Inside Steve's Brain Read Online Free Page A

out. If I couldn’t figure this out... how could our customers figure this out?” 11
    One engineer I interviewed who worked at Apple in the mid-1990s remembers seeing a poster-cum-flow-chart pinned to a wall at Apple’s HQ. The poster was titled HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR MAC and was supposed to guide customers through the thicket of choices. But it merely illustrated how confused Apple’s product strategy was. “You know something is wrong when you need a poster to choose your Mac,” the engineer said.
    Apple’s organizational structure was in similar disarray. Apple had grown into a big, bloated Fortune 500 company with thousands of engineers and even more managers. “Apple, pre Jobs, was brilliant, energetic, chaotic, and nonfunctional,” recalled Don Norman, who was in charge of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group when Jobs took over. Known as the ATG, the group was Apple’s storied R&D division and had pioneered several important technologies.
    “When I joined Apple in 1993 it was wonderful,” he said to me in a telephone interview. “You could do creative, innovative things. But it was chaotic. You can’t do that in an organization. You need a few creative people, and the rest get the work done.” 12 According to Norman, Apple’s engineers were rewarded for being imaginative and inventive, not for the difficult job of knuckling down and making things work. They would invent all day, but rarely did what they were told. As an executive, this would drive Norman crazy. Orders would be handed down, but incredibly, six months later nothing had happened. “It was ridiculous,” Norman said.
    John Warnock of Adobe, one of Apple’s biggest software partners, said that changed quickly when Jobs returned. “He comes in with a very strong will and you sign up or get out of the way,” Warnock said. “You have to run Apple that way— very direct, very forceful. You can’t do it casually. When Steve attacks a problem, he attacks it with a vengeance. I think he mellowed during the NeXT years and he’s not so mellow anymore.” 13

Steve’s Survey
    Within days of returning to Apple as the iCEO, Jobs got to work. Once he’d committed, Jobs was in a hurry to fix Apple. He immediately embarked on an extremely thorough survey of each and every product Apple made. He went through the company piece by piece, finding out what the assets were. “He needed to do a review of pretty much everything that was going on,” said Jim Oliver, who was Jobs’s assistant for several months after he returned to the company. “He talked to all the product groups. He wanted to know the scope and size of the research groups. He was saying, ‘Everything needs to be justified. Do we really need a corporate library?’ ”
    Jobs set up shop in a big conference room and called in the product teams one by one. As soon as everyone had convened, it went straight to work. “No introductions, absolutely not,” Peter Hoddie recalled. Hoddie is a hotshot programmer who went on to become the chief architect of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia software. “Someone started taking notes. Steve said: ‘You don’t need to take notes. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.’ ”
    The engineers and programmers explained in detail what they were working on. They described their products in depth, explaining how they worked, how they were sold, and what they planned to do next. Jobs listened carefully and asked a lot of questions. He was deeply engaged. At the end of the presentations, he would sometimes ask hypothetical questions: “If money were no object, what would you do?” 14
    Jobs’s review took several weeks. It was calm and methodical. There were none of the outbursts for which Jobs is infamous. “Steve said the company has to focus, and each individual group has to do the same,” Oliver said. “It was quite formal. It was very calm. He’d say, ‘Apple is in serious financial straits and we can’t afford to do anything extra.’ He was