Josh Ong
Writing for Fast Company, Brent Schlender published selected stories and snippets from the interviews on Tuesday. The recordings cover a period of 25 years, with many of them having take place during Jobs' time away from Apple.
"Many [of the tapes] I had never replayed— a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now," Schlender wrote. "Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him."
According to the journalist, the humbling period after Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 taught him adaptability, the value of partnerships and how to structure a corporation. Time spent at Pixar learning the business of making hit films would later help him trim down Apple's product line and produce a "decade-long string of hits," such as the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
iPad illustration of Steve Jobs by Jorge Colombo | Source: Fast Company
A key catalyst for Jobs' growth was his family, Schlender said, noting that his wife Laurene and his children had a calming effect on Jobs. Incidentally, having a family also helped him to understand the market that Pixar was trying to reach.
"In hindsight, Jobs's having a real family might have been the best thing to happen to Pixar. He was most effective as a marketer and a business leader when he could think of himself as the primary customer," Schlender wrote.
Jobs bought Pixar from filmmaker George Lucas for $5 million in 1985. The company struggled early on, but Jobs eventually decided to slim it down and focus on disrupting the animation industry. According to the interviews, he restructured the company to equally value team members working on the creative and technological sides. Schlender posits that Jobs applied a similar formula when he returned to Apple by integrating "designers and technologists" on his core team.
With hours of source material to draw upon, Schlender had a wealth of stories to tell about his interactions with Jobs. Fast Company has published a short collection of notable quotes from the tapes. For instance, Jobs once said that he models his management style after the Beatles.
"The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies," he said. "It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts."
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41 Comments
Never had any interest in his authorized biography or the specials that appeared on TV but i would love to get more insight into how he thought as a business man and, dare I say, futurist.
iPad illustration of Steve Jobs by Jorge Colombo | Source: Fast Company
Was this interior of the Apple jet really........ pink?
Good to see Schlender hasn't lost his touch about knowing nothing about NeXT other than the histrionics of early NeXT. He did get the interior correct, but the claim of rewriting NeXTSTEP truly shows you how technologically inept journalists continue to be.
Porting to the x86 architecture is not a rewrite, but then again, he's a journalist. Mach, by design was portable, Brent. BSD 4.3 was already on x86 long before NeXT ported it.
In reality, Brent, the Industry refused to welcome a 3rd system solution and the help of Gates tanking any porting of MS Apps, along with Adobe only made it that much more difficult to expand the Quad FAT NeXTSTEP into consumers hands.
Hell, we couldn't even get OEMs to send us specs to write device drivers because they didn't think the market was worth it.
Of course, now that NeXTSTEP is OS X and iOS with the same minds they refused to listen to now dominates they want to kiss everyone's ass.
Matrox, Diamond, you name it, they are all near death or gone and instead of working with us back then they snubbed us.
Linux survives much in part because OS/2 failed and IBM got sick and tired of being married to MS who they despise. Billions later and along with Oracle, Sybase, RedHat, Intel and so many others it's still no where near the polish of NeXTSTEP in it's day.
There is a lot to be said for vision and Linux has too many geeks who think they are smarter and more talented than the likes of Steve Jobs and the eye for talent and focus he famously earned.
I actually thought we were going to see some old interviews. Hell, I've got plenty of those of Steve. I'm sure as hell not putting them out on the Web. I'll hold onto my memories of working there at a place you always walked into knowing your stuff was ahead of the competition.
Gates famous line about crap APIs on NeXTSTEP immediately told me the guy is a bald face liar who always couldn't seem to figure out how come Steve was always 10 steps ahead of him and was seriously annoyed the day Steve slowed down a bit to the point the Industry could `get it' and start to dump Microsoft in droves.
I'm keeping my NeXTSTEP 3 boxes forever. It's too bad Apple has been pragmatic about the OS X UI. It could use some freshening up but with user drag such as it is, it'll never happen.
I did a search for NeXT Computer on google and found no NeXT Computers for sale. I can only assume that they have all been gobbled up and if one was found it would be expensive. As for Pixar. Any of those computers are also hard to find. Seems since Steve's death all real countable memorabilia is mostly bought up.