It’s personal
We all share some level of personal connection with Steve Jobs, much as we share connections with Edison when we turn a light on, or Ford when driving a car. I am typing on a MacBook Air, proofing on my iPad Pro, and taking pictures with my iPhone. It’s damn personal between Steve and me.
For a sliver of time in 1995, I worked with Steve Jobs. I was his sales rep. Somewhere, deep in Adobe System’s email archive from 1995, sits the last communication I received from Steve Jobs, my client.
It was short and to the point. To clarify the point, the second sentence read:
I AM REALLY PISSED OFF!!!
Steve Jobs to no one in particular important
Steve was pissed, and not in an English drunk pissing in a Birmingham street after a rave sort of way. Thwarted and angry, he was also angry for being thwarted.
Pissed.
Things might have been going better for NeXT Computer. The company had moved to a software-only business model in 1993, as it became impossible for NeXT to compete against other workstation manufacturers, like Sun Microsystems to Silicon Graphics, with any kind of volume.
The new Intel port had great promise, and there was talk that the elegance of the user interface could turn the tide against the evil forces of Microsoft Windows. This fiction continued until Windows 95 settled the score permanently and Intel’s hardware started to optimize for Windows performance. Still, for those familiar with the leading Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the day, NeXTSTEP was revolutionary. It was the promise of the Unix operating system overlaid with Steve’s elegant user interface.
In time, Steve took the technology and the engineers to Apple, but that’s not what this book is about. This book is about what happened to Steve right before he went back to Apple. It is a sliver of time, but for that sliver, I was there.
NeXTSTEP drove the industry at the time to develop more elegant and utilitarian user interfaces. Apple’s flagship operating system – iOS, known for its elegance and ease of use, is based on NeXTSTEP. The emergence of AMD’s Opteron chip helped make Intel-based machines (non-Itanium) compute-friendly for certain high compute applications, like Adobe Photoshop.
For NeXT, life in a hardware company meant low margins and tremendous inventory risks, the kind of risks which arguably brought down companies like DEC, Compaq, and others, leading to a grand consolidation in the industry. Steve knew this – NeXT was DOA (Dead on Arrival) if it remained a hardware company.
Not having to worry about hardware liberated Steve. At the time, Pixar was starting to gain traction; so losing the hardware harness was undoubtedly a godsend for Steve. A big piece of Pixar’s workflow involved the rasterization of computer-generated graphics, requiring very high compute devices. The first Pixar productions needed incredible compute power. Steve knew well the technologies involved. Later, Pixar’s business model eventually became a big part of Disney’s.
The Reality Distortion Field, the RDF, is a concept created with Steve in mind. I only heard about it, in the early days of computing, in the context of Steve and Bill Gates.
To gauge where Steve stood in the universe when I started working with him at NeXT, you had to grasp the concept of the RDF. The Reality Distortion Field was a bastard measure of importance in the 1990’s. It was first coined by Bud Tribble at Apple in 1981 to essentially describe Steve’s ability to persuade.
The RDF was used mainly to illustrate one’s dominance over a certain subject or technology tranche of your market. It was a concept, but one that was logarithmic in construct – requiring a certain calculus and not algebra, in its definition.
We were in a different time, circa 1995.
In an effort to expand his Reality Distortion Field (RDF) and the company’s revolutionary NeXTSTEP Operating System’s (OS’s) acceptance, Steve directed his engineers to port NeXTSTEP to the Intel architecture. It made good sense, but there was a problem. A certain licensing arrangement existing between NeXT and Adobe stood in his way, and he was not happy. As the steward of this arrangement, the keeper of the contract, I drew his ire.
Olivetti wanted to port NeXTSTEP to their Intel platform. To do this, the source code for NeXTSTEP, which included Adobe’s source code, needed to be shipped to Olivetti in Italy to be ported. Hardware dependencies meant vendors had to port their software to each major hardware platform and UNIX flavor of the time. There was always tuning necessary. Unfortunately, Adobe did not give NeXT the right to send their “family jewels,” the Adobe PostScript© source code, to Italy. The port was to be done on US soil or not at all.
The General Counsel for Adobe made it extremely clear to me. While she thought Italy had fine courts, she felt that they were fundamentally not good enough to protect Adobe’s intellectual property (IP), the PostScript source, the Crown Jewels of the company. Under no circumstances could the source code leave the United States. There were no exceptions. Even for Steve.
The answer was a hard no; I was the one to tell Steve. It was clearly time to shoot the messenger. It was coming.
I never lost a moment’s sleep about Steve’s flame – it was a collateral event, part of working in the business, and I didn’t belong if I over- or under-reacted. There was no reason to be scared, disappointed, or ashamed. My job was to take the hit for Adobe, and I took the hit.
Getting flamed, like getting fired, is a rite of professional passage for many. Everyone can’t like you all the time. Things don’t always go your way. In spite of your positivity things seem to never go your way. Sometimes, they just don’t.
Nor should you get everyone to like you. Some argue that there are some people you should go out of your way to stir up and piss off, that controversy and raising hell alone mark progress.
Flamed by Steve? Rapture. Put it on my headstone. Complete me.
I mattered. I was finally important enough TO FLAME! In all caps. By Steve Jobs.
