THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 6 page

Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart strategy to

Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature to share control. Deference did not

come naturally to him. He began to become more vocal about how he thought the company should

be run. At the 1984 business strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the company’s

centralized sales and marketing staffs bid on the right to provide their services to the various

product divisions. (This would have meant, for example, that the Macintosh group could decide

not to use Apple’s marketing team and instead create one of its own.) No one else was in favor,

but Jobs kept trying to ram it through. “People were looking to me to take control, to get him to sit

down and shut up, but I didn’t,” Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard someone

whisper, “Why doesn’t Sculley shut him up?”

When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to manufacture the Macintosh,

his aesthetic passions and controlling nature kicked into high gear. He wanted the machinery to be

painted in bright hues, like the Apple logo, but he spent so much time going over paint chips that

Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, finally just installed them in their usual beige and

gray. When Jobs took

a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter

objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He

turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended

up not working properly and was dubbed “Steve’s folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much

energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he

recalled.

Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the spunky but good-natured Macintosh financial

officer who had once won the team’s annual award for the person who best stood up to Jobs. But

she knew how to cater to his whims when necessary. When Apple’s art director, Clement Mok,

informed her that Jobs wanted the walls to be pure white, she protested, “You can’t paint a factory

pure white. There’s going to be dust and stuff all over.” Mok replied, “There’s no white that’s too

white for Steve.” She ended up going along. With its pure white walls and its bright blue, yellow,

and red machines, the factory floor “looked like an Alexander Calder showcase,” said Coleman.

When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said it was a way to

ensure a passion for perfection:

I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white glove to check for dust. I’d find it everywhere—on

machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I’d ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought

we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debi up the wall. She didn’t

understand why. And I couldn’t articulate it back then. See, I’d been very influenced by what I’d seen in

Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a

sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we

weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.

One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had always been

fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and his tools in order, and his

son was proud to show that he could do the same. Coleman came along to give the tour. “Steve

was, like, beaming,” she recalled. “He was so proud to show his father

this creation.” Jobs explained how everything worked, and his father seemed truly admiring.

“He kept looking at his father, who touched everything and loved how clean and perfect

everything looked.”

Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cubaadmiring

wife of France’s socialist president François Mitterrand asked a lot of questions, through

her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to

serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs

talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about overtime pay. He was

annoyed, so he described how automation helped him keep down labor costs, a subject he knew

would not delight her. “Is it hard work?” she asked. “How much vacation time do they get?” Jobs

couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so interested in their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell her

she can come work here any time.” The translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment

Rossmann stepped in to say, in French, “M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and your

interest in the factory.” Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what happened, Rossmann

recalled, but her translator looked very relieved.

Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to

Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he was going just over 100 miles per

hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After a few minutes, as the officer

scribbled away, Jobs honked. “Excuse me?” the policeman said. Jobs replied, “I’m in a hurry.”

Amazingly, the officer didn’t get mad. He simply finished writing the ticket and warned that if

Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would be sent to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs

got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t

apply to him,” Rossmann marveled.

His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a few

months after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just completely obnoxious and thinking he

could get away with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had arranged a formal dinner with

French software developers, but Jobs suddenly decided he didn’t want to go. Instead he shut the

car door on Hoffman and told her he

was going to see the poster artist Folon instead. “The developers were so pissed off they

wouldn’t shake our hands,” she said.

In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s general manager, a soft rotund guy who had come

from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was not impressed with his team or his

sales strategy. “You don’t deserve to be able to sell the Mac,” Jobs said coldly. But that was mild

compared to his reaction to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen. Jobs demanded a

vegan meal, but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce filled with sour cream.

Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She whispered that if he didn’t calm down,

she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.

The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts.

Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher

projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give them any

allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann

had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman

recalled.

It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in France.

Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his own way with

the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When

Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassée didn’t jack up

sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and

then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could

recognize that in Steve.”

Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted to.

François Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous—computing for

all—and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky and Nicholas

Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and

painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris

also brought out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and Negroponte tell tales of him pining over

women while there.

Falling

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper

off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully

slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that

its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green

pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a

text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by

pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa

handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with

128K.

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a

“Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just

one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis

elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh

lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the

calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the

nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had

sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations,

sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then

reality itself hits.”

At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten

thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to

take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a

new product, the “Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be

restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in. “I was

furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was just to blow the excess Lisas out

the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned.”

The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed

to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984” ad. Unfortunately there was a

fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards

presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited,

blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death. From the beginning both Jobs

and Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of

Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.

Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You guys didn’t

want to run ‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put

my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley

Scott’s brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching

off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,”

and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. “I can’t

believe you’re going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman

yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point

about how much she hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac.

I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with

desktop publishing.”

Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial during

the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy

(who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was

shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead

screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted

the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research firm told Fortune.

Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the

Wall Street Journal

apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page

and apologize for the apology.

Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when

he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy

Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in charge of hand-holding and logistics at the

Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though

it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place;

the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers.

He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. “I

know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type

of lily and said I was ‘stupid’ because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham

went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get

the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she

was wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he just

simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re angry, and

I know how you feel,” she said.

“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.”

Thirty Years Old

Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that proclaimed it

would never trust anyone over that age. To celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs

threw a lavishly formal but also playful—black tie and tennis shoes—party for one thousand in the

ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, “There’s an old Hindu

saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of

your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.”

One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old

friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy

Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the

more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony

Orchestra.

Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from

her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like “The Girl from Ipanema” to be

about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs called out a few. She

concluded with a slow rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to “technology’s foremost visionary.” Wozniak

also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast

Computer Faire, where the Apple II had been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine

marveled at the change in the decade since that time. “He went from being a Ho Chi Minh lookalike,

who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth

birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.

Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for. Debi

Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. But Jobs, in

an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room. Wozniak and some

of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served,

met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny’s.

“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing,”

Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate interview in

Playboy the month he turned thirty. “Of course, there are some people who are innately curious,

forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.” The interview touched on many subjects,

but Jobs’s most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future:

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical

patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never

get out of them.

I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of

my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few

years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. . . .

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You

have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an

artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m

getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little

differently.

With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life would soon be

changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and out of the thread of Apple’s.

Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he had been. Perhaps it was time to say “Bye, I

have to go,” and then reemerge later, thinking differently.

Exodus

Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in 1984. He needed to

recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he didn’t like. One

day he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to $50,000 to engineers on the Macintosh

team. So he went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that Belleville had decided not to give the

bonuses to people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later heard that the decision had actually been

made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs equivocated, then he said, “Well, let’s assume

what you are saying is true. How does that change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was

withholding the bonus as a reason for him to come back, then he wouldn’t come back as a matter

of principle. Jobs relented, but it left Hertzfeld with a bad taste.

When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have dinner with

Jobs, and they walked from his office to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away. “I really want to

return,” he told Jobs. “But things seem really messed up right now.” Jobs was vaguely annoyed

and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged ahead. “The software team is completely demoralized and

has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won’t last to the end of the

year.”

At that point Jobs cut him off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” he said. “The

Macintosh team is doing great, and I’m having the best time of my life right now. You’re just

completely out of touch.” His stare was withering, but he also tried to look amused at Hertzfeld’s

assessment.

“If you really believe that, I don’t think there’s any way that I can come back,” Hertzfeld

replied glumly. “The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Jobs replied. “I want you to come back, but if

you don’t want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as you think you do, anyway.”

Hertzfeld didn’t come back.

By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be hard to

quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too strong for him to

resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve got it!” he told Hertzfeld

one day. “I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field. I’ll just walk

into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It’s

guaranteed to work.” The betting on the Mac team was that even brave Burrell Smith would not

have the gumption to do that. When he finally decided he had to make his break, around the time

of Jobs’s birthday bash, he made an appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to find Jobs

smiling broadly when he walked in. “Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?” Jobs

asked. He had heard about the plan.

Smith looked at him. “Do I have to? I’ll do it if I have to.” Jobs gave him a look, and Smith

decided it wasn’t necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and walked out on good terms.

He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn. When Horn

went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with the Mac is your fault.”

Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault,

and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.”

“You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined the

offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said. And so they hugged.

But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder,

Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple II

division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from

management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification, that Jobs was not

appreciative of the Apple II, which remained the cash cow of the company and accounted for 70%

of its sales at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II group were being treated as very

unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said. “This was despite the fact that the Apple II

was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come.”

He even roused himself to do something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and

called Sculley, berating him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.

Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a

universal remote control device he had invented. It would control your television, stereo, and other

electronic devices with a simple set of buttons that you could easily program. He informed the

head of engineering at the Apple II division, but he didn’t feel he was important enough to go out

of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about it when the news leaked in the

Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly answered the reporter’s questions

when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple II

division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said.

Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where

Ronald Reagan presented them with the

first National Medal of Technology. The president quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had

said when first shown a telephone—“An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use

one?”—and then quipped, “I thought at the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the

awkward situation surrounding Wozniak’s departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So

Jobs and Wozniak went for a walk afterward and ate at a sandwich shop. They chatted amiably,

Wozniak recalled, and avoided any discussion of their disagreements.

Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. It was his style. So he agreed to stay on as a

part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the company at events and trade

shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not leave well enough

alone. One Saturday, a few weeks after they had visited Washington together, Jobs went to the

new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign had moved there to

handle its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches that the firm had made for

Wozniak’s new remote control device, and he flew into a rage. Apple had a clause in its contract

that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working on other computer-related projects, and Jobs

invoked it. “I informed them,” he recalled, “that working with Woz wouldn’t be acceptable to us.”

When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who, as

usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing him. “Steve Jobs has a hate for me,

probably because of the things I said about Apple,” he told the reporter. Jobs’s action was

remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others

did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak’s name

on it and used the same design language as Apple’s products might be mistaken for something that

Apple had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the newspaper, explaining that he wanted to

make sure that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t look like something made by Apple. “We don’t want

to see our design language used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can’t

leverage off Apple’s resources; we can’t treat him specially.”

Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already

done for Wozniak, but even so the executives at the firm were taken aback. When Jobs

demanded that they send him the drawings done for Wozniak or destroy them, they refused. Jobs

had to send them a letter invoking Apple’s contractual right. Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of

the firm, risked Jobs’s wrath by publicly dismissing his claim that the dispute with Wozniak was

not personal. “It’s a power play,” Pfeifer told the Journal. “They have personal problems between

them.”

Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs had done. He lived about twelve blocks from

Jobs, who sometimes would drop by on his walks. “I got so furious about the Wozniak remote

episode that when Steve next came over, I wouldn’t let him in the house,” Hertzfeld recalled. “He

knew he was wrong, but he tried to rationalize, and maybe in his distorted reality he was able to.”

Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired another design firm and even agreed to

stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 582