Welcome to Macintosh Page #4

going to change the world, all right?

We're bringing out Macintosh

for the first time...

...no one's ever seen it,

changing the world.

The second time, obviously,

the world had been changed.

Perhaps the world had been changed

by adopting Windows too.

So the second time

was much more dire...

...sort of digging yourself out of a hole.

The first time was just...

It was like being paid

to go to Disneyland.

Second time was more like,

you know, Vietnam.

Although I wasrt in Vietnam,

so that kind of trivializes it...

...but, you know, it was a war.

The second tour of duty came

when Apple was supposed to die again.

So every 10 years ago,

Apple's supposed to die.

And I went back at the height, or depth...

...of these problems.

Basically to ensure

that the Macintosh cult...

...remained vibrant and alive

and cared for.

And so because I couldn't really

control any medium...

...I started an e-mail list server...

...which had at its peak

about 44,000 subscribers.

And it was only good news.

So one could make the case

that I was blogging...

...before anybody else

knew what blogging was.

I just didn't know it.

So I had a very big list.

Forty-four thousand for, you know...

Even today, 44,000 would be a big list...

...but it was very big back then.

And I would just push out good news.

And it became a source of information...

...so that software developers would

send us notices and special offers...

...and all that, then we'd push it

to the community.

And the community would then

push it out to the rest of the people.

A Guy Kawasaki law

is sales fixes everything.

So when you have great sales,

everybody gets along. Life is good.

Everybody's a visionary. You know,

everybody thinks it's good, right?

When sales sucks, everything sucks.

So sales were sucking.

So Apple was divided into factions.

There was the Jean-Louis Gassee

faction and the Bill Campbell faction.

Campbell believed in marketing, Gasse

believed in engineering. Pick one.

And that kind of tore the company apart.

And the reason why I survived all this...

...is because I never

really joined either camp.

Now, you could make the case...

...that that means

that I was this neutral wimp...

...but I just...

I didn't see the world divided that way.

And so I got along with Sculley

and I got along with Jobs.

I got along with Amelio.

I got along with everybody.

One of the reasons is because

I'd never wanted any of their jobs.

All right? So Sculley wanted to be Steve.

Gassee wanted to be Sculley.

Bill Campbell wanted to be...

I don't know who he wanted to be.

But, you know, that's one of the things

that's pathetic about Silicon Valley...

...is everybody wants to be

something they're not.

And if you're the venture capitalist,

you wanna be the entrepreneur.

Me, I just wanna be

a hockey player, okay?

So everybody wants to be

something they're not.

And at the time,

that was rampant at Apple.

When I got started was 1979...

...when I took spare parts

and built an Apple II.

I tried to figure out how I could attach

musical instruments to the computer...

...which led to why I needed to

learn how to write code...

...which led to quitting college...

...which then led to getting a job...

...and then over the years,

that turned into getting hired at Apple.

I was sort of informally

in the QuickTime group as I was...

...a formal member of the OS team...

...although I didn't really

report too well into that group.

We were always kind of a renegade

kind of a group. But we got sh*t done.

But the work was the Sound Manager,

which was this complete rewrite...

...that ended up

fixing a lot of problems...

...and imported it from all this

nasty assembly code...

...and rewrote it in C, and made it

actually go like 10 times faster.

And then right about the same time

we got the Sound Manager working...

...I started working

inside of the moonlight hours...

...over in the forbidden zone of what

the QuickTime guys were doing.

They were hiding out

in the Networking building.

And the original idea was,

"Now we got these CD-ROMs.

They're not just bigger floppies.

What can we do with them?"

I know. Let's make movies.

And so that's where the postage-stamp

movie idea came from...

...was you couldn't put one on a floppy,

but you could put one on a CD-ROM.

So, you know,

taking advantage of the new media.

So that was the basic idea

for QuickTime.

And then that invented

all these other ideas...

...of how do you compress audio,

how do you compress video...

...how do you stream it, how do you

play it, how do you synchronize it...

...how do you do all these things

in real time, how do you control it?

And then QuickTime turned into

this entire industry...

...based upon that basic idea.

The people on the outside think that,

you know...

...it's like this wonderful world of

Oz or Disney going on...

...and all of us are just all these

brilliant, amazing, happy people.

And it's not.

It's like a sausage factory, man.

You really don't wanna know

how this stuff happens.

A lot of it is just bad arguments

and politics...

...and working around the rules

and not doing the right thing...

...and apologizing for it later,

getting fired a few times.

I mean, that's how things got done.

It's definitely, like, don't pay attention

to the man behind the curtain.

There's a lot of that stuff.

And you really don't wanna know

how this stuff is built.

To me, it's embarrassing, like...

...there's always big flaws

to a lot of the stuff, you know?

There was a computer that we shipped

where the speaker's magnet...

...was right next to the hard drive.

Now, when you played a sound...

...it caused

the hard drive's read-write head...

...to misalign.

So in the midst of, like,

playing your QuickTime movie...

...your computer would completely freeze

because it played a sound.

And I'm like, "What kind of engineers

do we have around here...

...that would put a magnet

right next to your hard drive?"

Jesus Christ, it's just a...

It beeped and it crashed, you know?

Then they wanted me...

This was the solution.

They wanted me to change the decibels

of the speaker...

...so that it wouldn't interfere

with the hard drive.

You're kidding me.

That's classic. See, you know,

engineers are retarded.

They have

some kind of brain damage...

...that allows them

to not have social skills...

...so that they could concentrate

long enough to write code.

But it's a disease.

That's why I had to quit. I mean,

I'm like an engineer in recovery.

I don't wanna write code anymore.

It just makes you retarded.

I mean, get a girlfriend.

Get a life.

There were times

when it was more difficult...

...you know, when Microsoft

was at its strongest.

Yeah, when I think about comparing

Microsoft and Apple...

...I think about the basic values

of the company...

...being almost diametrically opposed.

They have managed

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes