14 ms·

The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years (2018)

674 points by allenleein 6y ago

allenleein 6y ago
FYI: - Questions & comments about the Wayne Goodrich panel? (https://www.cake.co/conversations/2Jf7ksx/questions-comments-about-the-wayne-goodrich-panel https://www.cake.co/conversations/2Jf7ksx/questions-comments...) - That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo (https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-steve-jobs-keynote-at-unix-expo https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-st...)
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
As I look back, if we had not been berated so much, we wouldn’t have seen that these were amazing products and they could have been launched so much better. Textbook abusive relationship
- Daho0n 6y ago
  I find that the more people like Apple products the less they can see how abusive it was.
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    I like Apple products quite a bit. But I can still say that every story I've ever heard about Steve in this vein makes it sound like he was very abusive. But I hear you. It's like people with their favorite sports teams/automobile moguls/organized religions/podcast hosts/political parties/etc.
- lebaux 6y ago
  I know that I quit 3 times, one kind of officially via email to HR. God only knows how many times I was actually yelled at and fired but it never went anywhere. Essentially I never really wanted to leave so I didn’t. Smells a whole lot like Stockholm syndrome.
  - Veen 6y ago
    Why do people confidently assert psychological diagnoses based on i) minimal knowledge of the individual and their situation and ii) minimal knowledge of psychology? It seems stupid to me.
    - ladyanita22 6y ago
      Because sometimes it is this obvious.
    - goto11 6y ago
      Stockholm syndrome is not even a real diagnosis. But it is pretty clear form the story that Jobs was abusive towards his employees and the employee tries to justify and rationalize this. Call that what you will.
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      Because people are desperate to project their own personal opinion onto other people. Jesus, the man clearly doesn't regret working with Steve. So there's no reason to give these weird pseudo-psychological takes any time.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    I assume you also think every Chef working in a majorly successful restaurant under world leading chefs are suffering from the same, yeah?
    - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
      You paint with a very broad brush here, but I think that there is a pattern of toxic work culture in the kitchens of many top restaurants. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/dining/chef-restaurant-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/dining/chef-restaurant-cu...
      - breakfastduck 6y ago
        It may appear toxic externally, sure. It's clear many benefit from the military-style discipline and focus on perfection in these places. So while it's easy to look back at something 'toxic' it completely skirts around the fact that their own personal skill likely benefited hugely from the experience.
- goto11 6y ago
  The real question is if people with a capacity (perhaps even desire?) to suffer beration and verbal abuse are better at their job compared to the people who just quit? If they are indeed better, then Jobs may have had a sound strategy. But if this form of masochism is not positively correlated with competence, he may have ended up with a worse team overall. A similar discussion happened concerning toxic language towards Linux kernel contributors. Some have suggested that a "code of conduct" (i.e. speaking civilized) would lead to worse code quality, implying that the best developers are also the ones who tolerate or even desire verbal abuse. Personally I doubt this psychological condition is correlated with competence as a developer. After all, how did Jobs get so good at his stuff when nobody abused him? The poor guy in the interview suggest it was the threats and berations which made him do his best effort. So why does this logic not apply to Jobs himself?
  - birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
    Maybe Steve Jobs did the same berated to himself?
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Yeah, because you know more about it than the man himself, right? He clearly doesn't regret his decision to work with Steve.
Jerry2 6y ago
>He is writing a book about what it was like on the inside. Any idea if he ever completed the book? I can't find anything about it. Would love to read it.
- skrach 6y ago
  I was looking for the same thing. Would be really curious if it got released. BTW I really enjoyed "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process during the Golden Age of Steve Jobs"
  - Jerry2 6y ago
    Thank you for a book recommendation!
    - bookofjoe 6y ago
      Ditto
    - bookofjoe 6y ago
      "iCon: Steve Jobs — The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business" https://www.amazon.com/iCon-Steve-Jobs-Greatest-Business/dp/0471720836/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=icon+apple+jobs&qid=1612793677&s=books&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.com/iCon-Steve-Jobs-Greatest-Business/dp/... is fascinating. It has many stories you won't find in any other book about Jobs, including an unforgettable account by a guy who went to India with Jobs in search of enlightenment. They got caught in a monster storm in the Himalayan foothills and each dug a pit, burying themselves up to their shoulders to wait it out without getting struck by lightning. Frightening! I am not making this up. Jobs banned the book from Apple Stores as soon as it was released and all mention of it seems to have vanished, for the most part.
khazhoux 6y ago
This is one of the most insightful Q&A's about Steve that I've read. I especially appreciated the part about the risers for the gumdrop iMacs not working perfectly smoothly: he was pissed even though the audience couldn't possibly see the stuttering risers and even though the keynote was successful. One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick. But you realize in this small story, that the whole keynote could have been torpedoed, could have gone sideways and been ridiculed, if those mechanical risers had failed. The big moment for this product that could (and did) save the company, might have been a laughable sad trombone even though Steve had warned Wayne that it was a problem that needed to be fixed. The work of hundreds of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars, were pitted against shitty mechanical hand-cranks -- that's why small details matter, and why Steve was pissed.
- soperj 6y ago
  >One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick That's because he was, regardless of this story.
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    Your comment is unsubstantiated, but okay. It is extremely unpopular on HN to like Steve Jobs for some reason. The way reputation works is that if you're extremely rude to 100 people but are helpful for millions, people will still remember you as an asshole. People only see the mistakes, not the overwhelming successes, and that is an empirical fact, turned proverb at this point...
    - Razengan 6y ago
      Also see Tall Poppies There’s this thing, or entity, that seemingly everyone is talking about. If I can point out even one contrary thing about it, I win. (or feel like I have)
    - huhtenberg 6y ago
      There's a whole book that substantiates this. Commissioned by Jobs himself no less.
l1k 6y ago
Wayne Goodrich was fired by Apple shortly after Steve's death and subsequently sued the company: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn-apple-sued-ex-employee-20120821-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn...
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Couldn’t read it there but archive.org has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205073421/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn-apple-sued-ex-employee-20120821-story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210205073421/https://www.latim...
  - sgt 6y ago
    What was the outcome, was he compensated in the end?
    - rincebrain 6y ago
      A judge refused Apple's request for summary dismissal[1], but then news coverage about it just stops. My unjustified suspicion, since there's no evidence of it being resolved afterward, is that an out-of-court settlement was reached before it went to trial, and consequently, no press coverage resulted. I suppose, if this were true, it would qualify as a win-win - Apple doesn't have court precedent of them firing people unjustifiedly, he ends up with a bunch of the compensation he primarily claims Apple was denying him by firing him. The people who lose are anyone else who gets dubiously fired by Apple and don't have the resources to sue over it. [1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/05/21/man-behind-apples-spectacularproduct-launch-events.html?page=all https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/05/21/man-behi...
      - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
        I mean the article mentioned he had "restricted stock" (I guess it's like options?); I don't know how many he was entitled to, but the stock price of Apple has gone through a split and has become 40x worth as much today.
uniqueid 6y ago
If you watch different keynotes, you can see that he had different emotional ramps depending on whether it was a product he was totally into or not Probably the best known 2 minutes 30 seconds of 'not' https://youtu.be/jt7mbW8ov_U https://youtu.be/jt7mbW8ov_U
- Daho0n 6y ago
  And yet we wouldn't have had the iPhone without this, so good thing his dislike wasn't listened to.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    In the context of the full keynote it was pretty funny. The contrast between all the great announcements that preceded the Rockr was close to 'and lastly there's this phone. It's fine. Okay, good night, everybody!'
  - yreg 6y ago
    Project Purple started in 2004, a year before Rokr was announced. They were aleady building the iPhone and Jobs was very much on board with the idea.
    - mentos 6y ago
      Yea honestly the Rokr seems like an intentional misdirection to throw people off the trail
      - moftz 6y ago
        It was a real product so no clue why they would come out with something to trick people. The Rokr was just a test of the market, could your phone replace your MP3 player? The Rokr wasn't a huge success mostly because the hardware sucked but it did show that people were interested in the idea of having their music on their phone. Once it was clear that the hardware was hampering the coolness of having music on your phone, that was a big green light for Apple to push forward with the iphone. If the Rokr had been more successful, maybe we would have seen more phones come out with iTunes integration and the iPhone would have taken longer to bring to market.
macintux 6y ago
The story of how the iPad lost its second 30-pin port is astonishing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- juliendorra 6y ago
  And probably only a small part of the real reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034351
- gdubs 6y ago
  Something I’ve noticed time and again is that when you start working on marketing, you look at the product differently. In having to pitch it to an audience, you’re forced to confront things that seem obvious in retrospect but didn’t jump out at you throughout the design process. This particular anecdote is amazing - but also speaks to Jobs’ zen-like ability to edit things down to their essentials. For the more tech-minded, this aspect of Apple products is annoying. But it’s also a huge part of their success.
  - macintux 6y ago
    > In having to pitch it to an audience, you’re forced to confront things that seem obvious in retrospect but didn’t jump out at you throughout the design process. That reminds me of the old story about the early days of UNIX, and the great decision to introduce a "Bugs" section to man pages. Reportedly the developers would, when starting to capture the problems with their tools, get embarrassed and instead of documenting the bugs they'd just fix them. Related: documenting something is a fantastic way to uncover your own knowledge gaps. As soon as I start to feel myself handwaving something away (passive voice is a dead giveaway) I know I've hit on a topic I don't really understand.
jedberg 6y ago
That story about how the iPad lost its second 30 pin port on the side is so maddening. I understand Steve was all about the look of the device, but it would have been so much more useful if it could be docked on its side.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Of all the things I ever wished my ipads had, a second dock connector has never been one of them.
- juliendorra 6y ago
  It’s also most probably a small part of the story about the second port. We know from this interview with Schiller [0] that there was a clear price target for the first iPad, set early on at under $500, and that cutting everything superfluous was key in reaching the low price target (nearly all journalists were expecting a much higher price for an Apple tablet at the time) “Well, if we’re going to get to a price point like that, we need to remove things aggressively.” [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/15/technology/decade-in-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/15/technology/de...
  - ksec 6y ago
    The port cost less than a Dollar.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I wonder if they'd think the same about a side port with the Lightning or USB-C connector nowadays. That said, we'll see the end of physical connectors within five years I'm sure, at which point it won't be an issue anymore.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    It's really not an issue anymore. With the Qi charger, it can dock in both directions.
BillyTheKing 6y ago
I sometimes feel we all take ourselves a bit too seriously in this industry. At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. I think this Q&A really brings this sentiment back to the foreground. The iPad lost a side-connector, so what? who cares? It's an interesting tool that many people enjoy using, but is it really going to make a difference to anyone's life whether or not that port was there? It doesn't and it won't, which is why the decision to get rid of it was taken with just about as much thought as should've been given.
- paxys 6y ago
  These fun bits of software also sometimes topple governments, lift billions into or out of poverty, permanently alter the meaning of labor, enable mass surveillance and end the concept of privacy, hasten (or help) global warming... If anything we need to take everything we are doing a lot more seriously.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  >At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. We're also building little machines which, if designed thoughtfully, can be reliable and helpful, enable sharing information reliably, connect with close ones, generally create good in the world.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  It was just a mildly interesting story, about how a seemingly unrelated restriction changed the product. I don't think anyone is taking this to be an incredible development that'll change the world.
- riskable 6y ago
  >At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. We're also building little machines which, if designed carelessly can burn someone's house down, serve up your most private details to malicious actors, spread disinformation/propaganda, and completely destroy a person's life many times over an infinite number of ways.
ThouYS 6y ago
Amazing interview, but horribly "optimized" webpage. Impossible to meaningfully archive, because elements that are not visible on screen get instantly hidden.
- adsche 6y ago
  Yes, super annoying. It also breaks the 'find in page' function. I wanted to go back to something I clearly remembered and didn't find it. I thought I was going crazy until figuring this out.
menzoic 6y ago
> "I was, but when NeXT stopped making hardware they laid me off. A week later, Steve called me and started to say “okay Wayne, we need to...” I interjected “what do you mean we need to? You laid me off.” He said “oh” and then click. >Eight months later I heard from my brother, who was still working customer support, “Steve wants you to call. He won’t call you but you should call him.” The result of that conversation led to working directly with Steve on all his most important presentations at Pixar and Apple for nearly the next two decades." Steve Jobs' true skill was identifying great talent and leveraging them.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  He had defined leadership traits. It's easy to align with a leader if you are looking for alignment. I would have screamed "fuck that pompous fucker, why not call me?". And never consider working for him. So that edits me out. Saves me time. Saves Steve time. People that jump onboard self-select and know what to expect from the start. Welcome to the Steve Stockholm club. The damaging impact of Steve, an ongoing curse on industry, is the myriad Steve wannabes that only take the asshole part of Steve's leadership without any of his other qualities. "So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they're missing is the genius part". Bill Gates, of all people.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Yeah that quote pretty much nails it.
- iwasakabukiman 6y ago
  Another way to look at this is that Steve realized there was nothing this guy could do to help him at the moment, so he hung up on him.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    I don’t buy that. Steve: “We need to do [XYZ]” Wayne: “OK, sure, but I’ll need to be rehired.” Steve: “OK.”
whalesalad 6y ago
It’s always interesting to watch other companies give presentations in their attempt at Apple style. Google comes to mind as being the worst. It’s like everyone has analyzed or identified certain little nuggets of a good presentation and then sprinkled them in... versus truly and innately understanding how to deliver a cohesive performance to an audience. The most famous example of this is the way everyone started to use “we did x y and z and you’re going to love it!” which was thrown around like peanuts on a domestic flight. Richard Feynman’s quote on cargo culting comes to mind.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kemiller2002 6y ago
  I'm not an amazing presenter, but I think I'm ok. People ask me how do I approach giving a talk, etc. I tell them, "It's a performance. You are telling a story. There is emotion involved, both with you and them." People always look at me in bewilderment and never seem to get the fact that a great presentation is really not about the information. No one ever said, "You know what would take this presentation to the next level? Another product shot of Gmail."
  - randall 6y ago
    Storytelling is very under appreciated in business generally. Storytelling is what allows teams to make decisions without running every single one by their manager.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      Storytelling makes things relatable. Without it, it's as boring as reading a new tech gadget's spec sheet. (Though some would very much like doing that...)
    - wenc 6y ago
      I heard this on Lex Fridman's podcast a while ago. This is Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on “storytelling”: Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people? Kevin Scott: … (snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important. Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too. Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing. Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.
coldtea 6y ago
Did the book ever came out?
- fumar 6y ago
  I couldn’t find it
dandare 6y ago
I like this TED talk about Jobs' presentations: Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_...
j45 6y ago
Great read. Jobs didn’t seem to suffer anything he didn’t like very well, but everyone had to suffer him. If it’s possible to take the good from someone’s habits and ignore the bad, this book could be an interesting read
iainctduncan 6y ago
Interesting. If you have those emojis as much as I do, you add "display: none" to the CSS rules for post.footer and make them go away. So annoying.
- Arubis 6y ago
  Excellent suggestion; thank you. I am _entirely_ uninterested in my reading being crowdsourced and "social". I'll talk about the thing somewhere else, after I've read it and had time to think. This attempt to inject an attention-stealer in the middle of one of the last things we do without interruption is an enormous turn-off.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Emoji use in any serious writing is an appalling practice that will erode away at writing quality until everything reads like some bullshit twitter take.
Beefin 6y ago
The keynote that revolutionized the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4
TheJoYo 6y ago
Reggie Watts is another epic keynote speaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc
nvahalik 6y ago
I can't help—during the reading of the interview—but think of how people said the same things about Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson. You know, the the Skunkworks guy. He and Steve seemed to have a lot in common: really high expectations of their people, firing people without really meaning it, and ultimately producing things which are technological marvels.
j7ake 6y ago
Nice article but the emoticons between each question and answer were distracting.
taurath 6y ago
One factor that helped a lot in their preparation - the “Just in Time” product reveal. As someone who’s done big stage shows with software that is still over a year from completion, having that secrecy until it’s basically ready to release makes for demos that have a lot less chance of going wrong. Of course, Murphy’s law they still have gone wrong but having something so close to release helps things go so much smoother.
etqwzutewzu 6y ago
One last thing...

674 points by allenleein 6y ago

FYI: - Questions & comments about the Wayne Goodrich panel? (https://www.cake.co/conversations/2Jf7ksx/questions-comments-about-the-wayne-goodrich-panel https://www.cake.co/conversations/2Jf7ksx/questions-comments...) - That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo (https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-steve-jobs-keynote-at-unix-expo https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-st...)

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

As I look back, if we had not been berated so much, we wouldn’t have seen that these were amazing products and they could have been launched so much better. Textbook abusive relationship

Daho0n 6y ago
I find that the more people like Apple products the less they can see how abusive it was.
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  I like Apple products quite a bit. But I can still say that every story I've ever heard about Steve in this vein makes it sound like he was very abusive. But I hear you. It's like people with their favorite sports teams/automobile moguls/organized religions/podcast hosts/political parties/etc.
lebaux 6y ago
I know that I quit 3 times, one kind of officially via email to HR. God only knows how many times I was actually yelled at and fired but it never went anywhere. Essentially I never really wanted to leave so I didn’t. Smells a whole lot like Stockholm syndrome.
- Veen 6y ago
  Why do people confidently assert psychological diagnoses based on i) minimal knowledge of the individual and their situation and ii) minimal knowledge of psychology? It seems stupid to me.
  - ladyanita22 6y ago
    Because sometimes it is this obvious.
  - goto11 6y ago
    Stockholm syndrome is not even a real diagnosis. But it is pretty clear form the story that Jobs was abusive towards his employees and the employee tries to justify and rationalize this. Call that what you will.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Because people are desperate to project their own personal opinion onto other people. Jesus, the man clearly doesn't regret working with Steve. So there's no reason to give these weird pseudo-psychological takes any time.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  I assume you also think every Chef working in a majorly successful restaurant under world leading chefs are suffering from the same, yeah?
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    You paint with a very broad brush here, but I think that there is a pattern of toxic work culture in the kitchens of many top restaurants. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/dining/chef-restaurant-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/dining/chef-restaurant-cu...
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      It may appear toxic externally, sure. It's clear many benefit from the military-style discipline and focus on perfection in these places. So while it's easy to look back at something 'toxic' it completely skirts around the fact that their own personal skill likely benefited hugely from the experience.
goto11 6y ago
The real question is if people with a capacity (perhaps even desire?) to suffer beration and verbal abuse are better at their job compared to the people who just quit? If they are indeed better, then Jobs may have had a sound strategy. But if this form of masochism is not positively correlated with competence, he may have ended up with a worse team overall. A similar discussion happened concerning toxic language towards Linux kernel contributors. Some have suggested that a "code of conduct" (i.e. speaking civilized) would lead to worse code quality, implying that the best developers are also the ones who tolerate or even desire verbal abuse. Personally I doubt this psychological condition is correlated with competence as a developer. After all, how did Jobs get so good at his stuff when nobody abused him? The poor guy in the interview suggest it was the threats and berations which made him do his best effort. So why does this logic not apply to Jobs himself?
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  Maybe Steve Jobs did the same berated to himself?
breakfastduck 6y ago
Yeah, because you know more about it than the man himself, right? He clearly doesn't regret his decision to work with Steve.

Jerry2 6y ago

>He is writing a book about what it was like on the inside. Any idea if he ever completed the book? I can't find anything about it. Would love to read it.

skrach 6y ago
I was looking for the same thing. Would be really curious if it got released. BTW I really enjoyed "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process during the Golden Age of Steve Jobs"
- Jerry2 6y ago
  Thank you for a book recommendation!
  - bookofjoe 6y ago
    Ditto
  - bookofjoe 6y ago
    "iCon: Steve Jobs — The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business" https://www.amazon.com/iCon-Steve-Jobs-Greatest-Business/dp/0471720836/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=icon+apple+jobs&qid=1612793677&s=books&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.com/iCon-Steve-Jobs-Greatest-Business/dp/... is fascinating. It has many stories you won't find in any other book about Jobs, including an unforgettable account by a guy who went to India with Jobs in search of enlightenment. They got caught in a monster storm in the Himalayan foothills and each dug a pit, burying themselves up to their shoulders to wait it out without getting struck by lightning. Frightening! I am not making this up. Jobs banned the book from Apple Stores as soon as it was released and all mention of it seems to have vanished, for the most part.

khazhoux 6y ago

This is one of the most insightful Q&A's about Steve that I've read. I especially appreciated the part about the risers for the gumdrop iMacs not working perfectly smoothly: he was pissed even though the audience couldn't possibly see the stuttering risers and even though the keynote was successful. One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick. But you realize in this small story, that the whole keynote could have been torpedoed, could have gone sideways and been ridiculed, if those mechanical risers had failed. The big moment for this product that could (and did) save the company, might have been a laughable sad trombone even though Steve had warned Wayne that it was a problem that needed to be fixed. The work of hundreds of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars, were pitted against shitty mechanical hand-cranks -- that's why small details matter, and why Steve was pissed.

soperj 6y ago
>One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick That's because he was, regardless of this story.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  Your comment is unsubstantiated, but okay. It is extremely unpopular on HN to like Steve Jobs for some reason. The way reputation works is that if you're extremely rude to 100 people but are helpful for millions, people will still remember you as an asshole. People only see the mistakes, not the overwhelming successes, and that is an empirical fact, turned proverb at this point...
  - Razengan 6y ago
    Also see Tall Poppies There’s this thing, or entity, that seemingly everyone is talking about. If I can point out even one contrary thing about it, I win. (or feel like I have)
  - huhtenberg 6y ago
    There's a whole book that substantiates this. Commissioned by Jobs himself no less.

l1k 6y ago

Wayne Goodrich was fired by Apple shortly after Steve's death and subsequently sued the company: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn-apple-sued-ex-employee-20120821-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn...

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Couldn’t read it there but archive.org has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20210205073421/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2012-aug-21-la-fi-tn-apple-sued-ex-employee-20120821-story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210205073421/https://www.latim...
- sgt 6y ago
  What was the outcome, was he compensated in the end?
  - rincebrain 6y ago
    A judge refused Apple's request for summary dismissal[1], but then news coverage about it just stops. My unjustified suspicion, since there's no evidence of it being resolved afterward, is that an out-of-court settlement was reached before it went to trial, and consequently, no press coverage resulted. I suppose, if this were true, it would qualify as a win-win - Apple doesn't have court precedent of them firing people unjustifiedly, he ends up with a bunch of the compensation he primarily claims Apple was denying him by firing him. The people who lose are anyone else who gets dubiously fired by Apple and don't have the resources to sue over it. [1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/05/21/man-behind-apples-spectacularproduct-launch-events.html?page=all https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/05/21/man-behi...
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I mean the article mentioned he had "restricted stock" (I guess it's like options?); I don't know how many he was entitled to, but the stock price of Apple has gone through a split and has become 40x worth as much today.

uniqueid 6y ago

If you watch different keynotes, you can see that he had different emotional ramps depending on whether it was a product he was totally into or not Probably the best known 2 minutes 30 seconds of 'not' https://youtu.be/jt7mbW8ov_U https://youtu.be/jt7mbW8ov_U

Daho0n 6y ago
And yet we wouldn't have had the iPhone without this, so good thing his dislike wasn't listened to.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  In the context of the full keynote it was pretty funny. The contrast between all the great announcements that preceded the Rockr was close to 'and lastly there's this phone. It's fine. Okay, good night, everybody!'
- yreg 6y ago
  Project Purple started in 2004, a year before Rokr was announced. They were aleady building the iPhone and Jobs was very much on board with the idea.
  - mentos 6y ago
    Yea honestly the Rokr seems like an intentional misdirection to throw people off the trail
    - moftz 6y ago
      It was a real product so no clue why they would come out with something to trick people. The Rokr was just a test of the market, could your phone replace your MP3 player? The Rokr wasn't a huge success mostly because the hardware sucked but it did show that people were interested in the idea of having their music on their phone. Once it was clear that the hardware was hampering the coolness of having music on your phone, that was a big green light for Apple to push forward with the iphone. If the Rokr had been more successful, maybe we would have seen more phones come out with iTunes integration and the iPhone would have taken longer to bring to market.

macintux 6y ago

The story of how the iPad lost its second 30-pin port is astonishing.

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juliendorra 6y ago
And probably only a small part of the real reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034351
gdubs 6y ago
Something I’ve noticed time and again is that when you start working on marketing, you look at the product differently. In having to pitch it to an audience, you’re forced to confront things that seem obvious in retrospect but didn’t jump out at you throughout the design process. This particular anecdote is amazing - but also speaks to Jobs’ zen-like ability to edit things down to their essentials. For the more tech-minded, this aspect of Apple products is annoying. But it’s also a huge part of their success.
- macintux 6y ago
  > In having to pitch it to an audience, you’re forced to confront things that seem obvious in retrospect but didn’t jump out at you throughout the design process. That reminds me of the old story about the early days of UNIX, and the great decision to introduce a "Bugs" section to man pages. Reportedly the developers would, when starting to capture the problems with their tools, get embarrassed and instead of documenting the bugs they'd just fix them. Related: documenting something is a fantastic way to uncover your own knowledge gaps. As soon as I start to feel myself handwaving something away (passive voice is a dead giveaway) I know I've hit on a topic I don't really understand.

jedberg 6y ago

That story about how the iPad lost its second 30 pin port on the side is so maddening. I understand Steve was all about the look of the device, but it would have been so much more useful if it could be docked on its side.

Grustaf 6y ago
Of all the things I ever wished my ipads had, a second dock connector has never been one of them.
juliendorra 6y ago
It’s also most probably a small part of the story about the second port. We know from this interview with Schiller [0] that there was a clear price target for the first iPad, set early on at under $500, and that cutting everything superfluous was key in reaching the low price target (nearly all journalists were expecting a much higher price for an Apple tablet at the time) “Well, if we’re going to get to a price point like that, we need to remove things aggressively.” [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/15/technology/decade-in-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/15/technology/de...
- ksec 6y ago
  The port cost less than a Dollar.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I wonder if they'd think the same about a side port with the Lightning or USB-C connector nowadays. That said, we'll see the end of physical connectors within five years I'm sure, at which point it won't be an issue anymore.
- jedberg 6y ago
  It's really not an issue anymore. With the Qi charger, it can dock in both directions.

BillyTheKing 6y ago

I sometimes feel we all take ourselves a bit too seriously in this industry. At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. I think this Q&A really brings this sentiment back to the foreground. The iPad lost a side-connector, so what? who cares? It's an interesting tool that many people enjoy using, but is it really going to make a difference to anyone's life whether or not that port was there? It doesn't and it won't, which is why the decision to get rid of it was taken with just about as much thought as should've been given.

paxys 6y ago
These fun bits of software also sometimes topple governments, lift billions into or out of poverty, permanently alter the meaning of labor, enable mass surveillance and end the concept of privacy, hasten (or help) global warming... If anything we need to take everything we are doing a lot more seriously.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
>At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. We're also building little machines which, if designed thoughtfully, can be reliable and helpful, enable sharing information reliably, connect with close ones, generally create good in the world.
madeofpalk 6y ago
It was just a mildly interesting story, about how a seemingly unrelated restriction changed the product. I don't think anyone is taking this to be an incredible development that'll change the world.
riskable 6y ago
>At the end of the day we're building little machines that can execute bits and bytes of software written by people in the same industry, it's all a lot of fun and we mostly make a decent living from it. We're also building little machines which, if designed carelessly can burn someone's house down, serve up your most private details to malicious actors, spread disinformation/propaganda, and completely destroy a person's life many times over an infinite number of ways.

ThouYS 6y ago

Amazing interview, but horribly "optimized" webpage. Impossible to meaningfully archive, because elements that are not visible on screen get instantly hidden.

adsche 6y ago
Yes, super annoying. It also breaks the 'find in page' function. I wanted to go back to something I clearly remembered and didn't find it. I thought I was going crazy until figuring this out.

menzoic 6y ago

> "I was, but when NeXT stopped making hardware they laid me off. A week later, Steve called me and started to say “okay Wayne, we need to...” I interjected “what do you mean we need to? You laid me off.” He said “oh” and then click. >Eight months later I heard from my brother, who was still working customer support, “Steve wants you to call. He won’t call you but you should call him.” The result of that conversation led to working directly with Steve on all his most important presentations at Pixar and Apple for nearly the next two decades." Steve Jobs' true skill was identifying great talent and leveraging them.

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
He had defined leadership traits. It's easy to align with a leader if you are looking for alignment. I would have screamed "fuck that pompous fucker, why not call me?". And never consider working for him. So that edits me out. Saves me time. Saves Steve time. People that jump onboard self-select and know what to expect from the start. Welcome to the Steve Stockholm club. The damaging impact of Steve, an ongoing curse on industry, is the myriad Steve wannabes that only take the asshole part of Steve's leadership without any of his other qualities. "So many of the people who want to be like Steve have the asshole side down. What they're missing is the genius part". Bill Gates, of all people.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Yeah that quote pretty much nails it.
iwasakabukiman 6y ago
Another way to look at this is that Steve realized there was nothing this guy could do to help him at the moment, so he hung up on him.
- dannyw 6y ago
  I don’t buy that. Steve: “We need to do [XYZ]” Wayne: “OK, sure, but I’ll need to be rehired.” Steve: “OK.”

whalesalad 6y ago

It’s always interesting to watch other companies give presentations in their attempt at Apple style. Google comes to mind as being the worst. It’s like everyone has analyzed or identified certain little nuggets of a good presentation and then sprinkled them in... versus truly and innately understanding how to deliver a cohesive performance to an audience. The most famous example of this is the way everyone started to use “we did x y and z and you’re going to love it!” which was thrown around like peanuts on a domestic flight. Richard Feynman’s quote on cargo culting comes to mind.

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kemiller2002 6y ago
I'm not an amazing presenter, but I think I'm ok. People ask me how do I approach giving a talk, etc. I tell them, "It's a performance. You are telling a story. There is emotion involved, both with you and them." People always look at me in bewilderment and never seem to get the fact that a great presentation is really not about the information. No one ever said, "You know what would take this presentation to the next level? Another product shot of Gmail."
- randall 6y ago
  Storytelling is very under appreciated in business generally. Storytelling is what allows teams to make decisions without running every single one by their manager.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    Storytelling makes things relatable. Without it, it's as boring as reading a new tech gadget's spec sheet. (Though some would very much like doing that...)
  - wenc 6y ago
    I heard this on Lex Fridman's podcast a while ago. This is Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on “storytelling”: Lex Fridman: Microsoft has 50-60 thousand engineers. What does it take to lead such a large group of brilliant people? Kevin Scott: … (snipped)... One central idea in Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens is that “storytelling” is the quintessential thing for coordinating the activities of large groups of people once you get past Dunbar’s number. I’ve really seen that, just managing engineering teams. You can brute-force things with small teams, but past that things start to fail catastrophically if you don’t have some set of shared goals. Even though this is sort of touchy feely, and technical people balk at the idea that you need to have a clear mission, it’s very important. Lex Fridman: Stories are sort of the fabric that connects all of us, and that works for companies too. Kevin Scott: It works for everything. If you sort of think about it, our currency is a story. Our constitution is a story. Our laws are a story. We believe very strongly in them, and thank God we do, but they’re just abstract things, they’re just words. If we don’t believe in them, they’re nothing. Lex Fridman: In some sense, those stories are platforms.

coldtea 6y ago

Did the book ever came out?

fumar 6y ago
I couldn’t find it

dandare 6y ago

I like this TED talk about Jobs' presentations: Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_...

j45 6y ago

Great read. Jobs didn’t seem to suffer anything he didn’t like very well, but everyone had to suffer him. If it’s possible to take the good from someone’s habits and ignore the bad, this book could be an interesting read

iainctduncan 6y ago

Interesting. If you have those emojis as much as I do, you add "display: none" to the CSS rules for post.footer and make them go away. So annoying.

Arubis 6y ago
Excellent suggestion; thank you. I am _entirely_ uninterested in my reading being crowdsourced and "social". I'll talk about the thing somewhere else, after I've read it and had time to think. This attempt to inject an attention-stealer in the middle of one of the last things we do without interruption is an enormous turn-off.
breakfastduck 6y ago
Emoji use in any serious writing is an appalling practice that will erode away at writing quality until everything reads like some bullshit twitter take.

Beefin 6y ago

The keynote that revolutionized the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4

TheJoYo 6y ago

Reggie Watts is another epic keynote speaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc

nvahalik 6y ago

I can't help—during the reading of the interview—but think of how people said the same things about Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson. You know, the the Skunkworks guy. He and Steve seemed to have a lot in common: really high expectations of their people, firing people without really meaning it, and ultimately producing things which are technological marvels.

j7ake 6y ago

Nice article but the emoticons between each question and answer were distracting.

taurath 6y ago

One factor that helped a lot in their preparation - the “Just in Time” product reveal. As someone who’s done big stage shows with software that is still over a year from completion, having that secrecy until it’s basically ready to release makes for demos that have a lot less chance of going wrong. Of course, Murphy’s law they still have gone wrong but having something so close to release helps things go so much smoother.

etqwzutewzu 6y ago

One last thing...