Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy Page #3

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He said, "Do you want to sell sugar

water for the rest of your life,

"or do you want to come with me

and change the world?"

Kind of knocked the wind out of me,

because no-one had ever said

anything like that to me before.

Sculley was a pragmatic operator,

a marketing expert who knew exactly

what Apple should do.

What they needed was someone

who could keep the Apple II

commercially alive and generating

cash for about another three years.

After several new product lines

had failed to take off,

the income from the Apple II

was keeping the company alive.

But Apple's hopes of a revival

rested on a new home computer,

the Macintosh,

named after a variety of Apple.

Jobs set out to build a computer

that would blow IBM's PC away.

There was enough of the ordinary

corporate executive about him

to want to beat a rival.

But there was little else

conventional about Steve Jobs.

He wanted computers to be simple

and pleasurable to use.

He wanted our relationship with them

to be more human and intimate.

And that approach to technology has

been Apple's hallmark ever since.

The Macintosh team

was full of rebel spirit.

We were all young, we were all

the same age, and we all thought

we could do better

than has ever been done before.

Jobs thought it would take a year

to build the Macintosh.

In fact, it would take

more than three.

He's got a "reality

distortion field".

Steve wanted the impossible

and he was somehow able

to convince everyone

that the impossible was possible.

Jobs was determined

the Macintosh would be easy to use.

It would have a mouse

and icons on screen,

a first for an affordable

personal computer.

The story of how Jobs brought

that mouse to the world

explodes a myth about him -

That he invented revolutionary

technology.

You see, Jobs didn't

operate in an intellectual vacuum.

Nearby, in Silicon Valley, the Xerox

corporation had a research division

called PARC.

'And the function of spatial

frequency is something like this.'

It was full of free-thinking

technological radicals

and inspirational ideas.

It was just a kind of dream place.

We had a general overall

vision about what we called

"the office of the future."

And that was it. We were told

to figure out how to do that.

Jobs was desperate

to take a look inside

this precious storehouse of ideas.

He got his chance when Xerox

made an investment in Apple

and invited him in.

I demonstrated various technologies

that our group had,

but the things that stood out

to the visitors

were the pointing device, the mouse,

which we hadn't invented.

It had been around for 15 years.

We had just improved it,

but it wasn't something that most

people had ever seen before.

Larry Tesler was demonstrating how

a computer with icons

on the screen could be controlled by

this novel gadget. A mouse.

Jobs couldn't believe

what he was seeing.

He started pacing around the room

very nervously almost,

and then more excitedly and then

he just couldn't hold it back.

He just had to talk.

So, he started saying things like,

"You're sitting on a gold mine.

"This is insanely great.

It is just amazing.

"Why aren't you doing

anything with this?"

Unlike the vast XEROX corporation,

Jobs acted swiftly.

I went into his office,

sat down and said,

"Steve, I've been thinking

about a few product ideas"

and hardly had I got the sentence

out and he said, "Stop, Dean.

"I know exactly what we need to do."

When he said "a mouse",

I looked at him and said "A mouse?"

I had no clue what a mouse was.

Xerox saw the mouse as part

of an expensive business computer.

Jobs saw it very differently.

He gave me

a very clear design brief.

The mouse had to have four things.

The first was we had to be able

to build it for less than $15.

Low cost consumer product. Secondly,

it had to last for two years.

Third, it needed to work on a

regular desktop, Formica or metal.

And then, finally,

he leaned back in his chair,

put his hand on his knee and he

said, "And work on my Levi's."

The mouse,

as we now know it, was born.

Jobs had tweaked existing

technology to great effect,

just as he would over

the next three decades.

More editor than inventor,

Jobs had an instinct for innovation,

pouncing on a good idea

when he saw one.

The difference between invention

and innovation is that you execute.

You take an, an idea

and you turn it into reality.

You bring it into the marketplace.

Steve connected the dots.

He saw a little bit of this,

he saw a little bit of that,

and he said, "We need to do this.

"We need to take it from an

expensive business experience

"to a personal low-cost experience

and we'll build a company from it."

Along with making the Macintosh

easy to use,

Jobs brought

an aesthetic sensibility

to the computer's design.

A long-time follower

of Zen meditation,

he believed in the beauty

of simplicity.

When I went to his home

for the first time,

I was struck because there was

almost no furniture in the house.

Um...in his bedroom was a small bed,

a photograph of Einstein

over his bed,

another photograph of Gandhi.

In the living room

was a Tiffany lamp,

no place to sit. You know,

we would just sit on the floor.

Steve just was not into possessions.

He was not into money,

he was completely into

the things he believed in.

That integrity went through every

aspect of his life.

His devotion to the products,

to the work, to the ethic.

It permeated everything

and this desire for aesthetic beauty

the importance of the things

that you don't see,

what lies beneath the surface,

and in that sense,

I think there's

a kind of seamless philosophy

that binds everything together.

As the Macintosh neared completion,

the stakes were growing

higher for Apple.

In autumn 1983,

the company's share price tumbled,

wiping nearly half a billion

dollars from its value.

A new home computer

was on its way from IBM

and other versions of the PC

were flooding the market.

Worse still, the man Apple had

turned to, to write extra software

for the Mac was about to

steal a march on them.

Relations with the young Bill Gates

were strained from the start.

Bill Gates would

fly down from Seattle,

down to Cupertino to give

updates on the project.

And, often times, Steve would just

yell at Bill for two straight hours.

And then Bill would leave

and get on a plane and fly back.

We tend to think of Bill Gates

as a buttoned-up geek,

but in this instance, it was Jobs

who showed he was far from laidback.

He thought Apple

should keep complete control

of its software and hardware,

Gates wanted to produce

software for both Apple and the PC.

Tensions came to a head when they

were both working on the Macintosh.

Jobs began to suspect Gates

might be taking advantage

of his inside knowledge

of Apple's work.

Steve Jobs was racing to ensure

the Macintosh

was the first personal computer

to have icons on the screen.

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