It is May 1997. A furious developer is about to confront Steve Jobs. Steve has just returned to Apple following the acquisition of NeXT and, as a consultant, made the decision to cancel OpenDoc.
The developer, with blond hair and a blue shirt, takes the microphone: —Steve, it’s clear to me that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been doing in the last seven years?
The entire room reacts. —Ouch!
Everyone in that room understands the low blow: during those seven years away from Apple, NeXT’s computers had been a resounding commercial failure.
Steve Jobs remains seated on his stool. He lifts his bottle of Smartwater, brings it to his lips, takes a sip, and stares at the floor.
The silence stretches for five seconds. As he swallows the water, the developer’s attack—“what have you been doing in the last seven years?”—echoes in his head and drags him back to the origin of his scars: to 1985, the year he was exiled from the Macintosh division.
Macintosh sales had plummeted after its launch, and CEO John Sculley decided to strip him of command. The computer had maddening flaws for anyone at that time: it had no hard drive and froze constantly due to a lack of memory.
But to Steve, the Macintosh was a flawless work of art. In Steve's mind, Sculley had crippled the Macintosh by saddling it with a $2,495 price tag. Steve clung to an unshakable dogma: if you created dazzling enough technology, the world would surrender at your feet without looking at the price tag.
During that exile, searching for what to do with his future, Steve had lunch with Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Paul Berg. As the scientist explained the weeks his students lost mixing test tubes by hand, Steve interrupted him: “Why don’t you simulate those experiments on a computer?”. Berg replied that no university had access to machines that powerful: they were too expensive and scarce. Steve’s eyes lit up.
Inside Apple, there was already a secret project to build a machine like that: they called it BigMac and it was led by one of Steve’s favorite engineers, Rich Page.
But one day the phone rang. It was Rich Page on the other end of the line with a dry message: Jean-Louis Gassée had just killed the BigMac project.
At that moment, Steve made the decision to found NeXT to build the computer the universities were asking for.
Upon founding NeXT, he sat representatives from twenty universities at the same table. The department heads described the machine their laboratories needed, but drew a clear red line: their institutional budgets had a cap. To buy the computer by the hundreds and equip their campuses, it could not go over $3,000.
That was the customer’s reality.
Steve listened to them, but held fast to his own philosophy: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
He was passionate about Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said: ‘A faster horse!’”.
Steve had two alternatives: build the $3,000 tool the universities were asking for, or create a technological marvel never seen before. And Steve chose to dazzle with technology.
One of the components that obsessed him the most was storage. At that time, computers used floppy disks; a single one could barely fit a textbook without images. To save programs and assignments, students had to carry entire boxes of floppy disks.
Steve wanted to eliminate floppy disks and replace them with an optical disk. That meant storing an entire library inside a cartridge that fit in a backpack: the equivalent of 200 books stored to make university life easier.
The technology was still experimental, yet Steve was so committed to building the most advanced computer that he made that optical drive the sole storage system of the machine, refusing to include a conventional floppy or hard drive as a backup.
When the engineers fitted the disk into the prototype and put the machine to the test, the screen froze.
Reading that optical library was maddeningly slow: the drive took an eternity to find each file and paralyzed the computer. The very innovation meant to dazzle users made it impossible to work on it.
Forced to patch the flaw with extra hardware, costs began to climb. Worse still, Steve demanded that the casing be cast as a perfect cube of black magnesium packed with cutting-edge components. The universities' budget was completely forgotten.
In 1988, the NeXT computer hit the market at $6,500: more than double the limit set by the universities.
The same man who accused Sculley of ruining the Macintosh by setting a price of $2,495 had just put a $6,500 price tag on his own machine.
Priced out of academic budgets and isolated without everyday applications, the massive orders never arrived. Steve eventually removed the optical drive and launched a cheaper model, but it was too late: his state-of-the-art robotic factory in Fremont, built to produce thousands of computers a month, sat nearly empty, turning out barely four hundred.
In February 1993, reality finally broke Steve. He had to stand in front of his company, lay off more than half of his employees, and shut down the NeXT factory forever.
The creator of the Macintosh had failed at manufacturing computers.
Back in the auditorium in May 1997, the five seconds of silence end.
The developer in the blue shirt is still standing by the microphone, waiting to see how Steve tries to defend himself.
Steve lowers the water bottle, turns for a moment to leave it on the desk behind him, and locks his gaze back on his attacker: —You know? One of the hardest things when you're trying to drive change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas.
And then Steve speaks the truth that cost him seven years to learn: