7 ms·

Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs

136 points by bond 15y ago

TomOfTTB 15y ago
I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it) In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged) In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be learned there.
- pohl 15y ago
  What wouldn't I give to have my own failure of the magnitude of NeXT. As a business they merely survived, but to create as much system software value as they did (and during the dark ages of operating system monopoly, no less) and be able to use that value to acquire the dying husk of Apple for a negative 430 million or thereabouts...not bad, really.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    How was Next a failure? 11 years from start to being acquired for 400M 1996 dollars is not "failing".
    - wpietri 15y ago
      I'm not at a real computer to check, but I think $400m barely paid back the investors. And speaking as a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer), it was definitely a flop. The computers sold only in a few niches, and they had to kill off the hardware entirely. The OS and the dev tools lasted longer, but they wouldn't have survived more than another few years.
      - neild 15y ago
        A flop? The name may have changed, but NeXTSTEP has been a remarkable success in its new incarnation as OS X and iOS.
        wpietri 15y ago
        Yes, NeXT and NextStep were flops as products: nobody bought them. Some of the OS technology was great, and it eventually got incorporated into a successful product after a lot more work. But a flop with good tech is still a flop.
- syncopate 15y ago
  I wonder if NeXT was really that much of a failure, considering that ultimately today we use many of it's software technologies. I used to be a NeXT programmer and am always amazed how much of it is still there today in OS X..
  - wslh 15y ago
    With this line of reasoning Xerox PARC was a completely success and every "seed" that lives today in the human history too. But business success metrics are very cynical and NeXT was a business failure.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Hm, business history of NeXT as gleaned from Wikipedia: 1985: Founded by Steve Jobs using a bunch of his own money. 1987: "[Ross Perot] invested $20 million in exchange for 16% of NeXT's stock, valuing the company at $125 million." 1989: "Canon invested US$100 million in NeXT, giving it a 16.67% stake, making NeXT worth almost $600 million." [editor's note: on paper] 1992: "The company reported sales of $140 million in 1992, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat." 1996: "Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs." So, please tell me where the business failure is. What I see here is a company that appears to have turned $150 million in venture funding (plus an unknown amount of Steve Jobs' cash) into a valuable operating system platform, $429 million in cash, 1.5 million shares of Apple Computer, and complete control of Apple Computer itself, which as we all know proved to be an extremely valuable commodity in the hands of the former employees of NeXT. But Wikipedia is not a balance sheet, and I suppose it's possible that this account I've pieced together leaves out something like half a billion dollars in investments by otherwise unknown and unremarked parties. Can anyone out there show me a history of NeXT that is substantially different than the one above? Because until then I must conclude that the people who think of the story of NeXT as a "business failure" don't know how to count money. EDIT: Excellent, I found a contemporary account of the Canon investment in the NYT to spell it all out for us: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-100-million-in-next-inc.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-1... The Canon investment will dilute Mr. Jobs's ownership of Next to 50 percent. He started the company with $7 million of his own and later invested another $5 million. Next employees own 20 percent. H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who invested $20 million in 1987, owns 12.5 percent, and Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, which have invested a total of $1.3 million, have a combined stake of less than 1 percent. Please, tell me again what a terrible, terrible failure this was.
- fabulous 15y ago
  Steve sold NeXT to Apple for $400 Million. You're some guy with a blog. What are you so smug about?
  - TomOfTTB 15y ago
    Are you kidding? I'm not smug. I'm saying Jobs is probably the most amazing success story in the history of technology and he did it after an age where most people would write him off and after experiencing a significant failure. The point I was making was you shouldn't write people off because of age or past failures. The fact that he came back from a low makes him more impressive not less. I mean, if you want to make Jobs into a super hero than go right ahead. But if you want to learn from him you have to look at what he actually went through and the truth is he had lows. As for NeXT being bought for $400 million even Jobs himself would have to admit that's not the end he would have preferred. And though I was too young to remember exactly I'm pretty sure the whole venture was a net loss even with the $400 million.
    - cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
      Not sure why you called TomofTTB smug, he was being quite the opposite.
- steveb 15y ago
  Jobs failed multiple times early in his career! 1980: Apple III released, bombs and is killed in 1984 1982: Jobs is kicked out of the Lisa Project, joins the Macintosh project 1984: Mac released. It is overpriced and has tepid sales. 1985: Kicked out of Apple 1989: First NeXT cubes released. They are overpriced and see slow sales 1991: NeXTStation released. NeXT still has tepid sales. 1993: NeXT hardware cancelled, OS ported to multiple other platforms with little success. Only the Intel port survives. Releases OpenStep for Windows. 1996: NeXT is bought by Apple. For over a decade he had a string of public failures to match every success. Nowadays Apple hits home run after home run and disrupts multiple industries. Imagine how much he learned from each failure.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > For over a decade he had a string of public failures I'm not sure if NeXT's history is a failure or the building of a foundation. Something similar happened with Pixar: Steve bought it in 1986, Toy Story was released in 1995. Before TS, Steve had already sold the hardware side of Pixar, the staff had to be cut in half, and Jobs was still wondering whether he should resell Pixar in 1994.
ugh 15y ago
“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’ And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.” Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  a : abrupt in speech or manner b : being straight to the point : direct So yeah, that's exactly what blunt means. Don't be confused by all the people who think bluntness is automatically rude. It's not. Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth. They need to have it sugar coated.
  - ugh 15y ago
    “Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Saying “I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.” seems just honest to me, not blunt. “I’m bored by this, why do you tell me all this crap?” would be something I would be willing to call blunt. But yeah, being honest (or blunt, if you will) is something I’m perfectly alright with. I want the people I’m working with or for to be like that. I’m not so crazy about rudeness, but if that quote is accurate Jobs wasn’t rude (at least in those situations).
    - hollerith 15y ago
      >“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Rudeness or impoliteness is not part of the definition of the word in the dictionary I consulted.
      - ezy 15y ago
        Try looking up the word "connotation"
sorbus 15y ago
> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss. > “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud." Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.
- jerf 15y ago
  Uh, no. That problem predates Apple's entry into the space by decades. If you want to get down to the real root cause, the root problem is biological; the human ear's damage threshold is significantly lower than its pain threshold. That's not an easy problem to solve.
dvdhsu 15y ago
No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot, and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.
dpkendal 15y ago
Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out. Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then writing it. He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)
- lurker14 15y ago
  I refer you to this example of demanding a feature with no regard for feasibility: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=round http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
idlewords 15y ago
I was really hoping this would be an article about flatulence.
- joely 15y ago
  Since Jobs was gone from Apple in 1985 what was his role in the Macintosh II, which didn't come out for 2 more years? Not a question that should be left to suspension of disbelief. And the iMac came out in 1998, but Steve was working on it at Apple in 1985 – in the Macintosh II building? To paraphrase Col. Kurtz: "Journalism? I don't see any journalism here." And one more thing™, Dhuey is the one with a tin ear if he doesn't understand that fans are anathema to Jobs' aesthetic.
Duff 15y ago
Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward. I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.
chulipuli 15y ago
I would have loved an elevator ride with him. The man is quite smart, and a resilient entrepreneur.
WalterBright 15y ago
Not a problem for me, I always take the stairs!

136 points by bond 15y ago

I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it) In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged) In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be learned there.

pohl 15y ago
What wouldn't I give to have my own failure of the magnitude of NeXT. As a business they merely survived, but to create as much system software value as they did (and during the dark ages of operating system monopoly, no less) and be able to use that value to acquire the dying husk of Apple for a negative 430 million or thereabouts...not bad, really.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  How was Next a failure? 11 years from start to being acquired for 400M 1996 dollars is not "failing".
  - wpietri 15y ago
    I'm not at a real computer to check, but I think $400m barely paid back the investors. And speaking as a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer), it was definitely a flop. The computers sold only in a few niches, and they had to kill off the hardware entirely. The OS and the dev tools lasted longer, but they wouldn't have survived more than another few years.
    - neild 15y ago
      A flop? The name may have changed, but NeXTSTEP has been a remarkable success in its new incarnation as OS X and iOS.
      - wpietri 15y ago
        Yes, NeXT and NextStep were flops as products: nobody bought them. Some of the OS technology was great, and it eventually got incorporated into a successful product after a lot more work. But a flop with good tech is still a flop.
syncopate 15y ago
I wonder if NeXT was really that much of a failure, considering that ultimately today we use many of it's software technologies. I used to be a NeXT programmer and am always amazed how much of it is still there today in OS X..
- wslh 15y ago
  With this line of reasoning Xerox PARC was a completely success and every "seed" that lives today in the human history too. But business success metrics are very cynical and NeXT was a business failure.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Hm, business history of NeXT as gleaned from Wikipedia: 1985: Founded by Steve Jobs using a bunch of his own money. 1987: "[Ross Perot] invested $20 million in exchange for 16% of NeXT's stock, valuing the company at $125 million." 1989: "Canon invested US$100 million in NeXT, giving it a 16.67% stake, making NeXT worth almost $600 million." [editor's note: on paper] 1992: "The company reported sales of $140 million in 1992, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat." 1996: "Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs." So, please tell me where the business failure is. What I see here is a company that appears to have turned $150 million in venture funding (plus an unknown amount of Steve Jobs' cash) into a valuable operating system platform, $429 million in cash, 1.5 million shares of Apple Computer, and complete control of Apple Computer itself, which as we all know proved to be an extremely valuable commodity in the hands of the former employees of NeXT. But Wikipedia is not a balance sheet, and I suppose it's possible that this account I've pieced together leaves out something like half a billion dollars in investments by otherwise unknown and unremarked parties. Can anyone out there show me a history of NeXT that is substantially different than the one above? Because until then I must conclude that the people who think of the story of NeXT as a "business failure" don't know how to count money. EDIT: Excellent, I found a contemporary account of the Canon investment in the NYT to spell it all out for us: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-100-million-in-next-inc.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-1... The Canon investment will dilute Mr. Jobs's ownership of Next to 50 percent. He started the company with $7 million of his own and later invested another $5 million. Next employees own 20 percent. H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who invested $20 million in 1987, owns 12.5 percent, and Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, which have invested a total of $1.3 million, have a combined stake of less than 1 percent. Please, tell me again what a terrible, terrible failure this was.
fabulous 15y ago
Steve sold NeXT to Apple for $400 Million. You're some guy with a blog. What are you so smug about?
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  Are you kidding? I'm not smug. I'm saying Jobs is probably the most amazing success story in the history of technology and he did it after an age where most people would write him off and after experiencing a significant failure. The point I was making was you shouldn't write people off because of age or past failures. The fact that he came back from a low makes him more impressive not less. I mean, if you want to make Jobs into a super hero than go right ahead. But if you want to learn from him you have to look at what he actually went through and the truth is he had lows. As for NeXT being bought for $400 million even Jobs himself would have to admit that's not the end he would have preferred. And though I was too young to remember exactly I'm pretty sure the whole venture was a net loss even with the $400 million.
  - cowkingdeluxe 15y ago
    Not sure why you called TomofTTB smug, he was being quite the opposite.
steveb 15y ago
Jobs failed multiple times early in his career! 1980: Apple III released, bombs and is killed in 1984 1982: Jobs is kicked out of the Lisa Project, joins the Macintosh project 1984: Mac released. It is overpriced and has tepid sales. 1985: Kicked out of Apple 1989: First NeXT cubes released. They are overpriced and see slow sales 1991: NeXTStation released. NeXT still has tepid sales. 1993: NeXT hardware cancelled, OS ported to multiple other platforms with little success. Only the Intel port survives. Releases OpenStep for Windows. 1996: NeXT is bought by Apple. For over a decade he had a string of public failures to match every success. Nowadays Apple hits home run after home run and disrupts multiple industries. Imagine how much he learned from each failure.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > For over a decade he had a string of public failures I'm not sure if NeXT's history is a failure or the building of a foundation. Something similar happened with Pixar: Steve bought it in 1986, Toy Story was released in 1995. Before TS, Steve had already sold the hardware side of Pixar, the staff had to be cut in half, and Jobs was still wondering whether he should resell Pixar in 1994.

ugh 15y ago

“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’ And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.” Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.

wccrawford 15y ago
a : abrupt in speech or manner b : being straight to the point : direct So yeah, that's exactly what blunt means. Don't be confused by all the people who think bluntness is automatically rude. It's not. Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth. They need to have it sugar coated.
- ugh 15y ago
  “Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Saying “I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.” seems just honest to me, not blunt. “I’m bored by this, why do you tell me all this crap?” would be something I would be willing to call blunt. But yeah, being honest (or blunt, if you will) is something I’m perfectly alright with. I want the people I’m working with or for to be like that. I’m not so crazy about rudeness, but if that quote is accurate Jobs wasn’t rude (at least in those situations).
  - hollerith 15y ago
    >“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Rudeness or impoliteness is not part of the definition of the word in the dictionary I consulted.
    - ezy 15y ago
      Try looking up the word "connotation"

sorbus 15y ago

> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss. > “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud." Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.

jerf 15y ago
Uh, no. That problem predates Apple's entry into the space by decades. If you want to get down to the real root cause, the root problem is biological; the human ear's damage threshold is significantly lower than its pain threshold. That's not an easy problem to solve.

dvdhsu 15y ago

No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot, and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.

dpkendal 15y ago

Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out. Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then writing it. He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)

lurker14 15y ago
I refer you to this example of demanding a feature with no regard for feasibility: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=round http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

idlewords 15y ago

I was really hoping this would be an article about flatulence.

joely 15y ago
Since Jobs was gone from Apple in 1985 what was his role in the Macintosh II, which didn't come out for 2 more years? Not a question that should be left to suspension of disbelief. And the iMac came out in 1998, but Steve was working on it at Apple in 1985 – in the Macintosh II building? To paraphrase Col. Kurtz: "Journalism? I don't see any journalism here." And one more thing™, Dhuey is the one with a tin ear if he doesn't understand that fans are anathema to Jobs' aesthetic.

Duff 15y ago

Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward. I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.

chulipuli 15y ago

I would have loved an elevator ride with him. The man is quite smart, and a resilient entrepreneur.

WalterBright 15y ago

Not a problem for me, I always take the stairs!