Good Guys And Bad Guys - Graphics8.nytimes

Jobs Agoni ste s (Ste ve , T hat Is)51out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behindhim. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnervingearnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion: pushing back his hair, propping uphis chin, buried snugly under his armpits. When he hears something thatintrigues him, he curls his head toward his shoulder, leans forward, andallows a slight smile to cross his lips. When he hears something he dislikes,he squints to register his disapproval. He would not be a good poker player.His speech is also mannered, full of slangy phrases. “If we could pull thisoff,” he is saying enthusiastically, “it would be really, really neat!” “The original idea was good,” he is saying about some failed project at Apple. “I don’tknow what happened. I guess somebody there bozoed out.” Around the roomthere are knowing smirks. To bozo is a favorite Jobs verb, but where he onceused it mainly to describe some bit of stupidity perpetrated by, say, IBM, henow uses it just as often when he’s talking about Apple.Back in May of 1985, Jobs lost a power struggle to Apple president JohnSculley. It was awkward, bitter, and very public. In what was labeled a reorganization, Jobs had been humiliatingly dismissed as head of the Macintoshcomputer division. Four months later, Jobs walked.Now, more than a year later, he insists that he has managed to put Applebehind him. Surely, this is wishful thinking. Apple had always been a reflection of Jobs’ personality, a mirror of his eccentricities and passions. He usedto talk, for instance, about making Apple an “insanely great” place to work,but he wasn’t talking about irresistible perks or liberal benefits. Instead, hewas talking about creating an environment where you would work harderand longer than you’d ever worked in your life, under the most grinding ofdeadline pressure, with more responsibility than you ever thought you couldhandle, never taking vacations, rarely getting even a weekend off . . . and youwouldn’t care! You’d love it! You’d get to the point where you couldn’t livewithout the work and the responsibility and the grinding deadline pressure.All of the people in this room had known such feelings about work—feelingsthat were exhilarating and personal and even intimate—and they’d knownthem while working for Steve Jobs. They all shared a private history of theirwork together at Apple. It was their bond, and no one who was not therecould ever fully understand it.With personal computers so ubiquitous today, you tend to forget that theindustry is still barely ten years old; the Apple II, the machine that began itall, was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in 1977. You forget, that is,until you sit in a room full of people who have built them and realize howyoung they are. Jobs himself is only thirty-one. If anything, he looks younger.80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd513/27/084:46:47 PM

52good guys and bad guysHe is lithe and wiry. He is wearing faded jeans (no belt), a white cotton shirt(perfectly pressed), and a pair of brown suede wing-tipped shoes. There is abounce to his step that betrays a certain youthful cockiness; the quarterbackof your high school football team used to walk that way. His thin, handsomeface does not even appear to need a daily shave. And that impression of eternal youth is reinforced by some guileless, almost childlike traits: By the way,for instance, he can’t resist showing off his brutal, withering intelligencewhenever he’s around someone he doesn’t think measures up. Or by hisalmost willful lack of tact. Or by his inability to hide his boredom when he isforced to endure something that doesn’t interest him, like a sixth grader whocan’t wait for class to end.Which, as it happens, is how he’s acting now. Dan’l Lewin, NeXT’s director of marketing, has just handed out a complicated diagram outlining hisvarious responsibilities and lines of authority. When Jobs gets his copy hiseyes begin to glaze. As Lewin attempts to explain, somewhat convolutedly,what it all means, Jobs fidgets. He rocks back and forth in his chair. He rollshis eyes. He squints. About a minute into Lewin’s tortured explanation, Jobscan endure no more. “I think these charts are bullshit,” he interrupts. “Justbullshit.” Lewin stumbles momentarily, then tries to recover, but Jobs won’trelent. Finally, Lewin tries to retrieve all the copies of his diagram. “Whatare you doing?” Jobs asks pointedly as Lewin tries to pull his away.“If you think it’s bullshit, there’s no point in talking about it.” Others inthe room try to assuage Lewin’s hurt feelings, but not Jobs. His mind isalready elsewhere. “Can we do something really important?” he is asking.“Can we get that electric outlet fi xed?”The meeting drones on. A finance man comes into the room to report thedetails of a just-completed negotiation. “You did a really, really great job onthis,” says Jobs when he has finished. (The day before, Jobs had told the man,“This deal is crap.”) The man leaves and the discussion turns to other matters. Jobs prods Bud Tribble, a thin, diffident man who is heading his software team, to hire more people. He talks about people in the Valley he’d liketo steal away and discusses potential employees who’ve been in for interviews.As he speaks, he visibly perks up; his mind is engaged again. “We’ve got tostart thinking about middle managers, even now!” he urges his staff. Then anexhortation: “We’re not just building a computer, we’re building a company!”And after the meeting has broken up, a final, dazed thought: “I’d forgottenhow hard it is to start up a company.” There is a hint of joy in his voice.NThe last time Steven Jobs started a company, he had no idea how hard itwould be. How could he? When he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple, Jobs80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd523/27/084:46:47 PM

Jobs Agoni ste s (Ste ve , T hat Is)53was practically a teenager, a college dropout still living through what he calls“my existential phase.”In college, Jobs had found himself attracted to Eastern philosophy andhad also become interested in the power of diets, devouring such books asThe Mucusless Diet Healing System by a nineteenth-century Prussian namedArnold Ehret. Those interests remained strong even after he returned to theSanta Clara Valley, where he had grown up. He became a fruitarian and lectured his friends on the evils of bagels. Jobs let his hair grow long, smokeddope, and frequently went without shoes. He joined a farm commune, butquickly became disillusioned and wound up back in the Valley.Jobs wanted to go to India but couldn’t afford passage. To earn money, hebegan doing bits of work for Nolan Bushnell’s Atari Corp., helping to buildvideo games. Jobs was no engineer, but he was very quick and very smart—and very difficult. Even then, he was blunt to the point of tactlessness, andthat, combined with his unwillingness to shower regularly, caused mostAtari employees to find him insufferable. But Bushnell, who is something ofan eccentric himself, thought Jobs was valuable to have around, and keptthrowing him work. The arrangement suited Jobs perfectly. When he neededmoney, Bushnell provided him the means to earn it; when he didn’t, he couldcut loose from Atari for a spell and go do something else. It was the one timein his life he thought about work the way an assembly-line worker might:simply as a means to put money in his pocket.In the summer of 1974, Jobs finally made it to India, where he did all thethings a young, impressionable seeker of truth does in such a place. Heattended religious festivals and visited monasteries. He had his head shavedby a guru. He came down with dysentery and returned to California in thefall. Yet the fascination with spiritualism did not fade; Jobs now says he wasso serious about it that after India he contemplated going to Japan to joina monastery, if only for the experience. “There is a great tradition in thatkind of life,” he says. “It offers another kind of training, another way ofthinking.”Meanwhile, Jobs had another side, perhaps best typified by his friendshipwith Steve Wozniak. Woz, as everyone called him, didn’t give a hoot aboutmucusless diets or monasteries, and when Jobs was around Woz, which wasoften, he didn’t spend much time talking about such things. It was a waste ofbreath. What Wozniak cared about passionately, and what he could talkabout endlessly, were digital electronics and computers. He was “the hacker,”to use his own description of himself, whose goal in life was to become anengineer for Hewlett-Packard, where he could get paid for doing what heloved. Although Woz was also a college dropout, by 1973 he had achieved his80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd533/27/084:46:47 PM

54Ngood guys and bad guysgoal, only to find it disappointing. He was assigned to work on calculators,not computers.Although Wozniak was five years older than Jobs, they were best friends.In the intervening years, they have had their differences, but Wozniak canstill say with considerable fondness, “We had great times together.” Theywere both a little out of the mainstream, and they both had an abiding interest in electronics and computers. To be sure, Jobs’ interest was never quite asabiding or as single-minded as Wozniak’s. But he had done the science-fairbit in high school, had worked in electronic-supply shops, and had spent asummer at Hewlett-Packard. One of the “great times” Wozniak and Jobs hadtogether was building electronic “blue boxes,” those infamous devices thatallowed you to use the telephone without paying. Jobs was the one whodecided they should sell the boxes, which they did haphazardly for abouta year.At around the same time Jobs was trying to decide whether or not to runoff to a monastery, his friend Wozniak was attempting to build a small computer. The invention of the microprocessor had made such a machine theoretically possible, and Wozniak and his hacker friends had all becomeobsessed with the idea of creating one. It was all they did, all the time. Theymet informally at the Homebrew Computer Club, where they shared information and showed off their latest designs. None of the people in the Homebrew Computer Club had any real sense that microcomputers had muchvalue outside the universe of the hacker. They did it mainly as a hobby, toprove to themselves and each other that such a thing could be done. Ofcourse, none of the big computer companies like Hewlett-Packard had anysense of that, either, which is why none of them were trying to build one.Hewlett-Packard, in fact, turned Wozniak down when he showed the company one of his circuit boards and asked to pursue his hobby for the company. It was still a world of mainframes—big, lumbering machines.The one person who had some inkling that these smaller machines mighthave some kind of broader appeal—vague though that inkling was, unarticulated though it largely remained—was Steve Jobs. Somehow he got it, whenalmost no one else did.And so his other side, his computer side, began to exert its tug on him. Hefound himself spending more and more time with Wozniak. They wouldtalk for hours about the technical issues Woz was trying to solve, discussingthe kinds of choices Woz was making. What kind of microprocessor shouldthe computer have? What sort of memory device should it use? Jobs wasinexorably drawn to Wozniak’s machine. By the early part of 1976, he waspestering Wozniak about starting a little company so they could sell the cir-80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd543/27/084:46:47 PM

Jobs Agoni ste s (Ste ve , T hat Is)55cuit boards Woz was designing. And after that . . . well, you know what happened after that. You know the legend of Jobs and Wozniak. How theystarted out in Jobs’ garage. How they worked day and night to create theApple II. How they became modern-day folk heroes.Jobs says today that at some point early on he had to make a consciouschoice: the East or Apple. More recently, he adds, he has come to believe thatthere was far less difference between the two life choices than appeared tohim at the time. “Ultimately,” he claims, “it was the same thing.” Thatremark seems more than a little facile, especially when the man saying it isbarreling down the freeway in his Mercedes coupe, playing a new compactdisc by the Rolling Stones. But certainly there is one way in which the analogy is absolutely true. Jobs’ commitment to building the Apple II—to hiswork—was as all-consuming as any commitment he would have had tomake in a monastery. In a sense, he had found his monastery in his garage.Was it his age that allowed him to work with such maniacal intensity?Sure, that was part of it. If you ask Jobs about the difference between thenand now, the first thing he’ll say is, “Well, I can’t stay up four nights in a rowlike I used to.”Was it the cocoonlike atmosphere of the garage where he and Wozniakwere isolated with their dreams? Sure, that was part of it too; the excitementin the garage was palpable, and anyone who spent any time around Jobs inthose days felt some of it rub off. The simple satisfaction of building something was an important part of it: the satisfaction a good carpenter knows.And so was the thought of making money, especially for Wozniak, whosedevotion to work was never like Jobs’. Wozniak has always been quite direct:once building the Apple computer was no longer his hobby but his means ofemployment, his main motivation was money.But with Jobs, there was always something more, something that ties intothe larger culture. Although he was working himself to exhaustion, hisapproach to work was extremely narcissistic—it was a form of self-expression,of pleasure. His loyalty was not to some faceless corporation but to himself;Jobs likes to say that he is one of those people who wakes up in the morning,looks in the mirror, and says: “Am I doing what I want to do?” Fundamentally, his sense of who he was, which he had been searching for all along,became a function of what he did.Few people in the country took things to the extreme Jobs did. But during the period when he was in the garage, the young professional class wasembracing many of these same ideas about work. Work was no longer supposed to be work, it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to have somelarger purpose. It was supposed to offer a form of self-identity. And if it80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd553/27/084:46:48 PM

56good guys and bad guysdidn’t offer those elements—if you woke up one morning and couldn’t sayto yourself that you were doing what you wanted to be doing—well, then youquit. Your father’s loyalty may have been to the company or perhaps to thefamily he had to provide for. But your loyalty was to yourself, in a mannerthat had once been the style mainly of artists and ballplayers.In Silicon Valley, the company most people wanted to work for, pre-Jobs,was Hewlett-Packard. At HP, people were well treated and well paid, and thecompany was renowned for never laying anyone off, which provided comforting security to anyone who was even remotely competent. But it was—and is—a very large corporation, with more than eighty thousand people,and while you can do good work there, you’re also part of a huge bureaucracy. In return for the loyalty the company shows you, it expects the samekind of loyalty. Pre-Jobs, that was about what people thought they had aright to expect from their employers.In the Jobs era, the young engineers streaming into the Valley had adifferent set of expectations, and they gravitated to companies like Apple.One former Apple executive remembers the first time he spoke to Jobs aboutworking there. “I said, ‘Steve, I really want to come work at Apple, but I don’twant to do anything regular. Can you help me find something really, reallyneat to do?’ ” Nobody at Apple was ever willing to do anything “regular.”Everybody wanted to do something “really, really neat.” The implicit promise at Apple was that everybody would discover, while giving themselvesup entirely to their really neat projects, the same feelings of pleasure andworth and all the rest of it that Jobs had felt when he was building the AppleII. They all wanted that magical experience. Not least of all Steve Jobshimself.N“The hardest thing,” Steve Jobs is saying, “is trying to have a personal life aswell as a work life.” Well, yes. It is late on a Tuesday afternoon, and Jobs isbehind the wheel of his car, en route to a meeting in San Francisco that willstart in an hour. The meeting, it seems obvious, could have been bettertimed. Jobs’ girlfriend, whom he’s been seeing for two years, will be returning to Silicon Valley in, oh, three hours or so. The two of them had spent arare weekend water-skiing—something Jobs says he hasn’t done since hewas a teenager—and though he returned on Sunday to get back to NeXT, shestayed behind for a few days. Before he left, he told her they would have dinner together the night she got back. Now, of course, those plans are out thewindow.Late that afternoon, Jobs spent a few minutes at his Macintosh writingher a page-long note explaining why he wouldn’t be home when she arrived.80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd563/27/084:46:48 PM

Jobs Agoni ste s (Ste ve , T hat Is)57“I miss you terribly,” he wrote. Then he raced to his house, a huge old mansion in the hills of the Valley, to drop off the note.A small thing, perhaps. Or perhaps not. The rumblings around the NeXToffice are that Jobs’ girlfriend thinks he spends too much time working, andthat as a result they don’t have “a life together.” After spending a few dayswith Jobs, you find yourself sympathizing with her. The very next day, Jobscommitted himself to attend what would surely be a lengthy board meetingof Pixar (a computer-graphics company he had bought from George Lucas)in San Francisco on Saturday. He had previously made plans to leave townSunday for meetings in Minneapolis with his new ad agency. So there wentthe weekend. It is hard to have a personal life and a work life; it’s especiallyhard when all the compromises come on the personal side, but that’s the wayit’s always been with Steven Jobs.Why? He is worth, after all, 150 million or so. When he left Apple therewas no adventure he could not have tried. Yet he wound up forming a company in which he is re-creating as closely as possible the life he knew before:the life of not just work but nonstop work, no-other-life work. Why is thisthe path he chose?On the way up to San Francisco, Jobs is musing on this and other matters. “Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time,” hesays, “you have to give up other lives you could be living.” He gives a shrugthat implies that this is a small price. “You have to have a real single-mindedkind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished,”Again, the same it’s-worth-it shrug. “Especially if the desire is not to be abusinessman, but to be a creative person. . . .”But isn’t he a businessman?“My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though Irecognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who buildsneat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful topeople. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the worldof ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch ofincredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it outthemselves. I like all of that very, very much.” There is a note of excitement inhis voice. “I’ve had lots of girlfriends,” he a

Good Guys and Bad Guys Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (and Everything in Between) Joe Nocera PORTFOLIO 80228 i-xii 1-292 r4tr.indd iii 3/27/08 4:46:37 PM