The new movie "Steve Jobs" opened in limited release a few days ago. As I write this it is set to open wide in a couple of days. I haven't seen it yet but I plan to. As I understand it the movie is a fictional account of the events preceding three product launches. Liberties have been taken. But, if you believe the makers of the movie, these liberties have been taken in order to better understand Mr. Jobs and his relationship with the people around him. I leave the question of how successful this aspiration is to others. And, as all successful movies do, the movie focuses on the relationships between people. I am not going to go there. I am a "tech" guy and tech is what I will focus on. Specifically I am going to focus on the original Macintosh, the "Mac 1", if you will. Why? Because I believe it illuminates some of the same issues the movie is addressing, just from a different perspective.
And in the interests of perspective, I want to start by illuminating the environment that surrounded the Mac's original introduction in 1984. Computers have been evolving rapidly since the very beginning. Initially people would figure out better ways to do things and incorporate them into subsequent designs. But this evolution came to be dominated by the evolution of the computer chip. It started out as the Transistor, a device with a single "gate". Then the integrated circuit was developed. It initially allowed several gates to be built into a single chip. The gate count increased rapidly to dozens, hundreds, thousands, etc. It is now many billions.
With this increased gate count came increased capability and diminishing costs. Why? Consider the picture postcard. (I know that now everybody takes selfies and posts them to their Facebook page. But stick with me anyhow.) A picture postcard from New York might feature say the iconic "I 'heart' N Y" logo. Or it might instead feature a view of the skyline of the city. What's my point? The "I 'heart' N Y" image includes only a few simple shapes while the skyline includes many complex shapes. Yet the production cost for each is the same. You print the picture on one side of the card and you put the message and mailing stuff on the other. It literally doesn't matter what the picture is of. The cost is the same.
It turns out that computer chips are manufactured with essentially photographic techniques. A simple chip with a few gates costs about the same amount to manufacture as a complex chip with many gates. There's a little more to computer chip manufacture (manufacturers spend fantastic amounts of money developing new techniques for manufacturing more complex chips more cheaply) but that is the key insight. As manufacturers have gotten better and as the demand for computer chips has increased the cost of ever more powerful chips has stayed the same or gone down. This continuous innovation process has worked out over decades. But at any specific point in time, say 1984, the best chip available at a reasonable cost has only a limited amount of capability. It is way more capable than a chip from 1980 but way less capable than a chip from 1990. So that's the hardware side.
On the software side things advance over time too. People have lots of good ideas for what would be a cool thing to do. And during this time there was a company called XEROX. XEROX pioneered a technology for making copies that was head and shoulders better than anything else. They leveraged this into a ton of money. But copy machines are a one trick pony. XEROX management were very aware of this so they put together XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to brainstorm new ideas. Money was not an object because it was pouring in from the copy machine business. What was important was to come up with a great new idea. And PARC did.
They invented all of the pieces of modern computing. They started with the mouse. They added to it high resolution (for the time) screens that allowed you to display proportional font text, images, all kinds of things. They tied it in with a new networking technology called Ethernet and added a laser printer based on their copier machine technology. It was really cool and it all worked great. There was just one problem. It was way too expensive.
XEROX put the whole package together and marketed it. No one bought. The problem was that the terminals cost a lot of money. XEROX's idea was that you would put them on the desks of executives. They were not too expensive for this. But what did they do? In the opinion of the executives they did secretarial work. They did all the things that secretaries at the time did like keeping track of a person's calendar, handling phone calls, typing things, etc. (Spread sheets and other high powered business tools were all in the future at this time.) To an executive of the time that was all secretary's work and the whole XEROX system was far to expensive to put on a secretary's desk. So no one bought it.
At some point Steve Jobs was informed of what was going on at PARC and got a tour. He could see the potential. Anyone could. The problem was cost. Jobs figured he could solve that problem so he took all the things he saw at PARC back to Apple and said "do it". He was CEO at the time so they did it. The result was something called the Lisa. You have never heard of the Lisa because it flopped. The problem was still that it was too expensive. Jobs decided that if he was going to make the whole thing work he needed to get the cost down to $1,000. So he set out to do that. The result was the Mac.
In the early days Jobs' partner was Steve Wozniak. The Woz, as he was frequently called, was a hardware genius. What he was particularly good at was combining parts in very creative ways so that something could be made with fewer parts than the "standard" design required. This made his designs cheaper to manufacture so they could be sold at a lower price. This is one of the key reasons that the Apple II, the first mass market Apple product, was so successful. It did everything the others did, and sometimes, more, but it cost less. This Woz concept of "make it but with fewer parts" was seen as key to meeting the cost target for the Mac. Woz was instrumental in the early work on the Mac but a number of "Woz clones" ended up doing most of the work in the end. And Jobs was ultimately unable to hit is target. The original Mac sold for $1,100. Initially that looked like it was close enough.
In the first few months the Mac sold very well. But then sales tailed off rapidly and never recovered. Jobs had essentially bet the company on the success of the Mac. When it tanked the Apple board of directors sensibly forced him out. So why did the initial Mac flop? It was cheap enough and it had all the cool stuff the PARC system had pioneered. (Actually it didn't have any networking capability but at that time people were not networking that much so that wasn't the problem.) The problem was a simple and fundamental one. You couldn't actually do anything with it. What? People bought those early Macs. Then they tried to run the programs they wanted to run on them and they couldn't. To understand why we need to take a look under the hood.
First of all, it came in exactly one model. You got what you got and that was it. You got a really sweet processor chip called a Motorola 68000. But that was pretty much it for the good news. The box came with 128KB (K - thousand, not M - million or G - billion) of RAM. You got a nice GUI (Graphical User Interface) screen. But it was built in so it was not upgradable. And it was small and it was black and white only. Then you got a 600KB (K - thousand again) floppy drive.
You couldn't add a second internal floppy drive and you couldn't add an internal hard drive. So you had to boot off the floppy and it had to hold the operating system, your application, and your data. Parts of the operating system could be saved in RAM after you booted up but there was only a little space and the more of the operating system you put there the less room was left over for your application and data. That meant you were swapping floppies all the time. But wait, there's more.
Remember the "leave as many parts out as you can" thing. To get the price down they left a lot of parts out. They used software running on the processor chip instead. And many of these functions were dependent on tight timing. So at predetermined intervals you had to stop running the application so that some time critical function could take place on schedule. This made writing applications very tricky. If they didn't defer to the operating system properly the computer would start misbehaving. This made writing applications much more difficult.
The result of this was that there weren't many applications available on the Mac. They were very hard (expensive) to write what with the fact that they had to be small and properly behaved (defer to the operating system at appropriate intervals). So it turned out that the original Mac was a cute toy.
Apple and Steve Jobs couldn't have been so stupid as to allow for no expandability could they? No! They weren't that stupid. They incorporated something called the SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) bus. This was a jack on the back that you could hook say a hard drive into. But that meant you had a lot of cables and a lot of boxes littering up your desk. Most people found that they didn't want to do this. So the practical effect was that a lot of people gave up on the Mac. They also warned their friends off them so sales quickly dried up.
Somebody fixed the Mac. It wasn't Jobs as he was fired. Who was it? It was John Sculley. He is a much reviled figure among Apple aficionados but the fact is that he saved the Mac and, by extension, Apple. He is the guy who took over after Jobs was fired. The first thing he did was increase the RAM size to 512KB. It is not much by modern standards but it did a lot to relieve the pressure. You could now run a bigger program on the Mac. It was an easy change. It increased the price slightly. But by this time people could see the Mac's potential so they were willing to pay a little more.
The next fix came not from Apple but from an outsider. Someone figured out how to fit a hard drive inside the case. Sculley was smart enough to adopt the idea even though it was "not invented here". That fixed the two most pressing problems with the Mac. You could load a larger program onto the hard disk and then run it from the hard disk and within the expanded 512KB RAM now available. But there was a lot more that needed fixing.
Subsequent Macs added parts back in so operating system functions became far less time sensitive. That made it much easier to write applications so people did. Apple also changed to an external monitor so you could get a much bigger screen than the original one. Finally, a way was found to support color monitors and things like networking. Macs got substantially more expensive than the original Mac that was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. But by this time customers liked what they saw and Mac sales increased to the point where Apple was on sound financial footing.
So why is Sculley the goat and not the hero? The problem was that once he had fixed the Mac he did not know what to do. So Apple drifted and soon started drifting downward. This is when Jobs swooped in and "saved the company". He then went on to success after success. But he had learned a valuable lesson.
The reason Microsoft did so well over this period is that Microsoft did a much better job of working within the capabilities of cost effective hardware. The PCs of the 1984 era were much more clumsy than the Mac but they did useful things. The original iterations of Windows were crude and clumsy compared to the Mac. But they lived within the abilities of the hardware available at the time. As the hardware got more capable Windows got more capable. Microsoft did not do a nice GUI until Windows 95. But by that time the kind of hardware consumers were able to afford could handle the requirements.
I am not going to go into why Microsoft stalled out a few years after Windows 95 (hint: Antitrust lawsuit). Instead I am going to return to Steve Jobs. It was no secret that he wanted to do the iPhone years before he actually did it. But he had learned his lesson. He couldn't do the kind of device he wanted to do at the price point he thought he needed to do it at. So he waited and did things like the iPod.
But when he finally judged the moment right he brought out the iPhone. And part of what made the moment right was a decision to outsource manufacturing to China. All the Apple II computers and early Mac computers were built in the US. Jobs decided he couldn't meet his price target for the iPhone if he built it in the US so he didn't.
The evolution of the iPhone has followed the Microsoft model. Apple has regularly introduced new models with additional capabilities. They have closely followed the increase in capabilities of the available hardware. A classic example of this is camera resolution. The camera on the latest model takes much better pictures than the camera on the older models.
It is unclear whether Jobs had an idea for the next new thing. We'll never know because he is no longer with us. It is too soon to tell if Tim Cook, Jobs' successor, can keep the momentum going. Time will tell.
I am not a fan of Steve Jobs as a person. I am also not a fan of him as a manager. The justification for this bad behavior is the results he achieved. And that's enough for a lot of people but not for me. In spite of that I do want to end with some praise for him in two areas where I think he was truly superior.
He was a spectacularly good salesman. This evidenced in his ability to sell Apple products to consumers. But it also evidenced itself within the company. He is now known for his "reality distortion field". He was able to find a way to motivate people to achieve what they thought was impossible. Often what he wanted really was impossible. But those instances tend to get lost to the mists of time. And just often enough he was right. He convinced somebody that they could find a solution to an "impossible" problem and improbably they did. And those occasions turned out to be extremely important so we now remember and revere them.
But beyond that Jobs was the best person at industrial design in at least the last 50 years and possibly longer. We celebrate architects for designing beautiful buildings. There have been several notable and extremely influential car designers. But Jobs eclipsed them all both in the quality of his work and in his influence on us all. He sweated the tiniest details. There are stories about him spending days deciding exactly where a screw should be placed.
The result was series of devices that are characterized by many uses as magical. They are both extremely functional (they work and they work the way people want them to work) and elegant. They just look cool and feel cool. There are designers that are good at functional (Bill Gates) and designers that are good at a cool look (any number of architects). There are very few that could do either nearly as well as Jobs did both.
