THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 3 page

to an easel and began posting his thoughts.

The first was “Don’t compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be both helpful

and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the other hand, would end up

being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it—but it would not ship

for another sixteen months, way behind schedule. After mentioning a scheduled completion date,

he told them, “It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.” A different type of

project manager, willing to make some trade-offs, might try to lock in dates after which no

changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed another maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”

Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that he later told me was his favorite maxim: “The

journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted

mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing

off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives.

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market

research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what

they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk

diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mockup

of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a

notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They

were building a company that would invent the future.

For the next two days there were presentations by various team leaders and the influential

computer industry analyst Ben Rosen, with a lot of time in the evenings for pool parties and

dancing. At the end, Jobs stood in front of the assemblage and gave a soliloquy. “As every day

passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,”

he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I’ve done

in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about the “little

hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most

fun they had in their lives.

The next retreat was at the end of January 1983, the same month the Lisa launched, and there

was a shift in tone. Four months earlier Jobs had written on his flip chart: “Don’t compromise.”

This time one of the maxims was “Real artists ship.” Nerves were frayed. Atkinson had been left

out of the publicity interviews for the Lisa launch, and he marched into Jobs’s hotel room and

threatened to quit. Jobs tried to minimize the slight, but Atkinson refused to be mollified. Jobs got

annoyed. “I don’t have time to deal with this now,” he said. “I have sixty other people out there

who are pouring their hearts into the Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to start the meeting.”

With that he brushed past Atkinson to go address the faithful.

Jobs proceeded to give a rousing speech in which he claimed that he had resolved the dispute

with McIntosh audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact the issue was still being negotiated,

but the moment called for a bit of the old reality distortion field.) He pulled out a bottle of mineral

water and symbolically christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall, Atkinson heard the loud

cheer, and with a sigh joined the group. The ensuing party featured skinny-dipping in the pool, a

bonfire on the beach, and loud music that lasted all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in

Carmel, to ask them never to come back.

Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He

wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like swashbucklers who were

proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others. As Susan Kare put it, “He meant,

‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move fast. We can get things done.’” To

celebrate Jobs’s birthday a few weeks later, the team paid for a billboard on the road to Apple

headquarters. It read: “Happy 28th Steve. The Journey is the Reward.—The Pirates.”

One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve Capps, decided this new spirit warranted hoisting a

Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare paint a skull and crossbones on it. The eye

patch she put on the skull was an Apple logo. Late one Sunday night Capps climbed to the roof of

their newly built Bandley 3 building and hoisted

the flag on a scaffolding pole that the construction workers had left behind. It waved proudly

for a few weeks, until members of the Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the flag and sent their

Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to recover it and was able to wrestle it from a secretary

who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the grown-ups overseeing Apple worried that

Jobs’s buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand. “Flying that flag was really stupid,” said Arthur

Rock. “It was telling the rest of the company they were no good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made

sure it waved proudly all the way through to the completion of the Mac project. “We were the

renegades, and we wanted people to know it,” he recalled.

Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what they

were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar

with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just

quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their

renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.

By far the most important example of this involved the choice of a disk drive for the Macintosh.

Apple had a corporate division that built mass-storage devices, and it had developed a disk-drive

system, code-named Twiggy, that could read and write onto those thin, delicate 5¼-inch floppy

disks that older readers (who also remember Twiggy the model) will recall. But by the time the

Lisa was ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it was clear that the Twiggy was buggy. Because the

Lisa also came with a hard-disk drive, this was not a complete disaster. But the Mac had no hard

disk, so it faced a crisis. “The Mac team was beginning to panic,” said Hertzfeld. “We were using

a single Twiggy drive, and we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”

The team discussed the problem at the January 1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman gave Jobs data

about the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to Apple’s factory in San Jose to see the

Twiggy being made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With his face flushed, he began

shouting and sputtering about firing everyone who worked there. Bob Belleville, the head of the

Mac engineering team,

gently guided him to the parking lot, where they could take a walk and talk about alternatives.

One possibility that Belleville had been exploring was to use a new 3½-inch disk drive that

Sony had developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and could fit into a shirt pocket.

Another option was to have a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by a smaller

Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co., which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple

II. Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could build their own version

in time it would be much cheaper.

Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to design the first

power supply for the Apple II), flew to Japan to figure out what to do. They took the bullet train

from Tokyo to visit the Alps facility. The engineers there didn’t even have a working prototype,

just a crude model. Jobs thought it was great, but Belleville was appalled. There was no way, he

thought, that Alps could have it ready for the Mac within a year.

As they proceeded to visit other Japanese companies, Jobs was on his worst behavior. He wore

jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese managers in dark suits. When they formally handed

him little gifts, as was the custom, he often left them behind, and he never reciprocated with gifts

of his own. He would sneer when rows of engineers lined up to greet him, bow, and politely offer

their products for inspection. Jobs hated both the devices and the obsequiousness. “What are you

showing me this for?” he snapped at one stop. “This is a piece of crap! Anybody could build a

better drive than this.” Although most of his hosts were appalled, some seemed amused. They had

heard tales of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now they were getting to see it in full

display.

The final stop was the Sony factory, located in a drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs, it looked

messy and inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated it. Back at the hotel, Belleville

argued for going with the Sony disk drive. It was ready to use. Jobs disagreed. He decided that

they would work with Alps to produce their own drive, and he ordered Belleville to cease all work

with Sony.

Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore Jobs, and he asked

a Sony executive to get its disk drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it became

clear that Alps could not deliver on time, Apple would switch to Sony. So Sony sent over the

engineer who had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a Purdue graduate who fortunately

possessed a good sense of humor about his clandestine task.

Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate office to visit the Mac team’s engineers—

which was almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly find somewhere for Komoto to hide. At

one point Jobs ran into him at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized him from the meeting in

Japan, but he didn’t suspect anything. The closest call was when Jobs came bustling onto the Mac

work space unexpectedly one day while Komoto was sitting in one of the cubicles. A Mac

engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a janitorial closet. “Quick, hide in this closet. Please!

Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but he jumped up and did as told. He had to

stay in the closet for five minutes, until Jobs left. The Mac engineers apologized. “No problem,”

he replied. “But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”

Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the folks at Alps admitted it would take them at

least eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony drive into production. At a retreat in

Pajaro Dunes, Markkula grilled Jobs on what he was going to do. Finally, Belleville interrupted

and said that he might have an alternative to the Alps drive ready soon. Jobs looked baffled for

just a moment, and then it became clear to him why he’d glimpsed Sony’s top disk designer in

Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said. But it was not in anger. There was a big grin on his

face. As soon as he realized what Belleville and the other engineers had done behind his back, said

Hertzfeld, “Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right

thing.” It was, after all, what he would have done in their situation.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ENTER SCULLEY

The Pepsi Challenge

With John Sculley, 1984

The Courtship

Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s president. He liked designing his new houses,

flying his private plane, and living high off his stock options; he did not relish adjudicating

conflict or curating high-maintenance egos. He had stepped into the role reluctantly, after he felt

compelled to ease out Mike Scott, and he promised his wife the gig would be temporary. By the

end of 1982, after almost two years, she gave him an order: Find a replacement right away.

Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of

him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told

Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they

launched a search for someone from the outside.

The person they most wanted was Don Estridge, who had built IBM’s personal computer

division from scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and his team disparaged it, was

now outselling Apple’s. Estridge had sheltered his division in Boca Raton, Florida, safely

removed from the corporate mentality of Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was driven and

inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he had the ability to allow others to think that his brilliant ideas were

their own. Jobs flew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million salary and a $1 million signing

bonus, but Estridge turned him down. He was not the type who would jump ship to join the

enemy. He also enjoyed being part of the establishment, a member of the Navy rather than a

pirate. He was discomforted by Jobs’s tales of ripping off the phone company. When asked where

he worked, he loved to be able to answer “IBM.”

So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find

someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a

consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on

Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John

Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had

been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he

heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would

be happy to meet him.

Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East Side

Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his father was a proper Wall

Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St. Mark’s School, then got his undergraduate degree from

Brown and a business degree from Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as an

innovative marketer and advertiser, with little passion for product development or information

technology.

Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two

teenage children from a previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he

was struck by how poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked why he was so

interested, he said he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs. They were totally

blown away. They had grown up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true celebrity. It

made Sculley take more seriously the prospect of being hired as his boss.

When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley was startled by the unassuming offices and

casual atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed than PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,”

he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley declared that most

executives found computers more trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into evangelical

mode. “We want to change the way people use computers,” he said.

On the flight home Sculley outlined his thoughts. The result was an eight-page memo on

marketing computers to consumers and business executives. It was a bit sophomoric in parts, filled

with underlined phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it revealed his newfound enthusiasm for

figuring out ways to sell something more interesting than soda. Among his recommendations:

“Invest in in-store merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich

their life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi, but Jobs intrigued him. “I was taken by this

young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better,” he

recalled.

So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next came to New York, which happened to be for

the January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel. After the full day of press sessions, the

Apple team was surprised to see an unscheduled visitor come into the suite. Jobs loosened his tie

and introduced Sculley as the president of Pepsi and a potential big corporate customer. As John

Couch demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs chimed in with bursts of commentary, sprinkled with his

favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming it would change the nature of human

interaction with computers.

They then headed off to the Four Seasons restaurant, a shimmering haven of elegance and

power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley described Pepsi’s marketing successes. The

Pepsi Generation

campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s

got a chance to create an Apple Generation.” Jobs enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge

campaign, in contrast, focused on the product; it combined ads, events, and public relations to stir

up buzz. The ability to turn the introduction of a new product into a moment of national

excitement was, Jobs noted, what he and Regis McKenna wanted to do at Apple.

When they finished talking, it was close to midnight. “This has been one of the most exciting

evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked him back to the Carlyle. “I can’t tell you

how much fun I’ve had.” When he finally got home to Greenwich, Connecticut, that night, Sculley

had trouble sleeping. Engaging with Jobs was a lot more fun than negotiating with bottlers. “It

stimulated me, roused my long-held desire to be an architect of ideas,” he later noted. The next

morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know what you guys did last night, but let me tell you,

Steve Jobs is ecstatic,” he said.

And so the courtship continued, with Sculley playing hard but not impossible to get. Jobs flew

east for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up to Greenwich. He found Sculley’s

newly built mansion ostentatious, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, but he admired the three

hundred-pound custom-made oak doors that were so carefully hung and balanced that they swung

open with the touch of a finger. “Steve was fascinated by that because he is, as I am, a

perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the somewhat unhealthy process of a star-struck

Sculley perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in himself.

Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his guest’s taste, he borrowed his wife’s

Mercedes 450SL convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre corporate headquarters, which

was as lavish as Apple’s was austere. To Jobs, it epitomized the difference between the feisty new

digital economy and the Fortune 500 corporate establishment. A winding drive led through

manicured fields and a sculpture garden (including pieces by Rodin, Moore, Calder, and

Giacometti) to a concrete-and-glass building designed by Edward Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge

office had a Persian rug, nine windows, a small private garden, a hideaway study, and its own

bathroom. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was astonished that executives had an

area,

with its own whirlpool, separate from that of the regular employees. “That’s weird,” he said.

Sculley hastened to agree. “As a matter of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out

sometimes in the employees’ area,” he said.

Their next meeting was a few weeks later in Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on his way back

from a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the Macintosh marketing manager,

took charge of preparing the team for the visit, but he was not clued in on the real agenda.

“PepsiCo could end up purchasing literally thousands of Macs over the next few years,” he

exulted in a memo to the Macintosh staff. “During the past year, Mr. Sculley and a certain Mr.

Jobs have become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of the best marketing heads in the

big leagues; as such, let’s give him a good time here.”

Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about the Macintosh. “This product means more to

me than anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the first person outside of Apple to see it.”

He dramatically pulled the prototype out of a vinyl bag and gave a demonstration. Sculley found

Jobs as memorable as his machine. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every

move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”

Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare a special screen display for Sculley’s

amusement. “He’s really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is.” The

explanation that Sculley might buy a lot of Macintoshes for Pepsi “sounded a little bit fishy to

me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan Kare created a screen of Pepsi caps and cans that danced

around with the Apple logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began waving his arms around during the

demo, but Sculley seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem all that

interested,” Hertzfeld recalled. He never ended up warming to Sculley. “He was incredibly phony,

a complete poseur,” he later said. “He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He

was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”

Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New York in March 1983 and was able to convert the

courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really think you’re the guy,” Jobs said as they

walked through Central Park. “I want you to come and work with me. I can

learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated father figures in the past, knew just how to

play to Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It worked. “I was smitten by him,” Sculley later admitted.

“Steve was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a passion for ideas.”

Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered them toward the Metropolitan Museum for a

little test of whether Jobs was really willing to learn from others. “I wanted to see how well he

could take coaching in a subject where he had no background,” he recalled. As they strolled

through the Greek and Roman antiquities, Sculley expounded on the difference between the

Archaic sculpture of the sixth century B.C. and the Periclean sculptures a century later. Jobs, who

loved to pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college, seemed to soak it in. “I gained a

sense that I could be a teacher to a brilliant student,” Sculley recalled. Once again he indulged the

conceit that they were alike: “I saw in him a mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was

impatient, stubborn, arrogant, impetuous. My mind exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of

everything else. I, too, was intolerant of those who couldn’t live up to my demands.”

As they continued their long walk, Sculley confided that on vacations he went to the Left Bank

in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs

replied that if he weren’t working with computers, he could see himself as a poet in Paris. They

continued down Broadway to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street, where Jobs showed Sculley

the music he liked, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill jazz

artists. Then they walked all the way back up to the San Remo on Central Park West and Seventyfourth,

where Jobs was planning to buy a two-story tower penthouse apartment.

The consummation occurred outside the penthouse on one of the terraces, with Sculley sticking

close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First they discussed money. “I told him I

needed $1 million in salary, $1 million for a sign-up bonus,” said Sculley. Jobs claimed that would

be doable. “Even if I have to pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said. “We’ll have to solve those

problems, because you’re the best person I’ve ever met. I know you’re perfect for Apple, and

Apple deserves the best.” He added that never before had he worked for someone he

really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person who could teach him the most. Jobs

gave him his unblinking stare.

Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should just be friends and

he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time you’re in New York, I’d love to spend

time with you.” He later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head dropped as he stared at

his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for

days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to

change the world?’”

Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other

than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person

and know exactly what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I realized for the first time in

four months that I couldn’t say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left the apartment

and walked back across the park to the Carlyle.

The Honeymoon

Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management retreat at Pajaro

Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in Greenwich, he was still having

trouble adjusting to the casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting room, Jobs sat on the floor

in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to impose

an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa,

and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or

functions. But the discussion descended into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and

debates.

At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,”

someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you get a

product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one would have

challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on Steve.” It reminded

him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen: “What’s the difference

between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”

In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for the

beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone else shouted

that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and ran the other way.

“The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster, only foreshadowed what

was to come,” Sculley later wrote.

One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He was

then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his girlfriend, Barbara

Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna. Leezy had brought a pan

and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his strict vegan diet for the time being.)

“I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It

was one of his enduring quirks: His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan

streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a

Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam

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