

Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs - bond
http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/25/michael-dhuey-apple-engineer/

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TomOfTTB
I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme
developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant
victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people
were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never
lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple
was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it)

In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational
for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he
did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged)

In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be
learned there.

~~~
syncopate
I wonder if NeXT was really that much of a failure, considering that
ultimately today we use many of it's software technologies. I used to be a
NeXT programmer and am always amazed how much of it is still there today in OS
X..

~~~
wslh
With this line of reasoning Xerox PARC was a completely success and every
"seed" that lives today in the human history too. But business success metrics
are very cynical and NeXT was a business failure.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Hm, business history of NeXT as gleaned from Wikipedia:

1985: Founded by Steve Jobs using a bunch of his own money.

1987: "[Ross Perot] invested $20 million in exchange for 16% of NeXT's stock,
valuing the company at $125 million."

1989: "Canon invested US$100 million in NeXT, giving it a 16.67% stake, making
NeXT worth almost $600 million." [editor's note: _on paper_ ]

1992: "The company reported sales of $140 million in 1992, encouraging Canon
to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat."

1996: "Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and
1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs."

So, please tell me where the business failure is. What I see here is a company
that appears to have turned $150 million in venture funding (plus an unknown
amount of Steve Jobs' cash) into a valuable operating system platform, $429
million in cash, 1.5 million shares of Apple Computer, and _complete control
of Apple Computer itself_ , which as we all know proved to be an extremely
valuable commodity in the hands of the former employees of NeXT.

But Wikipedia is not a balance sheet, and I suppose it's possible that this
account I've pieced together leaves out something like half a billion dollars
in investments by otherwise unknown and unremarked parties. Can anyone out
there show me a history of NeXT that is substantially different than the one
above? Because until then I must conclude that the people who think of the
story of NeXT as a "business failure" don't know how to count money.

EDIT: Excellent, I found a contemporary account of the Canon investment in the
NYT to spell it all out for us:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-
invest-1...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-
invest-100-million-in-next-inc.html)

 _The Canon investment will dilute Mr. Jobs's ownership of Next to 50 percent.
He started the company with $7 million of his own and later invested another
$5 million. Next employees own 20 percent. H. Ross Perot, the Texas
billionaire who invested $20 million in 1987, owns 12.5 percent, and Stanford
University and Carnegie Mellon University, which have invested a total of $1.3
million, have a combined stake of less than 1 percent._

Please, tell me again what a terrible, terrible failure this was.

~~~
wpietri
It was a terrible failure. And I say that as a guy who loved the product so
much I still have boxed copies of the NeXT OS in one closet or another.

If the company was once priced at >$600m and the company sold for $429m (plus
less than $10m in Apple stock) then it was a clear loser. Canon alone could
have ended up with $200m in cash with a perfectly safe investment. In venture
terms, that's a failure.

It was also a failure in terms of meeting any goal set originally. Almost
nobody bought the hardware. Almost nobody bought the OS. Almost nobody bought
their Windows development tools, their last gasp of a product. It was a
brilliant product, but as businesses goes, it was one smoking crater after
another.

Moreover, that was a pity sale. Nobody else in the world would have bought
NeXT. Nobody needed Jobs or the OS; Apple, uniquely, was doomed without both.
Without that, NeXT would have been out of business within a few years. Those
sale terms were crafted to make Jobs happy to come on board, and for no other
reason.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I can't argue with this, I guess, except to say that if this counts as a
terrible failure we need a bunch of new words to describe all the _much, much
bigger failures_ that we've seen over the last twenty years.

After living through all these massive bubbles and frauds, I guess I have a
pretty high standard for failure. "Failure to make more profit than an index
fund" is not a success, I'll admit, but Canon could have done worse, oh so
much worse. They didn't win, but emerging from all that risk without a total
loss? Can we score it as a mulligan?

And I'll definitely push back on this whole "pity sale" concept. Just because
Steve Jobs found the one and only way in the world to turn his looming total
loss into a mulligan plus the seeds of future empire doesn't mean he lost.
This isn't chess. Companies aren't competing on some kind of infinite, uniform
ideal grid, they compete in the real world, and money is money, even if they
have to call in every favor and exploit every advantage.

~~~
wpietri
You can score it however you like, and I grant it wasn't a total disaster, but
by the standards of high-tech investments, it was definitely a failure, albeit
a gracefully executed one.

I will stand by the notion that it was a pity sale. The CEO is not a salable
company asset. That Apple bought NeXT for so much as a way to make Jobs happy
doesn't mean that NeXT did well; it just means that Apple really wanted Jobs.
(Correctly, as it turns out.) Props to Jobs for cashing out his investors
rather than just pocketing the money, though.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Apple did really want Jobs. But they also really wanted NeXT's operating
system. The month before they bought NeXT, every pundit was predicting they'd
buy the BeOS instead, because they all knew that Mac OS 9 wasn't going to cut
it.

And now here I am, working on a system all of whose libraries have entry
points prefixed with "NS".

Well, whatever. History rarely politely conforms to our categories. I suppose
we could declare NeXT to be a "disaster" relative to every other company
founded by Steve Jobs.

------
ugh
_“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring
him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’
And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.”_

Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a
meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is
crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.

~~~
wccrawford
a : abrupt in speech or manner b : being straight to the point : direct

So yeah, that's exactly what blunt means.

Don't be confused by all the people who think bluntness is automatically rude.
It's not. Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the
truth. They need to have it sugar coated.

~~~
ugh
“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it.
Saying “I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.” seems just honest to me, not
blunt. “I’m bored by this, why do you tell me all this crap?” would be
something I would be willing to call blunt.

But yeah, being honest (or blunt, if you will) is something I’m perfectly
alright with. I want the people I’m working with or for to be like that. I’m
not so crazy about rudeness, but if that quote is accurate Jobs wasn’t rude
(at least in those situations).

~~~
hollerith
>“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it.

Rudeness or impoliteness is not part of the definition of the word in the
dictionary I consulted.

~~~
ezy
Try looking up the word "connotation"

~~~
hollerith
Dictionary definitions often include connotations.

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dpkendal
Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you
could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got
out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you
were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out.

Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing
all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the
direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then
implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then
writing it.

He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit
feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged
ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)

~~~
lurker14
I refer you to this example of demanding a feature with no regard for
feasibility:
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=round)

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dvdhsu
No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot,
and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.

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Duff
Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward.

I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the
sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.

------
chulipuli
I would have loved an elevator ride with him. The man is quite smart, and a
resilient entrepreneur.

------
WalterBright
Not a problem for me, I always take the stairs!

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idlewords
I was really hoping this would be an article about flatulence.

~~~
joely
Since Jobs was gone from Apple in 1985 what was his role in the Macintosh II,
which didn't come out for 2 more years? Not a question that should be left to
suspension of disbelief. And the iMac came out in 1998, but Steve was working
on it at Apple in 1985 – in the Macintosh II building? To paraphrase Col.
Kurtz: "Journalism? I don't see any journalism here."

And one more thing™, Dhuey is the one with a tin ear if he doesn't understand
that fans are anathema to Jobs' aesthetic.

------
sorbus
> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss.

> “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve
> to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with
> a French law against things that were too loud."

Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder
to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting
hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.

~~~
jerf
Uh, no. That problem predates Apple's entry into the space by decades.

If you want to get down to the real root cause, the root problem is
biological; the human ear's damage threshold is significantly lower than its
pain threshold. That's not an easy problem to solve.

