
"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it." - carterac
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt&characters=Steve%20Jobs&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Rating&detail=medium
======
10ren
This story inspired me tonight: reading about how he didn't know if it would
work or not, and how he fixed bugs as they arose is true hacking style. And
it's definitely a way to get things done. So that's what I did tonight, and
made a ton of progress; just hounding down and stomping on bugs mercilessly.

Why wasn't I doing that already? I'd been reading too much Dijkstra, that the
"competent" programmer can show whether his code will work or not. It's
definitely possible to do it that way, but it's (very sadly) too high a
standard for me to reach in reasonable time (or maybe at all), for more than
toy problems. Dijkstra used this approach to write a multitasking operating
system. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that.

~~~
johnaspden
So, there are two ways to do things, an easy way and a hard way. Once you've
done it the easy way, it's probably a lot easier to cover up the traces and
make it look like you did it the hard way.

And a guy who is famous both for being incredibly clever and for being rather
arrogant and insecure told _all his competitors_ that they were incompetent if
they didn't do it the hard way.

Programming is a form of mathematics. Maths papers are terse and beautiful and
look as though they have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus.

But you don't see the days of hacking through examples and crazy leaps of
intuition (that are almost always wrong) in the finished paper, because the
mathematician removes them from the story in order to leave an argument that
is easy to verify.

I am not saying that Dijkstra couldn't do things the hard way. I would be
amazed if his best stuff was done the hard way.

~~~
timwiseman
Well said!

Lakatos in his "Proofs and Refutations" addresses precisely this topic.

~~~
10ren
I like this experimental approach, it's like debugging, except you can also
edit what inputs you accept. But is it actually accepted by mathematicians as
an accurate description of what they do?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations>

Even Alonzo Church published work that was later shown to be logically
inconsistent <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus> I came across

------
rodh257
"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project?
A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in
less than two months."

In my limited experience negotiating on fees for programming or selling
software I've heard this line a few times. "You seem like a really good
programmer, that program probably would have only taken you say 2 days, times
that by an average hourly rate and thats the rate I'm willing to pay for the
program and all source code".

Always a sign for me that things aren't going to go well.

~~~
anamax
> In my limited experience negotiating on fees for programming or selling
> software I've heard this line a few times. "You seem like a really good
> programmer, that program probably would have only taken you say 2 days,
> times that by an average hourly rate and thats the rate I'm willing to pay
> for the program and all source code".

Bzzt - "really good programmers" aren't paid an "average hourly rate" -
they're paid an absurdly high hourly rate.

You've got to be willing to walk away, to call their bluff to find another
programmer to do what you did for less.

And when they come back, the price is higher because you both know that they
don't have as many options as they thought that they had before.
(Alternatively, they've admitted that the options that they were using to beat
you down don't exist.)

------
noonespecial
Both Jobs and Gates tried to snare him with the same fallacy. It was easy for
him to do because he was very good/had insider knowledge so he shouldn't be
paid that much for it. Wrong.

What really mattered was how much it was worth to Microsoft or Apple and
_especially_ that it was worth a good bit to both. Picture Scotty asking if
that's worth somthin' t'ye or shd'aye just punch up clear?

~~~
danilocampos
It's a tough one, though. It sounds like an important thing to Andy was
getting more of his work onto a bunch of Macs, where it could make the most
impact. Which meant getting it bundled. Which meant making Steve happy.

Imagine Andy's horror, for example, if Steve had someone else build the Apple-
blessed switcher instead and it worked but lacked the elegance and care of the
Hertzfeld version.

Steve ended up having something Andy wanted, too. I gotta believe Jobs is a
tough enough negotiator under the best of circumstances. Imagine when he's got
you by your idealism.

~~~
jimbokun
The only possible leverage he could have had would have been to try to get
Gates and Jobs into a bidding war. But that only works if Microsoft sees it as
a competitive advantage to have the switcher for their apps but no one else's.

And, like you said, Andy already admitted he wanted it on all Macs, which blew
any chance at leverage he had.

~~~
ErrantX
It's hard to say, because we weren't there. But I would have just said, then
and there, "bullshit, I'll talk to Bill" and walked out the office - 10$ says
he wouldn't have made it to the exit :)

~~~
dedward
Times were different back then. The market was nothing whatsoever like it is
today. The context of this was for applications microsoft was writing for the
mac, not for operating system development... and the fact that he had insider
knowledge could have been used against him. And $100,000 was a decent amount
of money at the time.

------
statictype
When he started on about the key combinations at the end, I was convinced he
was about to give us the origin of Ctrl-Alt-Del.

~~~
mikeknoop
I had the exact same comment (see farther down). I went on a quick hunt and
turned up this as the actual origins: [http://www.reviewjournal.com/cgi-
bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_hom...](http://www.reviewjournal.com/cgi-
bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_home/2001/Sep-03-Mon-2001/business/16876535.html)

~~~
zimbu668
A more humorous take on it <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zADyh0JQh8>

------
ericb
I feel like he really dropped the ball on negotiating the sale. It seems like
he didn't make any counters, and didn't use their competing interest to reap a
higher price.

I was expecting at least a cease and desist or lawsuit would be involved.

~~~
10ren
Oh man you reckon that's poor negotiation skills, wait til you check out this
guy <http://www.nucalc.com/Story/>

_EDIT_ found a video of Ron telling the story in person
[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567#)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
"Sadly, Microsoft has effective building security". That says it all, about
corporate mentality.

------
owyn
That's a great story. I'm not sure how many people can say they got a hard
sell like that from both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for one piece of
software...

~~~
mcantor
I feel like there should be an award for that. I feel accomplished when I
manage to get _car dealerships_ to compete over me, much less CEOs worth
scrillions of dollars.

~~~
gaius
They were only worth quintillions back then, remember

~~~
zandorg
Also a Gatesion is more than a "Bill"ion.

------
JacobAldridge
Probably my favourite 'Folklore' story (though I've by no means read them all)
- I especially like the extra $50K kicker when Switcher was sold, something
Jobs "swore they would never do".

------
febeling
This is what the Switcher looked like:
[http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stor...](http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stories/EarlyMacStories.html#multitasking)

------
vinhboy
Wow, just wow. I am amazed by two things 1) How much a jerk both Steve Jobs
and Bill Gates are and 2) How young the engineers were that started all
this...

~~~
shin_lao
They're not jerks, they're putting the interest of their companies first.

~~~
jacquesm
They could do so without being jerks though, and yes, I think they both come
off as jerks. I can think of several ways in which they could have achieved
the same thing without being jerks.

~~~
shin_lao
Let's not rewrite history.

A skilled engineer Andy was obviously a very poor salesman, a trait both Bill
and Steve saw immediately. They took advantage of the situation for the
benefit of the company and although wording might be harsh, what they did was
fair.

It was up to Andy to haggle.

Bill wrote a unneeded "thank you" letter to Andy. Doesn't look like what a
jerk does.

And he eventually got $ 150,000 for his work. That's a fair amount of money,
isn't it?

~~~
jacquesm
> They took advantage of the situation

Contradicts the rest of what you wrote... The strongest point against that I
can see is the fact that he saw it somewhere else first.

~~~
shin_lao
I don't understand what you mean.

Do you mean they should have been "nice" to him? If yes, why? They were doing
business, not having a cocktail party.

~~~
jacquesm
There seems to be this unspoken assumption that you can't do business if
you're not nice.

This is definitely not true. If I were Jobs (which I'm arguably not, so it is
possible that you can't 'get there' by being nice) I would have seen quite a
few possibilities achieving the same without coming off as a jerk.

Maybe we disagree on that, but I don't think you _need_ to be like that in
order to succeed. Some of the wealthiest people that I have known would never
think of treating another person that way, business or not, and I find it
surprising that Jobs would do this. It's just my personal take on this, don't
make it in to an absolute.

~~~
shin_lao
We agree on that you don't have to be jerk to be successful.

I disagree when you say they haven't been nice with Andy. They've been "hard",
but not mean (to me) and certainly not jerks. Steve used a fallacy to move his
agenda but that's typical haggling (What! This used car is mint! And you want
me to sell it for that price? You want me to close my business?!!).

Let's not forget the story is told from Andy's point of view. Bill and Jobs
were probably very assertive and Andy might be sensitive to the point he
perceived that negatively.

~~~
jacquesm
> Let's not forget the story is told from Andy's point of view.

That's very true, and from the other side it might come out very different.

------
jacquesm
> ""But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to
> allow you to take advantage of Apple."

> "What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.

> "There's no way that you could have written that program without
> confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't
> have the right to charge whatever you like for it.""

Wow... that makes me think a whole lot less of Steve Jobs.

That information should have been public knowledge anyway, to try to claim a
stake in something that someone wrote just because you don't document your
stuff is really low.

~~~
DrJokepu
It's a common practice that parts of systems that cannot be guaranteed to not
change in upcoming releases are undocumented, and rightly so.

~~~
jacquesm
That's true, but that is not a reason to see that as giving you a stake in
someone else's efforts. I think that's a low thing to do.

------
10ren
With inflation, that's only doubled:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100%2C000+1984+%3D>

~~~
jrockway
Not a bad deal for sitting in your house for a few months working on something
that you enjoy.

~~~
brown
Or a really crappy deal compared to how much value Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
got out of it.

~~~
johnaspden
And thus, benefits from trade.

~~~
hammmatt
Benefits from trade are a good notion.

However, some trades are completely unfair.

Example, Native Americans trading the island of Manhattan for a few dollars of
beads.

Even though it is great business. It is immoral to me to lie about the value
of a product. Just as it would be immoral to lie about it's functions.

However, I can easily empathize with people who try to get the best deal for
themselves/their company.

~~~
ArturSoler
Native Americans sold Manhattan for $24 in 1626. It may seem a low amount, but
invested at an annual 6% that would be over $125 billion today.

~~~
cma
And yet still worth less than Manhattan.

------
hammmatt
It seemed like he had an incredible product he could have sold for more in my
opinion.

For contractual projects wouldn't it make sense to know the value of what is
going to be produced (more or less) and then negotiate the percentage of it.

Is there anything akin to an agent for a programmer in this situation? In all
seriousness, it might not be a bad idea for a business.

Assuming that you can add value to the talent by increasing contractual
payoffs, and/or your organization could develop a reputation for excellence
and potentially be sought out to find talent for certain jobs.

I'm picturing a mixture of a consultant, and a technical programming.

Any thoughts?

~~~
dedward
Keep in mind what the market looked like at the time - it was nothing
whatsoever like today. The field was so new there were no ground rules. It was
the wild west.

Either party could have also paid him nothing, hired someone else to do it,
and been done with it.

------
mikeknoop
Did anyone else think the story would end with the key combination being
changed to "Ctrl+alt+delete"?

~~~
neandorman
I was thinking command-option-escape (force quit on Mac).

~~~
mikeknoop
Well, Microsoft was the comapny who he was talking about force-quit shortcut
with, so I assumed the former.

------
shirtless_coder
Well, 100k is better than 40k

------
taylorwc
The conversation with Bill Gates in his office reads like something out of an
Ayn Rand novel. This is awesome.

------
Vivtek
Damn, look at this: "... including a simple UI for selecting applications and
'Switcher Documents' for remembering sets of related applications."

I wish the concept of switcher documents had survived in the greater ecology -
that would have been sweet.

------
andreyf
If this isn't inspiring to "predict the future by inventing it", I don't know
what is.

------
chopsueyar
Excellent story. Anyone remember DESQview for DOS?

I really liked how his development cycles are spaced with mini-vacations.

Also, a nice look at the young Gates and Jobs.

...and he's a hardware hacker, too!

Good stuff.

------
andreyf
I wonder if he'd gone with the single-heap-for-all-apps idea, whether or not
it would have encouraged program interoperability?

~~~
jacquesm
It probably would have led to programs crashing other programs by heap
corruption though. More separation is better.

------
mkramlich
When it got to the part where Andy was talking to Jobs and Jobs was trying to
close a deal to buy Switcher, I could almost hear the _click_ of Steve's
Reality Distortion Field turning on. Also pictured him doing the hand-waving
motion Kenobi did in Star Wars when doing the Jedi mind trick on
stormtroopers. "These are not the droids you're looking for. One hundred
thousand credits. The Jedi will not be taken advantage of. This little one is
not worth your trouble."

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
I always thought the Jobsian reality distortion field was more inspirational.
It turns on and engineers start thinking along the lines of, "Yeah, I guess we
can pack a mobo into a single square inch."

What he described sounded like vanilla intimidation. I could feel the guy
squirming in his seat.

~~~
hebejebelus
Man, for some reason a mobo in a single square inch sounds like a great idea.

Must… resist… RDF…

------
confuzatron
Interesting to see the different approaches taken by Gates and Jobs. Gates:
flattery, Jobs: implied threats.

------
mkramlich
great story. great insight into Jobs and Gates too, giving a glimpse of both
in action in the same era, and dealing with the same issue.

