The Valley 1995
Much as it is today, Silicon Valley in 1995 was a great time for cosmic travel and astral projection. The Grateful Dead reigned and the backed-up sewers of the second half of the 20th century were fecund ponds of innovation. Anyone serious in the punk movement OD’ed, even Buffy.
Little hidden portals of wayback machines manifested themselves in extremely odd ways. Some of us were getting unstuck in time with regularity. The NeXT parking lot, however spare of humanity and full of BMWs was the asphalt portal to a shrine, a holy, spare place, NeXT Computers.
I stood there, looking at Julie and a gaggle (or murder, be they crows) of NeXT employees ready to join us for our discussion and witness my summary evisceration at Steve’s learned hand.
We entered a large conference room in the annex, led in by Julie. Staff, as they were, followed us. They all wore black. I had served cheerier funerals as an altar boy at Holy Family.
I don’t remember what Steve looked like that day, though I suppose it was a lot like Elizabeth Holmes before she became a convicted felon.
Steve was surely wearing jeans and a dark, non-logoed t-shirt, upgraded to a simple thin dark, non-logoed thin pullover sweater.
That nothing was logoed, I am certain because he was hypersensitive to the power of his brand. I’m sure he looked like Steve in his prime, which he was about to reach with his return to Apple later that year.
When you play team sports, especially if it’s in front of a crowd, you must stay focused on the game you are playing. Some people focus to the point of blacking out. They set aside all sensory inputs except the one that matters – the game at hand. Hockey goalies, as an example, must follow the puck to gauge the ebb and flow, to stand against a breakaway.
I was up versus Steve at the board — I saw nothing and heard nothing but Steve. The focus of the murder of his employees was on the scene before them. My focus was on Steve’s marker and the numbers he was putting up on the whiteboard.
Net – Steve didn’t want to pay the royalties he was paying Adobe on every NeXTSTEP OS shipped into Japan. It complicated his life and emptied his pocketbook. Never mind the value.
“Steve, we’d take the royalty away, if we could. But we can’t – we have a deal with Morisawa.”
“I get it, but I’m paying the same whether the fonts print, or not.”
So that was Steve’s complaint. The disparity between using the fonts to print and using them just to image fonts on a screen.
His license with Adobe didn’t really differentiate. The concept of a computer screen being able to rasterize a font on the fly was new. Fonts had solely been for printing. Now, because of Adobe’s work, fonts were starting to be made for the screen. It was encapsulated in an acronym not really heard anymore WYSIWYG, (What You See is What You Get).
It’s just that the price was not proportional. In 1995, the web was just starting, and we were just beginning to think of these content issues.
“I don’t want to pay.”
“We don’t have a choice, Steve, you know this.”
“I’ll clone.”
“You can clone, Steve, but what will that do to your sales in Japan? What about the quality? Will the market accept it?”
No one answered.
I grabbed the marker.
“What about the rest of your publishing business? You need us for that market. We need you. You know this.”
The Japanese market was known to be inelastic to the perception of quality – you either had the veneer of quality or not. The Morisawa fonts were the gold standard. NeXT, Adobe, and Morisawa made a potent combination in that segment.
But Steve wanted more than just publishing.
But there might be something we could do. There were two fonts being made available that would fit the need at a much lower cost.
And so it went for the better part of the hour. Steve and I at the board, each with his own marker. (I pray silently that mine is not a permanent marker.)
We focus. There’s give. There’s take.
Steve talks. I listen and respond. He responds and posits. And so on.
Steve and I are doing all the talking.
All the talking. Back and forth. Propose. Back it up with data. Model it. A potential solution on the fly involving open source and a Japanese font consortium appears on the greaseboard. The price is a tenth of what NeXT is paying now.
Numbers appear on the board. “What if’s” are whiteboarded. Much hem. Much haw.
A pragmatic solution begins to take shape, enough to talk about it some more later. The hour has gone by much too quickly.
Steve likes that.It was on the fly. It was simple. It was sales.
Unstuck to younger days
I focused. Too focused on the problem at hand. And then it happened, I lost it. I became unstuck in a time of math drills and door-to-door sales.
I was back in Winnipeg, this time on the street, fourteen years old on a winter night, selling chicken, back bacon, and pork sausage door to door? We never worried about spoilage at forty below. Everything frozen, stays frozen in Winnipeg.
And just as quickly, I was back at a third-grade blackboard, an eight-year-old immigrant getting yelled at by the class and Sister Roberta, locked in a team math speed drill deathmatch from hell to see which half of the class gets an extra five minutes of recess?
And then, just like that, I was talking to him, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Driving North up Highway 280, up the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula towards Highway 92 and San Francisco, he spoke to me through my car radio.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I replied.
“You have a question?” PBS, memorable, smooth, yet fizzy.
What I must have sounded like – “Yeah, blah, blah, something non-specific about the meaning of something else meaningless.”
What I really asked – “What’s the origin of German bat ball? Is there a reason you mention it in your books as a thread?
I had my minute with one of the greats, and I choked—I blurted out nonsense to Vonnegut, our Victor Hugo, a Bradburys, a Jules Verne, the man who wrote Sirens of Titan, Ice Nine, Player Piano, Slaughterhouse 5, Breakfast of Champions, oh shit.
He stared me down in a mark twain way through the airwaves and explained that there was no significance, no significance at all to German bat ball. None whatsoever.
And so it went, bat ball and fonts, Germans and Japanese.
No room for fear when focused (or unstuck). I didn’t have to fear Steve, I just had to solve his problem.
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