Part 9 (2/2)

After a while the relations.h.i.+p became b.u.mpier. 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. ”I t 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 T avern 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. I t was based on an old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.h.i.+pped 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. I t would be called Windows. Gateshosted 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 p.i.s.sed 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 a.s.sail 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 cla.s.sic 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. I t 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 s.h.i.+t.'” 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 s.h.i.+t.'” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions. ”During the course of this meeting, he's just ruder than s.h.i.+t,” 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 s.h.i.+pping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. I t 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, ”I f 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 colonialstyle 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 furnis.h.i.+ng.

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. T oo 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. ”I t'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 friends.h.i.+p 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. T o Sculley's surprise, Jobs had gathered the Apple board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As they all congratulated him during c.o.c.ktails, Sculley recalled, ”a beaming Steve stood in the background, nodding his head up and down and wearing a Ches.h.i.+re Cat smile on his face.” Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. ”The happiest two days for me were when Macintosh s.h.i.+pped 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. ”I t 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.

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 pa.s.sions 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. ”I t 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 s.p.u.n.ky 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 pa.s.sion 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 j.a.pan. Part of what I greatly admired there-and part of what we were lacking in our factory-was a sense of teamwork and discipline. I f 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p 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 Cuba-admiring wife of France's socialist president Francois 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. ”I f 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 att.i.tude. 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 p.i.s.sed off they wouldn't shake our hands,” she said.

In I taly, 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.

I t was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Ga.s.see, Apple's manager in France. Ga.s.see was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. ”He has his own way with the truth,” Ga.s.see later remarked. ”The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.”

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