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What was NeXT


Image by jurvetson
For the special tribute issue of BusinessWeek that is coming out tomorrow, I tried to honor Steve Jobs in a small way with my memories of the NeXT days.

Here is the version I wrote (the print edition has several sentences edited out).

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The book of Jobs is a powerful parable of passion, parsimony and people.

Steve Jobs was intensely passionate about his products, effusing an infectious enthusiasm that stretched from one-on-one recruiting pitches to auditorium-scale demagoguery. It all came so naturally for him because he was in love, living a Shakespearean sonnet, with tragic turns, an unrequited era of exile, and ultimately the triumphant reunion. At the personal and corporate levels, it is the archetype of the Hero’s Journey turned hyperbole.

The NeXT years were torture for him, as he was forcibly estranged from his true love. When we went on walks, or if we had a brief time in the hallway, he would steer the conversation to a plaintive question: “What should Apple do?” As if he were an exile on Elba, Jobs always wanted to go home. “Apple should buy NeXT.” It seemed outrageous to me at the time; what CEO of Apple would ever invite Jobs back and expect to keep their job for long?

The Macintosh on his desk at NeXT had the striped Apple logo stabbed out, a memento of anguish scratched deep into plastic.

The NeXTSTEP operating system, object-oriented frameworks, and Interface Builder were beautiful products, but they were stuck in what Jobs considered the pedestrian business of enterprise IT sales. Selling was boring. Where were the masses? The NeXTSTEP step-parents sold to a crowd of muggles. The magic seemed misspent.

Jobs was still masterful, relating stories of how MCI saved so much time and money developing their systems on NeXTSTEP. He persuaded the market research firms IDC and Dataquest that a new computer segment should be added to the pantheon of mainframe, mini, workstation, and PC. The new market category would be called the “PC/Workstation,” and lo and behold, by excluding pure PCs and pure workstations, NeXT became No. 1 in market share. Leadership fabricated out of thin air.

During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation.

But Jobs was sleepwalking through backwaters of stodgy industries. And he was agitated by Apple’s plight in the press. Jobs reflected a few years later, “I can’t tell you how many times I heard the word ‘beleaguered’ next to ‘Apple.’ It was painful. Physically painful.”

When the miraculous did happen, and Apple bought NeXT, Jobs was reborn. I recently spoke with Bill Gates about passion: “Most people lose that fire in the belly as they age. Except Steve Jobs. He still had it, and he just kept going. He was not a programmer, but he had hit after hit.” Gates marvels at the magic to this day.

Parsimony

Jobs was the master architect of Apple design. Often criticized for bouts of micromanagement and aesthetic activism, Steve’s spartan sensibilities accelerated the transition from hardware to software. By dematerializing the user interface well ahead of what others thought possible, Apple was able to shift the clutter of buttons and hardware to the flexible and much more lucrative domain of software and services. The physical thing was minimized to a mere vessel for code.

Again, this came naturally to Jobs, as it is how he lived his life, from sparse furnishings at home, to sartorial simplicity, to his war on buttons, from the mouse to the keyboard to the phone. Jobs felt a visceral agitation from the visual noise of imperfection.

When Apple first demonstrated the mouse, Bill Gates could not believe it was possible to achieve such smooth tracking in software. Surely, there was a dedicated hardware solution inside.

When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard, where I already had Woz’s signature. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice.

And he dove deep into all elements of design, even the details of retail architecture for the Apple store (he’s a named patent holder on architectural glass used for the stairways). On my first day at NeXT, as we walked around the building, my colleagues shared in hushed voices that Jobs personally chose the wood flooring and various appointments. He even specified the outdoor sprinkler system layout.

I witnessed his attention to detail during a marketing reorganization meeting. The VP of marketing read Jobs’s e-mailed reaction to the new org chart. Jobs simply requested that the charts be reprinted with the official corporate blue and green colors, and provided the Pantone numbers to remove any ambiguity. Shifted color space was like a horribly distorted concerto to his senses. And this particular marketing VP was clearly going down.

People

Jobs’s estimation of people tended to polarize to the extremes, a black-and-white thinking trait common to charismatic leaders. Marketing execs at NeXT especially rode the “hero-shithead rollercoaster,” as it was called. The entire company knew where they stood in Jobs’s eyes, so when that VP in the reorg meeting plotted his rollercoaster path on the white board, the room nodded silently in agreement. He lasted one month.

But Jobs also attracted the best people and motivated them to do better than their best, rallying teams to work in a harmony they may never find elsewhere in their careers. He remains my archetype for the charismatic visionary leader, with his life’s song forever woven into the fabric of Apple.

Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality.

Free Ambulance


Image by Simon Varwell
I rather liked this somewhat brutal, Orwellian building near Wellington’s water front.

Interesting story behind it, too.

In the 1860s, when the city was just beginning to grow, medical services were at a very basic level, and there was only one ambulance for the whole city, manned by a Scottish migrant named Hector MacTavish. He owned a horse and cart and had some basic medical training and therefore began volunteering his services as the city’s first ambulance. Over the twenty years he and his trusty horse Mallaig worked, several lives were saved and Hector was widely known around town, and called "Ambulance MacTavish", or just "Ambulance" to most Wellingtonians.

One day, after a particularly hectic day of saving lives, Ambulance MacTavish was enjoying a couple of drinks in a local hostelry when word came through of a senior politician who had fallen ill at home. MacTavish left immediately, and arrived at the man’s home but when the politician smelt beer on MacTavish’s breath he called the police and had him arrested for being drunk in charge of a horse and cart.

The denizens of Wellington were up in arms, incensed that Ambulance MacTavish should be arrested for at best doing his job and at worst simply making an honest error of judgement.

Protests took to the street calling for his release, and many builders played their part by carving the demand "Free Ambulance" into their masonry and woodwork on new buildings. This is the largest surviving building to bear the protest.

The protests paid off – MacTavish was released after two weeks, and the untreated politican died a slow and agonising death.

Now Safely Home


Image by Boogies with Fish
www.messersmith.name/wordpress/2011/02/14/now-safely-home/
On Thursday I went out to Kranket Island  with the workmen from Lae Builders and Construction to put in place the monument for Eunie’s grave. The bright, sunny day belied my mood, which was dismal. I have been very anxious to finish this unhappy task before I leave for an extended holiday for some rest and recuperation. I was grateful for the company of an old friend, one of Eunie’s pals from a decade ago, Regine Neuhauser, who is visiting Madang for a short while. I needed to be propped up a few times during the day.

It was very hot in the blazing sun and the monument was extremely heavy. It is very solidly built. LBC did a good job.

It took quite a few of us to carry it up the hill from the water’s edge to the grave site.

I did not attempt to help the workers lower it into the hole. I was feeling shaky enough already. We were there for four hours. We left as soon as the workmen returned to town to get more cement, as they had discovered that they did not bring enough.

On Saturday morning twelve of us piled into Mike Cassell’s boat for the short ride to Kranket Island.  Until I got on the boat I thought that I was going to be ok. Then I felt as if I were going to lose it. I asked Mike and Trevor to talk to me. They kept me chatting until we got to the island. Nasty black clouds were gathering over Madang.

I had fretted all evening concerning whether the workmen had dug the hole for Eunie’s ashes. As it turned out, they had "forgotten" to do so. I could hear Eunie laughing at me. "Silly man. You expected everything to work smoothly? Did you forget where you are?" After a I made a suitable display of frustration and dismay one of the island residents retrieved a shovel and dug the hole while we all waited inside the small church.

Once again I found that I had no idea what to do. I asked Mike what he thought. Should I pour the ashes into the hole or simply put the whole container in? Mike decided for me that it was suitable to just place the container in the grave and cover it up. Hey, that’s what friends are for – to help you when you can’t help yourself. We all gathered around and I mumbled a few words of gratitude that we had all worked together to give Eunie the best possible care from the time she became ill. So many people helped – many more than gathered here to say goodbye to her. Finally, I invited all to drop a handful of sand into the grave and speak a few words if they liked. All I could manage was, "Goodbye, Baby."

Here is the small, intrepid group who braved the tropical sun at midday and made the trip to Kranket to bid Eunie farewell. In the background from left to right are Monty Armstrong, Di Cassell, Regine Neuhauser, Jenn Miller, Mike Cassell, Rich Jones and Trevor Hattersley. In the foreground are Meri Armstrong, me, Karen Simmons, Pascal Michon and Maureen Hill.

I was only mildly surprised that Di Cassell had laid on a very nice lunch for us at the Cassell home. We were all happy to recover from the heat and refresh ourselves in good company. It was a celebration of life. I could not help thinking that Eunie was enjoying the party. It is just the sort of gathering which she loved.

I have been very blessed to have gotten through the complex and uncertain processes necessary to lay Eunie’s remains to rest in accordance with her wishes. It was something of which I was always aware while she was with me, but in a detached, otherworldly way. Yes, I knew what would be required, but the details proved to be messy and impossible to work out quickly. It took me five months to do the job. All that time Eunie’s ashes rested in my closet two metres from my head as I slept. I can’t say that I was in any way uncomfortable with this, except that it reminded me that I had not yet fulfilled my promise to her.

I do feel relieved now, but not as much as I thought I would. I still have much to do to recover and build a new life. Most of what I need to do is not going to be much fun. Some of it is very scary. However, in about three weeks I will be off on a major adventure. Never in my life have I made such a journey alone. That, by itself, is a little scary to me, but it is necessary for me to learn to do all things in life alone.

That includes learning to enjoy life alone. This is going to be the most difficult task of all.