NeXT

"Perhaps part of the impulse to skip this story is because NeXT was—spoiler alert—never a huge market success. NeXT had all the ingredients to succeed. We were at the right place at the right time, we had a world-class team, and we were building technology that was years ahead of the rest of the industry. If history had gone differently—and if Steve had been more willing to take advice—I believe NeXT and its operating system, NeXTSTEP, could have become the industry standard, taking the place that Microsoft Windows eventually occupied."

"As we often discussed at NeXT, growing a company is like polishing rocks in a tumbler. Over time, the mix and grit change into a shiny, well-functioning team. Along the way, though, things can be rough. You’re crashing into each other, experiencing ups and downs. By overlooking this discomfort, these narratives ignore the role that the NeXT years played in both Steve’s leadership development and the eventual outcome: In the late 1990s, NeXT’s core technology became essential to Apple’s survival."

"Instead, we faced persistent challenges. Our computers were expensive, slow to come to market, and barely worked once they did. Meanwhile, Steve sabotaged important business and distribution relationships. NeXT existed on the perpetual verge of bankruptcy and on the wheel of Steve’s ever-shifting standards. Many of the original team, including me, left as a result of our frustrations with him. But despite these problems, NeXT succeeded in laying the unseen foundation for everything that came after for Apple and for the technology industry at large."

"When we started NeXT, Steve was eager to focus his energy on developing his public presence. I told him that wouldn’t work. Until we had a product to sell, Steve was the product—and we would have to be judicious about how we deployed him. I believed that the most strategic use of Steve’s persona was to present him with an air of mystery, which meant not talking all the time. That was a foreign idea for Steve. As we discussed this point on a walk one day in the Stanford Research Park hills, where we had rented our first office space, I could sense that he was struggling to express something. This was unusual for Steve. After I pushed him to share what was bothering him, he finally said to me, “Sometimes, I think you want to do my job.”"

"Having left NeXT in 1990, I watched from the outside as Steve managed Apple’s remarkable transformation. Meanwhile my own experience at NeXT—and my relationship with Steve—remained fundamental to my life’s work even as I took a job working for Microsoft to help Steve’s rival, Bill Gates, normalize business relationships with Apple and the rest of the computer industry as it settled its lingering antitrust case."

"NeXT allowed the Mac to live. And it allowed Steve to etch himself into the annals of history."

"When his father passed away, in 1993, the loss affected Steve deeply, and he invited me to the burial. There were less than ten people present. Soon after that, we had breakfast together. As was typical, Steve arrived a little late. But this time, with an unusual opening remark. “You were right,” he declared with that same old grin. “About what?” I said, incredulously, recalling the many years of argument and struggle as we built NeXT. “Family,” he said. We talked for a long time that morning, with little mention of products, but great enthusiasm for the life lessons that only family can deliver. It is my belief that Steve’s success and the eventual success of Apple emanate from this balance and the commitment to and trust in others that he learned from his family."

"When we first founded NeXT, Steve didn’t have much family to speak of. At times, it led to contention between Steve and me. It was important to me to spend time with my wife and young sons. But Steve made it difficult. He often demanded the leadership team appear in person for weekend meetings, whether on holidays or family birthdays. I did my best to draw boundaries."

"Steve, still pondering, couldn’t shake the idea of a 3M machine. When he later told the founding story of NeXT, he would bedazzle the press with the perfect tale. But it was largely a myth. It went like this. Steve first met Paul Berg, a tall, gregarious biochemist, at a Stanford luncheon in 1984. Paul, fifty-nine and the winner of a Nobel Prize for creating the first recombinant DNA molecule, was teeming with bleeding-edge insights about the creation of life. In late August 1985, Steve and Paul sat for lunch in Palo Alto. Steve began grilling Paul about how researchers used computers—and why they didn’t more often. Specifically, he wanted Paul to explain why biologists weren’t using computers to model DNA experiments. In theory, computers would speed them up exponentially. Over two and a half hours, Paul described to Steve the level of complication involved in conducting biology experiments. With each trial, Paul’s team had to choose different temperatures, enzymes, and other variables and then wait to see what worked via trial and error. The 3M machines capable of handling all of these factors were prohibitively expensive, even for well-funded laboratories. Steve left the lunch in awe. And Paul reciprocated Steve’s respect. He loved the Silicon Valley start-up culture that Steve had helped forge and he insisted that his own Nobel-winning research could only have been possible in the cooperative, entrepreneurial environment of the Bay Area. Steve came away from the meeting feeling confident that he could offer scientists and researchers the product they clearly needed: a more affordable 3M machine. “And gradually,” Steve said, “my spirits started to come back little by little.” This story Steve told about his lunch with Paul was far more elegant than the real story. As Dan’l later recalled, Steve understood the power of being able to say, “I met with Paul Berg, and there was an epiphany.” He knew that name-dropping Nobel Prize winners carried weight."

"Steve was thrilled about selling NeXT to Apple. NeXT had launched its first computer in 1988 but had failed to compete in the burgeoning market for workstation computers. In 1993 it had shut down its hardware business to focus on selling its operating system and development software. In selling the company to Apple, Steve had found a face-saving parking place for NeXT, and a chance to keep its advanced software technologies alive. It was no wonder he was excited about it. “NeXT’s software will be the core of a new-generation operating system for Apple,” he told me after the sale. “They really need it.” As Steve’s responsibilities at NeXT began to wind down, I wondered if his day-to-day involvement at Pixar might increase from the weekly visits that were now his custom. But nothing changed. Pixar was steadily working on A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2 and putting the expansion plan into place. Steve seemed happy with the way things were working at Pixar and he showed no inclination to change"

"By late 1996, NeXT had all but abandoned its goal of building an OS. Steve Jobs had told his staff “the ships are burning,” a metaphor signaling there was no turning back, in announcing WebObjects as the company’s new direction. But then a young staffer learned something intriguing: Apple needed a new operating system."

"As the details were being worked out, a group of NeXT employees sat in a room together, chatting. They’d all worked with Steve, and they just didn’t understand what Amelio was thinking. None believed Jobs would ever be a number two. Not anywhere, probably, but certainly not at the company he cofounded as a twenty-one-year-old."

"The duo had proved themselves making the cube-shaped computer at NeXT, when Steve wanted “no draft angles, no parting lines,” meaning that the sides of the cast part would be perfectly parallel to the direction the part was ejected from in the mold. “Tim and Ken figured it out,” this person says. “And it was absurdly expensive, but that was a defining experience. So if Jobs was having a hard problem and these guys say, ‘It cannot be done,’ then it really can’t. But if these guys say, ‘It can,’ then it’s just really hard. Acorn was almost his brain trust or sounding board for, is this *possible* or is this *crazy?*”"

"Neither NeXT nor Pixar proved to be good vehicles for Jobs. When he returned to Apple, he found a right mess; a whole series of projects and products, including the Newton handwriting recognition software, were loss-makers and cash-consumers. Apple had one product that was profitable and credible, the Macintosh. Jobs cut everything else, and then paused until his people created ‘the next big thing’, which proved to be the iPod and iTunes, and then all the delightful and simple new products they created. Apple had the DNA, and design capability, which Jobs greatly augmented, to go from strength to strength. Jobs took his rackety old vehicle, which was barely roadworthy in 1997, and endowed it with such a powerful new engine that it became for a time the most valuable vehicle in the world. The lesson? Don’t look for a new vehicle if the existing one has potential for success and can be radically reconditioned."

"NeXT expected to sell its factory capacity of ten thousand computers a month. Only four hundred a month were sold. NeXT was a magnificent flop – Jobs at his most expansive, and least commercial. Yet the venture served a function for Jobs – it distracted him from being fired from Apple, it kept him in the digital game, it preserved his self-respect as a player in the brave new world, it gave him valuable lessons in how not to create a viable business, and most of all it eventually paved the way for his return to Apple, when it was in even worse straits than NeXT."

"During this interregnum, Steve Jobs asked me to fly up to San Jose so I could see a movie he was in the middle of making for this unknown company he’d acquired called Pixar. But first he wanted to show me what he was doing with a “revolutionary” computer system at another new company of his called NeXT. It hadn’t been going that well because its complex yet elegant design couldn’t find a market, given the absolute domination of Microsoft. I went to the NeXT office, where Steve showed me a few scenes from *Toy Story*, and asked if I would join the Pixar board. I said I’d have to think about it. I didn’t want to commit myself and didn’t want to insult him, but I’d never been much interested in animation and had never made any animated movies. I don’t really understand the form and I thought this new Pixar work was awkward, and, separating me from most of the world, I didn’t get any of the charm of *Toy Story.*"

"The relationship between Master Hiruma and Jobs goes beyond that of merely teacher and student, or even friends. After Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, in disappointment, he appointed Master Hiruma as a “spiritual advisor” at the next company he founded, NeXT. When he married Laurene Powell in 1991, it was this Zen master who officiated at the wedding ceremony held in Yosemite. It is understandable that Zen and Japanese culture deeply influenced Jobs’ abilities and aesthetics, who was often called a genius."