all of its patents, and the services of its two founders. FingerWorks quit selling its products to others, and it began filing its new patents in Apple’s name.