26 April 2015
After I finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson I tried to recall the image I had of Jobs before I started the book. This image was blurred, and consisted mainly of various fragments that I had never taken the time to try and piece together into a coherent whole. His jeans and black turtleneck uniform came to mind. I had heard stories about his infamous bad temper. I knew he had suffered from illness in the last years of his life and had died (relatively) young. I was curious about his credentials: did he have a technical background? And what exactly was his role at Apple: did he think up the products in all their detail? Or was he predominantly a charismatic leader, steering the ship from a management pedestal?
The first 200 pages cover the Jobs story from his childhood as the adopted son of Paul and Clara Jobs to his expulsion from Apple in 1985 (he would return again in 1997). This first third of the book (corresponding to the first 30 years of Jobs’ life) is the most colourful, and provides all the ingredients for understanding the main traits of the Jobs character (or at least the interpretation thereof given by the author Isaacson).
We learn that Jobs’ (adoptive) father was a gifted tinkerer who instilled in his son the importance of good craftsmanship, even for those parts that are not visible in the end product (for instance, the backside of a wooden bookshelf that will always be placed against a wall). We hear how a young Jobs befriended engineer-extraordinaire Steve Wozniak and how they hacked the AT&T long-distance telephone routing system, allowing them to make long distance calls for free. This first collaboration led to the creation of a magic box which enabled these long distance calls and which Jobs was quick to try and sell. The venture ended unsuccessfully but the writing was on the wall. Even before the success of the Apple computer, the Jobs-Wozniak partnership would make a “dent in history” (as Jobs liked to say) at Atari (where Jobs was working night shifts because no one could stand his bad body odour and capricious personality). Together the two created “breakout”, one of the all-time classic video games.
One of my favourite passages from this first third is the description of how Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh team led by Jobs, developed the famous QuickDraw algorithm. This enabled the first Macintosh to have a blazingly fast graphical display that was unparalleled in any other desktop at the time. The book recounts how Atkinson was driven by the belief that he had seen such a graphical display during a demo the Macintosh team were given at Xerox PARC. He worked feverishly to recreate the functionality only to discover afterwards that the Xerox computers were far less advanced that he had convinced himself they were. We would later credit this mistake with giving him the necessary belief that what he wanted to achieve was actually possible. Had he known beforehand that no such functionality yet existed, he may not have had the courage to embark on the project at all.
The story of Atkinson’s creation of Quickdraw captures the best and the worst of what it meant to work under Jobs. When interpreted favourably, it illustrates what incredible feats Jobs could stimulate as a micromanaging product visionary. When interpreted more critically, it also reveals all the darker elements of Jobs’ management style and ruthless opportunism. The only reason the Macintosh team were aware of the developments at Xerox PARC was because Jobs had manipulated the Xerox team into revealing much more than they had ever intended. When referring to this episode, Jobs would sometimes quote a phrase he claimed came from Picasso: “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Moreover, once Jobs’ imagination had been triggered, he pushed the Macintosh team hard to turn his fantasies into reality. During this period, Atkinson crashed his car on the way to the office one morning and ended up in hospital. The book suggests that the accident was precipitated by the intensity of his work on Quickdraw. The legend goes that when Jobs visited Atkinson in hospital, the latter looked up at him from his bed and said “Don’t worry, I still remember regions” (regions being the central data-structure upon which Quickdraw was based).
Another double-edged aspect of Jobs’ personality that features prominently in the book is his “reality distortion field”. This refers to the ability Jobs had of ignoring the facts and convincing himself and everyone around him that things were not what they seemed. On the one hand, the distortion field could be a tremendous source of inspiration and energy. All problems and difficulties would dissolve under its influence. On the other hand, it made Jobs extremely difficult to communicate with and led him to develop unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved. While these expectations did serve to push the Macintosh team to create something truly exceptional and unique, they also took their toll on the well being of the team.
The image I developed after this first third was of Jobs as a man possessed. A man obsessed not only with pushing computers to their technical limits, but also combining them with a rigid design aesthetic to produce an all-absorbing user experience. His attention to every detail of this experience is evidenced by the care he took in designing not only all the fonts that the computer was able to display, but even the look and feel of the calculator app that shipped with the Macintosh. In Jobs’ eyes, the ends justified all the means, and as a result, his general behaviour left a lot to be desired.
Isaacson makes the claim that in his early adulthood, Jobs could be classified as a member of the Californian counter-culture prevalent at the time. He was a dedicated follower of Zen spirituality, he didn’t shower, wore long robes, dropped acid and engaged in strange fruitarian diets. He even went on a long soul searching voyage through India. While one could easily dismiss this behaviour as superficial trend-following, Jobs engaged in these activities with an intensity that surpassed the simple desire to “be hip”. His commitment to the all-embracing worldview of the counter-culture is striking. One could argue that at Apple Jobs created a company whose products are equally capable of absorbing their users into an all-encompassing worldview. As a young man Jobs was a consumer of ideology, but as an entrepreneur and product designer, he created one.
Jobs’ Apple is a company that aims to produce products which provide their customers with a unique and total experience. In order to achieve this goal, he was convinced that Apple needed to control every aspect of every product it created, from the power source to the computing hardware, from the operating system to the word processing software. For this reason, Apple products, from the first Macintosh to the newest iPhone, are famous for being hermetically sealed (with respect to both the hardware and software). On one of the early iMacs, Jobs even insisted the computer be constructed with custom screws so that it couldn’t be opened without special equipment. Unlike his arch-rival Bill Gates did at Microsoft, Jobs refused to license the Apple operating system to other computer manufacturers because he did not want their (in his eyes obviously inferior) hardware to interfere with the experience that the Apple operating system provided. This policy of total product control also explains why the Apple name is conspicuously absent from the open source software scene, dominated these days by younger tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and co.
Thus far, the Jobs vision at Apple has been vindicated. Apple today is incredibly profitable and its products set the benchmark for beauty, quality of manufacturing and ease of use. However, a healthy tech world is a diverse and democratic one. An inclusive tech world is one in which products from different companies effortlessly communicate with each other using standard protocols. How compatible are these goals with Apple’s insular policies of total control? This tension between the hackers and the spiritual gurus has its roots in the very beginnings of Apple, when Wozniak and Jobs argued about how extendable the Apple II should be. As a hacker, Wozniak wanted an open and extendable machine. As a product purist, Jobs wanted a closed finished product. In the case of the Apple II, Wozniak got his way, but in the long term Jobs prevailed. I will follow with interest how a post-Jobs Apple defines its place in tomorrow’s tech landscape.