In my entire life I've only seen about one in twenty engineers who really exemplify that artistic perfection. So it's pretty rare to make your engineering an art, but that's how it should be.
I was very touched recently by a scene in the movie
Walk the Line.
In it, a producer tells Johnny Cash to play a song the way he would if that one song could save the whole world.
That line summed up a lot of what I look for when I talk about art in engineering or in anything.
• o •
If you're that rare engineer who's an inventor and also an artist, I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is:
Work alone.
When you're working for a large, structured company, there's much less leeway to turn clever ideas into revolutionary new products or product features by yourself. Money is, unfortunately, a god in our society, and those who finance your efforts are busi- nesspeople with lots of experience at organizing contracts that define who owns what and what you can do on your own.
But you probably have little business experience, know-how, or acumen, and it'll be hard to protect your work or deal with all that corporate nonsense. I mean, those who provide the funding and tools and environment are often perceived as taking the credit for inventions. If you're a young inventor who wants to change the world, a corporate environment is the wrong place for you.
You're going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you're working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.
That means you're probably going to have to do what I did. Do your projects as moonlighting, with limited money and limited resources. But man, it'll be worth it in the end. It'll be worth it if this is really, truly what you want to do—invent things. If you want to invent things that can change the world, and not just work at a corporation working on other people's inventions, you're going to have to work on your own projects.
When you're working as your own boss, making decisions about what you're going to build and how you're going to go about it, making trade-offs as to features and qualities, it becomes a part of you. Like a child you love and want to support. You have huge motivation to create the best possible inventions—and you care about them with a passion you could never feel about an invention someone else ordered you to come up with.
And if you don't enjoy working on stuff for yourself—with your own money and your own resources, after work if you have to— then you definitely shouldn't be doing it!
• o •
It's so easy to doubt yourself, and it's especially easy to doubt yourself when what you're working on is at odds with everyone else in the world who thinks they know the right way to do things. Sometimes you can't prove whether you're right or wrong. Only time can tell that. But if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that's a key to happiness. And a key to confidence. Another key I found to happiness was to realize that I didn't have to disagree with someone and let it get all intense. If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don't have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone. So don't sweat it! You have to trust your own designs, your own intuition, and your own understanding of what your invention needs to be.
• o •
If you could easily predict the future, inventing things would be a lot easier! Predicting the future is difficult even if you're involved with products that are guiding computers, the way we were at Apple.
When I was at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, we would always try to look ahead and see where things were going. It was actually easy to see a year or two ahead, because we were the ones building the products and had all these contacts at other companies. But beyond that, it was tough to see. The only thing we could absolutely rely upon had to do with Moore's Law—the now-famous rule in electronics (named for Intel founder Gordon Moore) that says that every eighteen months you can pack twice the number of transistors on a chip.
That meant computers could keep getting smaller and cheaper. We saw that. But we had a hard time imagining what kinds of applications could take advantage of all this power. We didn't expect high-speed modems. We didn't expect computers to have large amounts of hard-disk storage built in. We didn't see the Internet growing out of the ARPANET and becoming accessible to everyone. Or digital cameras. We didn't see any of that. We really could only see what was right in front of us, a year or two out, max.
But there was one exception. Right around 1980, Steve and a bunch of us from Apple got to tour the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) facility, which is one of Xerox's research and development labs.
Inside, for the first time ever, we saw real video displays— computer monitors—and they were showing something entirely new. They were showing the first graphical user interface (GUI)—an interface that lets you interact with icons and menus to control a program.
Up to this point, everything had been text-based. That's going to sound odd to all the people who don't remember it, but that's how everything worked back then. A computer user had to actually type in text commands—long, complicated ones—to make something happen.
But this experimental Xerox computer had windows popping up all over the place. And they were using this funny-looking device everyone now knows as a mouse, clicking on words and small pictures, the icons, to make things happen.
The minute I saw this interface, I knew it was the future. There wasn't a doubt in my mind. It was like a one-way door to the future—and once you went through it, you could never turn back. It was such a huge improvement in using computers. The GUI meant you could get a computer to do the same things it could normally do, but with much less physical and mental effort. It meant that nontechnical people could do some pretty powerful things with computers without having to sit there and learn how to type in long commands. Also, it let several different programs run in separate windows at the same time. That was powerful!
A few years later, Apple designed the Lisa computer, and later the Macintosh, around this concept. And Microsoft did it a couple years after that with Microsoft Windows. And now, more than twenty-five years after we saw that experimental computer in the Xerox PARC lab, all computers work like this.
It's so rare to be able to see the future like that. I can't promise it'D happen to you. But when you see it, you know it. If this ever happens to you, leap at the chance to get involved. Trust your instincts. It isn't often that the future lets you in like that.
• o •
It's funny. In some ways, Apple is the bane of my life. That's because I'm hounded by people all the time—it's as if my whole life is constantly being directed by Apple's worldwide fame. But there was a time in the late and mid-1990s when it looked as if
Apple was in trouble. At least that's what all the media was reporting. That was shocking to me. Like most things in the world, the perception was pushed by the mass media and people's psychology. People would read things saying Apple was in trouble and the whole situation would just feed on itself. After reading stories like that, people were afraid to buy Apple products. I mean, at the time there were a lot of people going to Apple-using companies and schools and demanding that they switch over from their Macs to the new PCs. They were worried Macs weren't going to be around anymore. I was stunned by what was happening to Apple.
During the time Apple was supposedly going under, Gil Ame- lio was the CEO. He realized that the answer was to tighten up, start making more accurate amounts of product according to what we were going to sell, tighten our belt and restore profitability. But there was another problem. Macs running the operating system at the time, Mac OS 7, were crashing a lot. The sense that Macs running this operating system were weak and unreliable was a widely held belief throughout the Mac community: among the users, the executives, the employees—everyone. So one of the other things Apple decided was that it was going to need a new operating system.
At the time, this was an issue that meant a whole lot to me. I felt that Apple didn't need a new operating system. I felt that the current one was great—it was invulnerable to hackers and viruses, for one thing. I ran a major network in my home, and I never even once needed a firewall. I was as aware as everyone else of the Macs crashing, but I felt that fixing the current operating system would be a far better solution than finding a whole new one. And then one night, by accident, I figured out what the problem was. It was thanks to my son Jesse, who always likes to think different and not use the mainstream products that are out there. He downloaded a web browser called iCab and was using
it instead of Internet Explorer (IE). Because he was using it, I gave it a try. And I fell in love with it! That first day I used i( 5a I > instead of IE, I had no crashes. Not a single one. Hmm. That nighi in bed, I lay there and wondered what the heck was up. And the next day my Mac didn't crash. I went two weeks before I had to restart the system, and that was a record!
From then on I realized that for the most part I had no crashes at all, and the only thing I'd changed about my system was I'd stopped using IE. I realized that by this time, almost everyone who had a Mac was running IE. That's why there were so many crashes, in my opinion. And it turned out that the reason neither Apple nor anyone else believed me was that the error in IE causing the crashes didn't just happen when you had IE open on your screen, it could happen anytime your computer was running. So it wasn't easy for them to see that it was IE, and not the system, causing the crashes.
As soon as I figured this out, I informed Apple at every possible level. I told every Apple employee and executive I knew. But no one would listen. What's funny is, at the time I did have a few friends who said their Macs never crashed. I figured they were either babying their computers and not really using them, turning them off every night, or lying. But now I asked them what browser they were using, and all my friends who claimed their Macs never crashed said they were using Netscape, which was another browser on the market at the time. I started going online to email lists and asking people what browser they were using. And yep, everyone who didn't have crashes was using Netscape.
I could never convince Apple. This was such a big lament for me at the time. I couldn't convince anyone that it wasn't the Mac OS that was at fault.
Then one day Gil Amelio told me that Apple—in addition to avoiding excess production and inventory and keeping expenses down—was going to buy a new operating system. They were
going to buy the operating system from NeXT, which was the company Steve Jobs started after he left Apple.
Gil called me and said, "Steve, I'm letting you know that we're doing a deal with NeXT for $400 million." Wow, was I stunned! I never expected that. And I knew this meant Steve Jobs was coming back, which I'd also never expected! I knew that many people at Apple felt Steve had been disloyal by leaving Apple in 1985. (Steve resigned after a power struggle with the board. They stripped Steve of most of his responsibilities and Steve quit. It's a misconception in Silicon Valley that he was fired. He quit. And that made him look disloyal.)
It turned out that Steve, who just came back as an adviser at first, was exactly what Apple needed. I mean, a company like Apple largely depends on strong passions and the commitment of its customers. Apple became very passionate when its whole success and survival was questioned. The threat to its whole existence was so extreme! But Steve was able to stand up there on a stage and talk about Apple and really restore the loyalty that people had all along. Apple needed marketing leadership and charisma to get people excited again, and that's what Steve Jobs brought when he came back.
It's funny, because the products people credit with bringing Apple back to life—the iPods and the iMacs—all of them were in the design phase back when Apple was in trouble. Their main designer, Jonathan Ive, was already working on them. But the way Steve presented those new products was amazing. He made sure the press leaks were cut down, too, so when these new products came out—the colorful iMacs and, of course, the digital music iPods—they seemed to be totally new and surprising.
To be honest, I was never all that crazy for the iMacs. I had my doubts about its one-piece design. I didn't care about its colors and I didn't think its looks were all that good. It turned out that I just wasn't the right customer for it. Boy, it turned out to be the
perfect product for schools—a low-cost, one-piece Macintosh.
And then there was the iPod. Now, you have to understand that, for me, portable music has always been important. Ever since my first transistor radio, I always had music I could carry with me. I was always the one to have the first portable tape players, the first portable CD players. I was the first person I knew with a minidisc player. And during my trips to Japan, where you always see products way ahead of their time and whatever is currently available here, I saw small players that could store music on memory chips. Essentially these devices stored music on little cards with RAM, the same kinds of cards your digital camera stores photos on. I would always buy whatever cool thing I could find there.
So when the iPod came out, I was excited. It was on the expensive side—it had a little disk drive built in—but it turned out that was the way to do it. Steve was always good at that. He really is great at looking at new technologies and choosing the right ones, the ones that will succeed.