Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs

venturebeat.com

136 pointsbond46 comments

I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it)

In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged)

In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be learned there.

What wouldn't I give to have my own failure of the magnitude of NeXT. As a business they merely survived, but to create as much system software value as they did (and during the dark ages of operating system monopoly, no less) and be able to use that value to acquire the dying husk of Apple for a negative 430 million or thereabouts...not bad, really.

How was Next a failure? 11 years from start to being acquired for 400M 1996 dollars is not "failing".

I'm not at a real computer to check, but I think $400m barely paid back the investors.

And speaking as a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer), it was definitely a flop. The computers sold only in a few niches, and they had to kill off the hardware entirely. The OS and the dev tools lasted longer, but they wouldn't have survived more than another few years.

A flop? The name may have changed, but NeXTSTEP has been a remarkable success in its new incarnation as OS X and iOS.

Yes, NeXT and NextStep were flops as products: nobody bought them. Some of the OS technology was great, and it eventually got incorporated into a successful product after a lot more work. But a flop with good tech is still a flop.

I wonder if NeXT was really that much of a failure, considering that ultimately today we use many of it's software technologies. I used to be a NeXT programmer and am always amazed how much of it is still there today in OS X..

With this line of reasoning Xerox PARC was a completely success and every "seed" that lives today in the human history too. But business success metrics are very cynical and NeXT was a business failure.

Hm, business history of NeXT as gleaned from Wikipedia:

1985: Founded by Steve Jobs using a bunch of his own money.

1987: "[Ross Perot] invested $20 million in exchange for 16% of NeXT's stock, valuing the company at $125 million."

1989: "Canon invested US$100 million in NeXT, giving it a 16.67% stake, making NeXT worth almost $600 million." [editor's note: on paper]

1992: "The company reported sales of $140 million in 1992, encouraging Canon to invest a further $30 million to keep the company afloat."

1996: "Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs."

So, please tell me where the business failure is. What I see here is a company that appears to have turned $150 million in venture funding (plus an unknown amount of Steve Jobs' cash) into a valuable operating system platform, $429 million in cash, 1.5 million shares of Apple Computer, and complete control of Apple Computer itself, which as we all know proved to be an extremely valuable commodity in the hands of the former employees of NeXT.

But Wikipedia is not a balance sheet, and I suppose it's possible that this account I've pieced together leaves out something like half a billion dollars in investments by otherwise unknown and unremarked parties. Can anyone out there show me a history of NeXT that is substantially different than the one above? Because until then I must conclude that the people who think of the story of NeXT as a "business failure" don't know how to count money.

EDIT: Excellent, I found a contemporary account of the Canon investment in the NYT to spell it all out for us:

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/business/canon-to-invest-1...

The Canon investment will dilute Mr. Jobs's ownership of Next to 50 percent. He started the company with $7 million of his own and later invested another $5 million. Next employees own 20 percent. H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who invested $20 million in 1987, owns 12.5 percent, and Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University, which have invested a total of $1.3 million, have a combined stake of less than 1 percent.

Please, tell me again what a terrible, terrible failure this was.

It was a terrible failure. And I say that as a guy who loved the product so much I still have boxed copies of the NeXT OS in one closet or another.

If the company was once priced at >$600m and the company sold for $429m (plus less than $10m in Apple stock) then it was a clear loser. Canon alone could have ended up with $200m in cash with a perfectly safe investment. In venture terms, that's a failure.

It was also a failure in terms of meeting any goal set originally. Almost nobody bought the hardware. Almost nobody bought the OS. Almost nobody bought their Windows development tools, their last gasp of a product. It was a brilliant product, but as businesses goes, it was one smoking crater after another.

Moreover, that was a pity sale. Nobody else in the world would have bought NeXT. Nobody needed Jobs or the OS; Apple, uniquely, was doomed without both. Without that, NeXT would have been out of business within a few years. Those sale terms were crafted to make Jobs happy to come on board, and for no other reason.

If your analysis is correct, then NeXT was a success for Steve Jobs, which is the claim this thread started at.

In the sense that Bernie Madoff's investment firm was a success for Bernie Maddoff, sure, I guess. But as far as achieving his stated aims, definitely a failure. Similarly a failure on the standard by which high-tech investments are judged.

I can't argue with this, I guess, except to say that if this counts as a terrible failure we need a bunch of new words to describe all the much, much bigger failures that we've seen over the last twenty years.

After living through all these massive bubbles and frauds, I guess I have a pretty high standard for failure. "Failure to make more profit than an index fund" is not a success, I'll admit, but Canon could have done worse, oh so much worse. They didn't win, but emerging from all that risk without a total loss? Can we score it as a mulligan?

And I'll definitely push back on this whole "pity sale" concept. Just because Steve Jobs found the one and only way in the world to turn his looming total loss into a mulligan plus the seeds of future empire doesn't mean he lost. This isn't chess. Companies aren't competing on some kind of infinite, uniform ideal grid, they compete in the real world, and money is money, even if they have to call in every favor and exploit every advantage.

You can score it however you like, and I grant it wasn't a total disaster, but by the standards of high-tech investments, it was definitely a failure, albeit a gracefully executed one.

I will stand by the notion that it was a pity sale. The CEO is not a salable company asset. That Apple bought NeXT for so much as a way to make Jobs happy doesn't mean that NeXT did well; it just means that Apple really wanted Jobs. (Correctly, as it turns out.) Props to Jobs for cashing out his investors rather than just pocketing the money, though.

Apple did really want Jobs. But they also really wanted NeXT's operating system. The month before they bought NeXT, every pundit was predicting they'd buy the BeOS instead, because they all knew that Mac OS 9 wasn't going to cut it.

And now here I am, working on a system all of whose libraries have entry points prefixed with "NS".

Well, whatever. History rarely politely conforms to our categories. I suppose we could declare NeXT to be a "disaster" relative to every other company founded by Steve Jobs.

NeXT was a great software success. It was also a great business failure.

Steve sold NeXT to Apple for $400 Million. You're some guy with a blog.

What are you so smug about?

Are you kidding? I'm not smug. I'm saying Jobs is probably the most amazing success story in the history of technology and he did it after an age where most people would write him off and after experiencing a significant failure. The point I was making was you shouldn't write people off because of age or past failures.

The fact that he came back from a low makes him more impressive not less.

I mean, if you want to make Jobs into a super hero than go right ahead. But if you want to learn from him you have to look at what he actually went through and the truth is he had lows.

As for NeXT being bought for $400 million even Jobs himself would have to admit that's not the end he would have preferred. And though I was too young to remember exactly I'm pretty sure the whole venture was a net loss even with the $400 million.

Not sure why you called TomofTTB smug, he was being quite the opposite.

Jobs failed multiple times early in his career!

1980: Apple III released, bombs and is killed in 1984

1982: Jobs is kicked out of the Lisa Project, joins the Macintosh project

1984: Mac released. It is overpriced and has tepid sales.

1985: Kicked out of Apple

1989: First NeXT cubes released. They are overpriced and see slow sales

1991: NeXTStation released. NeXT still has tepid sales.

1993: NeXT hardware cancelled, OS ported to multiple other platforms with little success. Only the Intel port survives. Releases OpenStep for Windows.

1996: NeXT is bought by Apple.

For over a decade he had a string of public failures to match every success.

Nowadays Apple hits home run after home run and disrupts multiple industries. Imagine how much he learned from each failure.

> For over a decade he had a string of public failures

I'm not sure if NeXT's history is a failure or the building of a foundation. Something similar happened with Pixar: Steve bought it in 1986, Toy Story was released in 1995.

Before TS, Steve had already sold the hardware side of Pixar, the staff had to be cut in half, and Jobs was still wondering whether he should resell Pixar in 1994.

“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’ And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.”

Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.

a : abrupt in speech or manner b : being straight to the point : direct

So yeah, that's exactly what blunt means.

Don't be confused by all the people who think bluntness is automatically rude. It's not. Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth. They need to have it sugar coated.

“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Saying “I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.” seems just honest to me, not blunt. “I’m bored by this, why do you tell me all this crap?” would be something I would be willing to call blunt.

But yeah, being honest (or blunt, if you will) is something I’m perfectly alright with. I want the people I’m working with or for to be like that. I’m not so crazy about rudeness, but if that quote is accurate Jobs wasn’t rude (at least in those situations).

>“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it.

Rudeness or impoliteness is not part of the definition of the word in the dictionary I consulted.

Try looking up the word "connotation"

While you're at it, check out "denotation" to see the contrast.

Dictionary definitions often include connotations.

Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth.

This is perhaps unnecessarily blunt :-)

I agree that bluntness is not automatically rude. Indeed, to me, the whole purpose of using the word "blunt" in this way is to draw an important distinction between outright rudeness and behavior that risks being insensitive but does so for a constructive purpose.

Nonetheless, I think some confusion about the meaning of the word is understandable.

Depends on what the meeting is about, and what was boring him. If it was something crucial that needed to be discussed, that's crap. But if the purpose of the meeting is to inform him about something, then of course - skip the parts that don't matter.

I've never in my life attended a meeting where someone has been willing to say this. It's just "not done".

My solution is to just not go to meetings. The recap at my desk later will contain as much information and will only take 30 seconds.

I don’t really have a lot of work experience but this happened at meetings both when I was an intern (though not as often as I would have liked) and I have this professor who is really fond of asking people to leave details out and only present the big picture (and I appreciate that very much). We met regularly to present the progress of our thesis and he knows how to keep it tight and relevant for everyone.

Maybe this has something to do with culture? All that happened to me in Germany and it doesn’t seem extraordinary to me.

Most business meetings aren't led like a professor guiding students (or, frankly, interns). Steve also doesn't talk like the quote, it would be something more like, "Why the fuck are you wasting my time? What the fuck do you even do here?" He's one of a kind--arrogant as they come but with the talent, smarts and execution that actually back it up.

As an intern I was sitting in on the meetings, mostly just watching. Those weren’t meetings targeted at interns, they were normal, everyday meetings. (I was there mostly to get to see how those things work and to get a bit of context.)

I’m not sure why you are just asserting a different language. I see no evidence for that. The article treats the statement as a quote, as long as we don’t know any better we have to treat it like that.

I was asserting different language because I've never heard of Steve being so kind. Competent professional adults don't collude to not be in the elevator with someone who simply kindly asks someone to move on.

Steve is a genius, but he leaves a huge trail behind for HR/PR to clean up.

A fun anecdote from a friend of mine, who was excited as someone can be to meet Steve for the first time. It was a press meeting at the Macworld conference, years and years ago. Steve asks his handler who my friend was, she replied it was so and so from MacCentral. What followed was something to the effect of, "MacCentral? I fucking hate MacCentral. How did he get in here? Who the fuck invited MacCentral? What have they ever made?" End of meeting followed by profuse apologies from everyone but Steve. Friend was still stoked, reality distortion field and what not.

Unfortunately the corporate world has become frequent, long, useless meetings. It is rare that anything is accomplished during them, more and more people attend them, and no one questions them (everyone complains in private). The best skill to have in the modern corporate world is getting along with other people, not getting things done.

Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out.

Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then writing it.

He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)

I refer you to this example of demanding a feature with no regard for feasibility: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot, and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.

Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward.

I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.

I would have loved an elevator ride with him. The man is quite smart, and a resilient entrepreneur.

Not a problem for me, I always take the stairs!

I was really hoping this would be an article about flatulence.

Since Jobs was gone from Apple in 1985 what was his role in the Macintosh II, which didn't come out for 2 more years? Not a question that should be left to suspension of disbelief. And the iMac came out in 1998, but Steve was working on it at Apple in 1985 – in the Macintosh II building? To paraphrase Col. Kurtz: "Journalism? I don't see any journalism here."

And one more thing™, Dhuey is the one with a tin ear if he doesn't understand that fans are anathema to Jobs' aesthetic.

> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss.

> “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud."

Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.

Uh, no. That problem predates Apple's entry into the space by decades.

If you want to get down to the real root cause, the root problem is biological; the human ear's damage threshold is significantly lower than its pain threshold. That's not an easy problem to solve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com