This is one of the most insightful Q&A's about Steve that I've read. I especially appreciated the part about the risers for the gumdrop iMacs not working perfectly smoothly: he was pissed even though the audience couldn't possibly see the stuttering risers and even though the keynote was successful.
One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick. But you realize in this small story, that the whole keynote could have been torpedoed, could have gone sideways and been ridiculed, if those mechanical risers had failed. The big moment for this product that could (and did) save the company, might have been a laughable sad trombone even though Steve had warned Wayne that it was a problem that needed to be fixed.
The work of hundreds of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars, were pitted against shitty mechanical hand-cranks -- that's why small details matter, and why Steve was pissed.
I never noticed before how he grabs the Grape iMac, which also appears to be the one that's the most out of sync behind the others. I wonder if he was trying to subtly push it into a faster spin to even them up?
> even though Steve had warned Wayne that it was a problem that needed to be fixed.
I think you are mis-reading the situation here.
In the Q&A Wayne says:
> "A week before the event and we were still struggling to synchronize them and make the motion smooth. [...] However, Steve was on the stage watching these things not perfectly aligned with a little bit of stuttering. He wasn’t happy and we could see it in the video feed we were watching."
There is no suggestion of a risk of failure or that or that it was a problem. Steve simply wanted a perfect, smooth, synchronised motion.
> "But when you were in the audience, you couldn’t tell unless you knew what to look for."
Watch the video posted by another user and judge for yourself.
> There is no suggestion of a risk of failure or that or that it was a problem. Steve simply wanted a perfect, smooth, synchronised motion.
But Jobs did offer a solution that (for reasons he may not have been aware) wasn’t used (“I know the guys from Cirque du Soleil, why don’t you call them?”)
It actually reminds me of Van Halens brown M&M rider[0], but Steve doesn’t get to just take the money, cancel the show, and go home.
Startup time isn't really a minute thing. Its a huge factor in conversion thats widely measured. Like the load time of a web page. People always prefer to wait less.
For Windows, presentation wasn't that important. For Apple, it would have been.
Windows was the default operating system for business already.
Apple's products at the time were an alternative, not the mainstream, and sold largely on the customer's desire to live a different life. Apple sells a lifestyle as much as they do a product; you've always been able to see that in their marketing. The customer visualization of themselves in that life is formed first during those keynotes - and it's easy to break with a problem like the one Jobs cared about.
Since Cook took over, Apple's really switched largely to productionizing what they already had; that makes sense, it's what he's good at. Hopefully, he's kind of a caretaker until someone visionary can take the helm again.
It tarnished the brand, but maybe it's like pennies, where people sort of expect them to have that brown tarnished color.
Here's the deal - if you're charging a premium for a product, it has to be exceptional.
I had a friend who worked for the airlines (this was pre-9/11 days).
He would tell me stories about first class customers. One guy came to the airport and bought 2 first class tickets to france for he and his wife and paid an astronomical sum for last-minute tickets. no problem. Stuff like this happened all the time.
But he said the flip side was that you CANNOT disservice a first-class customer. If you want to see a REALLY MAD person, bump a first class customer. Their expectations are in line with the prices. high.
Yep. Steve Jobs did have a computer crash after that on a keynote and mentioned that's why they had two on stage. Macworld 2005 had the line "Well, that's why we have backup systems here."
Actually, there are compilations of all the bloopers made during Apple keynotes. They weren't all perfect.
It probably helps to recall that Apple had been on the brink of bankruptcy at the time, and as a hardware company, gambles their future every year by ordering inventory.
To be fair, Apple had one outlet for presentations and Windows had a horde of salesfolks in the ecosystem making different kind of presentations each day. Bill Gates had IBM fronting him and Compaq's actions with the BIOS made him rich.
Even if it didn't hurt sales, it would still have been shitty and embarrassing if the big reveal of this massive multi-year investment had been torpedoed by the risers, and (to the story'd point) after the risers had been explicitly called out as a problem.
This kind of thinking can be a problem. Spending outsized effort on unproven theories. Would it really have a serious impact if the shutters were bad?
On the flip side, if it was truly so impactful, relying on the faulty shutters would have been a very irresponsible thing to do. They could have paid some humans to use a pulley system out of sight at that point.
>This kind of thinking can be a problem. Spending outsized effort on unproven theories. Would it really have a serious impact if the shutters were bad?
Yes, because if he felt the same about other things ("woult it really have a serious impact if this/that") he'd have built worse or more-samey to other OEMs products.
So, it's not like you can have some precise cut-off point to stop caring, where the faulty systems in the keynote don't matter, but some other aspect of the product does.
If he ended up only caring for functionality, high impact, aspects of the products, it wouldn't be the same products.
And if the Keynotes didn't have such high production value demands, they wouldn't been as good.
It's not a binary issue (stop being too demanding and start being ok with good enough).
It's "where to put the cutoff point" in a sorite range (human caring).
>One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick.
Because he was worried about an important aspect of an important presentation his terrible behavior towards others is justified? C'mon, there are almost a hundred examples of him treating others like crap. Was every case justified as 'something very important at Apple will crack if I'm not all over this employee'? It that was so, then they were the worst hirers of talent in Silicon Valley.
It is a dichotomy. On one hand you have an innovative titan of the tech universe doing really amazing things. On the other hand you have, by all accounts, not a very nice human being to those around him. I think the hero/innovator narrative really wars with the asshole narrative in popular media. He was both of those things and it’s okay to acknowledge his insufferableness along with his great accomplishments. I don’t think the worst of his behavior was required to be the industry titan he was. A lot of people mix these up as somehow critical to the success of Jobs. The truth is, inspiring leadership that treats people fairly is very hard. It’s an understandable fault, but still a fault. That is why I always tried to understand Steve as an innovator first and leader second. People followed him despite his lack of leadership because he was getting things done and it was worth it to be a part of the show. The people that stuck around made peace with his behavior (as illustrated in the article) and learned how to filter it in a way that let them work together, but that is not an easy working relationship and again I think it speaks to how much people believed in what they were doing despite the poor (human) leadership.
Jobs was a textbook narcissist. Absolutely by the numbers. But unlike most narcs he was actually good at some things, and he used those talents to create a Steve Jobs Memorial Corporation - i.e. Apple.
The narcissism was the source of his drive to be the most amazing monkey in the room. If he'd been a normal human he wouldn't had the laser-like focus on creating a narrative about being the guy who made everything he touched game-changing, immaculately crafted, and insanely great.
If you happen to be a narc you may have similar motivations. But it's unlikely you also have the talent.
Which leaves a question - is it possible to be a billionaire wo makes game-changing, beautifully crafted, insanely great tech without being a narcissist?
Arguably the 60s/70s crop of tech companies came closest. CEOs like Ken Olsen had a paternal attitude and an interest in employee welfare and development. DEC were insanely great in their own pre-Internet way, so he must have been doing something right. But there was no worldwide media attention, and the market was almost exclusively fellow grad-level professionals who were more impressed by substance and less by showmanship.
As soon as you open that up and create commodified mass-market products the level of attention goes up a few orders of magnitude, and a self-absorbed rock star attitude is more effective market fit.
Non-narcs just don't care about that kind of attention, and aren't driven by a need to create it.
Which is non-narc CEOs may be millionaire successful, but don't have the unhinged drive needed to be billionaire successful. And they won't have the kinds of followers who need the reflected glow.
And that's why the top of the tech tree is full of people who have these personality issues. They're unusually effective in some very limited areas, and a cocoon of money protects them from consequences. But they're still... limited.
A real game-changing genius would be able to negotiate the attention and rock star challenge to do everything they do without paying the price of narcissism. But those people are not just vanishingly rare in general, they're actively cancelled by current corporate culture.
And this is a bad thing, because we're going to need effective but healthy management over the next few decades. And it's hard to see where that's going to come from in this culture.
>Jobs was a textbook narcissist. Absolutely by the numbers.
Narcissist in a colloquial sense, perhaps. But narcissist in a medical sense (i.e., a set of defined cluster B personality disorder traits), no. Jobs was known for changing his position in the face of strong enough rational arguments, sometimes a couple days later. He wasn't wedded to his positions in the emotional way typical of cluster B narcissists.
>Was every case justified as 'something very important at Apple will crack if I'm not all over this employee'?
Does every case have to be justified? Perhaps without the overall "pressure" climate they wouldn't get as good results.
Almost any company exec, even one phoning it in most of the time, would be all over an employee if "something very important at the company would crack" otherwise.
But doing it for small, medium issues too (not just "company on the line" ones), helps maintain the pressure climate better than just flipping off when there's something very very serious.
> The mythology of him mostly comes from individuals that didn't survive around him. The people who got close knew the rules, knew how to work with him, knew his core desires and what he was trying to achieve. They never really had problems with it.
Probably because he was, first and foremost, a user.
And users are fucking sick of the shit most companies and devs have been pulling since forever and we would treat them the same were we in a position of power.
And the fact that he was like that + attention deficit made Apple products the fastest and smoothest. Look how laggy flagship Android phones still are, compared to even obsolete iPhone... Fireworks exploding next to you is a tragedy but from miles away it's only beautiful.
Your comment is unsubstantiated, but okay. It is extremely unpopular on HN to like Steve Jobs for some reason. The way reputation works is that if you're extremely rude to 100 people but are helpful for millions, people will still remember you as an asshole. People only see the mistakes, not the overwhelming successes, and that is an empirical fact, turned proverb at this point...
There’s this thing, or entity, that seemingly everyone is talking about. If I can point out even one contrary thing about it, I win. (or feel like I have)
One might think Steve Jobs was an arrogant, perfectionist prick. But you realize in this small story, that the whole keynote could have been torpedoed, could have gone sideways and been ridiculed, if those mechanical risers had failed. The big moment for this product that could (and did) save the company, might have been a laughable sad trombone even though Steve had warned Wayne that it was a problem that needed to be fixed.
The work of hundreds of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars, were pitted against shitty mechanical hand-cranks -- that's why small details matter, and why Steve was pissed.