Try to imagine the second half of the twentieth century without the personal computer. Less than twenty-five years after its development, it has transformed how we think, work, and communicate. Try to remember the original computers, so unlike the beige box and glowing monitor that now sit on the desks of 30 million people in the United States alone. The first computers were behemoths, so large they filled entire rooms, so expensive only institutions could own them, and so elitist they responded to commands only specialists had mastered. The punch cards that they consumed by the millions bore a message that summed up the clear and present danger of depersonalization they seemed to pose: Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.
But by the mid-1980s the computer had changed utterly. It had evolved into a powerful but unintimidat-ing small appliance for organizing and sharing information. It had become compact enough to sit on a desk or slip into a briefcase. It was benign, even playful. It was cheap, easy to use, even user-friendly. Today millions of us turn reflexively to our personal computers to balance our checkbooks, chat with people who share our oddest obsessions, write books, battle digital demons and super villains, influence the direction of prime-time TV shows, research virtually anything, doodle, forge new careers, and send messages to our friends in the middle of the night. Not surprisingly, this remarkable tool—described by one of its inventors as “a product that has a rebel heart”—is the result of several Great Groups.
Its story begins, as developments that change the world so often do, with a personal vision. That vision belonged to Vannevar Bush, coordinator for United States-funded scientific research during World War II. In 1945, Bush published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think.” In it he proposed a new technology for managing information, which he called a memex. This new tool, he explained, “is a device in which an individual stores his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” The user of the memex could create personalized information “trails,” using keyboards and screens to access and manipulate data stored in many forms. The user would sit at the desklike memex and travel through the world of information. Thus Bush wrote, as if he were able to look fifty years into the future, “The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology.”
Bush’s visionary article was read by a naval radar technician named Douglas C. Engelbart, stationed in the Philippines. Inspired by the notion of interactivity at the heart of Bush’s vision, Engelbart became one of the earliest champions of the computer as an interactive machine—not merely a superior cruncher of numbers, but a tool for enhancing the human mind. Encouraged by the introduction of computer timesharing, Engelbart established the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and, with a 1964 grant from NASA, set out to make Bush’s vision a reality. By 1968, Engelbart had already made two startlingly original breakthroughs in the embryonic art of personal computing—the mouse and windows.
Engelbart demonstrated his discoveries in the fall of 1968 at a national meeting of computer scientists. John Markoff described that landmark occasion in a New York Times article on the now highly evolved art of computer demos. Engelbart sat at a desklike workstation in front of several thousand of his peers and effectively ended the era of punch-card computing. “People were amazed,” William English, an SRI colleague, recalled. “In one hour he defined the era of modern computing.”
While Engelbart was able to dazzle his colleagues, he was not able to turn his pioneering insights and inventions into the first viable personal computer. Many reasons seem to account for Engelbart s limited success. SRI apparently regarded his work as peripheral; several gifted colleagues are said to have found him difficult and left his lab; and, worst of all, he eventually lost his federal funding. For whatever reasons, Engelbart s Augmentation Research Center did not become personal computing’s first Great Group. That distinction goes to the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, a research and development adjunct of the Xerox Corporation.
Established in 1970, PARC would quickly develop the first user-friendly computer, called the Alto. As more and more of the country’s best thinkers joined the staff, it became a place electric with ideas and the sense that the future was being forged there. Enlightened leadership at PARC enabled its resident geniuses to become a Great Group. But even its sophisticated leaders couldn’t keep PARC from becoming a textbook example of how innovation can become detached from commercial exploitation. That story is ably told by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (1988).
But in 1970 nothing had yet been fumbled. Alan Kay was one of the first computer wizards asked to join PARC and, at thirty, among the oldest. At fourteen, Kay had encountered Bush’s vision of the memex machine once removed, in a story by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The idea had fascinated Kay ever since, a thread that ran through his highly original exploration of biology, mathematics, music, and other disciplines.
In an interview in Wired magazine, Steve Jobs made a shrewd observation about creativity. “Creativity is just connecting things,” he said. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” Exposed to art, music, and science from birth and a voracious and far-ranging reader, Kay had a vast number of experiential dots to connect.
In his doctoral dissertation at the University of Utah, Kay had described an interactive computer that would be easy to use and would “aid in the visualization and realization of provocative notions.” FLEX—the name of both the machine and its language—was not technically feasible at the time. But it was a major step toward clarifying the mental picture of the personal computer that would eventually result in the Macintosh and in the millions of IBM clones that use Windows.
Kay attributes much of the success of PARC to Bob Taylor, who headed the most influential of its three component divisions, the Computer Science Laboratory. (Kay is now an Apple Fellow, based in Los Angeles, one of six or so individuals retained by Apple because they “have made extraordinary technical or leadership contributions to personal computing.”) Taylor advanced the cause of interactivity during the late ‘60s as chief administrator for computer grants at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Administration, or ARPA. (It was Taylor, when he was at NASA, who had funded Engelbart’s work on the mouse.)
At PARC, Taylor’s first and most important task was recruitment. He wanted to fill PARC with people with rare intelligence and creativity and to see how far they could push the boundaries of computer science. Often a Great Group begins with a great network. At ARPA, Taylor had come to know all the leading computer scientists in the country. Like Disney, Taylor didn’t want people who were simply good. He sought to hire only the best. Kay says that Taylor believed, “You can’t pile together enough good people to make a great one.” According to Kay, Taylor was a “connoisseur of talent.” He loved talent, and he believed he usually knew it when he saw it. “There were two or three kinds of sparkle in a persons eyes that he had come to trust,” Kay says. Taylor’s tendency to associate greatness with two or three personality types resulted in his missing some great hires, but not many, in Kay’s view.
From the outset, Taylor maximized his chances of assembling a Great Group by looking for people who could work collaboratively Taylor was willing to sacrifice the occasional disruptive genius for the good of a group who would enhance each other’s work, not hinder it. He believed that collaborative skills were especially important in systems-oriented research such as PARC was undertaking.
At PARC, the selection process itself helped build the group. Candidates were not only interviewed; they also had to give a talk before the assembled staff and field probing, sometimes sharp questions and comments. It was a grueling experience, an ordeal, and thus a time-honored way of creating fraternity. Candidates who survived had built-in support from the others. “At PARC everybody had to want the next person to come in,” Kay says. Existing members saw a successful candidate “as someone who was going to make it more fun for them.” Acceptance was a high honor, affirmation that you were among the best and the brightest, and everyone was aware of it. “This is really a frightening group of people, by far the best I know of as far as talent and creativity,” Kay said of the group in 1972. “The people here all have track records and are used to dealing lightning with both hands.”
Recruitment was critical for several reasons. Taylor believed in the ARPA creed of choosing people over projects when funding research. Like George Pake, who headed both PARC as a whole and its science lab, Taylor believed that good science was done from the bottom up. You hired great people and turned them loose on projects that reflected their unique talents and passions. They told you what they needed to do. The more easily the individuals interacted, the less distracted from their mission they would be. Collaboration was formally encouraged. “You could spend 40 percent of your time working as ‘hands’ on somebody else’s project,” Kay says.
The quality of mind at PARC was quite rare. Only the Manhattan Project among the groups in this book had a comparable concentration of genius. But any project that requires excellence creates a demand for meticulous recruiting. When Tom West was putting together his Eagle project at Data General, described by Tracy Kidder in The Soul of a New Machine, he did not have Taylor’s luxury of assembling a creative dream team from a pool of talent with which he was long familiar. West and colleague Carl Alsing talked long and hard about whether they should recruit “kids,” novice engineers, for the demanding project. They decided that it was crucial to hire people who knew more about the current state of computing than they did, even if it made West and Alsing feel superannuated. They had to be willing to hire people good enough to replace them, to be, in Kidder’s term, “their own assassins.” The confidence to seek out excellence is perhaps the first rule of recruiting and the one most frequently broken. Great Groups are always created by people willing, even eager, to recruit people more talented than they.
Because the talent pool at Data General was known only by its credentials, West and Alsing looked for direct evidence that candidates were suited for the project. Alsing thought one recruit would probably have a knack for writing computer code—a complex and creative task—because he had made a complicated metal sculpture. West and Alsing also sought candidates who were willing to “sign up,” or commit themselves, by renouncing other involvements for the duration of the project.
At PARC, Taylor’s strategy for letting creativity flourish was to “get really great people together and manage the social dynamic,” Kay says. “Managing the environment was what he was good at.” While at ARPA, Taylor had thought systematically about how best to manage research, finding take-home lessons in the behavior of project leaders he had observed in the course of handing out federal money. As Smith and Alexander write, the resulting model emphasized four things: recruitment, structure, communications, and tools.
Like Disney in its halcyon days, the Computer Science Lab had a flat, nonpyramidal structure, with all forty-plus scientists reporting directly to Taylor. This allowed Taylor to stay in touch with all the work going on in the lab, and it also freed the group from any distracting concerns about title or status. You were as good as what you were doing. The scientists could move from one project to another, which meant, member Chuck Thacker recalled, the best projects attracted the best people and “as a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.” Taylor understood instinctively that he couldn’t force the direction of such a high-powered group. He had to let his people do what only they could do, and then trust in natural selection to allow the very best ideas to emerge from the process.
Taylor offered his group a rare opportunity: the freedom to do basic research for a handsome corporate salary. But, for most, the money hardly mattered. Taylor had assembled a group of people who wanted nothing less than to reinvent computer science. A key element in Taylor’s unusually capable and respectful leadership was communication. Sharing information is essential to a Great Group. The principal mechanism for doing so at PARC was the weekly meeting. These so-called Dealer meetings were modeled on the annual conferences that Taylor had started at ARPA, at which computer scientists with ARPA grants gathered to share their current research and submit it to the scrutiny of their peers. At these meetings a collective vision of the future of computing, including interactivity, began to emerge. (Kay recalls a metaphor from that era: “The ARPA dream was a magnetic field, and we were little iron filings lining up in that.”)
Taylor knew better than to burden his gifted team with arbitrary rules. If some were arrogant, so be it. It was a small enough price to pay for talent (the attitude was pretty much “we don’t care if they’re prima donnas, as long as they can sing”). But the weekly meeting was mandatory. “There was only one rule not to be broken at PARC,” Kay says. “There was one weekly meeting you had to go to, and you had to stay until the end.”
Each week, participants grabbed a beanbag chair from the pile as they came into the meeting. At these often heated sessions, every member of the group was exposed to the ideas and fragmentary accomplishments of the others. Those “bits and pieces,” as Taylor called them, were what everyone might have to build on in his or her own research. Thus the weekly meeting served as a simple but remarkably efficient structure for exposing everyone to information that might prove key somewhere down the line. The weekly meeting allowed information to be shared without resorting to time-consuming reports and memos. It also allowed tensions and disagreements to surface and be wrangled out on the spot. The meetings were a reflection of Taylor’s understanding of the dynamics of extraordinary groups. “No organization works beyond the size you can get all the principals together in a room and thrash out the issues before you go home,” Kay says.
Taylor was also sensitive to the critical importance of his group’s having the right tools. Most often, that meant tools they created themselves. In the ARPA community, everyone was both a hardware and a software person. “You had this group that was able to roll its own,” Kay says. Being able to create their own tools allowed Kay and his colleagues to avoid the common frustration of having to work around the limits of inferior or inappropriate technology made by others. “Ninety percent of the code written today is getting around other people’s mistakes,” he says.
Cutting-edge technology is often a factor in the success of Great Groups, and PARC was no exception. Early on, the group faced a technology crisis, one that helped spark the group to greatness and also reflected just how far removed from the rest of the company PARC really was. Xerox had paid more than $900 million in its stock to acquire Scientific Data Systems shortly before PARC was created. It was Xerox’s original intention to allow SDS to exploit any commercially viable discoveries in computing made at PARC. SDS had already produced a computer called the Sigma, and it was assumed by Xerox that PARC would use the advanced Sigma 7 in its research. But Taylor’s people didn’t want to use the Sigma. The SDS machine was inferior, the product of an outmoded paradigm, in the group’s view. It was not interactive, nor was it compatible with ARPA software. The group argued that having to adapt the Sigma for its purposes would set its work back several years. Instead, the group wanted to buy Digital Equipment Corporation machines designed for use with ARPA software. SDS argued that such a move would undermine the reputation of Xerox’s own product, the Sigma. It was an ugly battle that was finally resolved when George Pake threatened to quit unless the group was allowed to pursue a compromise and make its own computer. In eighteen months, PARC created a time-sharing machine with integrated-circuit memory. It was impishly dubbed the MAXC after SDS’s Max Palevsky.
The willingness of PARC’s leadership to battle the home office inspired enormous loyalty among members of the group. In putting himself on the line, Pake played the crucial role that General Groves had served in the Manhattan Project and that Kelly Johnson played at the Skunk Works. Most of the scientists at Los Alamos disliked Groves, who had a perverse knack for irritating them but who did a first-rate job of representing their interests with the governmental bodies they depended on. At Xerox, Pake, Taylor, and the other division heads were usually able to persuade the decision makers of the urgency of the PARC group s needs. This function is never more vital than when an elite group is doing something unprecedented and thus by its very nature is threatening to people who are more comfortable with what has been than with what might be. At PARC, Taylor, especially “put his body between Xerox and us,” Kay says, still obviously impressed by Taylor’s willingness to sacrifice his career “to protect his people.” Taylor resigned from PARC in 1983 after being ordered to reorganize his lab along more conventional lines and to stop criticizing other parts of Xerox. He then set up a computer research operation in Palo Alto for Digital Equipment Corporation.
Taylor brought an almost religious zeal to his work of advancing the state of computing. Tirelessness, certainty of the importance of the task, unwavering focus—these were the qualities that Taylor brought to PARC and that he either recognized or inspired (probably some of both) in others. Born in Texas in 1932, the son of a Methodist minister, Taylor could talk about his work in religious terms. “Back then, people believed they were called to the ministry,” Taylor said. “So I grew up assuming that whatever you did as a vocation had to have that kind of dedication under it.”
Taylor had brought Kay into PARC to spark ideas throughout the organization. Kay had his own research unit in the third of the center’s components, the Systems Science Laboratory. Here he was developing some of the ideas he had articulated earlier in describing the FLEX machine in his dissertation. The result was Smalltalk, a computer language that reflected his insight that computers were a medium, not simply a tool, and his belief that a computer should be simple enough for a child to use. (The computer that ran Smalltalk had a TV monitor for the display, a keyboard, and a mouse.) While many other computer pioneers had been preoccupied with the requisite mathematics, Kay was creating a whole new way of thinking about how machines and people might interact. His influences included the developmental and educational theories of Maria Montes-sori, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner and the proponents of the Inner Game of Tennis and the Suzuki method of teaching violin. The computer that was evolving at PARC was a learning environment, not simply a mechanism for displaying and processing information. It would be easy to learn because most of the guesses you make on it turned out to be right. This notion of intuitive computing amounted to a revolution.
Kay’s Smalltalk was the first object-oriented programming language. Another defining feature of computing today, object orientation allows the user to perform functions by sending messages to individual computational or software objects. The user need never be aware of the internal commands that are triggered by the messages. The defining metaphor for this innovation was the biological cell, which performs specific functions and communicates with other cells. However dramatic his successes at PARC, Kay says that his aspirations were greater than anything he actually achieved. Since seeing Seymour Papert s work with children and computers at MIT in 1968, Kay had wanted to develop an interactive laptop-type computer that even a child could use. It would be as portable as a book. (In conversation, Kay talks about the invention that helped democratize learning in the Western world. The ideal size had been determined by Aldus Manutius in the sixteenth century, when he scaled books down from the imposing size of most volumes then in libraries to something small enough to carry in a saddlebag.) Kay called his new kind of computer the Dynabook.
In 1977, Kay described the Dynabook, dubbed the most famous computer that was never made, this way: “Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.”
It would be fifteen years before the world actually had the powerful laptops that Kay imagined while at PARC.
When Xerox decided not to develop the Dynabook, the Computer Science Lab’s Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker began working on what would become the Alto, the first successful personal computer and the one that Apple, not Xerox, would ultimately develop commercially. The Alto had many of the features that are standard in the modern PC—bit mapping, which assigns a specific bit of memory to each pixel that appears on the monitor, a graphical user interface, and a mouse. The metaphor that controlled the design of the display was the desktop, Kay’s inspiration in the direction of user-friendliness. Different tasks were represented on the screen at the same time, as if they were pieces of paper on a desk, in the form of overlapping windows. The Alto was revolutionary in another way, too. It was playful. The scientists chose Cookie Monster from Sesame Street to be the first image on their new machine. In addition to creating the Alto, the first-generation scientists of PARC developed the first easy-to-learn word-processing program, the first local computer network, and the first laser printer.
Although none of these would have existed without the coordinated efforts of thinkers of the stature of Kay, Lampson, and others, Bob Taylor was the maestro of PARC’s success. “Without Taylor it would have been chaos,” Robert X. Cringely writes in his popular history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires. “Bob Taylor’s function was as a central switching station, monitoring the flow of ideas and work and keeping both going as smoothly as possible. And although he wasn’t a computer scientist and couldn’t actually do the work himself, Taylor’s intermediary role made him so indispensable that it was always clear who worked for whom. Taylor was the boss. They called it ‘Taylor’s lab.’ “
In Cringely’s view, Taylor did nothing less than create “the ideal environment for basic computer research, a setting so near to perfect that it enabled four dozen people to invent much of the computer technology we have today.” Taylor was the epitome of the leader as facilitator. He understood the wisdom of an observation that Xerox’s chief scientist and PARC advocate Jack Goldman had clipped from a newspaper and hung in his office: “There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.”
The people who were at PARC remember it as the greatest time of their lives. “It was the only time I’ve ever been part of a critical mass for doing great things,” Kay says. “It was the most fun I ever had.” Chuck Thacker described PARC as “the largest continuous piece of creative output that I have seen anywhere. And it was like being right there at the Creation. A lot of people worked harder than I had ever seen, or have seen since, doing a thing that they all thought was worthwhile, and really thought would change the world.”
In hindsight, it is hard to imagine why Xerox chose not to exploit the Alto commercially Lack of vision at the very top of the corporation was one reason, but not the only one. The sense of being an elite team that flourished at PARC and energized its staff had a less attractive side as well. The PARC scientists were rude to, even disdainful of, Xerox officials whom they regarded as uninitiated in the mysteries of computing (the unanointed were sometimes called “toner heads,” an allusion to the fluid required by the company’s famous copiers). Bob Potter, who headed the computer-engineering facility that Xerox established in Dallas during the PARC era, was one corporate decision maker who felt the sting of PARC’s collective scorn. “I went out there and I sat in their beanbags,” he recalls in Fumbling the Future. “But I just couldn’t get anything out of them. I even told them I was their savviest, best customer in the corporation. But they were only interested in their own thing. They thought they were four feet above everybody else. What the PARC people never understood was that they were supposed to help the less fortunate, less intelligent rest of the world.”
What Xerox fumbled, Apple gleefully recovered.
The occasion was, as Steven Levy puts it in Insanely Great, a “daylight raid,” conducted with Xerox’s blessing. Xerox’s money managers had agreed to allow Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and several of his staff to look at PARC’s technology in exchange for a good price on a block of Apple stock. As a result, in December 1979—six years after the Great Group at PARC had conceived and built the first Alto—Steve Jobs and his coterie got a jump-start on the Macintosh. At a demonstration of the Alto at PARC headquarters, the Apple contingent saw the entire panoply of PARC breakthroughs, from pop-up menus to the mouse. Larry Tesler, who conducted the demonstration for PARC, was struck by the intelligence of the questions the Apple people asked.
Tesler, who later left PARC for Apple, told Levy, “It was almost like talking to someone in the Group. But better, because they wanted to get it out into the world.”
Did they ever. Levy describes the scene. “Why aren’t you doing anything with this?” Jobs wondered aloud. “This is the greatest thing! This is revolutionary!” On the short drive back to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Jobs and the others talked about how they could use what they had seen to create a revolutionary computer of their own. As Levy writes, Apple now had the key component for building a new kind of computer: a paradigm. “By the time Xerox noticed they had the idea, it was already much too late. Apple had gone off to start the revolution without Xerox.”
Although Jobs was cofounder of Apple, he had never been its technical leader—that had been Steve Wozniak s role. But it was Jobs who immediately understood that what PARC had developed was the future of computing. As he told Wired magazine in 1996, “When I went to Xerox PARC in 1979, I saw a very rudimentary graphical user interface. It wasn’t complete. It wasn’t quite right. But within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday.”
Jobs’s genius had always been for marketing the products made by Wozniak and the others. Now he had a vision of his own—granted, not an original vision, but one that he could take ownership of. All he needed to do was to build the machine, market it in his own inimitable fashion, and get it shipped. The story of the Macintosh is now a Silicon Valley legend: how Jobs forced Jef Raskin out of the existing Macintosh project and put his own brilliant and adolescent stamp on it; how he gathered a small group of talented programmers, designers, and marketers and alternately inspired them and bullied them into making something “insanely great”; how he instilled in his Great Group the sense that they were a supremely gifted band of rebels, taking on other project teams within Apple as well as the rest of the digital world.
Apple, which started in the mid-1970s in a garage, was famous for its freewheeling atmosphere, even as the company grew and became more corporate. As the head of the Macintosh team, Jobs succeeded in imbuing his group with some of the original Apple spirit. They moved into their own building, Bandley 3, and began working 100-hour weeks. Jobs promised them they were going to build a machine that would “put a dent in the universe.” They were not engineers or marketers, they were buccaneers, cunning underdogs, going up against the Establishment in the name of excellence and innovation. “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy!” Jobs urged in one of his trademark epigrams, and they raised a skull and crossbones over Bandley.
Jobs had a genius for building group identity. He handed out distinctive T-shirts and offered such childish but effective incentives as buying pineapple pizza for everyone if they completed a particularly difficult task by a certain time. He shrouded their work in mystery, insisting that no outsider be told what they were up to. The Macintosh was their Manhattan Project, their Skunk Works—a secret project of life-changing importance. Secrecy has long been a passion of Great Groups. Whether national security requires it or not, secrecy serves to distinguish those who know from those who don’t, binding the insiders that much closer together.
It is instructive to compare Jobs s leadership at Apple with Taylors at PARC. Taylor was no saint. He tended to have a binary view of people. As one of the men who worked under him said, “Taylor only had two modes: either you were the greatest thing that ever walked the earth or you were scum.” But Taylor never abused the members of his group, as Jobs did at Apple. Jobs was notorious for what the people who suffered it called Management by Walking Around. He would suddenly appear in Bandley, looking at people s work and making scathing comments, even when he had no relevant expertise. “This sucks!” was a favorite Jobsian critique.
Jobs was only twenty-four when he found the paradigm of a lifetime at PARC. His youth and that of other Apple staff prompted the joke, “What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts?” Answer: “The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.” Perhaps Jobs should simply be forgiven for what can most kindly be described as an immature leadership style. But his behavior clearly undermined his authority. According to Levy, Jobs’s team routinely joked about the Reality Distortion Field he carried around with him. Behind his back, they often did whatever they thought best, as when they added the capacity for additional memory to the woefully underequipped Mac. What was the real cost of Jobs’s uncivil behavior? How much did he slow down the Mac effort, instead of advancing it, by ratcheting up the stress level? How much time and emotional energy did team members lose to bracing for surprise attacks from their leader? Decency in the workplace, especially one that depends for its success on the talent and devotion of its employees, isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do. The talent is your treasure. You don’t chew it up.
Among the major talents on the Mac team was Susan Kare. A defining feature of the Macintosh is that it has a personality, and much of the credit for that goes to Kare, who designed its famous garbage can and other icons. Kare’s expertise was very different from the programming and engineering skills of most of her colleagues. Brought into the project by Andy Hertzfeld, whom she knew from high school, Kare had a doctorate in fine arts. She also has a gift for an art form that she all but invented—designing the pinky-sized images of typewriters and other objects that users of computers with graphical interfaces point to and click on. Kare, who now has her own studio in San Francisco, designed the Mac’s typefaces as well as its icons. After leaving Apple, she created a series of whimsical icons for rival Microsoft’s Windows 3.0.
Jobs made critical contributions to the development of the Mac, including insisting on its elegant design. Bill Gates has said that the Mac would never have existed without Jobs, and Kay paid him the compliment of saying that his personal computer was the “first worth criticizing” (which Kay, already an Apple Fellow, did in a 1984 memo titled “Would You Buy a Honda with a One-Gallon Gas Tank?”).
Much has been made of the fact that people on the Mac team worked with fire in their eyes. How much of that was attributable to Jobs, and how much of it was the intrinsic pleasure associated with doing something challenging and important probably doesn’t matter. “Everyone who worked there identified totally with their work—we all believed we were on a mission from God,” Randy Wigginton said afterwards. Everyone on the team had invested a part of himself or herself in this first lovable computer. In an act that symbolized their creative collaboration, the Mac group wrote their signatures for a little plate to be installed inside each machine. They would know it was there even if no one else ever saw it.
The first Macintoshes shipped in 1984, years later than anyone who had been with Jobs at the Alto demonstration in 1979 would have predicted. Nor was the Macintosh a great commercial success initially But the people who made the Mac were as proud of their involvement in the project as the people who made Bambi were of theirs. Steve Capps said the Mac experience was “the best thing I ever did in my life.” Andy Hertzfeld told Levy: “We never doubted that the way we did things would catch on. The key thing is that we kept the Apple II spirit, the crazy irreverence, the anti-authority flavor. Macintosh tells people as they use it, ‘You don’t have to take things too seriously’ It was great to make a product that has a rebel heart.”
Steve Jobs once wrote on an easel during one of his pep talks, “The journey is the reward.” Lofty goals, great ambition, a sense of being the best and having the potential to change the world often transmogrifies a Great Group’s relentless labor into something remembered as golden, even when conditions are harsh. Commercial success doesn’t have to be part of the equation. Most members of the Great Group at PARC do not seem unduly distressed that their work led only to the Macs and Windows-driven PCs that are everywhere today. In part, that reflects the fact that the members of the PARC group saw themselves primarily as scientists. And as Alan Kay says, “The main difference between scientists and engineers is that engineers want to make things and scientists want to understand them.” The PARC people wanted to understand how information could be stored and transferred and manipulated as never before, and, to a remarkable degree, they succeeded. The Mac people wanted to make—and ship—an insanely great machine. They succeeded as well.
But at Apple the price was high. Marriages and other relationships floundered under the pressure. The Mac team was exhausted by the time they got their machine out the door. They simply didn’t have the energy to make the fixes the computer needed or to start other projects. Some left the company. The relentless fervor that Jobs brought to creating and promoting the Mac seems to have been most effective—and least destructive—when exercised at a distance. If you actually worked for Jobs, he took time out from preaching the Mac gospel to meddle in your life. For example, he started the practice of having Apple employees share rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings. The reason, according to Cringely, was “to limit bed hopping, not to save money. Apple is a very sexy company, and Jobs wanted his people to lavish that libido on the products rather than on each other.”
A wiser, less self-centered leader would have known that the Mac team was headed for a postpartum depression of epic proportions and would have tried to ease the pain, as West did at Data General. Indifferent or oblivious, Jobs busied himself presenting Macs to Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and other celebrities.
In his forties, Jobs seems to have mellowed, as a leader if not as a crusader for Mac-style computing. As head of NeXT Software and of Pixar, the computer-animation firm that scored big with Toy Story, Jobs is still a visionary, but he seems to have learned how to lead without bullying. Jobs gives the lie to E Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that there are no second acts in American life. Since leaving Apple, Jobs has found another niche and even remade the fortune, thanks to Pixar stock, that he lost when he angrily unloaded his depressed Apple shares a decade ago. As a corporate leader, Jobs no longer seems bent on turning the workplace into a dysfunctional family with an abusive head. And Jobs’s message is still resonant. Today the Macintosh is both a computer and a secular religion. In a poignant piece in the New York Times, Mac user Lloyd Krieger described his life with the machine and expressed the hope that he would never have to give up this symbol of his youthful, rebellious creativity for a clunky old PC, even if it is cheaper and comes with more software. Why would anybody switch to Windows 95 when he or she could have a real Mac? Krie-ger wondered. “Why listen to Harry Connick Jr. when you can listen to Frank Sinatra?”
Although Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, his vision of the Macintosh as a cause and not simply a product may save the troubled company yet. Apple has hired back Guy Kawasaki, who was one of Jobs’s original “evangelists” (that was the title on their business cards), as one of its half-dozen Apple Fellows. Kawasaki’s mission, which he has accepted, is to keep the Apple cult alive. Kawasaki spreads Good News about the Mac in such forums as an Internet newsletter, where the standard Apple response to Windows 95 is “Been there. . . done that.” “My goal,” Kawasaki says, “is to carry the Macintosh torch and save computer users from the gates of hell.” Jobs couldn’t have said it better himself.
What PARC dreamed of and developed on a limited scale, Apple sent out into the world, thanks to Steve Jobs. In one of the great ironies of computer history, Jobs once charged Bill Gates, whose Windows software makes every computer a watered-down Mac, with lifting Apple’s ideas. “No, Steve,v Gates countered, “I think it’s more like we both have this rich neighbor named Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, found I’d been there first, and said, ‘No fair, I wanted to steal the TV set!’ “