THE TROUBLEMAKERS TODAY THE TROUBLEMAKERS TODAY
After leaving Atari in 1981, Al Alcorn worked on a project, funded in part by Nolan Bushnell’s new technology incubator, that enabled buyers to load games onto blank cartridges dispensed through a vending-type machine. It was a very rudimentary version of downloading software in real time.
In 1986, Alcorn joined Apple as an Apple Fellow. It was a coveted appointment with a job description that thrilled him: change the industry.1 He worked on video compression technology and a project to put the Macintosh operating system on an IBM PC. His boss was Larry Tesler, the Xerox PARC employee who had given Jobs the demonstration of the Alto and then moved to Apple.
After five years at Apple and another four as vice president of engineering at a company that built multimedia slot machines, Alcorn joined Interval Research Corporation, a Palo Alto–based lab and incubator launched by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and David Liddle, formerly of Xerox PARC. Alcorn ran engineering at an Interval-backed company, later sold to Lego, that built “smart” play sets with electronics embedded in figurines and blocks.2 The physical movements of the toys could be mirrored on the screen of an attached personal computer.
Alcorn has since helped to found Hack the Future, a hackfest for middle school and high school students. Soldering iron in hand, he often appears at the local events in a T-shirt with the word MENTOR printed in capital letters across his back.
Fawn Alvarez continued to advance at ROLM after its acquisition by IBM. In 1987, she accepted a job as the assistant to the president of ROLM-IBM, Ray AbuZayyad. When ROLM was sold to Siemens a year later, she did the same job for Peter Pribilla, the CEO of ROLM Systems. These were not secretarial jobs; she functioned more as a chief of staff, calling on her long tenure at ROLM and her experience in production, engineering, finance, and marketing. She had a secretary of her own. She worked for Siemens in various capacities until 1997, after which she became a marketing consultant, finally enjoying a long tenure in a role she had wanted ever since seeing the ROLM employee who had worn lovely suits and fancy hats. In 2005, Alvarez married and changed her name to Fawn Alvarez Talbott. Ten years later, she retired.
The house in Cupertino that Alvarez Talbott’s mother bought for $22,000 in 1970 would sell for more than $1 million today. Stevens Creek Boulevard, the two-lane street that neighborhood kids raced down on bikes, is now six lanes wide, with high-tech companies lining both sides. The orchards are gone.
Alvarez Talbott has left the Valley, as has her mother, Vineta. Both women now live in the Sierra foothills, about an hour and a half from each other. Vineta Alvarez Eubank, vigorous at eighty-one, began investing after retiring and follows the market closely. Fawn Alvarez Talbott is an active volunteer and gardener. She grows much of her own food, including plums not too different from those she picked as a child.
Sandy Kurtzig moved to chair and CEO of ASK in 1984, when board member Ron Braniff became president. Before the move, she had acquired Software Dimensions for ASK for $7.5 million in 1983 and sold its constituent parts for less than $1 million a year later.3 Despite that misstep, by 1991, ASK, with sales of $315 million, was the tenth largest independent software vendor in the world.4 In the decade after Kurtzig left ASK’s presidency, she moved into and out of leadership at the company, at times stepping in as CEO.
The rising wave of personal computing ultimately swamped ASK. Businesses moved away from the minicomputers so central to ASK’s model, but the company never successfully developed a version of MANMAN for personal computers.5 In May 1994, in a series of mergers and acquisitions, ASK, along with five others of the top fifteen independent software companies, was acquired by Computer Associates International. ASK, by then described in the New York Times as “a struggling software supplier,” had two thousand employees and was valued at $310 million.6
Some one hundred MANMAN systems remain in use around the world. ASK’s corporate DNA lives on in today’s enterprise software industry, as former employees have taken on key roles at Oracle, Workday, and Rootstock Software. Kurtzig had several career turns—memoirist, business correspondent for Good Morning America—before returning to entrepreneurship in 2010, when she launched a cloud-based enterprise software company called Kenandy with backing from Salesforce.com, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the venture arm of Larry Sonsini’s firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She currently serves as executive chairman of Kenandy.
In 1984, one year after leaving Apple’s presidency, Mike Markkula started a company, ACM Research, to investigate distributed intelligence control systems.I Today the publicly held company is called Echelon. Its first CEO was Ken Oshman, the ROLM cofounder who told Sandy Kurtzig that ASK was not ready for an IPO in 1980. Early board members included Larry Sonsini, as well as former Apple directors Arthur Rock and Venrock’s Peter O. Crisp.7
Markkula launched other successful businesses—a 14,000-acre cattle ranch and native grass farm on the Northern California coast, a jet center for private aircraft—but most important to him is the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. He and his wife, Linda, seeded the center in 1986 and several years later donated $5 million to establish an endowment.8 The center has developed a much-cited framework for ethical decision-making and runs programs for businesspeople, educators, students, government officials, and medical providers. When the ethics center launched, Markkula feared that the business world was populated by “two generations of ethical agnostics.” He believed that they were not necessarily ill intentioned but made decisions that prioritized “dollars and cents, or their own advancement” without considering ethics. He calls the ethics center “the most bang for my philanthropic buck that I’ve ever gotten.”9
Markkula remained on Apple’s board until 1997, when Steve Jobs, who had left the company a dozen years earlier to launch NeXT, returned and asked him, along with every other Apple director save two, to resign. Markkula and Jobs had been somewhat estranged for years. Jobs felt betrayed by Markkula’s backing John Sculley over him in the power struggle that had pushed him out of Apple in 1985. Markkula thought that Jobs had left Apple in a way that was “unethical,” recruiting employees for NeXT while still chairing the Apple board.10
But the conversation upon Jobs’s return after Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million was long and cordial. The two men walked and talked under under the redwood trees on Markkula’s Woodside estate. Jobs was pensive and genial, seemingly no longer the “John McEnroe of American capitalism,” as Newsweek had once dubbed him.11 Markkula agreed to resign from the Apple board. Inside, he says, he rejoiced. He had wanted to leave for years but feared that the company had been in straits too dire to survive the resignation of the last person linked to its founding.12
As their conversation wound down, Markkula says, he offered Jobs some parting advice: Apple needed to be “opportunistic,” to reinvent itself in much the same way that Hewlett-Packard had transformed itself from an instrument business to a calculator firm to a computer and printer company. He told Jobs that he did not know how Jobs could pull off a similar metamorphosis at Apple—but he needed to, or the company would die. Markkula, the great planner, had no specific plan for such a move; he just wanted his “diamond in the rough,” one of the handful he had hoped would “learn everything I knew and add their own stuff to it and become world leaders,” to make something happen.
Of course, Jobs did. He transformed the struggling computer business into the most valuable company in the world, one that made coveted music players and mobile phones, as well as computers. In the process, he rewrote the rules for three major industries: computing, music, and telephony.
Regis McKenna, the advertising and public relations guru who demystified high technology for the world, sold the advertising side of his business to Chiat\Day in 1981 so he could focus his own firm on strategy consulting and public relations. Throughout the 1980s and well beyond, he continued to work with some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley, including Apple, Intel, Tandem, and ROLM. He also played an integral role in helping the Semiconductor Industry Association make its successful case in Congress for the importance of high-technology industries.
Apple remained particularly important to McKenna. In the mid-1980s, he was the only non-Apple employee to attend executive staff meetings. In that role, he served as a confidant to both John Sculley and Steve Jobs as they battled for control of the company in 1985. Tensions rising, Sculley told the executive staff, “I never had a problem with leadership; I was president of everything since my first grade class, yet I know you question my leadership.”13 He called McKenna into his office and asked, “What will Steve do? Will he leave? Will he blow his brains out? Will he go to India and become a monk? Will he try to tear me down?”14
Jobs, meanwhile, bared his soul: “I need help in growing up that I never had,” he said. “If I were at Kodak, for example, and I acted like an asshole, they would tell me to change or throw me out. But I spent my life at Apple with no one challenging me.”15
Throughout Jobs’s life, McKenna remained among his most trusted counselors and friends. The day after Jobs was pushed out of Apple, he presciently told McKenna, “Maybe we can develop a new, successful product line that would enhance the Apple product line, and they will buy us.”16 When Jobs particularly loved an Apple product, he sent one to McKenna. When a product had problems—when the antenna in the iPhone 4 had reception difficulties, for example—or when Jobs was concerned about Apple’s image, he called McKenna for advice.
In 1995, McKenna sold the public relations side of his company to its employees. He retired from his eponymous firm in 2000 but continued to consult and served for several years as a consulting partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. An accomplished author (five books and dozens of articles), McKenna today serves as a director for several not-for-profit organizations and as an informal adviser to startup companies. He also travels widely, speaking on marketing, strategy, and the history of Silicon Valley.
After leaving Stanford, Reimers founded the licensing program at the University of California, San Francisco, and managed it from 1996 to 1998. He later served as a consultant to universities around the world that were planning to open or operate their own technology transfer offices. In 2008, he was inducted into the IP [Intellectual Property] Hall of Fame in recognition of his role in changing how universities use patents and transfer research to the private sector.
In 2016, cumulative income from the Office of Technology Licensing was nearly $2 billion.17 But Reimers’s influence has extended far beyond the Stanford campus. Before he established the Office of Technology Licensing, most universities used patents simply as a tool to help transfer technology beyond the campus. After, universities used patents to make money, and companies licensed academic intellectual property to build products. When Reimers launched the Office of Technology Licensing, there were nine other such offices in the country. Today, university licensing offices, nearly all established in the wake of the breakthrough recombinant DNA patent, are the norm.18 In 2014 alone, academic research in the United States led to some $28 billion worth of product sales. In the same year, companies created 965 new products based on licensed university patents.19
Reimers has retired to a tidy cottage steps from the beach on the California coast. He spent much of his childhood in this same town, and every day, at the post office or walking down the street, he sees dear friends who have known him for more than seven decades and yet have no idea of the impact he has had on the world around them. He likes it that way.
Bob Swanson stepped down as CEO of Genentech in 1990, after Roche bought 60 percent of the fourteen-year-old company for $2.1 billion. In 1999, three years after retiring from Genentech’s board, he succumbed to brain cancer at the age of fifty-two. The man who at twenty-eight had wanted to change the world and had given himself the courage to do so by imagining his eighty-five-year-old self looking back at his life never made it to eighty-five. “One of the ironies here is he devoted so much of his life to applying this technology to generate medical breakthroughs, drugs that saved countless lives,” says Arthur D. Levinson, a former CEO of Genentech and director of Google and Apple, where he also chairs the board. “But unfortunately, his wasn’t one of them.”20
Genentech was the first company to produce a human protein by splicing a gene into bacteria, the first to produce a drug by genetic engineering, and the first biotechnology company to go public.21 It also set a new standard for the pharmaceutical industry when it allowed its scientists to publish papers on their research, rather than keeping it secret. Today many seminal publications in biology are written by scientists employed by industry, an unimaginable prospect when Genentech launched.22
Over the past four decades, Genentech has produced not only human insulin but human growth hormone, the cancer drugs Avastin and Herceptin, the antianxiety drug Klonopin, the anti-inflammatory Naprosyn, and the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu.23 In 2009, Roche fully acquired Genentech for $46.8 billion. At the acquisition, every share of stock bought at the IPO for $35 in 1980 was worth $4,560.24
In 1996, Bob Taylor retired from Digital Equipment Corporation, where he had started the company’s Systems Research Center. By then, there were around 725 million personal computers in the world, many of them with large screens, graphical user interfaces, a mouse, a word processor, email, and networked printing. The Arpanet had spawned the Internet. The first website was already six years old.
Taylor died on April 13, 2017, at the age of 85. For decades, he had lived in a secluded house overlooking Silicon Valley. Every summer, he hosted a tomato and oyster fest that brought dozens of the world’s leading computer scientists—all of whom had worked for him—to his modest yard on a steep hill.
Taylor’s feelings about technology were complicated. He thought the Internet was generally good for democracy and called the easy access to information that Google provides his “favorite part of the Internet.” He was a witty and regular email correspondent who kept his Kindle full of books. He believed Facebook and Twitter were “wastes of time,” though in many ways the applications do what Taylor dreamed a network of human-centered computing machines could do: create communities that transcend geographic boundaries.
He refused to try to predict the next big trend in computing.
Money never motivated Taylor, who saw lawyers and marketing people as distractions from the main event: research. When people he respected from his lab started or joined companies, he might have bought a bit of stock—that was how he ended up with early stakes in Adobe, Google, and 3Com—but the investments were so small and so not a focus of his attention that when asked about his investing, he talked about the stocks in his 401(k) plan.
Gaining recognition for the right people was the dream of Taylor’s retirement. He had received a number of awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize five years later, but he did not attend either ceremony. When he was inducted into both the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows and the Internet Hall of Fame, he skipped those ceremonies, as well. He did, however, send along comments to be read. “I have . . . some trouble with the way in which we, as a society, implement the idea of awards,” he wrote. “Awards are usually given to individuals. But in computer research, especially in computer systems research, significant achievements are accomplished by teams of people, not just one or two.” To the extent people know his name, he said, it is because the teams he led at Xerox PARC and Digital Equipment Corporation “made me look good.”
Taylor had long pushed for an award to honor group creativity. He liked to quote a Japanese proverb: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”25 It is a fitting epitaph for Taylor and a message for innovators everywhere.
I. Those systems were precursors to today’s Internet of Things. In the Internet of Things, items ranging from household thermostats and lights to industrial robots are connected to both a network and computing power to be more useful or valuable.