THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 5 page

recounting other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward the

present:

It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a

run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated

and-controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future

freedom. IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big

Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?

As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a frenzy of

cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell question, the auditorium went

black and the “1984” commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over, the entire audience

was on its feet cheering.

With a flair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across the dark stage to a small table with a cloth bag

on it. “Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he said. He took out the computer,

keyboard, and mouse, hooked them together deftly, then pulled one of the new 3½-inch floppies

from his shirt pocket. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play. Jobs held his breath for a

moment, because the demo had not worked well the night before. But this time it ran flawlessly.

The word “MACINTOSH” scrolled horizontally onscreen, then underneath it the words “Insanely

great” appeared in script, as if being slowly written by hand. Not used to such beautiful graphic

displays, the audience quieted for a moment. A few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid

succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill Atkinson’s

QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays of different fonts, documents, charts,

drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve Jobs with a thought bubble

containing a Macintosh.

When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat. “We’ve done a lot of talking about

Macintosh recently,” he said. “But today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh speak for

itself.” With that, he strolled back over to the computer, pressed the button on the mouse, and in a

vibrato but endearing electronic deep voice, Macintosh became the first computer to introduce

itself. “Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,” it began. The only thing it

didn’t seem to know how to do was to wait for the wild cheering and shrieks that erupted. Instead

of basking for a moment, it barreled ahead. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to

share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a

computer you can’t lift.” Once again the roar almost drowned out its final lines. “Obviously, I can

talk. But right now I’d like to sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a

man who’s been like a father to me, Steve Jobs.”

Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd jumping up and down and pumping their fists

in a frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad smile on his face, then looked down and

started to choke up. The ovation continued for five minutes.

After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking

lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh computers, each

personalized with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to each team member, with a

handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a

grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style.

But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off

the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and

committees. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs

what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham

Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

GATES AND JOBS

When Orbits Intersect

Jobs and Gates, 1991

The Macintosh Partnership

In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked because of their

gravitational interaction. There have been analogous situations in history, when an era is shaped

by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in

twentieth-century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early

American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age, beginning in the late

1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two high-energy college dropouts both

born in 1955.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of technology and

business, had very different personalities and backgrounds. Gates’s father was a prominent Seattle

lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of prestigious boards. He became a tech geek at the

area’s finest private school, Lakeside High, but he was never a rebel, hippie, spiritual seeker, or

member of the counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip off the phone company, Gates created

for his school a program for scheduling classes, which helped him get into ones with the right

girls, and a car-counting program for local traffic engineers. He went to Harvard, and when he

decided to drop out it was not to find enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a computer

software company.

Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined,

and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a

greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a

passion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding, and he managed by charisma and

scattershot intensity. Gates was more methodical; he held tightly scheduled product review

meetings where he would cut to the heart of issues with lapidary skill. Both could be rude, but

with Gates—who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s flirtation with the fringes of

the Asperger’s scale—the cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual

incisiveness than emotional callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding

intensity; Gates sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.

“Each one thought he was smarter than the other one, but Steve generally treated Bill as

someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style,” said Andy Hertzfeld.

“Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn’t actually program.” From the beginning of their

relationship, Gates was fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his mesmerizing effect on

people. But he also found him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed as a human being,” and

he was put off by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be “either in the mode of saying you were

shit or trying to seduce you.” For his part, Jobs found Gates unnervingly narrow. “He’d be a

broader guy if he had dropped

acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs once declared.

Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what would

become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and

indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of

a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a seamless package.

Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was open to

licensing Microsoft’s operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers.

After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. “He really never knew

much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works,” he said. But Jobs never

reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates’s real strengths. “Bill is basically unimaginative and has

never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than

technology,” Jobs said, unfairly. “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office near

Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II, including a spreadsheet program

called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even more for the

forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates’s conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a

computer for the masses, with a friendly interface, which would be churned out by the millions in

an automated California factory. His description of the dream factory sucking in the California

silicon components and turning out finished Macintoshes caused the Microsoft team to code-name

the project “Sand.” They even reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for “Steve’s amazing new

device.”

Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming language, for the

Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh, because Wozniak—

despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the Apple II’s BASIC to

handle floating-point numbers. In addition,

Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—such as word processing and spreadsheet

programs—for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982

Apple’s annual sales were $1 billion, while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on

to do graphical versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called

Word, and BASIC.

Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating system, and

he was not very impressed. “I remember the first time we went down, Steve had this app where it

was just things bouncing around on the screen,” he said. “That was the only app that ran.” Gates

was also put off by Jobs’s attitude. “It was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve was

saying, ‘We don’t really need you and we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the cover.’ He’s

in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I

might let you be involved.’”

The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. “You could tell that Bill Gates was not a very

good listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how something worked to him—he had to

leap ahead instead and guess about how he thought it would work,” Hertzfeld recalled. They

showed him how the Macintosh’s cursor moved smoothly across the screen without flickering.

“What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?” Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took great

pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using software, replied, “We don’t have any

special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was necessary to have special hardware to move the

cursor that way. “So what do you say to somebody like that?” Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh

engineers, later said. “It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would

understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.”

Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that Microsoft would

create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take personal computing into a new realm,

and they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon dedicated a large team to

the task. “We had more people working on the Mac than he did,” Gates said. “He had about

fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on it.” And even

though

Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste, the Microsoft programmers were persistent.

“They came out with applications that were terrible,” Jobs recalled, “but they kept at it and they

made them better.” Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain

with Gates: If Microsoft would make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years, and not

make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team working on a version of BASIC

for the Macintosh and instead indefinitely license Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the

deal, which infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in

future negotiations.

For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a conference

hosted by the industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,

where nobody knew about the graphical interfaces that Apple was developing. “Everybody was

acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling that,

hey, we’ve got something,” Gates recalled. “And he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught

on.” Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. “I went to every luau,” said Gates. “I was part of

the crew.”

Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino, where he got to watch Jobs interact erratically

with his employees and display his obsessions. “Steve was in his ultimate pied piper mode,

proclaiming how the Mac will change the world and overworking people like mad, with incredible

tensions and complex personal relationships.” Sometimes Jobs would begin on a high, then lapse

into sharing his fears with Gates. “We’d go down Friday night, have dinner, and Steve would just

be promoting that everything is great. Then the second day, without fail, he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit,

is this thing going to sell, oh God, I have to raise the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my

team is a bunch of idiots.’”

Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was launched. At a joint

team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many Stars had been sold thus far. Gates said

six hundred. The next day, in front of Gates and the whole team, Jobs said that three hundred Stars

had been sold, forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was actually six hundred. “So his

whole team starts looking at me

like, ‘Are you going to tell him that he’s full of shit?’” Gates recalled. “And in that case I didn’t

take the bait.” On another occasion Jobs and his team were visiting Microsoft and having dinner at

the Seattle Tennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how the Macintosh and its software

would be so easy to use that there would be no manuals. “It was like anybody who ever thought

that there would be a manual for any Mac application was the greatest idiot,” said Gates. “And we

were like, ‘Does he really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people who are actually

working on manuals?’”

After a while the relationship became bumpier. The original plan was to have some of the

Microsoft applications—such as Excel, Chart, and File—carry the Apple logo and come bundled

with the purchase of a Macintosh. “We were going to get $10 per app, per machine,” said Gates.

But this arrangement upset competing software makers. In addition, it seemed that some of

Microsoft’s programs might be late. So Jobs invoked a provision in his deal with Microsoft and

decided not to bundle its software; Microsoft would have to scramble to distribute its software as

products sold directly to consumers.

Gates went along without much complaint. He was already getting used to the fact that, as he

put it, Jobs could “play fast and loose,” and he suspected that the unbundling would actually help

Microsoft. “We could make more money selling our software separately,” Gates said. “It works

better that way if you’re willing to think you’re going to have reasonable market share.” Microsoft

ended up making its software for various other platforms, and it began to give priority to the IBM

PC version of Microsoft Word rather than the Macintosh version. In the end, Jobs’s decision to

back out of the bundling deal hurt Apple more than it did Microsoft.

When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs and Gates unveiled it together at a press

dinner at New York’s Tavern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would make a version of it for

IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal the bargain he had made with Jobs but merely answered that “in

time” that might happen. Jobs took the microphone. “I’m sure ‘in time’ we’ll all be dead,” he

joked.

The Battle of the GUI

At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating system, known as DOS, which it licensed to

IBM and compatible computers. It was based on an old-fashioned command line interface that

confronted users with surly little prompts such as C:\>. As Jobs and his team began to work

closely with Microsoft, they grew worried that it would copy Macintosh’s graphical user interface.

Andy Hertzfeld noticed that his contact at Microsoft was asking detailed questions about how the

Macintosh operating system worked. “I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to

clone the Mac,” he recalled.

They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future, and that

Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had been developed at Xerox PARC.

As he freely admitted later, “We sort of say, ‘Hey, we believe in graphics interfaces, we saw the

Xerox Alto too.’”

In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would not create

graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in January

1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the Macintosh launch

would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights when, in November 1983, he revealed

that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for IBM PCs featuring a graphical

interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-click navigation. It would be called

Windows. Gates hosted a Jobs-like product announcement, the most lavish thus far in Microsoft’s

history, at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York.

Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he could do about it—Microsoft’s deal with Apple

not to do competing graphical software was running out—but he lashed out nonetheless. “Get

Gates down here immediately,” he ordered Mike Boich, who was Apple’s evangelist to other

software companies. Gates arrived, alone and willing to discuss things with Jobs. “He called me

down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went down to Cupertino, like a command

performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re betting our company on

graphical interfaces.’”

They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple

employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. “You’

re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!” Hertzfeld recalled

that Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice,

what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I

think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal

the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs’s emotional responses and manipulation

techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft symbiosis had become a scorpion dance,

with both sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either could cause problems for both. After

the confrontation in the conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was

being planned for Windows. “Steve didn’t know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could either

say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a

piece of shit.’” Gates was thrilled, because it gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment.

“I said, ‘Yes, it’s a nice little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions.

“During the course of this meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And then there’s a part

where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off.’” Gates responded

by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”

As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested they go on a

long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to De Anza college, stopping at a

diner and then walking some more. “We had to take a walk, which is not one of my management

techniques,” Gates said. “That was when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make

it too much like what we’re doing.’”

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 ready

for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of

the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping

windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it.

Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows

better and then dominant.

Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no

shame,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes

that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.” In a legal sense, Gates was

right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong

case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it

was inevitable that other companies would develop similar graphical interfaces. As Apple found

out, the “look and feel” of a computer interface design is a hard thing to protect.

And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative,

elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft created a crudely copied

series of products, it would end up winning the war of operating systems. This exposed an

aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always

win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and

over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have

no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a

big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into

their product.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ICARUS

What Goes Up . . .

Flying High

The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984 propelled Jobs into an even higher orbit of celebrity,

as was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the time. He went to a party that Yoko Ono

threw for her son, Sean Lennon, and gave the nine-year-old a Macintosh. The boy loved it. The

artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were there, and they were so enthralled by what they could

create with the machine that the contemporary art world almost took an ominous turn. “I drew a

circle,” Warhol exclaimed proudly after using QuickDraw. Warhol insisted that Jobs take a

computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived at the rock star’s townhouse, Jagger seemed baffled.

He didn’t quite know who Jobs was. Later Jobs told his team, “I think he was on drugs. Either that

or he’s brain-damaged.” Jagger’s daughter Jade, however, took to the computer immediately and

started drawing with MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.

He bought the top-floor duplex apartment that he’d shown Sculley in the San Remo on

Manhattan’s Central Park West and hired James Freed of I. M. Pei’s firm to renovate it, but he

never moved in. (He would later sell it to Bono for $15 million.) He also bought an old Spanish

colonial–style fourteen-bedroom mansion in Woodside, in the hills above Palo Alto, that had been

built by a copper baron, which he moved into but never got around to furnishing.

At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking ways to curtail Jobs’s authority, Sculley gave

him more: The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded together, with Jobs in charge. He was

flying high, but this did not serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there was a memorable

display of his brutal honesty when he stood in front of the combined Lisa and Macintosh teams to

describe how they would be merged. His Macintosh group leaders would get all of the top

positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off. “You guys failed,” he said,

looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many

people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to

work at our sister companies here in the valley.”

Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but unfair.

“These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,” he said. But Jobs had latched

onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to

be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with

a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C

players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with

other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to convince themselves that their friendship was

still strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded like high

school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display. The first anniversary of Sculley’s arrival came in

May 1984, and to celebrate Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton Noir, an elegant

restaurant in the hills southwest of Cupertino. To Sculley’s surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple

board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As they all congratulated him during

cocktails, Sculley recalled, “a beaming Steve stood in the background, nodding his head up and

down and wearing

a Cheshire Cat smile on his face.” Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. “The happiest two

days for me were when Macintosh shipped and when John Sculley agreed to join Apple,” he said.

“This has been the greatest year I’ve ever had in my whole life, because I’ve learned so much

from John.” He then presented Sculley with a montage of memorabilia from the year.

In response, Sculley effused about the joys of being Jobs’s partner for the past year, and he

concluded with a line that, for different reasons, everyone at the table found memorable. “Apple

has one leader,” he said, “Steve and me.” He looked across the room, caught Jobs’s eye, and

watched him smile. “It was as if we were communicating with each other,” Sculley recalled. But

he also noticed that Arthur Rock and some of the others were looking quizzical, perhaps even

skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was completely rolling him. They had hired Sculley to

control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control. “Sculley was so eager for

Steve’s approval that he was unable to stand up to him,” Rock recalled.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 595