Steve Jobs

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“Now Gandhi Is Modeling For Apple”

December 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steve Jobs possessed many great qualities if you could look past the bullying tyrant who disliked philanthropy, which, admittedly, wasn’t easy, but it’s always been tremendously galling that Apple’s grammatically challenged 1997 “Think Different” campaign used Mahatma Gandhi’s likeness to peddle marked-up consumer electronics manufactured by sweatshop labor. Yes, they were really cool computers, but still. 

The slain civil rights leader was, of course, a complicated and contradictory character, and no one more ably parried against the simple-headed sanctification and commodification of him than Salman Rushdie did in a Time essay published a year after the ad was launched. The opening:

A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there’s a slangily American injunction to “Think Different.” Such is the present-day power of international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on message,” in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.

The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M.K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.

“Think Different.” Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, “He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages.” This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.

Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.

Richard Attenborough’s much-Oscared movie Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saintmaking. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw.

But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African antiapartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film’s galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted “international Gandhi” has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.

The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he’s so darned dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums (“An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind”) with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, “I think it would be a great idea”). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century.•

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“Jobs Was Making The Computer An Extension Of Yourself”

January 27, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In a series of articles in the New York Review of Books over the last couple of years, Sue Halpern has taken a thought-provoking look at the dubious side of the Digital Era, considering the impact of tech billionaires, technological unemployment and the Internet of Things.

Her latest salvo tries to locate the real legacy of Steve Jobs, who was mourned equally in office parks and Zuccotti Park. In doing so she calls on the two recent films on the Apple architect, Alex Gibney’s and Danny Boyle’s, and the new volume about him by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. Ultimately, the key truth may be that Jobs used a Barnum-esque “magic” and marketing myths to not only sell his new machines but to plug them into consumers’ souls.

An excerpt:

So why, Gibney wonders as his film opens—with thousands of people all over the world leaving flowers and notes “to Steve” outside Apple Stores the day he died, and fans recording weepy, impassioned webcam eulogies, and mourners holding up images of flickering candles on their iPads as they congregate around makeshift shrines—did Jobs’s death engender such planetary regret?

The simple answer is voiced by one of the bereaved, a young boy who looks to be nine or ten, swiveling back and forth in a desk chair in front of his computer: “The thing I’m using now, an iMac, he made,” the boy says. “He made the iMac. He made the Macbook. He made the Macbook Pro. He made the Macbook Air. He made the iPhone. He made the iPod. He’s made the iPod Touch. He’s made everything.”

Yet if the making of popular consumer goods was driving this outpouring of grief, then why hadn’t it happened before? Why didn’t people sob in the streets when George Eastman or Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell died—especially since these men, unlike Steve Jobs, actually invented the cameras, electric lights, and telephones that became the ubiquitous and essential artifacts of modern life?* The difference, suggests the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, is that people’s feelings about Steve Jobs had less to do with the man, and less to do with the products themselves, and everything to do with the relationship between those products and their owners, a relationship so immediate and elemental that it elided the boundaries between them. “Jobs was making the computer an extension of yourself,” Turkle tells Gibney. “It wasn’t just for you, it was you.”•

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“That’s Exactly The Kind Of Thing I Don’t Mind Making Up”

October 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

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It bothers me to no end that Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man depicts boxer Max Baer as a semi-psychotic villain for the sake of narrative convenience. It’s cinematic license taken to an ugly extreme.

In general, the Hollywood biopic is a troubling compromise that will satisfy no one completely–or at least it shouldn’t. The best-case scenario is that you come away with some sort of an impressionistic truth but realize that, no, Richard Nixon never made a drunken, late-night phone call to David Frost.

Perhaps each film should be labeled with a Surgeon General-ish warning: “Believing the events of this film are true can be injurious to history.” That agreement has always been tacit, but I can’t tell you how many people over the years have cited the “facts” in Oliver Stone’s overwrought bullshit JFK. There’s really no easy answer.

Steven Levy, who reported on Steve Jobs and knew him, was troubled by his portrayal in the new Aaron Sorkin-Danny Boyle film. In a Backchannel Q&A, he interviewed the former about writing a screenplay on an actual historical figure. An excerpt:

Steven Levy:

Let’s take a specific example of history and fabrication. In the first act, you have Steve’s obsession with the 1983 Time Magazine story about him. You’re right to zero in on that — he was complaining about that when I interviewed him for Rolling Stone before the Macintosh launch, and he was complaining about it 20 years later.

Aaron Sorkin:

That’s right.

Steven Levy:

But you took it a step farther. In your screenplay, someone at Apple ordered boxes of the magazine and was going to place one on every seat in the shareholder’s meeting until someone figured out it would make Steve crazy. In real life, that didn’t happen.

Aaron Sorkin:

Right. That’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t mind making up. Here is what’s true, here is the important truth. As a matter of happy coincidence, Walter Isaacson, who was at Time Magazine in 1983 when all this happened, was able to tell me that Steve was never in the conversation for Man of the Year. Steve had always blamed Dan Kottke for spilling the beans in that article about Steve having to take a paternity test and that whole situation with Lisa and believed that was the reason why he didn’t get the cover. But, as Walter pointed out, it had nothing to do with Kottke — if you look at the cover, it’s a sculpture of a man at a desk with a computer, and that sculpture would have had to have been commissioned months and months in advance. In fact, the sculptor himself is a well known guy whose name I forget.

So that information is something that I want to use. I want to use it to introduce the paternity issue, I want to use it because it’s going to pay off in the third act both when Joanna [Hoffman] is giving a demonstration of his reality distortion field… And the final payoff is that Lisa, who now has Internet access at school, has read it — has read about her father denying that he’s not her father.

So I never worried that what the audience was going to go away with was there were cartons and cartons of Time Magazine backstage at this event. It didn’t seem to be important that the audience gets that right or wrong, that it was a fact of history. It has no negative effect on anyone’s life. You can’t say, who was the idiot who put those cartons of Time Magazine backstage? But that [represented] something truer and I felt this was an interesting way to dramatize it.•

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“Everything You Can Do With An iPhone Was Government-Funded”

October 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Once a thing is developed and the dollar signs are in sight, venture capital is a really effective means of bringing it all home. But in those early days when it’s just risk without reward, government plays a crucial role. For political means, Mitt Romney excoriated the Obama Administration in 2012 for investing in alternative energy companies like Solyndra (a bomb) and Tesla (a boom), but as the philanthropic Bill Gates 2.0 recently pointed out, federal investment in such technologies is vital. Even far-less-essential tools like the Internet would not have gotten off the ground without DARPA dollars. 

In a smart Alternet Q&A, Lynn Stuart Parramore asks economist Mariana Mazzucato about the interdependence of public and private sectors in birthing new industries and devices, including the ever-present iPhone. An excerpt: 

Lynn Parramore:

We constantly hear that anything to do with government is incompetent and inefficient. Yet as you show, many of the industries and products that make our lives better wouldn’t exist without government-funded research. The whole process of economic growth is hugely interdependent with governmental action.

What about something like the iPhone? Is it a product of Silicon Valley magic and the genius of Steve Jobs? Or is there more to the story?

Mariana Mazzucato:

Economists have recognized that government has a role to play in markets, but only to fix failures, like monopolies, for example. Yet if we look at what governments have done around the world, they have not just stepped in to address failures. They have actually actively shaped and created markets. This is the case in IT, biotech, nanotech and in today’s emerging green economy. Public sector funds have not only supported basic research, but also applied research and even early-stage, high-risk company finance. This is important because most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.

I often use the iPhone as an example of how governments shape markets, because what makes the iPhone “smart” and not stupid is what you can do with it. And yes, everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system —all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.

These agencies are all mission driven, which matters to their success, including who they are able to hire. The Department of Energy was recently run by Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who wanted the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to do for energy what DARPA did for the Internet. Would he have bothered leaving academia to join the civil service just to “fix” markets? Surely not. That’s boring.•

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“Sorkin Has Moved Jobs’s Story Into His Own Comfort Zone”

October 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Say what you will about Bill Simmons, but the guy knows talent, as he abundantly proved when staffing up Grantland, his ESPN pop-culture-and-sports combo, which has gone far deeper in analysis of screen and sound and society than anyone had a right to expect. It’s been feared that an exodus of gifted people would follow his ugly divorce from the company, and that now seems to be the case. Sad, but even before the industry itself became fragile, the dynamic of the masthead always was. Erase the wrong name and others magically disappear.

Alex Pappademas, one the really perceptive critics there, has written about Aaron Sorkin’s new Steve Jobs dreamscape. An excerpt:

In Steve Jobs, Sorkin takes interactions and confrontations that occurred at different points in Jobs’s life, or not at all, and reimagines them as having taken place backstage in the minutes immediately before Jobs unveiled one of three new products — Apple’s Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Computer in 1988, and the original Bondi blue iMac G3 in 1998. (Each sequence gets its own distinct look: grainy/nostalgic 16-millimeter for the Mac, sumptuous 35 for the NeXT, warts-and-all digital for the iMac.) The film’s more-than-a-little-bit cockamamy sub-premise is that on each of these crucially important days, Jobs also found himself scheduled for back-to-back come-to-Jesus meetings with people he’d wronged on his way to the top, including Lisa and her mother, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston); Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, putting deepening wrinkles of hurt in his Fozzie Bear rumble); and the company’s third CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels, perfectly wry and wounded).

Sculley shows up as a slayable father figure/level boss in all three chapters, even though in real life he and Jobs rarely spoke after spring 1985, when Jobs fought Sculley for control of Apple’s board and lost. And while Mac marketing guru Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) did follow Jobs from Apple to NeXT and was famously one of the few people who could stand up to him and live to tell the tale, she’d moved on to a position at General Magic and then to retirement by the time the iMac hit. I’m also going to assume Hoffman was more than the sassy-but-supportive Sorkin work-wife figure this movie makes her out to be. Of course, Sorkin has freely admitted that if any of these scenes actually happened the way he’s written them, it’d be news to him — but when you see the movie, chances are you’ll understand exactly why he played so fast and loose with history. By tossing out the biopic beat sheet and zeroing in on the parts of Jobs’s business that most resembled show business, Sorkin has moved Jobs’s story into his own comfort zone. It’s now a three-act backstage-panic comedy/melodrama about a brilliant, work-fixated white guy whose genius far exceeds his emotional intelligence and the people who can’t help but love him anyway.•

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“HP Still Managed To Botch Things”

October 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Carly Fiorina’s disastrous stretch as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO can be summed up thusly: a huge debacle, a golden parachute, a long period of inactivity. Now she’s trying to ride failure and inertia to the White House, and in this strange era of anti-politics, she’s actually one of the Republican frontrunners, seemingly rewarded for her lack of government experience.

Fiorina namechecked Steve Jobs at the most recent GOP debate, trying to get a posthumous rub from our era’s most-celebrated businessperson. Steven Levy, having written the book on the iPod (quite literally), recalls in a Backchannel article how the Apple chief defeated Fiorina in a landslide in the two companies’ dealings. Let’s put it this way: Steve Jobs would have been a terrible President, and the person he clearly outmaneuvered maybe shouldn’t get the gig, either.

From Levy:

Ms. Fiorina’s trainwreck stint at HP has been well documented. But I want to address one tiny but telling aspect of her misbegotten reign: an episode that involved her good friend Steve Jobs. It is the story of the HP iPod.

The iPod, of course, was Apple’s creation, a groundbreaking digital music player that let you have “a music library in your pocket.” Introduced in 2001, it gained steam over the next few years and by the end of 2003, the device was a genuine phenomenon. So it was news that in January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America.

I can talk about this with some authority. Not only have I written a book about the iPod, but I interviewed Fiorina face to face when she introduced the HP iPod at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, and then got Steve Jobs’s side of the story.•

 

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“I Fear That The IRS Doesn’t Have The Courage To Take On Scientology”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It might seem strange to call a filmmaker a writer of perfect essays, but that’s an apt description of Alex Gibney. The director consistently turns out potent work that brims with intelligence and never loses its precision despite the great passion propelling it. Having just followed up a documentary about one popular storyteller (L. Ron Hubbard) with a film about another one (Steve Jobs), Gibney did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Have any Scientologists done anything in retribution for Going Clear to you personally? I thought it was a great documentary by the way.

Alex Gibney:

They have tried to make my life uncomfortable through online harassment and occasional in-person confrontations. But it’s what they are doing to the subjects of the film that is really terrible. Those who appeared have reported harassment by PIs, economic and physical threats and lots of on-line vilification.

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Question:

My question is about Going Clear. At the end of the film, you display a list of high ranking Scientologists who refused to be interviewed or never responded to your interview requests. Among those is Tom Cruise and Captain David Miscavige. What would you like to have asked these men, if you had been given the opportunity?

Alex Gibney:

I would have asked them both about specific aspects of the story. For example, I would have asked Cruise detailed questions about the Nazanin Boniadi episode. I also would have asked him how it is that he can defend the allegations of human rights abuses that have been confirmed by so many. Re: Miscavige, I would have asked him detailed questions about the battle against the IRS and also about the hole and the Cruise wiretap and so much much more. I find it instructive that Miscavige won’t permit anyone to ask him questions.

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Question:

Do you see Scientology continuing to have tax exempt status, or do you think the “religion” is on the way out?

Alex Gibney:

I fear that the IRS doesn’t have the courage to take on Scientology. I think they should lose their exemption because they are really a money-making organization disguised as a religion and because the church has an appalling human rights record. Why should we subsidize that? I wrote a piece about this in the L.A. Times.

Question:

Isn’t that pretty much true of all organized religions?

Alex Gibney:

Depends. I don’t have any problem with subsidizing anti-poverty programs. But I think the exemption should be based on that – which in theory it is supposed to be – rather than on belief in a deity.

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Question:

What do you make of Pope Francis and his tenure as Pontiff? Shockingly, MEA MAXIMA CULPA gave me more respect for Pope Benedict, and I lost a lot of respect for Pope John Paul II.

Alex Gibney:

I am truly impressed by Pope Francis. I love his principled stands on the growing disparity between rich and poor and the destruction of our environment. He has changed things more than I ever thought possible and acted as a moral force for change for everyone. I find it appalling that prominent wealthy Catholics suggest that he should not involve himself in economic issues. If a Pope can’t talk about morality and economic justice, he shouldn’t be Pope.

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Question:

What were you most surprised to learn about Steve Jobs?

Alex Gibney:

Three things. 1) I was fascinated to find out about his interest in zen. What CEO has a monk as a spiritual advisor? 2) I was surprised to learn how much the teams at Apple took care of invention of the actual products. Steve was more of a storyteller.

Question:

What’s number 3?

Alex Gibney:

Good question.•

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“It Needs To Participate In This Change”

September 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Apple has managed Steve Jobs’ legacy so well that people no longer mention the company has failed to deliver the next killer product after the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Unless, of course, you count the Apple Watch, and if you do, you’re alone. The ridiculous sum earned from the middle of the Jobs 2.0 trio of inventions has overwhelmed all talk of the company losing its edge. For now, at least. 

Tim Cook et. al. realize that won’t always be the case, so like the rich company it is, Apple is pouring money into major categories which seem poised to play a major role in commerce this century: transportation and AI. Those, of course, are also two sectors that are going to coalesce. 

Excerpts follow from reports on Apple’s growing interest in autos and machine learning.

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From Chris Mims’ WSJ piece, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Apple Car“:

Technology is set to radically transform everything from who owns automobiles to how they work, and much of this change is driven by the very mobile devices that are Apple’s bread and butter. If Apple is serious about maintaining its gargantuan size, it needs to participate in this change, even if it’s just at the level of experimenting with how it can integrate its software and hardware into the transportation system of the future. Even if, as Apple has often said about its ventures into television, cars start out as just a “hobby.”

Take self-driving cars. There’s plenty of evidence, from hiring and patents to an open records request by U.K. newspaper the Guardian, that Apple is at least thinking about building them.

Estimates for when self-driving technology will be ready for widespread adoption range from the wildly optimistic—five years, according to the head of self-driving technology at Google Inc.—to decades after, perhaps even somewhere beyond 2040.

That’s an eternity in technology years.•

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From Julia Love’s Reuters piece about Apple collecting AI talent:

Apple has ramped up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts, recruiting from PhD programs, posting dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff, a review of hiring sites suggests and numerous sources confirm.

The goal is to challenge Google in an area the Internet search giant has long dominated: smartphone features that give users what they want before they ask.

As part of its push, the company is currently trying to hire at least 86 more employees with expertise in the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, according to a recent analysis of Apple job postings. The company has also stepped up its courtship of machine-learning PhD’s, joining Google, Amazon, Facebook and others in a fierce contest, leading academics say. …

While Apple helped pioneer mobile intelligence–it’s Siri introduced the concept of a digital assistant to consumers in 2011–the company has since lost ground to Google and Microsoft, whose digital assistants have become more adept at learning about users and helping them with their daily routines.

As users increasingly demand phones that understand them and tailor services accordingly, Apple cannot afford to let the gap persist, experts say. The iPhone generated almost two-thirds of Apple’s revenue in the most recent quarter, so even a small advantage for Android poses a threat.

“What seemed like science fiction only four years ago has become an expectation,” said venture capitalist Gary Morgenthaler, who was one of the original investors in Siri before it was acquired by Apple in 2010.•

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“They Have Created Forces That Are More Powerful Than Governments And Banks”

September 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Parallel to Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs doc is Danny Boyle’s fictional take on the subject, the mercifully Kutcher-less exploration of the motivations of the Apple founder and his peers in Silicon Valley. In a Guardian piece by Catherine Shoard, the director discusses his movie at Telluride in somewhat though not overwhelmingly hyperbolic terms. The opening:

The director Danny Boyle has called for more films to be made about the creators of influential new technology. Speaking at the Telluride film festival, where his Aaron Sorkin-scripted biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is winning largely rave reviews, Boyle said that those in the movie industry had a responsibility to examine the import of people such as Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook creator who was the subject of Sorkin’s 2010 hit, The Social Network.

“These films have to be made,” he said. “Benign as they may seem, they have created forces that are more powerful than governments and banks. And they don’t seem motivated by money. I find that extraordinary. It’s a paradigm shift we seem blissfully unaware of. They’re not interested in money but in data. Our data.”

The film is largely an interiors piece, unfolding in real time in the 40 minutes before three key Apple product launches: the Mac in 1984, the NeXT box in 1988, once Jobs has split from Apple, and the iMac in 1998, when he’s back in business with the company. Yet despite the offer of tax breaks from countries such as England and Hungary, Boyle was insistent that the film not be shot far from Silicon Valley. “San Francisco is the Bethlehem of the second industrial revolution,” he said. “It’s where the extraordinary forces emerged that now rule our lives.”•

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“Why Did Jobs’ Death Make Us Mourn?”

September 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

More than anything, Steve Jobs was a salesman, maybe the greatest one ever, with a taste for auto-hagiography. Sure, that’s not the total picture. While he had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Apple I and Apple II, he did ultimately (twice) become the company’s Nudge-in-Chief who hectored his teams to perfection, the way Ahab urged his to the great white whale. 

I can’t wait to see Alex Gibney’s new doc, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which wonders why the late Apple founder was mourned deeply in office parks as well as Zuccotti Park. In an L.A. Weekly piece, Amy Nicholson sees Gibney’s latest as almost a sequel to his last work, Going Clear, the Cult of Mac being analogous in some ways to Scientology. An excerpt: 

Both Scientology and Apple were founded by now-dead gurus who commanded devotion. Both are corporations that claim to stand for something purer than greed. Neither pays fair taxes. And neither functions openly, speaks freely or tolerates critics.

Where the two films differ is us. Dismantle Scientology, and audiences will cheer. Chink away at the cult of Apple, and we all feel accused. I imagine that people will slink out of Steve Jobs keeping their iPhones guiltily stashed. When they make it a safe distance from the theater, they’ll glide their smartphones in front of their faces, swipe the black monoliths awake and disappear into the dream machines of their own desires: where they want to visit, what they want to hear and who they want to reach. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle describes it, the iPhone that was meant to connect the globe instead made us “alone together.” In the future, will historians wondering how society fractured look to Jobs’ Apple as the original sin?

We love our smartphones. In the eight years since the iPhone 1, they’ve become necessities — almost a human right. Though they’re made of circuits and wires, our attachment to these external brains is personal. They keep us company, and in turn we fondle them, sleep with them, flip out when they break. Which is why we have this documentary about their creator and not docs about the inventors of the subway, the shower, the fridge. Gibney’s film asks “Why did Jobs’ death make us mourn?”•

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“He Is Also Fighting For The Construction Of A Technology Infrastructure—A Nationwide ‘Data Superhighway'”

June 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

John Sculley is, similar to the late Steve Jobs, a creative person (Architecture at Brown, Art as RISD) with a mind for business, so it’s sad he’s usually depicted so reductively in the popular narrative of Apple. Even Steve Wozniak has pushed back at this crude portrait. The Newton was a great idea, and things might have been different had it not been roughly a decade ahead of the technology.

Two passages follow from a 1993 People article by Craig Horowitz at the end of Sculley’s run atop the company.

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If Sculley is running on pure adrenaline these days, who can blame him? At a time when most personal-computer makers—including the behemoth IBM—are struggling for survival, Apple posted record revenues last year (more than $7 billion). The Powerbook, its notebook computer introduced in 1992, quickly became the best-selling computer on the market and a must-have accessory for the trendy. But for Sculley, selling computers is only the beginning. A Renaissance man who once had his sights set on a career in architecture and design, Sculley wants to change the world. Or at least America.

“Our resources are no longer coal and iron ore and things that come out of the ground,” he says in his sparsely furnished office at Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley. “The strategic resources are things that come out of people’s minds.” Sculley has campaigned vigorously for fundamental changes in education, job training and the economy to meet the high-tech future. He is also fighting for the construction of a technology infrastructure—a nationwide “data superhighway”—that would transmit vast quantities of information quickly and help create jobs.

It is this vision of the future that transformed Sculley, a lifelong Republican, into an avid Clinton supporter. George Bush “is a very nice person, but he obviously had no interest in anything we [in the high-tech industry] were talking about,” says Sculley. “Remember, this was the President who was amazed by the scanner in a supermarket.” Sculley, who had met the Clintons while Bill was still a Governor, helped mobilize the business community for the Democratic ticket and has become a valued adviser to both Bill and Hillary. “John was instrumental in the development of the President’s overall economic plan,” says White House Chief of Staff Thomas McLarty. The Clintons, Sculley says, “are the kind of people I’m attracted to. They’re builders.”

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By 1982, Sculley was one of three hand-picked contenders to replace Kendall as chairman of PepsiCo when he retired. It was then that Sculley was unexpectedly offered the top spot at Apple. He knew little about computers, but was attractive for his management skills. Though Apple was only five years old—having moved al warp speed from a company located in the garage of its founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, to the FORTUNE 500—the opportunity captured Sculley’s imagination. So did the now famous pitch made by Jobs, then 28, a vegetarian and a college dropout. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water?” Jobs asked Sculley. “Or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Choosing the latter required an adjustment of epic proportions for Sculley. who had to go from pinstripes to corduroy and from formal meetings in the august PepsiCo boardroom to brainstorming in Apple’s funky cubicles. Perhaps most significant, he went from being a respected leader in his industry to an object of suspicion that he was just another empty suit. Sculley quickly proved otherwise when, less than two years into his tenure at Apple, the bottom fell out of the computer market. Sculley had to make tough decisions—decisions Steve Jobs couldn’t live with. “Everyone says I took his company away from him,” Sculley says, “but I told him he could have it back. I didn’t like the direction it was going. It was ultimately the board of directors who made the decision.” Jobs, who quit and started a computer company called Next, refuses to comment.

To get Apple back on track, Sculley, who is known for such openhanded policies as on-site childcare, profit sharing and employee sabbaticals, cut staff, closed factories and reorganized the company. When a second crisis occurred in 1990, he reduced his own $2.2 million salary by a third and look over the reins as technical chief. In that role, he has now bet the future of the company on a new group of products called the Newton, scheduled for introduction later this year. The small, hand-held devices perform a wide variety of office functions—as typewriters, calculators, calendars, faxes, modems, telephones and radios. “If it works out well, it will be great.” he says. “If it doesn’t work out, I guess I’ll be looking for a new job.” With Sculley’s history, no one is betting against him.•

 

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“The Government, In Effect, Served As The Valley’s First Venture Capitalist”

May 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a wonderful Backchannel piece, historian Leslie Berlin answers two key questions: “Why did Silicon Valley happen in the first place, and why has it remained at the epicenter of the global tech economy for so long?”

Sharing granular details (before the name “Silicon Valley” was popularized in 1971, the area was known as “Valley of the Heart’s Delight”) and big-picture items (William Shockley’s genius drew talent to the community, and his bizarre paranoia dispersed them), Berlin provides a full-bodied sense of the place’s past, something she says continues to be of interest to the latest wave of technologists.

The short answer to the two questions posed is that there was confluence of technical, cultural and financial forces in this place in a relatively short span of time, and these same factors continue to sustain the area’s growth. (Oh, and immigration helps.) An excerpt from the “Money” section:

The third key component driving the birth of Silicon Valley, along with the right technology seed falling into a particularly rich and receptive cultural soil, was money. Again, timing was crucial. Silicon Valley was kick-started by federal dollars. Whether it was the Department of Defense buying 100% of the earliest microchips, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed selling products to military customers, or federal research money pouring into Stanford, Silicon Valley was the beneficiary of Cold War fears that translated to the Department of Defense being willing to spend almost anything on advanced electronics and electronic systems. The government, in effect, served as the Valley’s first venture capitalist.

The first significant wave of venture capital firms hit Silicon Valley in the 1970s. Both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers were founded by Fairchild alumni in 1972. Between them, these venture firms would go on to fund Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Genentech, Google, Instagram, Intuit, and LinkedIn — and that is just the first half of the alphabet.

This model of one generation succeeding and then turning around to offer the next generation of entrepreneurs financial support and managerial expertise is one of the most important and under-recognized secrets to Silicon Valley’s ongoing success. Robert Noyce called it “re-stocking the stream I fished from.” Steve Jobs, in his remarkable 2005 commencement address at Stanford, used the analogy of a baton being passed from one runner to another in an ongoing relay across time.•

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“When He Died, People All Over The World Who Didn’t Know Him From Adam Were Weeping”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

There’s another passage from Andrew O’Hehir’s recent Salon interview with Alex Gibney I wanted to put up when I published the Going Clear one, a section about his forthcoming Steve Jobs documentary, but it seemed odd to combine them. Although, you know, cults!

An excerpt in which the director tries to explain why he believes there was a deluge of grief over the passing of Jobs, a businessman:

Question:

How does your approach to Jobs differ from the conventional wisdom?

Alex Gibney:

It’s an impressionistic rumination on his life and what it means to us. I didn’t want to do a dutiful, stone-skipping, “Here are all the events in Steve Jobs’ life” movie. But I was interested in the idea that, when he died, people all over the world who didn’t know him from Adam were weeping. I mean, this guy was not like Martin Luther King Jr. or John Lennon. He was a businessman. But nobody is going to weep for Lloyd Blankfein when he goes. [Laughter.]

Question:

No. Or Bill Gates either, I think.

Alex Gibney:

Or Bill Gates, despite the fact that Bill Gates has contributed more to make the world a better place than Steve Jobs ever did. That’s one of the things we get at, because what I got interested in was values. Not just the story of technology, but the story of values. Why do we care so much about him? And I think the answer — I hate to say “the answer,” because then why bother making the movie — but one of the answers is that he was our guide through this world of the computer. He introduced us to it. He made the computer warm and fuzzy. He made us feel like we were one with the computer. He came very much out of counterculture. He took acid, he went to Reed College and dropped out, he traveled around the world. It was all about “Think Different,” and putting up billboards with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks.

Where did those values take us? By the end, they didn’t take us to such a nice place, although there are aspects of his life that I find very important and moving. For those who see the film as a slam, they’re looking at the wrong end of the telescope. Because a lot of the film is about us, it’s about how we deal with our machines. There’s a small group of people in the film, and they’re not always the ones you would think of. So I hope it ends up being an interesting and in some ways unexpected portrait. We spent a lot of time on his affection for Zen, for instance. We found some great footage of his spiritual adviser, Kobun Chino, talking about his first exchanges with Jobs. So it’s a meditation on many aspects of this person’s life.

Question:

Well, there’s such a contrast with Jobs. We have this person who was really a revolutionary and a visionary when it came to understanding the way people use technology, and then we have the effect he had on the culture of the American workplace.

Alex Gibney:

We definitely talk about that. And as I say, there’s the question of values, expressed in terms of how Apple used and uses its corporate power. It’s one thing for Jobs to give the finger to IBM as a young man. But when you’re atop the most valuable corporation in history and you’re still giving the finger, to whom are you giving the finger?

Question:

Yet Apple still somehow has this cultural cachet of being an underdog company who we’re all supposed to root for.

Alex Gibney:

Yes! And how that happens, I just don’t get. Last year I did a film about James Brown, and there’s a lot that’s similar about James Brown and Steve Jobs. He’s an awesome performer, on stage at those Apple events and presentations. Most people think of him as Edison. Steve Jobs was not Edison — he was a lot closer to P.T. Barnum.•

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“They Are Also Equipping Officers With Smartphones And Tablets”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Jobs banned typewriters from Apple offices in 1981, no matter how advanced they were, and the NYPD may be very belatedly launching a similar initiative. It’s just stunning to realize that old-school keyboards are still a staple in the city’s policing. From Azi Paybarah at Capital New York:

The New York Police Department would be forced to phase out its use of typewriters, under the terms of a bill being introduced tomorrow by Councilman Danny Dromm of Queens. …

Mayor Bill de Blasio and police commissioner Bill Bratton have made upgrading NYPD equipment a key part of their reforms of the department. In addition to giving every police officer an official email address for the first time, they are also equipping officers with smartphones and tablets, and the NYPD is aggressively using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.•

 

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“Steve Believed The World Was Going Mobile, And He Was Right”

January 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s good stuff in James B. Stewart’s New York Times piece “How, And Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft,” though it oversimplifies the reasons for the heavenly resuscitation of Jobs’ near-dead company and the purgatory Bill Gates’ once-mighty empire is now experiencing. In one passage, it reduces the reversal of fortunes to a “vision thing,” making it seem as if Gates was taken unawares by a mobile-dominated future. Oh, Gates knew. From his 1995 book The Road Ahead: 

What do you carry on your person now? Probably at least keys, identification, money, and a watch. And maybe credit cards, a checkbook, traveler’s checks, an address book, an appointment book, a notepad, something to read, a camera, a pocket tape recorder, a cellular phone, a pager, concert tickets, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photographs, and maybe a loud whistle to call for help.

You’ll be able to keep equivalent necessities — and more — in an information appliance I call the wallet PC. It will be about the same size as a wallet, which means you’ll be able to carry it in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, and play both simple and sophisticated games. At a meeting, you might take notes, check your appointments, browse information if you’re bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call-up photos of your kids.•

The real distinction between the companies wasn’t vision but execution. Microsoft was too huge to pivot, though Apple might have won even if its rival wasn’t “encumbered” by success. From Stewart:

The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But Apple’s was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, a radical idea when IBM mainframes took up entire rooms. But Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. That computer also just happened to be a phone, the most ubiquitous consumer device in the world. Apple ended up disrupting two huge markets.

“Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” [Bernstein analyst Toni] Sacconaghi said. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult. It’s the equivalent of Pixar producing one hit after another. You have to give kudos to Apple.”

Walter Isaacson, who interviewed Mr. Jobs for his biography of the Apple co-founder and chief executive, said: “Steve believed the world was going mobile, and he was right. And he believed that beauty matters. He was deeply moved by beautiful design. Objects of great functionality also had to be objects of desire.”•

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“The Ben Franklin Of Today Is Elon Musk”

October 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Walter Isaacson, who has written his second Silicon Valley book, The Innovators, just conducted an AMA at Reddit. Elon Musk will no doubt be pleased with the headline quote, though for all his accomplishments, he certainly hasn’t emulated Benjamin Franklin’s political achievements, nor will he likely. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

Hey Walter, who is the Ben Franklin of 2014?

Walter Isaacson:

The Ben Franklin of today is Elon Musk.

_________________________

Question:

I thoroughly enjoyed your biography on Steve Jobs! Thank you for your diligence!

I know you talked about how you had never done a biography on a living person before. What it easier to feel like you could get a more accurate picture of a living subject? Did you have a system in place that you felt would prevent the tainting of your perspective based on the bias of the person you were interviewing?

Walter Isaacson:

I have done living people before: Kissinger, the the Wise Men. With a living subject, you get to know (if you take time to do a lot of personal interviews and listen) a hundred times more than you can learn about a historic person. I know much more about the chamfers of the original mac than about all of Ben Franklin’s lightning rod and kite-flying experiments. I tend to be a bit soft when writing about someone alive, because I tend to like most people I get to know.

_________________________

Question:

I’m surprised to see computers have not evolved beyond silicon in nearly 30-40 years. What are your thoughts?

Walter Isaacson:

It would be interesting if we built computers not based on digital circuits using binary logic — and instead tried to replicate the human mind in a carbon-based and wetware chemical system, perhaps even an analog one, like nature did it!

_________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on singularity? Do you think it will happen, and if so, when? 

Walter Isaacson:

The theme of my book is that human minds and computers bring different strengths to the party. The pursuit of strong Artificial Intelligence has been a bit of a mirage — starting in the 1950s, it’s always seen to be 20 years away. But the combination of humans and machines in more intimate partnership — what JCR Licklider called symbiosis and what Peter Thiel calls complementarity — has proven more fruitful. Indeed amazing. So I suspect that for the indefinite future, the combination of human minds and machine power will be more powerful than aiming for artificial intelligence and a singularity.•

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“I Don’t Think You Can Say There Is A ‘Typical’ Genius”

October 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

My definition of a genius is someone who can creatively make connections among disparate things in a way that others can’t, piecing together a new reality, a new “language,” in art or physics or anything. They see it.

In a Nautilus blog post, Claire Cameron asked for a description of such a person from five members of Mensa, an organization that measures IQ, which is a different thing. The responses:

“Question:

Can you define ‘genius’ for me, or describe what a genius is?

Richard Hunter (retired finance director): An exceptional ability perhaps? That would satisfy if you were a member of Mensa—you know you have an exceptional ability in IQ if you get in to it. It is one type of genius, but genius takes many forms. An example would be Dave Johnson. He was a famous decathlete in the 80s and 90s. He was clearly a genius athlete: He ran, he could throw javelin, he could do all these things, and he won the Olympic gold decathlon. That must be genius in the sporting field. I am nothing like Dave Johnson—it is far more complicated than one thing or another.

Bikram Rana (director at a business consulting firm): It’s something that you see and you know it when you see it. I think a modern-day genius would be someone like Steve Jobs. It’s someone who has captured the imagination, done something groundbreaking.

Jack Williams (journalist): Oh god. I have no idea. I actually couldn’t. It comes in different forms. I don’t think being a Mensan makes you a genius, as I prove on a weekly basis on a Saturday night. I think there is a creative, innovative element there as well. Genius pushes the boundaries.

John Sheehan (clinical hypnotist): I don’t think you can say there is a ‘typical’ genius. There isn’t a typicalness to it, bar that one exception: Great intellectual ability. Genius has gone from ‘having a [kind of] genius’ to ‘being’ one. I think the word genius now comes from the popular press, it’s easy to say, it’s got a cachet to it. It’s easy, but among the people whose careers are invested in giftedness, high intelligence, then the word ‘genius’ is not often used. It is something I was born with, and that I have had all my life. I don’t think about it until someone asks me, because it is all I know. I think about this a lot though.

LaRae Bakerink (business consultant): It is what you do with your life that defines whether you are a genius. A genius is someone who can create something new.”

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“Most Of The Greatest Ideas Are Usually Denounced By Most Of Us As Crazy In The Beginning”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

____________________________

Question:

What was your experience on Glenn Beck’s program like?

Malcolm Gladwell:

A lot of people wondered why I went on Glenn Beck’s show. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. But i was curious to meet him. And my basic position in the world is that the most interesting thing you can do is to talk to someone who you think is different from you and try and find common ground. And what happened! We did. We actually had a great conversation. Unlike most of the people who interviewed me for David and Goliath, he had read the whole book and thought about it a lot. My lesson from the experience: If you never leave the small comfortable ideological circle that you belong to, you’ll never develop as a human being.

____________________________

Question:

What do you think is the most bat-shit crazy common human characteristic?

Malcolm Gladwell:

There are so many to choose from! How’s this. I do not understand the impulse that many people have of looking first for what they DISAGREE with in another person or idea, instead of looking first for what they might learn from. My second is that I don’t understand why we are so scared of changing our minds. What’s wrong with contradicting yourself? Why is it a bad thing to amend your previous opinions, when new facts are available? If a politician hasn’t flip-flopped at some point in his career, doesn’t that mean he’s brain dead?

____________________________

Question:

You write about Steve Jobs a lot and overall I would sum up your opinion of Jobs as rather quite negative. Is this wholly true and what sort of response have you received from people over this?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I have complicated thoughts about Steve Jobs. He fits very clearly into the idea I write about in David and Goliath about how entrepreneurs need to be “disagreeable”–that is, that in order to make something new and innovative in the world you need to be the kind of person who doesn’t care about what your peers think. Why? Because most of the greatest ideas are usually denounced by most of us as crazy in the beginning. Steve Jobs was a classic disagreeable entrepreneur. That makes him a difficult human being to be around. But were he not difficult, he would never have accomplished an iota of what he did!

____________________________

Question:

Your books have a really interesting critical thinking aspect to them. Do you have any idea what your next book/piece will be about?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I’m writing a bunch of pieces for the New Yorker right now. One is about crime–which has been a recurring theme in many of my books. It asks the question: is crime a means of economic mobility? That is–is it a way for outsiders to join the middle class? It clearly was once. The children and grandchildren of Mafia dons ended up going to law school and becoming doctors. But is that still the case? It’s kind of weird question, but it gets at something that we rarely consider, which is that there might be a downside to cracking down too successfully on organized criminal activity. The New Yorker is a great place to explore complicated questions like this. Plus, when my ideas are simply crazy, the editors there are smart enough to step in and save me from embarrassing myself!

____________________________

Question:

Sorry, I haven’t yet read your new book so you may already cover this, but I do have a question about college choice. Thirty years ago, I went to a snooty liberal arts college, paid lot of money, and in those 30 years, literally no one has cared about or even really asked where I went to college. Seems like I wasted my parents money and should have gone to the University of Minnesota for a lot less. Am I wrong?

Malcolm Gladwell:

You aren’t wrong. I have an entire chapter on college choice in David and Goliath. My point in that chapter is that prestige schools have costs: that the greater competition at a “better” school causes many capable people to think they aren’t good at what they love. But your point is equally valid. People going to college and in college vastly over-estimate the brand value of their educational institution. When I hire assistants, I don’t even ask them where they went to school. Who cares? By the time you’re twenty-five or thirty, does it matter anymore?

____________________________

Question:

There’s a lot of discussion here about college choices based off your book. What’s your opinion on the Thiel Fellowship over at MIT where Peter Thiel is giving away $200K to a student to leave school and start their own start-up? Do you think it’s wise for these students to take an investment in their future at the cost of a potentially valuable education?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Thiel’s idea is really interesting. But let’s be clear. He’s not saying that it is a good idea for MOST people not to go to college. He’s saying that if you are really really driven and ambitious and smart and already have a great business idea at the age of 18 or 19, college probably isn’t going to do you much good. And he’s right! But that really only applies to those students in the 99th percentile. This fits into one of my pet peeves, by the way. We spent an awful lot of time as a society fretting over the quality of educational opportunity at the top: gifted programs, elite universities. People actually freely give money to Harvard, which has an endowment of 50 billion! But surely if you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you are the person least in need of the benefits of a 50 billion dollar endowment. We need to spend a lot more attention on the 50 percentile. That’s where money can make a real difference.

____________________________

Question:

Has anyone ever told you that you remind them of Sideshow Bob?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yes. I take it as a compliment!•

 

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“He Would Reminisce About The Time When He Was Young, And California Was Still The Fruit Bowl Of The United States”

March 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Jobs, that grandiose dreamer, didn’t just want to build Apple a new campus, he wanted to create a new California–or recreate the old one. From Cathleen McGuigan’s interview with the project’s architect, Norman Foster:

“Architectural Record:

The Apple headquarters you’ve designed for Cupertino, California, will have 12,000 employees in one building.

Norman Foster:

You could compare that with a typical university of the same size. Traditionally, you’re probably talking at least 16 or 17 buildings. The Apple building will occupy the site much more tightly than what was there. It was the former Hewlett-Packard site, and, just in the last month, we demolished all the buildings that were there. It was a large number of them. [The new Apple construction will cover 13 percent of the site, while the two dozen former HP buildings, in total, covered much more, according to Foster’s office.]

Architectural Record:

So what made the form of a ring the logical choice for this building?

Norman Foster:

It’s interesting how it evolved. First of all, there was a smaller site. Then, as the project developed, and the Hewlett-Packard site became available, the scale of the project changed.

Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.

We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle—essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.

Remember, the main building caters to 12,000 people, but the wellness center—the fitness center—is probably responding to the needs of the entire Apple community in Silicon Valley, which is 20,000-something. Also, another building on the site is the presentation center, which will allow Apple to do the kind of things like product launches that otherwise would require space in San Francisco or wherever. And, a bit like the airport, where you have one building—although it is in itself quite large—it is essentially compact.”

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“Even In Apple’s Unrelenting Culture, Cook’s Meetings Stood Out As Harsh”

March 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Apple CEO Tim Cook is clearly a bright and talented guy, but until the company delivers a product post-Jobs that wows and not just new iterations of the same old things, he’ll be judged with suspicion. And even though he seems to be more progressive than his late boss in terms of charitable giving and environmentalism, he’s apparently just as scary when in business mode. From Haunted Empire: The Job After Steve Jobs, Yukari Iwatani Kane’s new book which has been excerpted in the Wall Street Journal:

“Meetings with Cook could be terrifying. He exuded a Zenlike calm and didn’t waste words. ‘Talk about your numbers. Put your spreadsheet up,’ he’d say as he nursed a Mountain Dew. (Some staffers wondered why he wasn’t bouncing off the walls from the caffeine.) When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. ‘Why is that?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?’ He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.

Cook also knew the power of silence. He could do more with a pause than Jobs ever could with an epithet. When someone was unable to answer a question, Cook would sit without a word while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The silence would be so intense and uncomfortable that everyone in the room wanted to back away. Unperturbed, Cook didn’t move a finger as he focused his eyes on his squirming target. Sometimes he would take an energy bar from his pocket while he waited for an answer, and the hush would be broken only by the crackling of the wrapper.

Even in Apple’s unrelenting culture, Cook’s meetings stood out as harsh. On one occasion, a manager from another group who was sitting in was shocked to hear Cook tell an underling, ‘That number is wrong. Get out of here.’

Cook’s quarterly reviews were especially torturous because Cook would grind through the minutiae as he categorized what worked and what didn’t, using yellow Post-its. His managers crossed their fingers in the hopes of emerging unscathed. ‘We’re safe as long as we’re not at the back of the pack,’ they would say to each other.

Cook demonstrated the same level of austerity and discipline in his life as he did in his work. He woke up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and hit the gym several times a week. He ate protein bars throughout the day and had simple meals like chicken and rice for lunch.

His stamina was inhuman. He could fly to Asia, spend three days there, fly back, land at 7 a.m. at the airport and be in the office by 8:30, interrogating someone about some numbers.

Cook was also relentlessly frugal. For many years, he lived in a rental unit in a dingy ranch-style building with no air conditioning.”

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“The Result Is What One Executive Calls ‘The Most Computerized Company In The World'”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1981 Inc. article by Steve Ditlea that covered Apple Computers’ decision to disappear the typewriter from its desks and make space for the “office of the future”:

“Apple Computer Inc. practices what it preaches. Without fanfare, the firm has inaugurated the workplace of the future by putting its personal computers on most of its employees’ desks. The company almost eliminated typewriters, abolished the job title of secretary, and instituted a more efficient and pleasant work environment.

In a memo circulated last year, then-president Mike Scott ushered in a new age in office procedures. ‘EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc. Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let’s all use it! Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple… We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let’s prove it inside before we try and convince our customers.’

Combined with conventional data processing run on a Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputer system, the result is what one executive calls ‘the most computerized company in the world,’ a revolutionary development even by the high-tech standards of California’s Santa Clara County (a.k.a. Silicon Valley).

There are now no more than 20 typewriters left in the 2,200 employee firm. Instead of typewriters, the several hundred employees involved in composing or disseminating letters, memos, documents, or reports use a typewritersized Apple II with built-in keyboard, a pair of add-on disk drives, a video monitor, and Apple Writer, the company’s own disk-stored word processing software. Word processing has gained a foothold in many businesses, but never before has a firm so completely done away with typewriters by executive fiat. …

The Apple way is best exemplified by chairman of the board and co-founder Steve Jobs, a dark-haired 26-year-old, who in grey workshirt and slacks this particular morning could easily be mistaken for a maintenance worker. Instead he’s the holder of the largest single block of Apple stock, some 7.5 million shares worth about $163 million at recent market prices.

When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the ‘gee-whiz’ enthusiasm of someone who sees the future and is making sure it works. He explains the decision to put an Apple computer on every desk as part of an overall desire to institute a more humane workplace. ‘Not only do our area associates have the freedom to do more rewarding, enriching tasks, they have the chance to get involved in solving problems that can ultimately affect the success of the entire company.’

As for worker fears that office automation may lead to greater unemployment, he insists the opposite is true, with personal computers opening up jobs for Apple employees.”

______________________________________________

In 1967, Walter Cronkite imagined the remote office of the future:

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“For Some Crazy Reason We’re Just In The Right Place At The Right Time”

January 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As absolutely everyone has mentioned, it’s the 30th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh and the great “1984” ad that introduced it to the masses. The Mac, even if it wasn’t a tremendous success in and of itself, changed everything by popularizing GUI, making text interfaces obsolete, and coming up with a design that aspired to update the modernist beauty of Olivetti.

Steven Levy, the best tech journalist of the personal-computing age, is releasing an unexpurgated version of an interview he did with Steve Jobs just as the Mac was about to drop. In that conversation, the Apple co-founder asserts that the invention of the light bulb influenced the course of history more than Marxism. I probably disagree with that, though a lot fewer people died by misuse of the light bulb. From Nick Bilton at the New York Times:

“There are some aspects of the 30-year-old interview that might answer some unanswerable questions about what Mr. Jobs would have done with his life if he were still alive today.

When Mr. Levy told Mr. Jobs that there was ‘speculation’ that he might go into politics, Mr. Jobs replied that he had no desire to enter the public sector and noted that the private sector could have a greater influence on society. ‘I’m one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did,’ Mr. Jobs said.

One thing Mr. Levy was continually searching for in the interview, was what was driving Mr. Jobs — a question that was echoed in 2011 in Steve Jobs, the biography written by Walter Isaacson.

In the 1983 interview, it’s clear that money isn’t the answer. Mr. Jobs talked about his net worth falling by $250 million in six months. ‘I’ve lost a quarter billion dollars! You know, that’s very character building,’ he said, and notes that at some point, counting your millions of dollars is ‘just stupid.’

Mr. Levy pressed again. ‘The question I was getting at is, what’s driving you here?

‘Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom,’ Mr. Jobs replied, noting that the 1980s were the beginning of the computing revolution. ‘We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use.’

Such passion is something that would follow Mr. Jobs through his career, and what he said next seemed to be the driving force behind that passion.”

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“Was George Orwell Right About 1984?”

January 24, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Orwell, of course, was the main inspiration for Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad by Ridley Scott, but it also riffed on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which is perhaps more influential from a visual perspective than any other work of art ever. Sure, Lang’s plot was overheated, but, my god, those images. You can’t truly be literate about media without having seen it.

The Apple spot “went viral” thirty years ago, even though it was shown only once, and there was yet no infrastructure for it to be propelled by person to person. What careered around the world wasn’t the actual spot but verbal descriptions of it. It was the collision of a new thing (computers) and an old thing (oral history). And soon enough, the centralized media was smashed, though that didn’t make the world perfect. Tyranny doesn’t disappear; it just attempts to reinvent itself.

Steve Jobs introduces the commercial at the 1984 Apple keynote.

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“Steve Jobs Built The First 100 Apple 1 Computers At The Crist Drive Home”

October 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can hardly blame the town elders in Los Altos for designating Steve Jobs’ childhood home an historic resource. There’s tourism money in the short-term future. But for how many decades will Jobs be recalled and revered? Edwin Land was once just as big an icon. From Jason Green at the Mercury News:

“Steve Jobs built the first 100 Apple 1 computers at the Crist Drive home with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Patricia Jobs. The first 50 were sold to Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in Mountain View for $500 each, according to the evaluation. The rest were assembled for their friends in the Homebrew Computer Club.

‘I’d get yelled at if I bent a prong,’ Patricia Jobs told The Daily News in an interview last month.

The original computers are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. One sold for $213,000 at an auction in 2010.

The home is also where Jobs courted some of his first investors, including Chuck Peddle of Commodore Computer and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, according to the evaluation.

The first partnership for Apple Computer Co. was signed on April 1, 1976, and nine months later the company was established and operations moved to nearby Cupertino.

‘These significant events took place at the subject property,’ Commissioner Sapna Marfatia wrote in the evaluation.”

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“I Think It Is Perfectly Sensible To Trust The Russians”

September 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not everyone believes in the Tao of Steve, but Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer, feels, as many of us do, that Apple has limped along since its co-founder’s death, offering new iterations instead of innovations. In a Financial Times article about the state of Apple and other topics, the former Time Managing Editor also analyzes the tense situation in Syria, seeing an intersection of Russian and American interests. An excerpt:

“I was at a dinner in Manhattan a few weeks ago, just as the Syria issue was heating up, with one of my previous biography subjects, Henry Kissinger. He gave a dazzling analysis (I would call it ‘incredible’ except that it was, in fact, exceedingly credible) of how Russia would see its strategic interests, and predicted that Russia’s president would soon insert himself into the situation by calling for an international approach to the problem. So I was impressed but not surprised when Vladimir Putin did precisely that a week later.

On some of the TV shows I went on to talk about Steve Jobs, I was asked instead about Syria – and the question was usually about whether we could possibly trust the Russians. Most of the guests got worked into a lather, saying that Barack Obama was being horribly naive to trust them. But I think it is perfectly sensible to trust the Russians: we can trust them to do what they perceive to be in their own strategic interest.

Some of Russia’s strategic interests clash with ours: they want to protect their client state Syria and minimise US influence in the region (and yank America’s chain when possible). But to a great extent, Russia’s interests in this situation actually coincide with ours – at least for the moment. Russia fears as much as the US does the rise of radical Islam just south of its borders. It doesn’t want chemical weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists. And it would like to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power.

That last interest seems to conflict with ours, since the US has called for regime change. But the Russians believe that toppling Assad is not the best idea when that might lead to al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces taking over much of Syria and getting control of some of the chemical weapons. Thus it is in Russia’s interest to get Assad to surrender his chemical weapons, rather than summarily topple him. That might actually be in the west’s interests as well.”

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