Inside Steve's Brain, Expanded Edition

219 Pages·2008·1.06 MB·English

by  Leander Kahney

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction

Chapter 1 - Focus: How Saying “No” Saved Apple
Chapter 2 - Despotism: Apple’s One-Man Focus Group
Chapter 3 - Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence
chapter 4 - Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos
Chapter 5 - Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe
Chapter 6 - Inventive Spirit: Where Does the Innovation Come From?
Chapter 7 - Case Study: How It All Came Together with the iPod
Chapter 8 - Total Control: The Whole Widget
Chapter 9 - Steve Jobs’s Battle with Cancer

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

PORTFOLIO
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This expanded edition published in 2009 by
Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Leander Kahney, 2008, 2009
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kahney, Leander.
Inside Steve’s brain / by Leander Kahney. -- Expanded ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-10114019-2
1. Jobs, Steven, 1955-2. Apple Computer, Inc.—Management.
3. Computer industry—United States. I. Title.
HD9696.2.U62J636 2009
338.761004’092—dc22 2009016641

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http://us.penguingroup.com
For my children, Nadine, Milo, Olin, and Lyle; my wife, Traci; my mother,
Pauline; and my brothers, Alex and Chris. And Hank, my dear old dad, who
was a big Steve Jobs fan.
introduction
“Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could,
could—I’m searching for the right word—could, could die.”

—Steve Jobs on his return to Apple as interim CEO, in Time, August 18, 1997

Steve Jobs gives almost as much thought to the cardboard boxes his gadgets
come in as the products themselves. This is not for reasons of taste or elegance
—though that’s part of it. To Jobs, the act of pulling a product from its box is an
important part of the user experience, and like everything else he does, it’s very
carefully thought out.
Jobs sees product packaging as a helpful way to introduce new, unfamiliar
technology to consumers. Take the original Mac, which shipped in 1984.
Nobody at the time had seen anything like it. It was controlled by this weird
pointing thing—a mouse—not a keyboard like other early PCs. To familiarize
new users with the mouse, Jobs made sure it was packaged separately in its own
compartment. Forcing the user to unpack the mouse—to pick it up and plug it in
—would make it a little less alien when they had to use it for the first time. In
the years since, Jobs has carefully designed this “unpacking routine” for each
and every Apple product. The iMac packaging was designed to make it obvious
how to get the machine on the Internet, and included a polystyrene insert
specially designed to double as a prop for the slim instruction manual.
As well as the packaging, Jobs controls every other aspect of the customer
experience—from the TV ads that stimulate desire for Apple’s products to the
museum-like retail stores where customers buy them; from the easy-to-use
software that runs the iPhone to the online iTunes music store that fills it with
songs and videos.
Jobs is a control freak extraordinaire. He’s also a perfectionist, an elitist, and a
taskmaster to employees. By most accounts, Jobs is a borderline loony. He is
portrayed as a basket case who fires people in elevators, manipulates partners,
and takes credit for others’ achievements.1 Recent biographies paint an
unflattering portrait of a sociopath motivated by the basest desires—to control,
to abuse, to dominate. Most books about Jobs are depressing reads. They’re
dismissive, little more than catalogs of tantrums and abuse. No wonder he’s
called them “hatchet jobs.” Where’s the genius?
Clearly he’s doing something right. Jobs pulled Apple from the brink of
bankruptcy, and in ten years he’s made the company bigger and healthier than
it’s ever been. He’s tripled Apple’s annual sales, doubled the Mac’s market
share, and increased Apple’s stock 1,300 percent. Apple is making more money
and shipping more computers than ever before, thanks to a string of hit products
—and one giant blockbuster.
Introduced in October 2001, the iPod transformed Apple. And just as Apple
has been transformed from a struggling also-ran into a global powerhouse, so
has the iPod been transformed from an expensive geek luxury into a diverse and
important product category. Jobs quickly turned the iPod from an extravagant,
Mac-only music player that many people dismissed into a global, multibillion-
dollar industry that supports hundreds of accessory companies and supporting
players.
Quickly and ruthlessly, Jobs updated the iPod with ever-newer and better
models, adding an online store, Windows compatibility, video, and then a
touchscreen. The iPhone, an iPod that makes phone calls and surfs the Net, looks
set to become another monster hit. Launched in June 2007, the iPhone is already
radically transforming the massive cell phone business, which pundits are saying
has already divided into two eras: pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
It is already the bestselling series of digital audio players in history. At the
time of this writing (March 2009) Apple had sold a whopping 163 million iPods,
and is on track to reach more than 300 million by the close of 2009.
Apple has a Microsoft-like monopoly on the MP3 player market. In the
United States, the iPod has nearly 90 percent market share: nine out of ten of all
hard-drive-based music players sold is an iPod.2 Three quarters of all 2007
model-year cars have iPod connectivity. Not MP3 connectivity—iPod
connectivity. Apple has distributed 600 million copies of its iTunes jukebox
software, and the iTunes online store has sold three billion songs. “We’re pretty
amazed at this,” said Jobs at a press event in August 2007, where he cited these
numbers. The iTunes music store sells five million songs a day—80 percent of
all digital music sold online. By 2009, the iTunes store had sold 6 billion songs
and had become the largest music retailer in the United States, ahead of retail
giants Wal-Mart and Best Buy. By the time you read this, these numbers will
probably have doubled. The iPod has become an unstoppable juggernaut that not
even Microsoft can compete with.
And then there’s Pixar. In 1995, Jobs’s private little movie studio made the
first fully computer-animated movie, Toy Story. It was the first in a string of
blockbusters that were released once a year, every year, as regular and
dependable as clockwork. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for a whopping $7.4
billion. Most important, it made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder and
the most important nerd in Hollywood. “He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt
Disney of this era,”3 said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state
librarian.
What a remarkable career Jobs has had. He’s making an immense impact on
computers, on culture, and, naturally, on Apple. Oh, and he’s a self-made
billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. “Within this class of computers
we call personals he may have been, and continues to be, the most influential
innovator,” says Gordon Bell, the legendary computer scientist and a preeminent
computer historian.4
But Jobs should have disappeared years ago—in 1985, to be precise—when
he was forced out of Apple after a failed power struggle to run the company.
Born in San Francisco in February 1955 to a pair of unmarried graduate
students, Steve was put up for adoption within a week of his birth. He was
adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a blue-collar couple who soon after moved to
Mountain View, California, a rural town full of fruit orchards that didn’t stay
rural very long—Silicon Valley grew up around it.
At school, Steven Paul Jobs, named after his adoptive father, a machinist, was
a borderline delinquent. He says his fourth-grade teacher saved him as a student
by bribing him with money and candy. “I would absolutely have ended up in
jail,” he said. A neighbor down the street introduced him to the wonders of
electronics, giving him Heathkits (hobbyist electronics kits), which taught him
about the inner workings of products. Even complex things like TVs were no
longer enigmatic. “These things were not mysteries anymore,” he said. “[It]
became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these
magical things.”5
Jobs’s birth parents had made attending college a condition of his adoption,
but he dropped out of Reed College in Oregon after the first semester, although
he continued to unofficially attend classes in subjects that interested him, like
calligraphy. Penniless, he recycled Coke bottles, slept on friends’ floors, and ate
for free at the local Hare Krishna temple. He experimented with an all-apple diet,
which he thought might allow him to stop bathing. It didn’t.
Jobs returned to California and briefly took a job at Atari, one of the first
games companies, to save money for a trip to India. He soon quit and headed out
with a childhood friend in search of enlightenment.
On his return he started hanging around with another friend, Steve Wozniak,
an electronics genius who’d built his own personal computer for fun but had
little interest in selling it. Jobs had different ideas. Together they cofounded
Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs’s bedroom and soon they were assembling
computers by hand in his parents’ garage with some teenage friends. To fund
their business, Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus. Wozniak sold his calculator.
Jobs was twenty-one; Wozniak, twenty-six.
Catching the tail of the early PC revolution, Apple took off like a rocket. It
went public in 1980 with the biggest public offering since Ford Motor Company
in 1956, making instant multimillionaires of those employees with stock options.
In 1983, Apple entered the Fortune 500 at number 411, the fastest ascent of any
company in business history. “I was worth about over a million dollars when I
was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four and over a
hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five, and it wasn’t that important
because I never did it for the money,” Jobs said.
Wozniak was the hardware genius, the chip-head engineer, but Jobs
understood the whole package. Thanks to Jobs’s ideas about design and
advertising, the Apple II became the first successful mass-market computer for
ordinary consumers—and turned Apple into the Microsoft of the early eighties.
Bored, Jobs moved on to the Mac, the first commercial implementation of the
revolutionary graphical user interface developed in computer research labs. Jobs
didn’t invent the graphical user interface that is used on almost every computer
today, including millions of Bill Gates’s Windows machines, but he brought it to
the masses. This has been Jobs’s stated goal from the very beginning: to create
easy-to-use technology for the widest possible audience.
In 1985, Jobs was effectively kicked out of Apple for being unproductive and
uncontrollable. After a failed power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs
quit before he could be fired. With dreams of revenge, he founded NeXT with
the purpose of selling advanced computers to schools and putting Apple out of
business. He also picked up a struggling computer graphics company for $10
million from Star Wars director George Lucas, who needed cash for a divorce.