Intermittent Signal: How Steve Jobs Didn’t Impact My Life. Until He Did

“The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

~From “Blade Runner”, 1982. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, would go on to make the famous “1984” commercial, used to launch the Apple Macintosh in January 1984.

I was asked to write something about Steve Jobs.

Now, I never knew Steve Jobs. And not knowing him, I didn’t think of him as “Steve.” Still don’t. And he never “burned so very, very brightly,” on my radar screen in 1984. I’m guessing I wouldn’t have liked him, personally. Too abrupt. Too sure of himself. Too American. Too much (apart from the last part) like me.

Not fundamentally like me, though, really, the only great product-manager CEO. I’d never, ever, call myself great; Steve Jobs, I think, was great. A CEO who ran his company through running the product plan, in the belief that everything else—if it could be reliably tethered to the product plan, if he could control the hardware, the software, the content chain, if all of that was tied irrevocably to his vision—could and would be a success.

Unlike my colleague Dan Zeck, I never had an Apple II. The Apple II barely entered my consciousness. The great innovator in UK home computing was Sir Clive Sinclair, with the ZX-81 and the ZX Spectrum.

When I finally bought a decent home computer to replace the Sinclair, it was a Commodore Amiga. I loved that computer – everything about it. But I won’t be holding a candlelit vigil outside the house of Commodore’s CEO, when he passes away (if he hasn’t already). By that stage of the mid-80s, Personal Computer World (the UK equivalent of Byte Magazine), was a kind of Burgess Shale of half-formed, half-thought-out, could-be computers – and the Apple II was as obsolete as the trilobite.

Just before I acquired the Amiga, around 1986, I encountered the Mac. It was a Mac Classic (or would become one). I played with it for about 10 minutes, and found it impenetrable – I felt that I was playing with it, but it didn’t particularly want to play with me. The “smiley” countenance supposedly built into the computer struck me as smug and self-satisfied (surprisingly, though, it appealed very much to Stephen Fry).

At that time I was working on a UK government project funded by a group of companies, which included my then employer, IBM. The civil servants had used consortium money to go out and buy all kinds of computers that their funders weren’t contributing. There was the Mac, there was a Xerox Star, there was a Whitechapel WC-1 (appropriately named, if sadly so, this being the UK industry’s answer to Sun Microsystems), which broke after a few weeks and then took about nine months to repair. And there were some Sun-350 workstations. Everyone wanted to use the Suns, but most of the programming work was actually done on VT-100 screens.

This watering hole of mid-80s computer fauna is interesting though, because as well as the Mac, a few of the ancestors of the current Mac OSX and iOS platforms were also floating around. For it’s my contention that Apple has never really innovated that much on software – they’ve by and large stolen it, and it’s possible to chart their progress.

Steve Jobs is on record (in a fascinating interview) as to his visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1979. They showed him object-oriented programming and they showed him networked computers, but he ignored both of these, because first they showed him the GUI and the mouse. And that was enough to start his brain spinning.

Xerox later tried to commercialize those ideas through the Xerox Star. But Jobs spirited away their inventions, married them to a consumer hardware design that stuck, and marketed the hell out of it. And then he was fired, by the CEO he’d brought in to run the business, John Sculley.

Incidentally, you can read John Sculley’s side of the story in a self-congratulatory autobiography. It’s actually peppered with lessons for managers, which would be easier to swallow if Sculley came out of the story with any credit. He couldn’t work with Jobs and engineered his removal. Apple went into a decline. (When I was in IBM’s UNIX division in the early ’90s, Apple was actually re-selling IBM RS/6000 servers.) Jobs took (or perhaps stole) the next generation Apple server software,and some of the engineers from that project, and started NeXT.

Back to that watering hole of ancestral computing. At the start of that government project, those Sun boxes were running a system called NeWS. NeWS was a windowing system (the name stood for Network extensible Windowing System), running on top of Sun’s UNIX operating systems, and based around an implementation of Adobe’s Postscript font engine, with some added object-oriented extensions Interestingly, it was subsequently used as part of the Pixar Image Computer, a chunk of proprietary hardware originally sold by Pixar before it got into the movie business.

The similarity between the capitalizations in NeWS and NeXT strike me as significant (take the “WS” and move each letter forward by one). NeXT also used a UNIX microkernel, and included a tightly-integrated vector font processing capability (Display Postscript, also from Adobe) and an object-oriented programming language (then a largely unknown C dialect, called Objective C). Towards the end of our project, the consortium acquired a NeXTStation as well. It was beautiful. I had access to one and merely admired it. Meanwhile at CERN, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee had access to one and invented the World Wide Web on it.

When Jobs returned to Apple, almost by acclaim, he brought the NeXT system with him. OSX, or MacOS version 10 (of which the current version, Lion, is the seventh incarnation), has the same BSD UNIX microkernel, similar graphics subsystems, and uses Objective C as its main programming language. The same is true of iOS, on both the iPhone and the iPad. When Jobs announced the iPhone, it was basically a miniaturized Mac running effectively similar systems, just tuned down for size and user interface. Similarly the iPad.

And here’s the innovation. The day before the sad announcement of Jobs’ death, his successor Tim Cook announced the iPhone 4S, to worldwide underwhelm-ment. But from a sales point of view it’s already a runaway success. I told everyone who would listen that it would be (And I really should write this stuff more quickly, so I can credibly claim credit). Everyone looks at the software. The software’s great, but it’s like the greatest art thief of the late twentieth century is showing off his ill-gotten gains. The real innovation, as it always has been at Apple, is the hardware – both technical and in terms of industrial design. Take a closer look at the iPhone 4S. I marvel at what they’ve now crammed into an iPhone 4 case. I marveled at the iPhone 4, for that matter. Look back at the last 10 years or so – three generations of beautiful iMacs, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. The software is beautiful, but it came from elsewhere. The innovation is the hardware.

I’ve run many different systems for personal computing. I’ve used, for a large part of my career, UNIX (or Linux) as my personal desktop. I’ve used Windows. I’ve even used OS/2. I got my first Mac in 2005, after a colleague, Matt Asay, persuaded me to try it out. Loved it at first sight. Now I also have an iPad, and my entire family have iMacs. And my daughter just started university with her own MacBook Air. And we all have iPhones. And so on. Apple became as much a part of my daily life as tap water.

The iPhone revolutionized the mobile industry. All the players from a few years ago – Nokia, Ericsson, RIM – are holed below the waterline. Why? They were still making phones when Apple started making phone-shaped computers. And Jobs’ obsession with owning the food chain, with controlling the product, meant he had to own the mechanism for supplying content. Hence the app store. Hence iTunes. I work in the mobile industry, and anybody who works in the mobile industry has been affected by this.

One last story. I had breakfast a few years ago with a friend whose company had acquired a maker of mobile phone software, based in the Bay Area. I asked him how things were going. He said, “Terrible. They’re all ex-Apple guys. Not one of them understands how to program a phone. I hear Apple is trying to make a phone now. It’s doomed, from what I can see.”

Turns out they weren’t trying to make a phone. They were making a phone shaped computer. Running stolen ideas. It would change the world.

Tags: Apple, Intermittent Signal, Mark Watson, Steve Jobs