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An excerpt from “The One Device” – origin story of the iPhone
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ghughes 9y agoOn one hand, I don't like the glorification of overwork and burning people out for the sake of maybe making a great product: "You're going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple years as we make this product." On the other hand, they did make the iPhone, so I guess this is a lesson to project managers and executives that death marches do occasionally pay off.
- maxxxxx 9y agoIt seems a lot of influential software projects were death marches. I just finished a book about Windows NT which almost drove its developers to the breaking point. Mac development was the same. However, I believe most death march projects don't end as something influential.
- avasylev 9y agoIn the end iPhone added billions to the company and shareholders, but interesting if all these engineers who spent nights and weekends to make that happen got an extra pay for that. Not much about that in the article, just the praise for extra work. If I remember correctly from iCon book, the was period when engineers on Steve's jobs team where paid less than in other teams in Apple. This would really suck working weekend and creating multibillion dollar product, but getting regular salary as the rest of the folks in the company.
- rbritton 9y agoAny idea if this division of Apple employees are eligible for stock options? If so, those may have ended up being one form of a payoff.
- sushisource 9y agoI think the real question to ask is "Could they have been just as successful without doing a death march?" Obviously it's hard to know the answer to that, but I suspect it's yes.
- valuearb 9y agoNot a chance in the world.
- mtdewcmu 9y agoApple did a great job engineering the iPhone. They really killed it, no doubt. That being said, I think that Apple was the only company that could have invented the iPhone in the mid-2000s, because of their high degree of vertical integration. They were the only company that had a completely proprietary computer system for which they developed the hardware and software. Also, I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable. Cell phones were becoming little computers and giving them little keyboards was a problem, because there wasn't enough space. If you figure that little keyboards were a dead end, then about the only remaining option was to use a touch screen. Other companies could have started working on the touch screen, but they didn't have an operating system. I believe Apple was in a unique position to create the iPhone.
- rjsw 9y agoHandspring could have left the keyboard off the Treo, their earlier PDAs were much closer in style to the iPhone.
- kalleboo 9y agoOther phone vendors also felt tantalizingly close, but they were all busy optimizing their local maxima without making that final "finger-controlled" breakthrough. I remember using a Sony Ericsson Symbian UIQ phone in 2006 (the M600i IIRC, Jobs was rumored use an earlier phone in the same OS series, the P800), where they had put the action buttons at the bottom of the screen at a finger-friendly size. I remember often quickly using my fingers to do common tasks, but it was a resistive screen and they still used scroll bars and tiny checkboxes. In hindsight it shouldn't have been that difficult to make the leap to finger-first, but it was Apple who did it.
- icebraining 9y agoit was Apple who did it I think you mean LG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada Apple made the first successful one. Which seems to be their knack, after all.
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- Joeri 9y agoYou’re going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple years as we make this product. The excerpt doesn't give a strong rationale for why people had to give up nights and weekends. It wasn't to protect apple from bankrupcy, because thanks to the ipod and imac apple was already a profitable business. It wasn't because phones were a threat to the ipod, because carriers had the phone market locked up so tight that you couldn't do a decent mp3 player on a phone. The ROKR was ample evidence for that. It wasn't because competitors were on the horizon, because all phones at the time were terrible, and would have remained so without the iphone. As far as I can tell from the article, the pressure cooker was created deliberately, by having competing teams and top-down imposed deadlines, but it still doesn't explain why it was necessary to do things like that. Was it all due to Steve's personality? If that's the case, how is modern-day apple? Is the autonomous car project still this crazy pressure cooker, or can people go home over the weekend to spend time with their families?
- t4h9drg 9y agoApple needed to fulfill its deal with Cingular in a timely matter: http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_... "And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines."
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoThat, and the hardware relevancy, seem like plausible reasons: but why limit yourself to only the rock-star engineers willing to work in secret and for extreme hours? It doesn't seem like they had competency, competitive, or budget constraints that would have prevented them from using more engineers, more openness, or, again, more engineers on the project.
- janwillemb 9y ago"The iPhone ruined more than a few marriages". That would really never be worth it to me. But maybe it depends on your marriage.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoMore likely that quote is a Fallacy of Single Cause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoNo, "the iPhone" in this sentence is representing the iPhone development program and its high-stress, night- and weekend-consuming, burnout-inducing, multi-year schedule. That - and the resulting changes in behavior - can absolutely be sufficient cause of a wrecked marriage. Some fallacies are universal: "If A then B, therefore because not A, not B" is an example. But that one seems extremely contextual. It denies that "If A then B" is possible.
- dguaraglia 9y agoI'm willing to be the iPhone (the actual device) might actually have had part in many more broken marriages than the development process itself. Mind you, not saying the iPhone caused the broken marriages, but it has become the preferred medium of communication for a substantial part of the population. I wonder how many of the unmasked Ashley Madison users were iPhone users :P
- r00fus 9y agoI disagree with this. Marriages fail for a lot of reasons - the iPhone project may be similar to a military deployment - except nonmilitary spouses/families are unlikely to be prepared for that kind of stress.
- s_kilk 9y agoBut they maximised shareholder value! /s
- codeulike 9y agoIt's strange to remember that no-one had ever seen 'swipe to scroll' before the iPhone unveil in 2007. It's so fundamental to everything now. Before, touchscreens had little scrollbars with up down arrows. Nuts.
- MichaelGG 9y agoPretty sure Windows had this in their tablet PC stuff, thought it was more "flick" to scroll. I remember sitting around the house, browsing using the touch system and thinking it was pretty nifty, and this was before the iPhone was released.
- y04nn 9y agoPrior to the iPhone most touch screens were resistive and you had to use a stylus and press hard on the display, capacitive touch screen made all the difference.
- digi_owl 9y agoNah, by the time iPhone came out, many devices used soft resistive screens that one could easily use with fingers. I often thumb typed on a Nokia N800 for example. Thing about resistive screens though is that it has much better precision. Thus one could operate checkboxes and scrollbars that were downright tiny. And speaking of scrollbars, i kinda miss them. I wonder how many times i have tried to scroll or pan and something makes the capacitive sensor think i instead pressed some element. Having distinct scrollbars avoid the ambiguity of input.
- kjksf 9y agoIt kind of dampens the image of Jobs as visionary leader. For a long time he was against making a phone, other executives had to convince him that Apple should make the phone, even doing risky things like running "secret" projects exploring possible technologies for the phone. Job's talent seems to be more of a taskmaster: once he decided that phone needs to be done, he was able to organize people to do it, even if it meant great personal sacrifices.
- theprop 9y agoYeah but it's good that Jobs who has a kind of god-like status these days could be a complete f*ing idiot (which would be his own words) by being against things like the iPod for Windows.
- petra 9y agoTrue. It does dampen it. But the whole "our CEO is a genius, the gift of the gods", is a standard trick in branding luxury products. Actually, one of the more interesting stories behind the iPhone would be of the marketing behind it. But i'll guess we'll never hear it, because there's always new stuff to sell.
- MBCook 9y ago> Job's talent seems to be more of a taskmaster: once he decided that phone needs to be done, he was able to organize people to do it, even if it meant great personal sacrifices. He was also a fantastic editor. He was very good at saying "no" to things whether it was because they were just bad ideas, weren't fully done yet, were missing something important, where especially when some stuff that other people thought was important wasn't and needed to be removed. Now we know he didn't always get it right, he could be swayed by personal emotions such as when he wanted to keep the iPod off Windows. But clearly he got it right a number of times where it really mattered.
- valuearb 9y agoJobs greatest skill was the ability to change his mind when the data proved him wrong. Lots of leaders will deny new info that contradicts their goals, or take far to long to actually take action when the truth was staring them in the face. Jobs could switch on a dime. He was against a phone for good reasons, then when his employees solved those problems he became its greatest advocate, to the point of threatening to fire Schiller if he didn't get on the iPhone train.
- theprop 9y agoSo great to read personal stories about many of the insanely hard-working & talented engineers who made the iphone and ipod. Their stories sadly are often lost or left out.
- cpeterso 9y agoCheck out "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" by G. Zachary. The book was recommended in a thread above. The book is about Dave Cutler and other DEC engineers joining Microsoft to build Windows NT (originally "OS/2 NT").
- ghaff 9y agoHave to plug Soul of a New Machine as well. It's more about hardware than software--Data General's Eagle (MV/8000) minicomputer in the early 80s. I'm somewhat biased as I was the product manager for many of DG's systems over a fairly long period (starting about 5 years later) but it's still one of the best books about product development ever written.
- rospaya 9y agoGreat excerpt. Except, it ignores the fact that there were smartphones, touchscreens, app stores, MP3's on phones way before the iPhone. It's a very American point of view, since Nokia never made a lot of progress with their smartphones in the US, like Blackberry did, and their phones were strickly email and business. I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories. The iPhone did a huge cultural change, and pushed UI and apps into the future. But pretending that it was the first one to make icons like phones today use or that it created the first computer-phone like the excerpt says - is nonsense.
- MBCook 9y agoIt was the first MODERN smartphone phone, in that it defined everything that came after. The ford Model-T wasn't the first car, but in many ways it defined what we're all used to (controls changed though) and was a breakthrough product that sold WAY better than what was available before. The iPhone with such a large shift from the things that existed before that even though they had many of the features in different forms, it's a bit hard to look at them and say "that's the same thing as a smartphone" instead of "that's a really fancy feature phone" or "that's a PDA with a radio stuck on it".
- pinaceae 9y agotouchscreen as in stylus or touchscreen as in finger?
- valuearb 9y agoNo you didn't. If it required a stylus they blew it.
- nailer 9y agoIt's like full Pol Pot year zero: > The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer. Do they mean... a PDA? Apple's execution and OS is amazing but the idea they invented mobile computing is insane. Palm created that market, then Windows Mobile did, then Apple did, then Android did.