Posted on 04/08/2019 10:37:23 AM PDT by Red Badger
Ive had a long and exciting journey full of failures and successes since I first started working at Apple in 1983. I was part of the original Macintosh team and had two stints at the company (one from 1983 to 1987, and then from 1995 to 1997).
Ask people who worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was around, and theyll very bluntly tell you it wasnt easy. There were days where he was impressed by my work, and there were days when I was certain he would fire me. But it was always exciting because we were on a mission to prevent totalitarianism. (You can read more about my adventures in my new book, Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life. )
I wouldnt trade working for him for any job Ive ever had and I dont know anyone in the Macintosh Division who would, either. My job as a software evangelist in the Macintosh Division defined my career.
Here are the top 11 life-changing lessons that I learned at Apple: 1. Only excellence matters
Jobs elevated women to positions of power long before it was cool or socially responsible to do so. He didnt care about gender, sexual orientation, race, creed or color. He divided the world into two groups: Insanely great people and crappy people. It was that simple. 2. Customers cant tell you what they need
In the early 1980s, Apple was selling Apple IIs. If you asked customers what they wanted, they would say a bigger, faster and cheaper Apple II. No one would have asked for a Mac. 3. Innovation happens on the next curve
Macintosh was the next curve in personal computing. It wasnt merely an improvement to the Apple II or MS‑DOS curve. Innovation isnt making a slightly better status quo. Its about jumping to the next curve. 4. Design counts
It may not count for everyone, but design counts for many people. Jobs was obsessed with great design. He drove us nuts with his attention to detail, but that is what made Apple successful. 5. Less is more
One of the key tenets of Jobs obsession with design was the belief that less is more. He was the minimalists minimalist. You can even see this in his slides: They had dark blue or black backgrounds with 90 to 190 point text and no more than a handful of words. 6. Big challenges beget big accomplishments
The goal of the Macintosh Division was preventing totalitarianism and worldwide domination by IBM. Merely shipping yet another computer was never the goal. 7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence
When Jobs announced the iPhone, it was a closed programming system to ensure that it was safe and reliable. A year later, he opened it up to third-party apps, and iPhone sales skyrocketed. This was a 180 degree reversal and a sign of intelligence and courage.
8. Engineers are artists
Jobs treated engineers like artists. They werent cogs in a machine whose output was measured in lines of code. Macintosh was an artistic expression by engineers whose palette was software and hardware design. 9. Price and value are not the same thing
No one ever bought a Macintosh based on price. Its true value became evident only when you factored in the lower requirements for support and training. Jobs didnt fight on price, but he won on value. 10. But value isnt enough
Many products are valuable, but if your product isnt also unique or differentiated in some way, you have to compete on price. You can succeed this way as Dell did, for example. But if you truly want to dent the universe, your product needs to be both unique and valuable. 11. Some things need to be believed to be seen
Innovators ignore naysayers to get the job done. The experts told Jobs he was wrong many times for example, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and Apple retail stores. Its not that Jobs was always right, but sometimes, you need to believe in something in order to see it.
I hope that everyone has at least one chance to work for someone as brilliant as Steve Jobs. It wont be easy, but what doesnt end your career makes it stronger.
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva. Previously, Kawasaki was chief evangelist of Apple. He has written fifteen books, including The Art of the Start, Selling the Dream and his latest, Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life. Follow him on Twitter .
*This is an adapted excerpt from Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life, by Guy Kawasaki, and with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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And eating IBM’s lunch in the process!
“But it was always exciting because we were on a mission to prevent totalitarianism.”
Pompous ass. Are those the placards you have hanging in those slave factories you all operate?
>Hmmm, Ive met Jobs, Kawasaki, and the Founder of 4D. Theyre not >evil, but just people trying to figure out the next thing to do. I liked the >founder of 4D best. ;-)
Didn’t say anyone was evil. I just consider Guy to be a dim bulb. I used to have lunch with Jobs a few times a year in Palo Alto. He had tried to get me to NeXT (I told him, I would never want to work with him) and then when he returned to Apple (same reason).
I do remember having a business meeting once with Laurent, and specifying my company’s requirements, and his 4D would not scale to our needs.
“Xerox had it on a mini. We sold them in our store”
I thought maybe they did. That’s interesting, what store sold Xerox minis? Comp USA? I still contend they really didn’t know what they had and they sure as hell did not how to market it.
The Dod apps I am familiar with were not so much designed beforehand as they are just results of years of change requests and feature adds by scads of contractors who come and go over the years leaving a mess of conflicting code styles, conventions, and basically bloated and out of control.
Holiday Computer Center off Elm St. Mr Holiday owned the store. He was a hobbyist.
“Apple didnt invent the GUI. Xerox did many years before.”
Beringians discovered America first. But it didn’t matter until Columbus showed up.
I was being sarcastic. Your comment is more correct, but less fun. :P
That Dilbert comic reflects truth about some clueless bosses. Happened to me decades ago when I went to work as a systems engineer for an outfit. Hired as a junior engineer despite having experience but a manager wooed me away from another outfit with promises of advancing. First day, asked my supervisor what it was that he wanted me to work on. Guy got hostile, saying “I need to tell you?”. I said “Just a general direction, tell me what tasks are mine.”. Guy walked away. For the next month I dived in and began fixing software and improving everything, ran circles around their senior staff. All the supervisor did was play games and I realized the place was run by clueless idiots. Supervisor quit after a couple months, and no one missed his absence. By the way, I met Kawasaki a long time ago and have an autographed book from him.
If you ever saw the Xerox GUI work you would see a clone of the old Mac down to the 1 button mouse, toolbar and, menu. Nothing wrong with that. History gets things wrong sometimes just like your analogy.
Not even close to true, Okie.
The Lisa and Mac GUI is really quite different from Xeroxs SmallTalk GUI. They bear very little relationship to each other and share ZERO code at all, Okie.
Apple engineers on their PAID eight hour (sixteen if you count Steve Jobs previous eight hour visit) visit to Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center were permitted take no notes but allowed use any concepts they saw which they found useful. Thats all.
Apple invented draggable active visible multiple layered Windows, nested relocatable menus, live drag-and-drop icons, both vector drawn and bit mapped matching typographic style calligraphy font systems, WYSIWYG display, the Waste Basket / Trash Can file deletion metaphor (later stolen by all other GUIs some called it a "recycle bin"), and many other features of the accepted features of todays GUI paradigm. None of those were developed by Xerox. Xerox SmallTalk was in many was GUI that relied much more on keystrokes.
Apples development of these GUI features and functionality are well documented and dated as pre-dating all other work on such features with photographic evidence showing the progress. The fact is that Apple invented and developed its own GUI, which was quite different from Xeroxs GUI. False claims to the contrary are just that: false. Another fact is that many of the engineers from PARC went to work at Apple on the Lisa and Mac projects.
Xerox Star office mini-computers sold a basic GUI installation for approximately $50,000. The Apple Lisa sold for ~$10,000, and the Macintosh sold for the same price (over Steve Jobs objections and advocacy for a $1695 price) as the 1984 IBM-PC with one floppy drive and a green screen monitor of $2495. No other GUI computer was available for less than the $50,000 Xerox star. That was revolutionary. Now add the Apple laser printer and youve got desktop typesetting with pre-press editing, on-screen WYSIWYG, and the ability with Adobe type font to go to actual high definition print typesetting output which is why Apple bought 19% of Adobe. That was revolutionary, and reinvented the publishing industry.
So was Thomas Edison.
Seems to be a prerequisite...................
As I recall, basic starting price was around $75,000, but to be truly useable was more like $100,000. . . After adding workstations. Later they got it down to around $50k.
I have heard that Elon Musk is the same................only time will tell if it works in his favor............
the Macintosh sold for the same price (over Steve Jobs objections and advocacy for a $1695 price) as the 1984 IBM-PC with one floppy drive and a green screen monitor of $2495. No other GUI computer was available for less than the $50,000 Xerox star.
In short, Jobs did for GUI computing what Henry Ford did for automobiles.Ford hired a consultant to estimate the market for automobiles. The consultant came back with a number, and Ford asked his basis. He was told that that was how many people he thought could be hired as chauffeurs! Which was completely irrelevant to Fords vision of automobiles operated by the general public.
Likewise with GUI: Xerox saw the market for computers in grossly static terms, but Jobs vision was a GUI on every desk (and not just at work).
The lesson is to ask, How low would the price have to be before you would be a buyer? And ask yourself how close you can come to that target. If youre off by a country mile, you have to forget it. If you can come in at twice the bid price, now you are in a negotiating position.
I sprung for an Apple IIc in 1984; that was as much as I could talk myself into spending. Would have loved a Mac at $1695 . . .
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