hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in control. “Sculley was so eager for Steve’s approval that he was unable to stand up to him,” Rock recalled.
Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart strategy to Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature to share control. Deference did not come naturally to him. He began to become more vocal about how he thought the company should be run. At the 1984 business strategy meeting, for example, he pushed to make the company’s centralized sales and marketing staffs bid on the right to provide their services to the various product divisions. (This would have meant, for example, that the Macintosh group could decide not to use Apple’s marketing team and instead create one of its own.) No one else was in favor, but Jobs kept trying to ram it through. “People were looking to me to take control, to get him to sit down and shut up, but I didn’t,” Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard someone whisper, “Why doesn’t Sculley shut him up?”
When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to manufacture the Macintosh, his aesthetic passions and controlling nature kicked into high gear. He wanted the machinery to be painted in bright hues, like the Apple logo, but he spent so much time going over paint chips that Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, finally just installed them in their usual beige and gray. When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working properly and was dubbed “Steve’s folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he recalled.
Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the spunky but good-natured Macintosh financial officer who had once won the team’s annual award for the person who best stood up to Jobs. But she knew how to cater to his whims when necessary. When Apple’s art director, Clement Mok, informed her that Jobs wanted the walls to be pure white, she protested, “You can’t paint a factory pure white. There’s going to be dust and stuff all over.” Mok replied, “There’s no white that’s too white for Steve.” She ended up going along. With its pure white walls and its bright blue, yellow, and red machines, the factory floor “looked like an Alexander Calder showcase,” said Coleman.
When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said it was a way to ensure a passion for perfection:
I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white glove to check for dust. I’d find it everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I’d ask Debi to get it cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this drove Debi up the wall. She didn’t understand why. And I couldn’t articulate it back then. See, I’d been very influenced by what I’d seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.
One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had always been fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and his tools in order, and his son was proud to show that he could do the same. Coleman came along to give the tour. “Steve was, like, beaming,” she recalled. “He was so proud to show his father this creation.” Jobs explained how everything worked, and his father seemed truly admiring. “He kept looking at his father, who touched everything and loved how clean and perfect everything looked.”
Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-admiring wife of France’s socialist president Francois Mitterrand asked a lot of questions, through her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about overtime pay. He was annoyed, so he described how automation helped him keep down labor costs, a subject he knew would not delight her. “Is it hard work?” she asked. “How much vacation time do they get?” Jobs couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so interested in their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell her she can come work here any time.” The translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment Rossmann stepped in to say, in French, “M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and your interest in the factory.” Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator looked very relieved.
Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he was going just over 100 miles per hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After a few minutes, as the officer scribbled away, Jobs honked. “Excuse me?” the policeman said. Jobs replied, “I’m in a hurry.” Amazingly, the officer didn’t get mad. He simply finished writing the ticket and warned that if Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would be sent to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to him,” Rossmann marveled.
His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a few months after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just completely obnoxious and thinking he could get away with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had arranged a formal dinner with French software developers, but Jobs suddenly decided he didn’t want to go. Instead he shut the car door on Hoffman and told her he was going to see the poster artist Folon instead. “The developers were so pissed off they wouldn’t shake our hands,” she said.
In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s general manager, a soft rotund guy who had come from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was not impressed with his team or his sales strategy. “You don’t deserve to be able to sell the Mac,” Jobs said coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen. Jobs demanded a vegan meal, but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce filled with sour cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She whispered that if he didn’t calm down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.
The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give them any allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman recalled.
It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple’s manager in France. Gassee was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassee later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassee didn’t jack up sales projections, Gassee got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”
Gassee was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted to. Francois Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of
After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.
Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and
