The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give them any allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman recalled.
It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in France. Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassée didn’t jack up sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”
Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs
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could turn on the charm when he wanted to. François Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous—computing for all—and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and Negroponte tell tales of him pining over women while there.
Falling
After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.
Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component
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failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented,
“The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”
At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation. He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program, and sell them as a new product, the
“Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he did not believe in.
“I was furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the horrible hoax, so I resigned.”
The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984”
ad. Unfortunately there was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,” showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death. From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who had bought an IBM.
Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You guys didn’t want to run
‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, “I will put my whole
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reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. “I can’t believe you’re going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing.”
Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley’s wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the response was negative. “It insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the president of a market research firm told Fortune.
Apple’s marketing manager suggested afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing. Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and apologize for the apology.
Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in charge of hand-holding
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and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a big fight on what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. “I know what they are, because I had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was ‘stupid’
because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham went out and, this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what she was wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her.
Cunningham knew that at times he just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.
“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.”
Thirty Years Old
Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. To celebrate his own thirtieth, in February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but also playful—black tie and tennis shoes—party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St.
Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read,
“There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30
years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30
years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.”
One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman
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dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like
“The Girl from Ipanema” to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of
“Happy Birthday.”
Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to
“technology’s foremost visionary.” Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II had been introduced. The venture capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade since that time. “He went from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.
Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for. Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room.
Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon mousse that was served, met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny’s.
“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing,” Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. “Of course, there are some people who are
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innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.” The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs’s most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future: Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. . . .
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.”
