~ The Biography Of Steve Jobs ~

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

At a high-school gym in Berkeley, Calif., [Steve Jobs is] rehearsing the rollout that will introduce his new baby, the NeXT computer, to the world. Dressed in blue jeans and a red flannel shirt, Jobs paces back and forth, reading lines into a wireless microphone. […]. When the first slide appears on the screen, Jobs enthuses: "I really like that green." Around him, other NeXT executives chime in: "Great green. Great green".

The computer goes through its paces, playing music with the sound of a live orchestra, pulling up images as clear as photographs, retrieving quotes from a memory bank big enough to hold a bookshelf full of classics. Then a software glitch makes the image on the sleek black monitor freeze. NeXT employees tense up, expecting an infamous Jobs outburst. Jobs just stares at the screen, then shrugs. "We're hosed," he says calmly. "We'll fix that. No problem."

Later, a video shows the automated assembly plant that Jobs has built to manufacture the NeXT machines. Wandering back to sit with a handful of employees, Jobs watches as robot hands install the state-of-the-art chips that will power the computer. For a second he looks almost teary. "It's beautiful," he says softly.

Source: Newsweek, Oct 24, 1988

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

I met Jobs at a celebrity-filled birthday party for a youngster in New York City. As the evening progressed, I wandered around to discover that Jobs had gone off with the nine-year-old birthday boy to give him the gift he’d brought from California: a Macintosh computer. As I watched, he showed the boy how to sketch with the machine’s graphics program. Two other party guests wandered into the room and looked over Jobs’s shoulder. ‘Hmmm,’ said the first, Andy Warhol. ‘What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!’ The second guest, Keith Haring, the graffiti artist whose work now commands huge prices, went over. Warhol and Haring asked to take a turn at the Mac, and as I walked away, Warhol had just sat down to manipulate the mouse. ‘My God!’ he was saying, ‘I drew a circle!’

But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answer seemed unrehearsed to me: "Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'"

Source: Playboy, Feb 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Jobs could be ruthless when he talked to the labels. Kevin Gage, then Warner's technology vice president, remembers one key meeting at Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters where he and Vidich tried to persuade Jobs that digital rights management – virtual "locks" to prevent songs from being shared – was necessary to get other labels on board.

He was three slides into a PowerPoint presentation when Jobs, rocking in his chair, exploded into a tirade about how the music business just didn't get it. "He said, 'You've got your head stuck up your ass' to me a number of times," Gage recalls. "There's that side of Steve – but in a smooth kind of way. He never reacted to Roger [Ames, then Warner's CEO] the same way he reacted to Paul and myself, put it that way. When Roger came into the room, you saw Steve at his brightest and sharpest."

Source: Rolling Stone, Oct 7, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

No matter how influential he became, Jobs was still a Beatles fan.

Former Apple executive Tony Fadell, who worked closely with Jobs as senior vice president of the iPod division, remembers a lunch when Jobs received a phone call from Paul McCartney and excitedly declared, "Oh my God! I gotta take this!"

Jobs was open to new music, but his favorite artists were the ones he got to know when he came of age in the Sixties, including Bob Dylan and Donovan. After one meeting with Interscope chair Jimmy Iovine, he returned to work and asked colleagues, "Did you know there's this really great thing called hip-hop music?"

"This was, like, 2004!" Fadell recalls fondly. "We all turned to each other and smiled."

Source: Rolling Stone, Oct 7, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

"Apple has already come back," and now that his days are not so intently involved in crisis management, and he is able to spend more time with his family, he appears to be having a wonderful time.

He runs Apple in a mode that can only be described as post-CEO. Sometimes he will greet visitors in shorts, sandals and a two-day beard growth. His office is a surprisingly compact rectangle cluttered with books, videos and advertising awards. On the phone, sitting at a desk that sports both Mac and Windows laptops [running NeXTSTEP], he schmoozes and deals with everyone from Pixar executives to Jerry Seinfeld, concerning Apple's ad on the Final Episode.

Last week he spent an extraordinary amount of time monitoring every last detail of the iMac intro; a typical executive decision was the elimination of a clarinet on a video soundtrack because it sounded "too synthetic."

Source: Newsweek, May 18, 1998

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

I remember being at a talk he gave shortly after returning in 1997 as Interim CEO. A bunch of us employees (I was at ATG at the time) were in Town Hall in Building 4 at Infinite Loop to hear him, and he was fired up. Talked a lot about how Apple was going to completely turn things around and become great.

It was a tough time at Apple — we were trading below book value on the market — our enterprise value was actually less than our cash on hand. And the rumors were everywhere that we were going to be acquired by Sun. Someone in the audience asked him about Michael Dell’s suggestion in the press a few days previous that Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders, and as I recall, Steve’s response was: “Sorry Michael Dell.” Good god, what a message from a CEO!

He followed it up by admitting that the stock price was terrible (it was under $10, I think — pretty sure it was under $2 split-adjusted), and that what they were going to do was reissue everyone’s options on the low price, but with a new 3 year vest. He said, explicitly: “If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.” I think it’s not an overstatement to say that just about everyone in the room loved him at that point, would have followed him off a cliff if that’s where he led.

Source: John Lilly, Oct 9, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

One of the struggles we were going through when he came back was that Apple was about the leakiest organization in history — it had gotten so bad that people were cavalier about it. In the face of all those leaks, I remember the first all company e-mail that Steve sent around after becoming Interim CEO again — he talked in it about how Apple would release a few things in the coming week, and a desire to tighten up communications so that employees would know more about what was going on — and how that required more respect for confidentiality. That mail was sent on a Thursday; I remember all of us getting to work on Monday morning and reading mail from Fred Anderson, our then-CFO, who said basically: "Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company."

Well. If it wasn’t clear before that the Amelio/Spindler/Sculley days of Apple were over, it was crystal clear then, and good riddance.

Source: John Lilly, Oct 9, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

After having written www, [inventor of the World Wide Web] Berners-Lee noticed that there was a NeXT developers conference in Paris at which Steve Jobs would be present. Tim packed up his black cube, complete with the optical disk which contained arguably the most influential and important code ever written and took a train to Paris.

It was a large and popular conference and Tim was pretty much at the end of the line of black NeXT boxes. Each developer showed Steve Jobs their new word-processor, graphic programme and utility and he slowly walked along the line, like the judge at a flower show nodding his approval or frowning his distaste. Just before he reached Tim and the world wide web at the end of the row, an aide nudged Jobs and told him that they should go or he’d be in danger of missing his flight back to America. So Steve turned away and never saw the programme that Tim Berners-Lee had written which would change the world as completely as Gutenberg had in 1450. It was a meeting of the two most influential men of their time that never took place. Chatting to the newly knighted Sir Tim a few years ago he told me that he had still never actually met Steve Jobs.

Source: Stephen Fry, Oct 6, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Early on a July workday in 1997, Jim McCluney, then head of Apple's worldwide operations got the call. McCluney was summoned with other top brass of the beleaguered company to Apple Computer's boardroom on its Cupertino campus. Embattled Chief Executive Gil Amelio wasted no time. With an air of barely concealed relief, he said: "Well, I'm sad to report that it's time for me to move on. Take care," McCluney recalls. And he left.

A few minutes later, in walked Steve Jobs. The co-founder of the once proud company had been fired by Apple 12 years before. He had returned seven months earlier as a consultant, when Amelio acquired his NeXT Software. And now Jobs was back in charge. Wearing shorts, sneakers, and a few days' growth of beard, he sat down in a swivel chair and spun slowly, says McCluney, now president of storage provider Emulex.

"O.K., tell me what's wrong with this place," Jobs said. After some mumbled replies, he jumped in: "It's the products! So what's wrong with the products?" Again, executives began offering some answers. Jobs cut them off. "The products sorry!" he roared. "There's no sex in them anymore!"

Source: Business Week, Jan 26, 2006

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

I was among the few journalists who got to test [the iPhone] before its release. Soon after I received the unit, I was walking down Broadway and my test unit got a call from "Unknown." It was Jobs, ostensibly wanting to know what I thought, but actually making sure I understood how amazing it was. I acknowledged that it was extraordinary, but mentioned to him that maybe nothing could match the expectations he had generated. People were calling it the "Jesus phone." Didn’t that worry him? The answer was no. "We are going to blow away the expectations," he told me.

Source: Steven Levy, Wired, Oct 5, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Anyone who doubts the tenacity of Steven P. Jobs gets an earful from his head cheerleader and principal investor, billionaire H. Ross Perot.

Perot tells of a San Francisco party last year where he ran into the King of Spain. When the King asked whom else he should meet there, Perot suggested Jobs. Soon, the King engaged the entrepreneur in what Perot recalls as an "electric conversation," with Jobs gesturing madly in front of the transfixed monarch. Then the King took out his card, scribbled on the back, and handed it to Jobs. Perot hurried across the room. "What happened?" Replied a beaming Jobs: "I sold him a computer."

Source: Business Week, Oct 24, 1988

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Jobs's nagging perfectionism extended to every detail. He insisted on a finish inside the [NeXT] cube's magnesium shell -- even though it would never be seen.

He disliked a tiny line left in the chassis by the molds for the cube, a flaw most computer makers deem unavoidable. Jobs flew to Chicago to persuade the die caster to retool. "Not a lot of die casters expect a celebrity to fly in," says Kelley.

Source: Business Week, Oct 24, 1988

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Guy Kawasaki, another early employee who was assigned to recruit outside developers to write software for the new machine, said Jobs once came by his cubicle with an executive Kawasaki didn’t recognize. Jobs asked for Kawasaki’s opinion about some third-party company’s software. Kawasaki replied that he didn’t think it was very good. "And Steve turns to the guy and he says, ‘See, that’s what we think about your product,’" Kawasaki says, laughing. The stranger was the third-party company’s chief executive officer. "I’m sure the CEO did not expect to get ripped like that."

Source: Business Week, Oct 6, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

Jobs had to have a calla lily. It was 11 p.m. in New York City in December 1983, and he absolutely had to have a calla lily in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. No other flower would do. He also needed a piano. "Not that he played one," says Andrea Cunningham, who did marketing for Apple. He merely stipulated that his room have one. Cunningham was part of Jobs’s entourage in town for a Fortune magazine photo shoot to promote the Mac, which was going to be introduced just a month later on Jan. 24, 1984.

"He was being such a pill," says Cunningham. "He staunchly refused to do anything the photographer asked." To lighten the mood, she set up a tape recorder and played music Jobs liked—the Michael Jackson album Thriller. No dice; Jobs refused to pose. Then the song Billie Jean came on. "He snapped to and was a different guy," she says. "And as soon as the song ended, he reverted back. So I kept rewinding the tape to play over and over so he’d behave."

Source: Business Week, Oct 6, 2011

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Anecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussion

If Jobs knew NeXT was a loser, he rarely let on. He remained demanding, confident, and grandiose.

Asked to deliver the keynote speech at a computer trade show at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, Jobs told MacAskill to ship out Jobs’s own desk—complete with the vase and red rose he always kept there—for him to sit at onstage. He insisted that the desk be placed at a 28-degree angle, to match the angle of Rand’s box-shaped logo, which was tipped to one side.

A few minutes before the curtains opened, MacAskill begged Jobs not to introduce a new Lotus spreadsheet that hadn’t been cleared by Lotus. "Fine," Jobs said, "then you do the speech," and walked off "only to return as the curtain opened." MacAskill says he and everyone else put up with the volatility and withering personal insults because "we really thought we had the chance to change the world."

Source: Business Week, Oct 6, 2011