Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain chronicles the twelve years between Steve Jobs's departure from Apple in 1985 and his return in 1997.
The book focuses on Jobs's time at NeXT and argues that these years were crucial to his personal development. It was during this period that he evolved from a brilliant jerk into a more mature leader.
Here are several quotes that caught my attention.
Mach:
On a muddy walk to lunch, Avie's fellow researchers joked about naming the microkernel "muck." A faculty member misheard it as "Mach" and the name stuck. (p.65)
A premonition of a short life:
At the same time, Steve felt he was running out of time to make his mark, The feeling would surface in conversations with colleagues, when Steve told them about his intuition that he wouldn't live a long life. He couldn't explain where it came from, but at thirty-one, he believed his time was limited. (p.75)
NeXT and Common Lisp:
[Steve] wanted NeXT computers to crack open a field that most considered dead: artificial intelligence, The grand promises of the early '80s—computers that would diagnose cancer or argue legal cases—had crashed and burned in what they called "Al winter."
Yet when Steve visited labs at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, he saw researchers hunched over $50,000 workstations, stubbornly teaching machines baby steps like understanding sentences or solving puzzles.
They wrote in Lisp, an exotic programming language that lets programmers manipulate ideas the way other languages manipulated numbers.
Steve made a decision that would have sounded insane to other executives: bundle Allegro Common Lisp—software that cost thousands per license—for free with every NeXT machine. While IBM and Sun treated Al tools as exotic luxuries, Steve was intent on putting them in university computer labs. (p.102)
The two laws of demoing:
Then Steve turned to the demos. "For those of you that aren't software developers in the audience, I'd like to remind you of the first two laws of demoing. First law of demos is that demos will always crash.
And the second law of demos is that the probability of crashing goes up with the number of people watching." The audience laughed. "So if something goes wrong today, have some compassion for the demo-er." (p.115)
Make Unix taste sweet:
NeXTSTEP was Steve's attempt to make Unix taste sweet. (p.141)
The World Wide Web on a NeXT Cube:
By December, info.cern.ch went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black magnesium cube in CERN's Building 31. [Tim Berners-Lee] scrawled a warning on the Cube in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" If anyone disobeyed, then the entirety of the World Wide Web would disappear from the internet until Tim restarted the machine. (p.173)
What the FBI learned about Steve Jobs:
The same year, President George H. W. Bush nominated Steve for a seat on the President's Export Council. The position required an FBI background check, which involved hundreds of hours of interviews with Steve's coworkers.
In these conversations, coworkers struggled to reconcile the visionary with the jerk. "Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs' honesty, stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals," an FBI agent wrote. One source told the FBI Steve was both "deceptive" and perfect for a "high level political position," since "honesty and integrity are not required qualities to assume such a position." Another managed to pack the entire Steve paradox into a single breath, describing his personal life as "lacking due to his narcissism and shallowness," then saying, "he has far-reaching vision and can vitalize plans and goals." (p.178)
When traders became software customers:
As NeXT's leaders studied the problem, a consensus began to emerge: they should abandon high-cost hardware in favor of selling high-margin software.
[…]
"Phil," he said, "you have to help me make Steve understand the value of NeXT computers to us is not in the hardware, it's in the software."
O'Connor made money by analyzing data and making fast trades in the market. NeXTSTEP allowed the firm to build proprietary trading software quickly, giving it an advantage over competitors.
The firm had developed a mutually dependent relationship with NeXT. O'Connor needed NeXT to survive so it could keep making NeXTSTEP. Without it, O'Connor would lose its edge. (p.188)
NeXT's dependence on Motorola:
The [Motorola's 88110] chip NeXT had bet everything on? Dead before it could ship. Motorola would fulfill existing orders, then cut NeXT of altogether. Mike summed up Motorola's message: "Fuck you and this new chip." Motorola had supplied every processor NeXT had ever used starting with the Cube. Now NeXT was left with a computer it had spent months building on top of a chip that it couldn't use.
[…]
"This is the single most important thing that ever happened to NeXT," Mike said.
Steve promised that he would never again let himself be dependent on other companies' road maps. He kept his word, spending $278 million to buy chipmaker P.A. Semi in 2008 after he returned to lead Apple. The purchase would allow Apple to design its own processors for the iPhone and iPad—and eventually create Apple silicon chips to power Macs. The lesson of NeXT's dependence on Motorola and other suppliers had stuck. (p. 200)
In Silicon Valley, deals come first:
Six months later, Steve's anger had cooled. As Bud would put it, they were "back on reasonable terms." Bud was now at Sun, and Sun had something Steve needed: powerful workstations that could run NeXTSTEP.
In Silicon Valley, rifts have an expiration date when there are deals to be made. (p.215)
A company consumed by bureaucracy:
Steve's verdict on John was less generous. "What can I say?" he told interviewer Robert X. Cringely. "I hired the wrong guy."
He had watched from exile as John turned Apple into everything he despised: a bloated bureaucracy that confused activity with achievement, releasing more than seventy products while neglecting to consider what would make any one of them truly great. (p. 228)
OpenStep:
The operating system wars were beginning […]
[…]
Sun couldn't be caught unarmed. It needed its own object weapons to stand a chance. To get them, it briefly considered acquiring NeXT.
But it ultimately chose the cheaper option: licensing NeXT's software.
In the $10 million deal that emerged, Sun would work together with NeXT to develop a new program called OpenStep. OpenStep would botle some of NeXT's magic, making NeXT's revolutionary development tools available to programmers working on different computers.
Now developers could write software once and have it run on Sun workstations, IBM machines, or NeXT hardware—instead of being confined to NeXT platforms only. (p.235)
Doom was built on NeXT:
As 1994 went on, a violent first-person shooter game called Doom, released at the end of the previous year, exploded around the world.
[…]
The NeXT team watched in awe as the game conquered millions of computers and reshaped the industry. They learned that John Carmack, the game's twenty-three-year-old creator, had built the entire thing on NeXT machines.
"The first major personal purchase I made wasn't a car, but rather a NeXT computer," John later wrote in a Facebook post. (p.245)
When the CEO works for the team:
The transtormation was real and lasting. "The people who were with Steve by the end of '95 pretty much stayed with him for the rest of his life," Ed observed. By November 1995, Steve had become the kind of leader people wanted to follow long-term.
And he was humbled. "If you don't treat [talented workers] right, they can go get another job in ten minutes, right?" he later recounted to an interviewer. "So a strange thing happens, which is the sort of the hierarchy of power inverts, and the CEO is actually at the bottom. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people, because they're the ones that are doing all the brilliant work, you know."
[…]
The man who had emerged by November 1995 was different. He was still demanding, still visionary, but tempered by failure and success in equal measure. (p.268)
Fear of founder's syndrome:
An Apple alumnus who had known Steve since the early eighties put it more colorfully. He called Ellen directly and, according to Heilemann, said: "Ellen, Steve is going to fuck Gil so hard his eardrums will pop." Ellen herself told Gil that she suspected Steve would succumb to "founderitis" —the inability of company founders to work under anyone else's authority. (p.297)
The top line drives the bottom line:
Steve spent the summer of 1997 on a listening tour, gathering thoughts from senior managers on what had gone wrong at Apple. All he heard were tales of doom and gloom. He wanted to flip the script to one of optimism. In his presentations, he made it clear Apple had talented people but the wrong strategy. "Somebody taught me a long time ago… if you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow," he told CNBC. (p.322)
Rhapsody:
Apple announced a "dual OS strategy": The company would support two operating systems simultaneously. The existing Mac OS would continue for current users, while a new system called Rhapsody would offer NeXT's advanced capabilities on Apple computers. Rhapsody was essentially NeXTSTEP being ported to run on Apple hardware. (p.324)
Apple–Microsoft collaboration:
Finally, Microsoft would invest $150 million in Apple for nonvoting stock—the public vote of confidence that the company desperately needed.
The investment was shrewd self-interest. Microsoft faced mounting antitrust scrutiny from the Department of Justice, which was threatening to break up the company. Keeping Apple alive gave Microsoft a competitor to point to, arguing they were not a monopoly. For $150 million-pocket change for Microsoft—Bill Gates bought himself a defense exhibit. (p.326)
Wall Street Unix:
In the 1990s, using a personal computer was like driving a car that might randomly stall in trathe. The old Mac OS crashed so routinely that people saved their work every few minutes out of paranoia. NeXT machines, built on the same Unix bedrock that ran Wall Street's trading systems, didn't break as easily. (p.339)
Joint