Steve Jobs in Exile

The popular story of Steve Jobs is that he co-founded Apple, was pushed out, wandered through a failed venture called NeXT, then returned to save the company and usher in the iPod and iPhone. That version is memorable, widely repeated, and, in an important sense, wrong. His years at NeXT are usually treated as a footnote, when they were among the most consequential of his life and career. Geoffrey Cain https://x.com/geoffrey_cain is the author of Steve Jobs in Exile, which draws on previously unpublished material and new interviews to illuminate the NeXT years. The book argues that NeXT was not a failure but the hidden turning point. Its operating system, NeXTSTEP, became the foundation of Mac OS X and, later, the iPhone, and its fingerprints are still visible in Apple’s code today. Dan’l Lewin https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlewin1/was an early Apple employee who led the initial launch of the Macintosh into higher education. In 1985, he left the company alongside Steve Jobs to co-found NeXT, where he served as VP of Marketing and Sales. Over more than 30 years in Silicon Valley, he went on to hold senior roles at Sony and Microsoft, and later served as President and CEO of the Computer History Museum. In this episode, Geoffrey and Dan’l join Matt Merrill to discuss the story behind NeXT, the 1980s computing landscape that shaped it, the technical bets like Objective-C and dynamic binding that gave Apple a long head start, why the university market mattered so much, and how the company ended up shaping the devices in our pockets. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] The post Steve Jobs in Exile https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/steve-jobs-in-exile/ appeared first on Software Engineering Daily https://softwareengineeringdaily.com.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The popular story of Steve Jobs is that he co-founded Apple, got pushed out, wandered through a failed venture called Next, then returned to save the company and usher in the iPod and iPhone. It's a memorable story, but it treats his years at Next as a footnote. In reality, they were among the most consequential of his life and career. Jeffrey Kane is the author of Steve Jobs in Exile, which draws on previously unpublished material and new interviews to illuminate the next years. The book argues that Next was not a failure, but the hidden turning point. Its operating system, Next Step, became the foundation of macOS X and later the iPhone,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  and its fingerprints are still visible in Apple's code today. Daniel Lewin was an early Apple employee who led the initial launch of the Macintosh into higher education. In 1985, he left the company alongside Steve Jobs to co-found Next, where he served as VP of Marketing and Sales. Over more than 30 years in Silicon Valley, he went on to hold senior roles at Sony and Microsoft, and later served as President and CEO of the Computer History Museum. In this episode, Jeffrey and Daniel join Matt Merrill to discuss the story behind Next, the 1980s computing landscape that shaped it, the technical bets like Objective C and

• 1:26Speaker 00

  dynamic binding that gave Apple a long head start, why the university market mattered so much, and how the company ended up shaping the devices and our pockets. Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in backend development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at Depp Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  All right. Hello, everybody. I'm Matt Merrill, and I am here with Jeffrey Kane and Dan'l Lewin. Jeffrey is the author of the book Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of Next and the Remaking of an American Visionary. It's a very unique and excellent book about Steve Jobs before he became kind of the legend he is today. Most people know that Steve Jobs started Apple, but what you may not know is that Jobs was forced out of the company. And after he left, he created a new company, Next, with the idea of creating a powerful computer for the academic market. And so we have Jeffrey here, who wrote the book and did all the research, and we have Daniel, who was actually a co-founder of Next and left Apple to create the company with

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs in 1985. And I think that I looked you up on LinkedIn, Daniel, and you have probably the only phrase that anybody could accurately say, "left Apple to establish a pioneering startup with Steve Jobs." I don't think anybody else can accurately say that.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  There are a couple others with us, but yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  So, welcome. And so I'd like to kind of ground the audience and kind of assume that not everybody knows this history. So I'm hoping, Jeffrey, maybe you can give us a quick dive into some of this history and kind of what the book is about, and we'll take it from there.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Sure, Matt. So, one of the most fascinating things I've found diving into the story of Next Computer is that the memory that we all have of it is off. It's just not completely accurate. The way that events actually happened with Steve Jobs and Apple versus how we remember them today are significantly different, you know, in the sense that our memories have been warped by pop culture, by film, by, you know, everything out there about Steve Jobs. So there's a storyline out there about Steve and about Apple. And the usual story goes that Steve co-founded Apple in the garage with Steve Wozniak. They built Apple, they released the Macintosh. You know, it was all a great success, and Steve Jobs was brilliant

• 4:20Speaker 02

  from day one. And then, you know, this is something that people have told me, they thought that Steve Jobs was so creative that he was kicked out of Apple, that Apple didn't like him because he was outshining them. And he was removed, and then he wandered in the wilderness for 12 years. He built a failed company called Next Computer, and then he returned to Apple. They realized how smart he was, and he saved Apple from bankruptcy. It was about three quarters away from complete bankruptcy, would have probably gone out of business had things gone differently. And, you know, and then we got the iPhone, we got the iPod, the iPad, and so forth. And Steve Jobs was memorialized as the great legend who we all know. This is the popular narrative, and it's that, you know, Steve

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Jobs was this brilliant visionary from day one. And from day one onwards, he was always doing things right, but then he was just misunderstood, and then he became great later in life. What was so fascinating about this book is that as I dive deeper and deeper into the story of Next Computer, I found that the real story of what happened here, the real story of Steve Jobs, was the inversion. It was actually that Steve Jobs founded Apple with flaws. You know, they built great stuff. It was a, it was a successful company. You know, they had an IPO, they built the Macintosh. But Steve Jobs was not well-liked by certain

• 5:43Speaker 02

  factions within Apple. And there was the CEO, John Sculley, a former Pepsi co-CEO, who he had brought on to help run the company. He was pushed out. You know, the real story is that the Macintosh computer was not a commercial success, that the company was bleeding money, it had inventory piling up. And, you know, in these final years of, you know, Steve Jobs in Apple version one, these final years were actually quite difficult. And Steve was quite a divisive figure in the company. I mean, people either loved him or hated him. And then eventually, you know, he tried to oust his CEO, who he brought on, and they brought both of them before the board. And ultimately, Steve was sent

• 6:23Speaker 02

  off into his exile, which became Next Computer. So the real story is that Next Computer, despite we, you know, people living today, software developers, technologists, going back and looking at this incredible story, you know, we think of Next Computer as the ultimate failure, that everything that Steve Jobs touched in this company just didn't hit the market. It wasn't doing well. Ultimately, you know, they say that the company failed, but that's actually not what happened. Next Computer was a success, and it was a success because it developed a type of software. So Next Step, the operating system, which was based on object-oriented programming, I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar

• 7:08Speaker 02

  with this, you know, something that became really popular in the 1990s and 2000s. Object-oriented programming became the basis for the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the acquisition of Next Computer. Because what happened is that Apple needed this operating system, Next Step. They needed a new operating system. Apple was struggling, and they saw that Steve had been developing at Next this exact system for about 10 years. I mean, you know, he was developing things in the years, you know, 1987 and 88, that would appear in 2008 with the iPhone. I mean, this is the operating system that powers, you know, a lot of the

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Apple software today, and it's just something that's everywhere. So, you know, what I found in this book, and this is the story that I feel hadn't been told, it's that the story that we think we know isn't actually the real story of Apple and Steve Jobs. It's really Next Computer that was the turning point. That's where he both learned to lead, learned to trust and delegate to his people, but then on the other hand, also developed extremely advanced software and operating system, a kernel that would be needed decades down the road. And once the world saw what this was really capable of, then Steve Jobs was able to return to Apple and to bring it to the greatness that we know today.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  What a great overview. And I have to say, again, I was, I was joking before we started, I'm not trying to butter you guys up, but the book is written in such a way that it's, it's not dramatic, but it really tells quite a nice story and weaves the human element into this very nicely. It's a great book, truly. And what's funny is, as you say that, I didn't know a lot about Next. I was saying before we started that my brother was a big Next fan. And that framing of Next being a failure, that's actually not something I was terribly aware of until like, kind of, I read the through line of the book. But I walked away from it just being absolutely blown away at how ahead of the times, specifically

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Next Step, was. And so truly highly recommend reading this book. And now that we've gotten the history lesson, thank you, Jeffrey. We have one of the founders of Next here, Daniel. And I'm going to start with, with a bunch of questions for you. I've been super excited to talk to you. So let's start with like, a, like a framing of, it's 1985, you started up Next. What was the problem Next was trying to solve? And what was so revolutionary about it? And how did Steve convince you to leave a company like Apple to start this up?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's 1985, 1986 were amazing years for the computer industry. You know, Apple was on its way to a billion-dollar run rate, 1 billion annual sales. The beginning of the computing industry was blossoming. And when I say the computing industry, I mean networking and the cornerstone by which Internet Protocol emerged, the essence of the Internet, which was the connection of major research institutions, building a distributed network, et cetera. What people don't understand, and I think it's important

• 10:33Speaker 03

  to put in context, is time sharing, the notion of sharing a mainframe computer was invented on the college campus of Dartmouth College.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Stanford wrote their own time sharing system called Lots, Low Overhead Time Sharing System. The connection capability to put the Macintosh, just to fast forward a little bit to 1984, the connection capability to bridge Macintosh into the Lots network spun out and became the company known as Cisco.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I did not know that. Okay. Wow.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  1986, Microsoft went public, Adobe went public, Oracle went public, Sun Microsystems went public. These were companies that were a couple hundred million in sales with a couple hundred million dollar market caps. That's the way the world was. And IBM, at the same time, was a $40 billion a year company.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Wow. That contrast is stark. Wow. That's stark.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  It's stunning to appreciate kind of where we were and what we were thinking about. So the answer to your question is, I had been part of Apple from really the beginning of the Lisa computing project, which was a precursor to Macintosh. And without Lisa, Macintosh would not exist. And the Lisa was built essentially by the people who were at Xerox PARC, who had done all the original work on Smalltalk and the Bravo architecture, which was WYSIWYG word processing, what you see is what you get. Tom Malloy, Charles Simonny, they were at PARC. Charles went to Microsoft. Tommy came to Apple. And so there were these interesting technologies that were bubbling up mostly out of research

• 12:20Speaker 03

  parks and universities. And when I was working on the Lisa project, it was to do market development into the Fortune 500. And I wore a suit and tie. I was in my early twenties and I was dealing with CEOs of major corporations. That was my job, was to wear the suit and to, we always had the CEO and the others needed to be officers. We brought 80 or 90 companies through to look at this technology at the time when they were steeped in IBM mainframes and had some Digital Equipment Corp mini computers for their research scientists and things like that. And what I found is, the Fortune 500, which is where Apple wanted to sell, was uninterested in the Lisa system for all sorts of reasons.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Not the least of which was they were running on mainframes and we were programming in Pascal and we were pushing this notion of a SQL database. Oracle was this little startup. And what came of it was me, I spent time doing research on the university community. And I said to the division chief and the executives, I reported right into the, basically the CEO's office, it's like, we should be selling this to the people who invented these technologies because we don't have to sell to them. They invented it. They'll buy it. And the division chose not to. So that's what led me to go to work for Steve in the Macintosh division when he took over that division. And I looked at what they were trying to do out of the division.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  There were 10 people in the group and they had an idea. Joanna Hoppin had an idea about the university community and I had done all this research and written it all up. So they said, you need to be the one to come figure this out. So I did it, not reluctantly, I did it with full energy and enthusiasm under three conditions. One, that I could undo what they were doing because it was way off base. Two, that Steve helped me, but only when I asked him. And three, that they paid me, because I knew he was a meddler, that they paid me when it was done because I had a young family and I was going to be flying all around the country and that would have been a new part of my role. So two out of three is not bad. I'll let you guess. So we set up the university consortia with 24 institutions.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  So at the moment of the launch of the Macintosh, we had two dozen major institutions, kind of one of each kind, some liberal arts colleges, et cetera, but a lot of the mainstream computing from Stanford and MIT and Carnegie Mellon in Utah, where all the graphics were developed and on and on. And that saved Apple for a while because Macintosh sales stalled at four units a month per dealer, when the manufacturing ramp was going to 80,000 units a month, a million units a year. So we had a 90-day window where that inventory stacked up to turn down the supply chain commitments because they were long lead and to put 50,000 computers, round number, into

• 15:16Speaker 03

  the university market in August and September of 1985. And so that saved Apple's bacon because they could turn down the inventory supply chain and all the costs and penalties associated with that. And it spread the word through the kids can't wait. We had this Wheels for the Mind initiative. Sometimes you can go find the poster on the web about the kid on a bicycle with the Macintosh mouse trailing off the back. I set all that up. That was part of Steve's vision about bicycle for the mind, but I set those programs in motion. So the punchline was, these were people who desperately wanted to put next generation computing to work for educational purposes.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  And when Steve was fired, we were underway building, Rich Page, one of the co-founders, and I were working, Rich was doing the, obviously the design work, but I was working with the market. So we were interested in designing this notion of a 3M machine, which Jeffrey identifies very clearly in the book. It's a really important part of, of reading the process about why the company existed, why I went along with it and why Steve frankly needed me to do what I was doing for them as opposed to continuing to do that at Apple. So it was a very magical time and we were basically servicing a market was the key. I can stop now and you can, you know, carry on or tease things along as you see fit.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  But it was a wild time in the industry. Took multiple years to build these kinds of things and we were fearless. We had a blank sheet of paper and market contacts and a lot of energy.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  That sounds incredibly exciting, also probably very nerve wracking for somebody in their twenties with a new family.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 16:58Speaker 04

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• 18:41Speaker 01

  The 3M concept, that is very important. Can you talk about that just briefly, just so we can ground people?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the essence of it was, imagine if you will, again, Macintosh, 128K of RAM and no operating system, just a read-only memory ROM with a bunch of routines that you could call. And I'm out there talking to computer science departments about using Macintoshes to teach. And they said, what's the operating system like? And the answer was, well, from your point of view, there is no operating system. But there are these interpretive Pascal program that you can use to teach people what, you know, it's like, okay, a teaching machine, that's good. What they really wanted, and it was defined primarily at Carnegie Mellon University, was this notion of a machine that would have a million pixels on the screen, would

• 19:29Speaker 03

  process a million instructions per second, and have a megabyte of RAM.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  It's 1986. That was remarkable. Yeah, it was remarkable.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  It was a big deal. And it needed to cost, roughly speaking, less than $3,000. And then they were going to deploy them everywhere. That was the idea.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  It was like the dream. Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  It was the dream. That's right.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Also, one thing, as you were describing that time, SQL itself was pretty new, right?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Early, yes. I mean, again, we were, we were touting Oracle when I was at, at Apple as a, as a partner in proposing the notion of SQL interactive for database work at a time when it was IBM.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Was DB2 a thing then or was that late?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  DB2 and FORTRAN, everything, you know, they wanted FORTRAN and we were, at the time, Pascal was the rave and yeah, it was just another world.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Man, wow. It's wild.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  And networking was all proprietary. There were fights going on about different types of networking, token ring versus, you know, the proprietary stuff that everybody was building, you know. And then in background, one of my classmates from college, Eric Schmidt, most people know who Eric is.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  He was your roommate in college?

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Not my roommate, we were classmates.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Oh, excuse me, I missed you.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  No, no, no. But, you know, and he went to Berkeley with Bill Joy and they put Internet Protocol in the Berkeley distribution. And what people don't actually know is that as an undergraduate at Princeton, Eric was the ringleader among four or so undergrads who petitioned Bell Labs for rights to the Unix operating system, which they were under the consent decree with DOJ to make available their technology. And so they got a copy of Unix and ported it to the only computer on the Princeton campus in 1975, 76, which was an IBM mainframe. And so they learned how to port Unix as undergraduates.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And then when he went on to get his PhD with Bill at Berkeley, they were weaving Internet protocol into the Berkeley distribution, which as the distributions went out to the computer science departments around the country, which were all new because they were all double E prior to that time. That's how things got strung together. And the universities were also crazy about what we were doing with Nextstep, which was based on the Berkeley distribution, but engineering a kernel that would allow for all kinds of interesting long-term things around parallelism and portability and all kinds of the rest.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  That's a great segue because Nextstep is the thing that, as Jeffrey was talking about, like, it still lives today, which is absolutely bonkers to me in a good way. And so the choices that led to that, right? Like, the way you described that makes a lot of sense. And then Next and Steve also hired Avi Tavanyan for his work at Carnegie Mellon on the Mach kernel. And you're using BSD. And can you talk a little bit more about those choices and like how it shaped where Next was going and why it was, I mean, I think you've already touched on why it was so revolutionary.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, no, there's more to it. So it's a very good and fair question. We were pretty far down the pike, having selected Berkeley Distribution as the foundation. And we made a series of other choices, which I'm sure you'll want to talk about around what we're going to do with Interface Builder and Object Orientation and Objective C as opposed to C++ and all the things that went into the whole stack were really important. And we were licensing a lot. I mean, the compilers we licensed from Richard Stallman at MIT, that was my turf, right? I was smart enough to know what I didn't know when I was at Apple. And so the university people adopted me when I would just say, I don't know, tell me. And then they were educating me all the time. So I was learning who was doing what,

• 23:35Speaker 03

  where in the university community and how that could be pieced together into what they wanted at the end of the day. And the thing about Carnegie Mellon is there were so many interesting projects there. And Rick Rashid, who was running that project, and Avi was one of his students, Rick went on and founded Microsoft Research, right? So he left CMU and became the founder of MSR, Microsoft Research, which is the last standing major research lab in a corporation in the world, for the most part. He did amazing things. He was fostering this new cadre of under, well, PhD students. And Avi had worked, obviously,

• 24:15Speaker 03

  at Rochester as well, where Rick was. And so the idea, obviously, was flexibility, portability, the multi-threaded capability, parallelism and things. So basically, having the protected memory space at the low level, under control, which would just, you know, help the whole process of stability and growth over time. So we were really trying to pick and taking risks to take research projects and productize them. But we were also doing a lot of other things that were unique. Next Software Distribution bundled a Symbase database with every machine.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  So we bundled the full-function SQL database with every machine. We bundled Mathematica, Richard Wolfram's technology, with every machine. We bundled Shakespeare. You know, I mean, we bundled all kinds of things with every machine so that there would be a kernel of ideation and capability in these machines that other people could extrapolate and build on. And then with Interface Builder, you could envision corporate databases, which gets into the discussion about IBM and things, corporate databases being the place from which data would reside on a desktop, and easily developed applications would allow for enterprises

• 25:36Speaker 03

  and intelligence communities and others we'll talk about to actually do amazing things with these desktop machines. Because I'll close in a second, but, but basically, what we're doing is taking extreme workstation functionality and putting it in a PC business model. Because another thing about that moment in time is that Sun Microsystems and Apollo and all the other workstation companies, they sold under the same business model as the mini-computers. So they sold you the product, and then you had a monthly maintenance fee for the operating system. The PC model was you get the operating system, and you might pay for an upgrade every year or two, but you get the operating system with every

• 26:19Speaker 03

  machine. So we were doing PC model and workstation plus functionality. So we were really, and the distribution strategy was very, very different as well. So all these things, we were looking at the, to your earlier question, the context of the industry and the markets, and then how to service a market that was exceptional in the sense that the university is a superset of the real world. It's not a subset market. More things happen in universities than happen in the real world. They're researching, they're exploring, they're doing what have you. So what better place to start than that?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  So an absolute academic's dream in one package that they own as opposed to pay a subscription for. Sorry, Jeffrey, did you want to hop in?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  I had nothing more to say. I mean, I think Daniel covered the university market quite well. And I will just say that that was one of the more interesting stories that I went into and wrote about in the book. It was, you know, the significance of the university market. I think that's something, it's something that in hindsight, we tend to forget because, you know, today, we live in an age of screens everywhere, phones everywhere. You know, whether you're a scientist or a researcher or just a regular person using your phone, we all have access to high-powered tools now. And with AI, we can get one of these high-powered, expensive Nvidia machines, you know, Apple's coming out with new Mac minis that are getting ever, ever more powerful that do local AI processing. So, you know,

• 27:44Speaker 02

  we really live in an age now when things that, you know, were once rare are now available to all of us for relatively cheap. And I think that you look at the whole history of Silicon Valley, it's not even just Apple. And, you know, look at how research laboratories were so intertwined with companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel in the early days. You know, really, it's that federal government complex, that military industrial complex, as they call it, that, you know, allowed for the chips to be made, that allowed for the workstations to be made, that created demand. And if there were no government involvement in Silicon Valley in the early days, then the Valley, as we know, it might not even

• 28:28Speaker 02

  exist today. So universities are a huge part of the story, and it's something that I think we tend to forget these days.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  You just made me think of a personal anecdote. My brother was a PhD candidate at Stanford in the early 90s. And I remember him coming home on break, and he had his computer, and he would dial into, I think it was the Stanford network. And I had no idea what he was doing, right? At the time, I was just a little kid. He's much older than me. And it's just making me think back to that because he was on the forefront of that. He was in that academic space doing these things. And how, it's so wild how ubiquitous it is now. But like, back then, it was, it was folks like him that were doing this stuff. So.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Man, fascinating. You mentioned Interface Builder, which is pretty crazy because a little fun fact, in Xcode today for iOS and Mac development, there's a file called a .NIB, N-I-B, stands for Next Interface Builder, holds the compiled user interface layout. It still lives today, which is pretty nuts. So Interface Builder was ahead of its time. You started to talk a little bit about that, but like, if we can help frame how that helped pivot into business use cases and just how crazy this was for the time, I would love to hear about it.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Sure. First, I would say most of the credit, sort of the unsung hero on that whole approach was, was William Parkhurst, who did a lot of 3D effects for the Macintosh. He was a developer in that community when we launched the Mac. And he, too, was a Stanford grad. He did the accelerated computer science and management program at the same time. Highly, highly capable computer scientist and world-class big wave surfer, too. It's a real, is a real character. But William was deeply involved in the object community, the whole Oopsla thing of the day. And there was a Mac event, one of Mac World or whatever

• 30:29Speaker 03

  it was, going on. And Jean-Marie Houle was there. He was building things for, for the Macintosh. And as a result of those community connections from the object community, Jean-Marie came and visited Next and showed off what he was doing. And, you know, it became obvious that what we needed to do, particularly when you start to think about university professors wanting to build simulations and all this other. And, and oh, by the way, to do a quick look back to Xerox PARC and Smalltalk, for those in your audience that are generally familiar, Smalltalk, operating system, living, working environment, and user interface, all rolled into one. It's a.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Right. And one of the first object-oriented.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  The first thing.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Languages, yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So it wasn't like people weren't aware, but the idea of productization and shipping it in a commercial machine as a way for your customers and your audience, who were both users, but also developers, because they all had these ideas they wanted to implement. And that was one of the benefits of the university community and that market, and the enthusiasm that they brought to bear for helping us, guiding us, sticking with the company over time as well. So it was really Jean-Marie coming to the company. He unfortunately passed away some time ago, but he was at Enria in, in France, where he

• 32:01Speaker 03

  did a lot of the early research. And he's a professor academic type as well. But he was just a super gentle person and a genius in the field at that moment in time of thinking through how to build a kit, if you will, that would sit on top of the object library that will let you build these things. And because of the choice that, again, William and Bud Tribble were party to of Objective C and the notion of dynamic binding at runtime was key. And that's. Everybody else had gone another direction with, you know, C++ and the rest. And so that was a very, very important and pivotal moment in a teeny little company.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  I think they were based in Connecticut constantly. And there were just a handful of employees and we bet on them.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Just to make sure I'm tracking, this is Objective C?

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Correct. Yeah, which, which made Interface Builder, you know, a rational thing to have because you'd be building interface widgets, et cetera. And you'd want to cut rather than going away compiling. It's like in runtime, you want to, you want to introduce capability that would express itself and then be bound into the system or the application layer. And those things were, I mean, people had seen that because of Smalltalk, but no one had ever really shifted in an aggressive, commercial way. And there are lots of arguments with the Park Place folks about why Park Place didn't succeed. And they were the ones that, you know, commercialized Smalltalk. But, but Nextup was the pioneer and therefore in the long run,

• 33:40Speaker 03

  15 plus year lead time and anyone else pulling those things together. That gave Apple a lot of running room after the acquisition of Next.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. And that, that dynamic binding thing, I mean, I really went down a rabbit hole preparing for this. I was watching some demonstrations that Steve did that are still on YouTube, which you can still find. I think it's fascinating. Go, go take a peek of him creating something with Interface Builder. And now this framing that you've given, just how kind of mind blowing that is at the time that he was able to, in what was it, like three or four minutes, create a little database application? That's crazy.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And also that I feel like for a subset of our audience who's done iOS or Mac development at Objective C, maybe it's kind of my age where the iPhone came out and we're like, what do we have to learn Objective C? What is this like? Why can't it be Java? Why can't it be something else? Like just knowing why that was the case and how important that one, I was going to say little decision. It's not a little decision at all, but that's mind blowing.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. They were better company divisions on small partners. Again, you think the size and scale of the industry. I don't know that with hindsight, we look back and it was crazy. But in the moment, everything was possible and small groups of people could do amazing things. And it's, and maybe they can now as well with the, the new, new world, but.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll see what I've got an agent running on that laptop right there. I think it's going to change the world.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  So you mentioned Jean-Marie Houle, is that how you say his name?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  That was a really interesting story about how he got recruited and something that came out to me in the book. And really I would love to hear both your opinions on this, based on what you know, is that Steve, I think it was Steve, you can tell me if I'm wrong, seemed to have just an absolutely incredible eye for talent. You know, you think of Avi, you think of Jean-Marie Houle, there's others as well. And he was very loyal to them. You know, like Avi stayed with Apple until 2006. Can you talk a little bit about like how he identified talent and, and how he built his teams? I find that fascinating.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  This is one of the first things that almost everybody told me. I would sit, I sat down with more than 110 former Next executives and employees. And early in the conversation, they would say exactly what you just said, Matt. They would say that Steve's greatest talent and perhaps his greatest contribution as well, you know, to the world of technology was that he could look right into your soul and figure out who you are, what you wanted, what you were good at. And he could find ways to bring out the very best work that you had ever done. So, you know, we think of Steve as somebody who was mercurial and difficult and, you know,

• 36:34Speaker 02

  hard to work with, but they always emphasize that side of Steve that when he were at Next Computer, they always said it was the most magical place of their careers, that, you know, nothing else came close. You know, the graphic designer said it, the engineer said it, that, you know, everything they did at Next was just far above and beyond what other companies asked of them. And, you know, it's something that really, they would describe it as a more intuitive talent. It's not, it's not something you can measure and structure and place on a computer screen. You know, there's no compiler, there's no code. It's more of a, a human to human connection that somehow Steve was able to make. And, you know, he would bring in, he would select the very best people to begin with.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  They told me about the interview questions that he would give. And, you know, one of the favorites that a lot of people talked about is, you know, he would ask them, are you the best designer in your field? Are you the best engineer in your field? And if anybody hesitated or said, no, you know, I mean, you know, I'm, I'm good, but I'm not the best. He would just shut down the interview and say, I would rather talk to them. So screened them out right away, got rid of the ones he didn't want to work with. He really looked for people who had a force of will, a force of personality. He wanted people who could push back on him, who could defend their ideas. And a lot of times, you know, what Steve would do, they talked about how he would walk around the hallways randomly and he would check on, check in on people and ask what they're working on.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  And when he was asking questions, you know, the questions would be difficult, but he wasn't asking the questions just to be difficult. He was trying to see if you could stand up for your idea and defend it in front of him, that you wouldn't, you know, cower and quiver and step back and say, oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here. He really wanted people who believed what they were doing, who believed that they were making a contribution to technology. And so, you know, to answer your question, it's one of those talents that you don't come across much, uh, you know, it's, it's just not something that a lot of people have with this for, with this level of force. And it seems to be something that he might have been born with or that he at least learned

• 38:45Speaker 02

  early in life, because, you know, it's something that he was able to channel and to put out there in the company and in the world. But the mistake that he made early on was that his force of personality, this ability to cut through people's soul, there was something called the hero shithead roller coaster. So one day you're a hero, you're awesome. He's holding you up. The next day you're a shithead and he's cutting you down and telling you, you're doing a terrible job. You know, early in life at Next Computer, at the early Apple, you know, this was the kind of stuff he was known for, but it was more about the process of not erasing this side of him. But what people observed was that he was learning how to fully form this aspect of him,

• 39:30Speaker 02

  learning how to not make it a chop down, a cut down. You're not chopping down the trees. You're trying to allow the forest to grow. You know, you want the garden to grow. And over time, he developed an ability to not only foster the, the loyalty of the people around him. I mean, he had eight years at Apple, when he returned to Apple, eight years of executive stability, which, I mean, what company has that now in 2026? It's so rare to see any public company out there that has eight years of executive stability. It just doesn't exist in many places. And Steve just had this, this incredible ability over time, developed from this period of struggle to place trust in people who he hired, to identify them as talented,

• 40:15Speaker 02

  but to learn how to harness their talents more and more as time went on. It's, it's, it was a universal story. Everybody talked about this. I didn't hear one dissenter. And, you know, I've, I've done a lot of journalism and books in my career. And when you go into a project like this, you, you usually get lots of dissent. You get a lot of people who have different memories and they say, no, no, that's not how he was. That's not what happened. I disagree with what that person said about, about this person. You know, books are big, complicated projects with many memories, you know, many people with their own points of view. But I was quite amazed and just awestruck by the universal agreement with everybody

• 40:57Speaker 02

  who I talked to, who said that that was what Steve was great at, finding talent, harnessing it. And that's also what he learned to harness better and better as time went on, as he learned from his struggles.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll comment on that because I witnessed a lot of these things. You know, Steve is known for blending science and the humanities. That's the thing. When asked about Microsoft, his comment, well, that is successful, but they have no taste. Right? I'll give you one example, both in terms of hiring, but also just a longer thread. The hiring process, there were, when I left Next, there were more than half the company worked for me. And we all interviewed everyone. That was the way it worked. This executive staff interviewed everyone that we hired. And there were a lot of capable people in the world when you look at their resume.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  We could filter through that pretty quickly. There were a smaller number of people who had a calling for what we wanted to do as a mission and a purpose. And in particular, in those early days, no one saw what we were doing. We didn't show them models. We didn't show them the software. We didn't, they all had to take a leap of faith. And the last Steve was character. And, you know, to Jeff's point, et cetera, was Steve had a good way of appreciating the character. And that came from the surrounding of those that he trusted, who were, you know, part of the interview process with him. And, you know, if it was someone that I wanted to hire, it would be, you know, be my tale that would be on the line.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  He participated, but if he saw something, you listened because he did have this incredible ability to see these things and to draw things out, which was really important. But what I would say in terms of, of over time with Steve, and everyone looks back on this fondly, both because of the ride that we were on at NeXT and then the inevitable outcome of NeXT, which was, it was along with the new mature Steve, the savior of Apple, which, again, to Jeff's book and the notion of an origin story for Steve, it's the Macintosh. And in the end, that's, that's what brought him around. But the thing that I think is important, and to some extent, I would say, you know, I wrote the foreword,

• 43:24Speaker 03

  thanks to Jeff, and Ed Catmull wrote the afterword.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  CEO of Pixar, is that correct?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Correct. Yeah, okay. So in 1985, we founded NeXT. In early 1986, Steve bought Pixar from George Lucas. And I was there when we did that. The Articles of Incorporation for Pixar were exactly the same, word for word, except NeXT was changed to Pixar and the comma Inc. remained the same. And the cap table was exactly the same. The founders got the same shares and the table was the same for employees. And Steve put in the same amount of money upfront. As NeXT was meandering and dissolving the hardware business and there were, you'll read all about it. You gotta read this book, it's really good. The punchline is that by the end of it all, Steve had put the majority of his personal net worth

• 44:15Speaker 03

  into keeping Pixar alive. And Ed, who was the genius behind Pixar, and he and I were kind of in parallel universes over the exact same period of time. Steve did not get to run rampant through Pixar. He was only allowed in on Fridays. And he couldn't contribute on the technology because these guys were wizards in special ways with graphics. And he wasn't a storyteller like they were. He's a different kind of storyteller. And he grew under that. And so I think his humanness came from Pixar turning digital into what looked like analog.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Right?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Truly a blend of humanities and, and tech.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, they always recognized the uncanny valley and they never made the humans look too real, but.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  I mean, Toy Story still holds up.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Toy Story still holds up. And so, so Steve, he had a vision for, to support what Ed and Alvy wanted to do. Because they were really clear from the time that Lucas, because there were three things. And by the way, we stole all the marketing from Lucas for the Macintosh. So, so we used all of the Star Wars marketing techniques. So Star Wars was, there were three things. There was Droidworks for sound, Pixar for imaging, and then Industrial Light Magic. Those are the three companies that he spun up. And then they typically would dissolve them after the movie. They didn't know it was going to be a franchise like that, right? So all things considered, I think this universe of Pixar being the entity

• 45:53Speaker 03

  which actually gave him the financial success and confidence at that level to trust people in a new and different way. And he clearly had to trust people at NeXT towards the end as well, because just keeping it going was very, very different. He started to actually believe some of the things that we tried to do early on that he didn't want to do. So you just have to read the book to get a picture of that. But anyway, I just think there's this blending of digital and analog and that he grew up in the Pixar thing was really party to him recognizing, he's got to let people do their jobs and trust them. He's good at identifying these people, but you gotta trust them.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  That's fascinating. The other thread that, you know, I mentioned earlier, that I thought the book told this really nice human story. When he had his son, he got married and had his son. People report that there was this change in him. And I mean, I've experienced it too. There, it changes you. It absolutely changes you. And it was very sweet to hear, like, I think there's one anecdote in the book where somebody said, you know, Jeffrey, you mentioned he would walk around the offices and ask what you were doing. And it would put people on the defensive. And that changed, they felt this shift change to, he was just curious. He just wanted to hear what they were doing. I thought that was, this is really interesting, really interesting.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  So many fascinating things, but.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna come back to the Cube and Quake and WWW. So there's a really good moment in the book where the story of how IBM almost licensed NeXT. And there's this kind of like hypothetical, Jeffrey, that you positively, that there's a world in which NeXT eclipsed Windows as the world's most popular OS. And Daniel, I think that this intersects nicely with your experience at NeXT and how you left the company. And so with the benefit of hindsight, can you talk about that a little bit and, and why you ended up leaving?

• 47:50Speaker 03

  For sure. IBM didn't almost license NeXT. They did. They never shipped, but they definitely licensed it. Again, you gotta remember what was going on in the world at that time, just a quick history lesson. IBM came out with a micro channel architecture for the PC. And they were working with Microsoft to build OS 2 for essentially a proprietary version, if you will, of an operating system on a proprietary hunk of hardware. The industry coalesced around that and created the ISA bus consortia,

• 48:35Speaker 03

  which was the extended architecture. Compaq was the leader, and that's where the clone market came from. And the four horsemen showed up, if you will, the, it was, what, or Packer Bedell? I forget all the names back in the day.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, man. Taking me back.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And IBM was kind of left out there. And they were very clear, and this is out of the vice chairman's office and the CEO's office and the CFO's office. They designed a joint logo plate that had NeXT and IBM's logo on it by the same designer who did the IBM logo and the NeXT logo. And they were going to manufacture a computer and go global with it. And they were going to put NeXT up on every employee's desktop and do away with their internal electronic mail system, which was called PROF, that was run on their mainframes. So they were all in. And the deal that fell apart, and this after I left, because it was falling apart, and that's why I quit,

• 49:34Speaker 03

  is we were going to go with Peros Systems and ESL into the government market and into the corporate market with a side base database on every NeXT machine hooked into an IBM mainframe so that they could start to build desktop apps with IBM mainframe data in this proprietary NeXT app environment, which IBM was willing to license on a non-exclusive basis and only wanted to share with us on the royalty streams if we licensed it to anyone else. This was at a time when Windows 2.0 was on the market.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  And it took Windows 3.1 to put networking extensions in place, which was in what, 1980s? No, 1992 or 93, maybe even 94, because it was 95 with Windows 95. And this is when companies were selling TCP IPS as standalone thing. And I knew consultants making four or $5 million a year implementing it inside of corporate firewalls and stuff.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That is, that is wild.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Goofy era stuff. So the reality is the distribution infrastructure, the global opportunity. And IBM walked away because they wanted to have the NeXT app, the app kit, the interface builder and everything run on top of their version of Unix, which was AIX, which would have been easily done. They would have done the work and they were doing it on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. And they needed that because that's how you sell to the government. You needed POSIX standards and we didn't have them. And I had hired a guy who worked for the regional sales manager in Pittsburgh,

• 51:18Speaker 03

  who worked for the head of sales, who worked for me, who had run IBM's federal systems division. It had a $2.2 billion quota selling to the federal government for IBM.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  2.2 billion?

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, 2.5, $2.2 billion quota. In 1986, 87, when Apple was a billion dollar company, just to the US government. And, and Peros Systems had implemented all the $600 million worth of PCs into the Navy and so.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Can I just pause? I just did, I, I mean, my AI might be wrong, but that 2.2 billion in 1987 is 6.5 billion today. That's nuts.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  So the market context and IBM, as they said to us, we are out of balance with Intel and Microsoft. So we need to go a different direction and you are our ticket to ride. And I was in so, so many meetings and I have all the documentation that went back and forth. So any level of high level stuff that Jeff wrote about is all grounded and black and white on paper.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it might have been a very different world.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  So just for, we don't have to go into, read the book for the details, but just high level, what happened?

• 52:37Speaker 03

  I left and the bridge back to getting Steve to do rational things went away.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  IBM called me and said, what are we going to do? And I said, you want me to intervene? And they said, well, you really can. And I said, yes, I know. But what it's like, I'm sorry. It's like, good luck.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That story in the book is kind of mind blowing. I got stressed out reading it.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Not gonna lie. Like, I was just like, oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Oh, the other thing, people remember Silicon Graphics and the indie workstations that they did all the Jurassic Park stuff in the in the early 90s and all that. Yeah, we licensed them the backplane architecture and they were building boards to plug in and do color in the next machine. All that blew up, too.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Why I left, because all these things were on the table and the distribution infrastructure to make it work. And this is so be it.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  That's unbelievable. The logo was being created by, what's the name of the designer? Because that's an interesting story there is that Steve spent an ungodly amount of money for the next logo.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Well, that was one of the most well documented stories in this book I've found because Paul Rand, who is forgotten today outside of graphic design circles, he's just somebody who.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  He's a big deal. I work with a lot of designers. He's a big deal. Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  He's massive. Yeah. He designed the logos, the logos for IBM, designed UPS, ABC, Yale University Press, all the major, yes, all the major 20th century corporations that are still massive today. He was the guy, he's sort of like, if you were to open a book of logos from the last 70 years, you know, his fingerprints might be on a huge number of them. And I've actually known the former associates of Paul Rand for a long time from previous work I've done. So our worlds collided again when it came to the next computer. I had been asking them earlier about IBM and all these other companies and so forth. And Paul Rand, you know, he's a, so Steve Jobs in an interview described him

• 54:45Speaker 02

  as a cranky man with the heart of a teddy bear. I'm paraphrasing, but that's, that's roughly, he used those words, the heart of a teddy bear and described him as a man who was a master of his craft, who combined the intellectual with the emotional resonance that a logo needs. You know, it has, for him, it was an intellectual project because he wanted to make something that both advanced the arts that, you know, contributed somehow to the art form, but also was something that resonated with the usual consumer who just opens a book or looks at a TV screen and sees a logo. What do they see in it? So very much a man of many worlds who, you know, one, one day you could talk to him and he would be talking about,

• 55:28Speaker 02

  you know, the ancient cave art of France, you know, that in the caves that have been around for a long time. And then, you know, the next day he would talk about the Louvre and the architecture of the Louvre and, and then he would go to modern logos and he could fit like a modern, he would, he would design the IBM logo and describe it as something that moves along the course of history with the whole history of art and not just a corporate logo. So something that really encapsulates his worldview is just this ability to bring together all of history into the, all, all the work that he was doing. And that was something that really impressed Steve. So it was so fascinating learning about Paul Rand's approach. So I went to the Yale University Archive where his archives have been left.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  He died in 1994 and one of his students was tasked with putting together all of his old notes. So he was famous for scribbling on napkins. He was kind of a guy, like, he wasn't the type who would need to sit down in a studio all the time. A lot of the logos that he created were literally just on the back of a napkin. He'd be sitting in the hotel lobby. And he left all these napkins from both Next Computer, but, but many other companies too, in this archive. So I was there and I was picking up these laminated napkins, these 40 year old napkins. And it would say Sanford Court Hotel. And then there are, you know, 10 different doodles of a Next Computer logo and they're all different. And then, you know, I remember it was funny because then there would be a doodle of Steve Jobs, like he draws, you know, Steve,

• 56:57Speaker 02

  and he's got his turtleneck on. And I'm just thinking like, you know, this is, this is a creative genius at work. And he's thinking about next and thinking about Steve and putting it all together into this grand vision. But one of the things I discovered is that this logo, it's actually often been criticized as too expensive. It was just something that was unnecessary for next. $100,000 logo, that was the deal. He said, you get one logo, you can't make any changes. It's $100,000 and that's that. But I found an old interview with Steve from the 90s in which he actually described the process of choosing Paul Rand and why did he want to get that $100,000 logo?

• 57:39Speaker 02

  It wasn't simply that he was indulging and overspending. He described a specific business problem and then it's, it's this problem that if you were in the business, it takes 10 years or more and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a brand and an image and an imprint that's memorable. So what IBM had, what UPS has, what Microsoft has today, you know, their logos, their imprint in the mind of the regular consumer is something that was built over decades and decades of marketing and work and, and resources and talent and people. And Steve wanted to find a shortcut. He wanted to figure out, how can I

• 58:20Speaker 02

  develop a logo that would be memorable as a kind of, you know, like something like a stamp that you could put on a Christmas gift and like people would recognize it. That's sort of how he described it. And so he did, he figured out that, well, you know, I can spend $100,000 upfront and I can get this beautiful memorable logo from the best person in the business. Or I can go the other route, which is I'll go cheaper on a logo as a startup and maybe in 10 years we'll have something that's memorable. Steve was impatient at this point in life. He had already been a success at Apple. People knew who he was and he didn't want to sit around and wait another 10 years to, to build this logo that would be memorable. And so, yes, the logo was expensive, but as a result of him

• 59:04Speaker 02

  finding Paul Rand and spending this money on the logo, the Next Computer logo is now one of the classics. It's studied today in graphic design schools. It's studied in all kinds of art schools. There are, like, when I was going through the archives, I, I found pieces, like I found old documents containing this logo that were signed by Paul Rand and they're sitting in an archive and they're probably worth thousands and thousands of dollars and they're just sitting there. And that's because Paul Rand put his blessing on it because he was such a luminary of his time. So I have to give a lot of respect to Steve and Next for this, that art, design, beauty was held to the very highest standard.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  You look at the typical PC, the typical beige box computer over the years and how many people actually keep their computer? I mean, you know, you throw them away after five years, it ends up in a landfill. But with Next Computer, these things were so beautiful. The logo, the design, the perfect cube, this, this exotic magnesium casing. Even today you look at it and it's, it's beauty, it's, it's art. It's still in museum casings around the world and it's auctioned at Sotabees Auction Houses in London. Very, very few pieces of technology get that far. And I think that's one of the lessons that we can draw from Next is, you know, reaching

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  from the world of technology into the world of art and finding that ground where they can both fuse and become one. It's a powerful place to be.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. We should give Susan Kerr the credit for introducing Paul to Steve and educating him on that topic. It's again, it's a, it's a level of his filtering for people who have skills in particular areas and appreciating their work. And Susan's case, obviously, on the Macintosh. And then she did a lot of stuff for Microsoft under contract for Win95 as well. And she's kind of world class unto herself. But she brought Paul to the table.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  And that level of trust too of, you know, he's paying all this money and you don't, don't get any revisions. You get what you get and you don't get upset, as we say to our kids. And yeah, that next logo does hold up. If any listeners right now, just go Google the next cube and the next logo. And if you put yourself in that context that Daniel had of 1986, when, when did the cube come out? Was it 87?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Well, we showed it off at the launch and that was in, in 88.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  In 80, you put yourself in 1988 and you look at that piece of hardware and even the logo and it was so ahead of its time.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  All right. Before we move on to post Daniel next, Daniel, what's your favorite Steve story? Just got to ask from working with him.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Different points in time, different eras, working with Steve. You know, maybe I mentioned it earlier when he recruited me to come work in the Mac division when he pushed Jeff Raskin out of that project and took over the project. The story of, you know, we care about what you care about and you know how to do it. So you should come work for us, you know? And I, I said, okay, here's, here's three things that I need, you know, do it my way. You help, but only when I ask and then pay me. And Steve was notoriously cheap. So he did only help me when I ask and I did it my way.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  That's one. Another one at Next that was really fun was long before we had the ability to run the software, debug the software, really know how to enter into some stage of completion. We didn't even have any of that work. We were just rolling along, building stuff, doing what we were doing.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  The audience will, will appreciate this. You didn't have, you didn't have Jira. So I don't know if that means anything to you guys, but the audience will.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  There was a, Jeff writes about this quite well. There was a person running manufacturing who left and then another person came in to run manufacturing and the guy that came in to run manufacturing turned out to be bad, bad hire. But anyway, it's my opinion, of course, but he put together this plan that was called Plan 10,000. And he put together this big binder with his team about how they were going to build 10,000 computers a month in this little factory that we had built with these single line of robots, all painted the same shade of gray. Manuels needed to be translated from Japanese into English because they were fresh off the boat, literally from Japan.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  We were designing the motherboard across the bay and Silicon Valley and the factory was in Fremont and we were able to push the layout to the factory over a T1 line and do a unit of one down the line. So anyway, Steve came in and dropped this binder on my desk and said, manufacturing is going to build 10,000 units a month. How are you going to sell? This is, I'm just with such a ludicrous thing that he did. And so, because I'm more than confident and always have been, I think, I said, okay, we got that one.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  So the next retreat, which we did regularly, we put together a presentation and my sales, product, marketing and marketing organizations, because that's what I was running is everything that wasn't engineering or finance. And we called it P O B. It was Plan One Billion, because, because it was going to be a billion dollars worth of revenue if they built that much. And we were so far away from, you know, and I, we were going to do it like tomorrow, you know, this kind of thing. So we orchestrated this layering project and I built organization charts about what

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  the structure of the sales and marketing organization would need to look like in order for us to sell a billion dollars worth of product. Because in Steve's mind, we were going to do all this with like 300 people, right? It's like, we were going to build the whole company out of a 10,000 square foot building when we started. We were going to do manufacturing on the first floor of a 10,000 square foot building. I mean, and we were going to have a gym in the corner and hired the guy who trained Christopher Reeves to be Superman to come in and teach everybody how to do weightlifting. And because I had done a lot of that, I was in charge of ferreting that out and went to LA and went to Cher's house to look at the equipment that we were going to buy from her because it was used so I could belong to these stores.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Wait, did you say Cher as in the singer?

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, so there was another book here. Jeff and I have to work on this.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  I do think that there's like an outtakes version of this book.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  So anyway, Plan One Billion turned into this, this charade of my entire team each coming up and doing a layer of what needed to be done. And we all put it into this little briefcase that I bought. And then I, in the end, cracked all these eggs and said, we're good, this thing's going to have to rise like you've never seen. And I used a whisk and I, and I licked the eggs and I was going to make a souffle out of it and I pretended to pour it into the briefcase. Got a standing ovation from the 150 people who were in the company, whatever it was, including Steve, who realized what a farce the whole ask was. And we turned it into just the best time of all and everybody that night had fun and

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  drank and, and we moved on to the next retreat another 90 days or so later.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  And he, he got a kick out of it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Hey, like Jeff said, Jeff said it so well. It's like, the reason why Steve hired me at Next is when I set up the university stuff at Apple, he came in the night before I had 100 academics coming out right before we launched the machine to do this full day workshop. And he came in and totally blew it up with his, just his behavior. And so the next, you know, and I had, and then he left. It's like he shows up and then he leaves. And so I had a, you know, work it all, get everybody back on the bus and, you know, the whole thing. And the next morning I'm in my office on my Apple three, you know, writing a memo because there's no electronic mail. And I was going to send him a memo that just said, you know, you are so bad, you know?

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  And so he came walking into my office and I saw him and turned around and stood up and walked up to him and I said, hey, I said, I will never in my life ever be right for doing the wrong thing again. When you, I, I said, forget it. And he just went, oh, okay. Not just had turned around and walked out. It's like, he wants people to stand up. And if you didn't, and I think Ed Catmull made reference to that in some of his comments, perhaps, I know he's, I've talked to Ed about this and I think it's in, in his comments in the book about Steve letting some directors go at Apple and asking them not to serve on the board, not because they weren't good directors. He's just said, they don't challenge me. They're not.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is in the book. Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  So part of it was this constant testing and looking for the best ideas. And he was really good at getting that out of people, especially as he matured and became more trusting of those interactions. Anyway, enough.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  No, that was fascinating. I also love that you, you said, yeah. I just, I like, I wonder this hypothetical, if you had pushed back, if he actually would, like, I get the sense that you knew pushing back was not the option and you just had to do this and show him how crazy it was.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  No, I, you don't know my background, but I'm probably capable of, of pushing back.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  So you, you just rolled with it. So that's awesome.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Oh, man. We should go offline if you want to know what I learned when I was a kid, but that's, that's different.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  It's the psychology of life.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  And then I, when I left Next, when I quit, I called him the day before the day of my two week notice, because of course I gave two weeks notice. I didn't come into the office, they didn't want me in either way. And so I just said, you know, I want to take you to lunch. And I said, let's have lunch. And he just said, oh, I'm busy. I said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm buying, you're going. And he bursts out laughing. He said, okay. So we went to lunch and he asked me, what do you really think we should do? And I said, I've been fighting with you for well over a year about all the things that I think you need to do and you need to listen to the people around you. I just can't fight with you anymore. I'm tired of it, you know, I'm going to go do something else. Good luck, you know?

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  That must've been exhausting.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, it's at some point, you know, and that's true for most of the founders at the end of the day. Everybody is like, all right, enough. But again, later on, loyalty abounds, success breeds a lot of that when your shares are extremely valuable.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  Yep. Oh, man, that's fantastic. So let's move on to post. Don't worry, Daniel, I still have more questions for you, but let's move on to post, Daniel, Next, and let's flash forward to 1993. Next isn't selling the computers at Hope too expensive. It starts to deliberately, I'll say, but you correct me if I'm wrong, shift into software and Apple's not doing well either. So Jeffrey, can you talk a little bit about this kind of inflection point? And it sets up a lot of the legacy that you kind of teased in your, your history lesson at the beginning.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Right. So by the early 1990s, Next hardware, the computer that's called the Cube was failing. It just simply wasn't selling. I believe the total sales over its entire lifespan were about 50,000, but it wasn't even 50,000 units being sold. A lot of them were, they were technically sold, but they were given to distributors on credit. So, you know, they hadn't really even paid for it and the whole thing was inflated. When I went through the actual numbers that I could find in writing from the time period, I saw anywhere between about 50 cubes to maybe 300 at the most sold in it per month. So per month over a lifetime of five or six years. I mean, that's.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Important framing here too. How much was a cube at this period of time?

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  It was just over $10,000 for.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  In 1993 money.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  In, in 1988 money, 1987 money even.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  1988 money, yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. When it was released, October 1987. And it was just so beyond what anybody could afford sadly. A beautiful machine, highly capable, had some of the cutting edge technology of the time, including this optical disc that Steve was so fond of. But when you added up all the costs, so you needed to have a hard drive at minimum, but the hard drive was an add-on to make it work because the optical disc wasn't good enough to run on its own. And so when you added all these things together, it was just over $10,000 for the package that actually worked as a machine. So the target customers who were university buyers, these are giant bureaucracies and

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  institutions that have set budgets and the budget is $3,000 or less. That's what they told Steve from the beginning. Once they got news of this new price, they just said, look, we, we can't buy this. I mean, some of them, what they would do is they would buy one cube, they would buy a few cubes and put them in the corner and they would, they would test them and work with them. And they often found them quite impressive in terms of what they were capable of, but just not worth the investment, you know, of getting, you didn't want to get 100 of these or 200 of these. There were other big competitors like Sun back in the day, you know, IBM was making their own workstation. So there wasn't a whole lot of market practicability to actually getting a cube.

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  And so by the time we get to the early 1990s, this is four to five years after release, there are a few more Next computers that have been released and they're getting cheaper in price, but they're still not what the market wants. And one of the big problems that Steve ran into in this time is that he wasn't listening to his customers. He was so married to his vision and his idea of how things were supposed to work that he completely overlooked what the customers were asking him for. There, there was a financial firm specifically called O'Connor that was doing some of the first experiments in extremely fast trading. So this is something that we take for granted today, but what they found when they use

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Next software, Next step, they could design their custom apps, still a new thing at the time, and they could use it to do, you know, high speed trading at, you know, like right when something hits the market, they do the trade, they make a lot of money at it and that's what they wanted. But they were getting constrained by buying these cube. Computers because the hardware, it's like if you put the software only on one hardware piece, you're trapped in this prison. But what customers wanted was software that they could port and move around and they could put it on different systems. They wanted Next Step, but they just didn't want the hardware that was that was burdensome and expensive. And so after they kept advising him, look, this is what we need. He kept resisting.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  And then finally, the company was effectively bankrupt. There was a chief financial officer who I talked to, a man named Marcel Gani, who was recruited. So Steve called him one night at 2:00 AM and Steve had a habit of calling people at 1:00, 2:00 AM to give them the news. And he said, I'm going to give you the job as CFO, but I don't want you to be able to look at the balance sheets. Like what we want to do is we want to hire risk takers. So we're not going to show you our spreadsheets. You're just going to have to join and trust me that the company is in good shape. So Marcel told me that he joined.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  This is the hiring for the CFO, the chief financial officer.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  The CFO was not allowed to look at the finances before he joined. So he decided to join and Steve used an investor from Intel as evidence. Well, we have Intel behind us. So therefore it'll be okay. We have Canon also as a company. So Marcel joins and then he opens the books and he says, oh, this company is actually bankrupt. I just joined a bankrupt company. And then it was shortly after that, that the dominoes started falling and people could not hold off any longer. It was a dramatic few weeks. It was in late 1993. And they decided that they had to call up Canon, their biggest investor, and do what they called a cram down. They said, all right, time for the cram down. And they told Canon, you've got to invest $20 million by the end of the weekend. It should be in

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  our Bank of Monday or we're closing the doors. And so Steve played this game with them. And the game was you're all in some, it's the some cost fallacy. And Canon had, at this point, had invested $100 million or more. And if Next went up in flames, then Canon was going to lose all that money. So they got their last $20 million from Canon, put that in the bank. That was just a safety measure. So they don't go totally bankrupt. They closed the hardware division. The announcement that the hardware division was going to be closed leaked to the press a day before the announcement was going to go out. So Next hardware employees were literally driving to work and turned on the radio and heard a radio announcer saying, oh, by the way, they're closing the entire hardware division

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  at Next. So that meant that they were going to lose their jobs. They told me that they went into an auditorium. People cried. They felt literally like family members had died. And literally about three weeks later, Steve's father, Paul, actually did die, which is just horrific timing. So put yourself in the shoes of Steve Jobs. You've invested everything you have, your own personal money. It's not a public company in Next and also Pixar. Pixar at the time was not yet a success. Next is going bankrupt. Hardware is closed. You've laid off your staff. People are upset at you and angry. Your investors are angry at you. The press is tearing you down. Even Fortune magazine called Steve Jobs a snake

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  oil salesman. When this news went out, they said that he was going to be written out of history. And, you know, all this happened in just a space of weeks in the life of Steve Jobs. And it must have been devastating to have to go through that, to see your business blow up in flames, and then have your father die just weeks later. It really had a massive impact on him. And then to add insults, there were lawsuits coming in. People were upset because Next had shipped off their last shipment of cubes, the same day that the leak went out. So they sent it off and then they built them and they said, this is discontinued hardware. You have to pay for it. And it was just a, it was a mess. It was a total mess. It was

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  such a mess that one of the Next developer, one of the Next fans actually got a few cubes from Next and he got it from Rich Page, the hardware chief. And they brought it out to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which is a federal nuclear science laboratory near Berkeley, California. And they brought it out and they decided that they were just going to light up these cubes in flames. So the cubes were built so that you can't light them up. So they, they brought it out. They, so they had a federal government pyrotechnician come out and he set up like torches and tried to burn them symbolically, but they wouldn't burn because Steve set it up so you can't burn them down. And they were just, they were telling me all these stories and they were just laughing at it. I mean, in hindsight,

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  laughing. At the time it was tragic, but they were thinking like, oh my God. So all this just happened. And, you know, we're just trying to see what happens if we literally burn a cube to see what happens. And we can't. It's like Steve has set up everything he can to make sure that we can't see justice in the situation. Like, everybody was just having a hilarious time joking about these stories with me, even though it was so hard for them at the time. And so this is the ultimate tragic moment for Steve. This was the moment, and Daniel, I recall that you had told me that there was a quote from an Ernest Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises. And it sort of summed up what Steve was going through. And it was when one character asked him, so how did you go broke? And then the

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  other character says, well, it was slowly and then suddenly. And that's what happened here. And this is the turning point when things have to change. And if they don't change now, then Steve Jobs and Next are going to be in even deeper trouble.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  You know, in retrospect, I'm sure they're joking, but I cannot imagine how intense, I mean, Daniel, for you, like how intense this was at the time, and especially that, like that's, that's what I mean about this human story underneath all this. It's, it's crazy. So just a little bit of like nerdy trivia for our audience. One of the things that happened after this is that Next, out of this shift, was that OpenStep was created. Can you just talk a little bit about what OpenStep was and how it's the partnership with Sun? And then I'll give that little trivia bit afterwards.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Sure. So the deal with Sun, it was set up by a software engineer named Bud Treble, who was the chief of software at Next. And he was there from the beginning. What happened was that since Next hardware was failing and Next had to find a way to import the Next Step operating system and Next software to other people's hardware, other companies' hardware. So we're talking Compaq, HP, you know, maybe Gateway 2000 a little later on, you know, all these other firms and also Sun. Sun was a major player. The idea was to create, I guess you would call it the API in software terms. So the idea is that OpenStep would be the layer of Next Step that sits on top of the Sun systems. And so

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  this was something that Sun and Next did together. And it was a lifesaver because the people who worked on it told me that it comprised about 40 to 50% of Next revenues at the time. So without OpenStep, which is, you know, a very obscure project that we don't remember today, Next would have died. And without OpenStep, Steve Jobs would not even have returned to Apple. So Apple would have probably gone out of business or been acquired. And there would be no more Apple, you know, as we know it today, at least. So this is one example. And what I found as I was writing the book, it was so fascinating. You know, there's the butterfly effect, the idea that, you know, butterfly flaps its

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  wings and creates a storm somewhere far off. And I found that that's the case as I was writing this book, that Steve Jobs or the Next team would do something at the time that seemed small or not so relevant. And nobody could see what the future would look like. But Steve and his team, Avi Tavani and Bud Treble, they all had such a far reaching vision that they would do something that seemed small, but when you actually looked at it, it was quite profound. They were taking object oriented programming and they were finding ways to layer it on top of these Sun Spark stations, these Windows machines,

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Windows NT needed this sort of thing. The software is so far ahead of its time and so much more powerful, but it was just a question of reaching that critical mass and getting enough people to use it. People knew that it was good software, but how, the question is, how do you latch it on to another company's success? So you can go with their hardware and it can grow. And I think that was the problem they ran into.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  It almost seems like it was so far ahead of its time that people didn't know what to do with it in some cases.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Right, absolutely.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  And so this is just the thing that I find extremely fascinating. I don't know if the audience is going to agree with me, but so OpenStep, the original classes in Objective C, like they were called NXImage, NXBrowser, et cetera, et cetera. And with OpenStep, they got renamed to an NS prefix. And so any developers in the audience who've written an iPhone app or macOS software, you've probably seen NS string and NS array. And there's some debate on, and the NS prefix, some people think it stands for Next Step. Some people think it stands for Next Sun. But I just think that's wild. Still today, that lives, those concepts live. That's how powerful it was. That's how ahead of its

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  time it was. They've survived a company sale, three CPU architecture changes, and a new programming language. It's, it's still used in Swift, which is, is nuts. I have no further comment, but it's mind blowing.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  So that partnership didn't go so well. And I mean, then we have Java, which kind of competed with it. Jeffrey, you want to give a little quick, quick history on that? Because I think that that's interesting too, to kind of, for our software developer audience, kind of putting Java into this picture as well.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Right. So from Steve's point of view, Steve was very much a spinner of stories and he would present the partnership as Sun was betting its future on Nextstep, which actually wasn't true. So Sun executives responded to that and they told me, actually, Steve was just making stuff up. Nobody was paying attention to Nextstep as the future at this point. That wasn't known until later on. Sun was simply spreading its cards across the table and trying to figure out what language, what operating system, what software was going to be the software of the future. Because at this point, this is the mid 1990s, the operating system wars are in full swing. Microsoft Windows 95 is about to come out and that's going

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  to be the big game changer. That's going to make Bill Gates a billionaire. You know, Apple at this point is also exploring its own object oriented possibilities. There was a failed operating system called Copland's that just never really took off and it was a total mess. Too many engineers adding too many features into software that just wasn't working. So the world of software in the mid 1990s is very much up in the air and you wouldn't have guessed that Next was actually going to be the future. So Java is the web based language that that Sun was developing. And Java, like I, back when I was young, I played with Java. I mean, I was learning Java and I was developing, you know, web

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  apps with it kind of in my free time when I was, I was very young at the time, but I found it fascinating. And Sun had that scalability that allowed for Java to catch on. The web was such a frontier at the time and there were so many tinkers. I mean, I remember it in my youth, you know, all the, the Wild West feeling, the tinkering, the, you know, playing around with things and figuring what was going to happen. It's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, we would make websites on GeoCities and it was just mind blowing at the time. Like you could make a website.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  CGI scripts.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  CGI scripts, JavaScript, you know, MIDI files that play on your website as you open them. And Steve was looking at all this and, you know, saw that the web was fundamentally going to be an interactive medium. And so that led to one of his breakthrough successes that was going to bring Next from the brink, and that was software called Web Objects. So Web Objects was the result of many years of contemplation and trial and error. Sir Tim Berners-Lee had created the World Wide Web on a Next computer, six years before this software, Web Objects, was created. And what happened is that Next software developers

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  were experimenting with, you know, exactly, you know, what we were talking about, object oriented programming, the, the way that the web was structured. And they discovered that because the web was created on Next, that actually made the web the natural home for Next computer. And they realized that they could create this app called Web Objects. So you have to remember that websites at the time were static. You just go on, there's one website and that's, that's that. But if you wanted to engage in anything serious, if you wanted to sell products, or you wanted to update a search engine, or, you know, you wanted to buy a car and choose the color and the make and the model, you needed a

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  web that was self-creating, that was self-replicating and that could update itself without, without a human having to go in and to, you know, constantly go into HTML and, and change the code. I mean, what a nightmare that would be. So Steve saw this very early on and he realized that this was going to be the big transition and this was going to be the real purpose of the web. There was a fascinating interview with Steve with Wired Magazine in 1996, just as this Web Objects revolution was just starting. He made such a fascinating observation and it was that technology by itself doesn't change the world. There's kind of an assumption out there that Steve Jobs was just out changing the world all

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  the time and that was his mission. But as he matured and as he had a family around him that was taming him, he started to realize that a lot of web, that the web and a lot of technology was going to be a tool, just simply a tool. And, you know, whether you wanted to buy and sell, or you wanted to get, you know, get information online, he actually said, this stuff doesn't change the world. So why don't we focus on the practical usages for people who need it. So don't put a computer in front of somebody and say, here's my grand vision, buy my computer. If you don't buy it, you're not smart. You don't understand what I'm talking about. That was the old Steve Jobs at the young Apple, at the young Next. But this is where the transition happens and this is where

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  the new Steve is saying, you know, here's something that I've created to solve a problem that you have and you can give me feedback and I'll take it into account and I'll make it better for you. It's a huge gap between old Steve and new Steve. And so Web Objects is his attempt to address this problem on the web. What they find is that they can create, so for companies, for IT companies, for, you know, companies like Dell and Disney and, you know, the BBC, these are major institutions. So he's no longer selling this to consumers. Consumers were originally the people that he wanted, but now he's selling to companies who need dynamically updated websites. This is one of the late ball moments

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  and this is where the true power of Next comes into view. And this is where people like Michael Dell show up, Bill Gates showed up, the who's who, you know, Larry Ellison, this is the who's who of Silicon Valley, you know, builders. They're all coming and knocking on the door of Next because they've realized what this software can truly do for them and where the power can be unlocked. And this is where the story turns around.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  There's a couple of things that historically you might want to layer into Jeff's comments, which I think are spot on. One is, you know, Sun was marketing themselves back in that day as the network is the computer.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  And Java was all about the browser becoming the platform as opposed to anything else.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I always forget that's Java's origins. Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  Right. And so it was all about putting real time into a browser because Sun was out of the desktop workstation business and transitioning exclusively into selling servers. So they were going through a major infrastructure shift and how they marketed what they sold and what their P and L looked like, because they were turning into a server company with no desktop sales, because PCs had taken the cake by then. The second thing is CommerceNet, thank goodness for Al Gore inventing the internet, but I mean CommerceNet, he did shepherd in the notion of actually doing anything commercial on the internet, because you couldn't do anything commercial on the internet back then. That was the mid 90s.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  And it wasn't until 97 that we had XML and the web standards start to emerge. So this is all before that. And then the last thing about the Sun deal with Next, which most people have not written about or documented, is yes, they licensed the software, but more importantly, they got the intellectual property and they had the patent rights. And that's what was required for Sun to stay alive before they were bought by Oracle, because that's what Microsoft ran into in the antitrust case. So the intellectual property around Nextstep

• 1:32:02Speaker 03

  was way ahead of its time and fully documented. And so those were all those dynamics in the early, early 90s, mid 90s.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Man, you framed the mid 80s, now framing the mid 90s. Yeah, totally forget that Java's origins were.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta look at it and go, what was going on? And why were these things important? And why did people spend that money? And were, did they really care about shipping it? Probably not. Was Steve marketing that they were going to ship it because he needed it? You betcha. But very different.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  And Jeffrey, to your point of, you know, these things at the time probably seemed inconsequential. I don't know if that's the right word, or just choices that are made to save a company. And man, wow, you know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but look where it turned out.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  And so for me as a dev, you know, in our audience, this might resonate with some of our audience. I was doing some research and trying to figure out for myself, like, what did that landscape look like for web development back in, what, 1995? We had CGI scripts, Perl and things like that. You know, they worked. It was, it was kind of cobbling things together with duct tape. And I was like, but wait, Microsoft had Active Server Pages. We had JSPs, Java Server Pages from Java. But what I did not realize is just how much Web Objects pulled all this together. It was component based, kept state on the server, had an object relational mapper in 1995. So basically, you didn't see that

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  again until 2002 with ASP.net. I could be wrong on all that, you know?

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  But you were getting range. That's right. Right.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, people can correct me, but like, that's wild. That is absolutely wild that it was that ahead of its time. Also, fun fact, in one of my engagements that I just did in the past couple of years, I worked on a project that, still alive, was on Web Objects. It was very, it was very hard for me to find documentation on it. And also, I think it's fascinating that Web Objects actually powered the iTunes Store up until some very, you have like very late in the aughts, the 2000s. So that's pretty crazy too. The talk about scale, like, man, wow, that's nuts.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  Right. And that's one of the things actually that I found in my research, that when the Apple acquisition happened of Next, people weren't really sure what to do with Web Objects. And there were even fights between the Web Objects team and the Nextstep team. And it wasn't until, this is another example of, you know, doing something now that maybe doesn't seem so relevant, that turns out to be relevant later. Once iTunes was coming out, Web Objects became the go-to software for that. It was just perfectly made for what they were doing with iTunes. So they were, Web Objects was redeemed after a period in the desert with nothing going on.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  All right. So let's flash to 1996. Apple's at its lowest point. They buy Next. They get Steven as an advisor. It's a lot of, as well as a lot of Next employees, about $427 million. Why did Apple need Nextstep at the time? And let's talk about that history about moving forward.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  Oh my, go Jeff.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Just a small question, small question. Yeah.

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Apple's software was stuck in the previous decade in the 1980s. For people who can remember, there was the spinning ball of death. You booted up your Mac, you were working on your word processing document. And then there that that spinning ball of death struck and you had to turn off your Mac and you lost all your data. You know, there was no, if I recall right, no memory protection in the Mac software in the OS at the time. So everybody knew that this was a disaster. And with the onslaught of Microsoft Windows and, you know, the advances by other software companies. Everybody knew that Apple was going to be dead meat if they didn't upgrade their operating system.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Copland, the code name for their operating system, was a complete disaster. As I recall, so Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time, wrote that when he was appointed to turn around Apple. He was a turnaround artist. He went in and there was something like 500 engineers working on Copland. And they were all putting their own things in there that they wanted. It was, it was a featureitis situation where the software was, it was lagging. It was behind, it was going to be years behind schedule. And at this stage, it just wasn't going to work. So Gil Amelio and his lieutenant, the CTO, a woman named Ellen Hancock, who he brought over from his previous company.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  They decided that the way to go was going to be to acquire a software company. So where does, where does the next operating system come from? It's going to come from one of a handful of companies. They talked about maybe Sun, you know, the Solaris being one option. They talked about a few others. They, they talked about a company called B, which was run by Jean-Louis Gassé, who was the rival to Steve Jobs originally. So the man who overtook Steve's Macintosh division back when Steve was fired in 1985. So something of a personal rivalry, that's something that bordered on hatred between these two. Steve once called Jean-Louis a very evil man. That's a quote from Steve. So, you know, you can see that this gets very personal very quickly.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  And Steve eventually, so Next Step was not in the running at first. And it wasn't until later. So I should say that there are variations to this story and there's not one single event that happened. In my book, the, the way that I wrote it, which is it's accurate, it's true, is that there was a call from a, a, a next employee named Garrett Rice, who called Ellen Hancock and she managed to call back and then they, you know, got Next Step. But I should stress that it wasn't like one single phone call that started the whole cascade of this acquisition. There were other people who were lobbying to Steve and other people who called Apple and said, check out Next Step.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  But from what I can gather from studying the archives and the history, this was the most prominent call that actually got the response. And it was confirmed by Steve, you know, as the event that really started moving things forward, despite all these other phone calls happening. So Next gets the attention of Apple and they decide that there's going to be this thing called a shootout. That's what Gil Amelio, the CEO, calls it. They're going to bring in Jean-Louis Gassé and Steve Jobs with Avi Tavany and his software chief. And these two are going to do their own presentations and they're going to decide, decide who wins. So Jean-Louis Gassé goes in, he goes in for his presentation. He's already done a lot of presentations for Apple.

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  He thinks that the deal is done and he blows it because he is kind of arrogant, brushes them off, tells them, you have what you need. Just buy the software. That's that, that we already have this deal set. And Steve and Avi come in for their own presentation at the Stanford Court Hotel and they just blow it away. It is just a stellar presentation where things are just incredibly well done. And he's showing, you know, these quick time videos on the screen and everybody's impressed. And the Apple team pretty much decides on the spot that they're going to acquire Next. So this is the moment that changed.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Jeffrey, can I, can I hop in there? I think the one thing that it, I actually had to reread this sentence in the book because it didn't sink in at first. He was playing something like 11 movies at the same time or something like that, right?

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  Right, playing multiple movies at the same time in 1996.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, which that's crazy because I read it at first of like, oh, okay, he's playing a movie. Big deal. It's like, no, no, no, he's playing 11 at the same time. That is amazing for that time. So sorry to interrupt you.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  No, no, it's not an interruption. It's just mesmerizing for the period. And this is the moment when the story of Next comes full circle. Because think about how long Steve and his team have been working on this, the toil, the hardship, the struggles, the losses, you know, the near bankruptcy, the ridicule that came from the press and from investors and consumers. I mean, Steve was almost written out of history at one point. And here he is finally making his comeback with the help of brilliant engineers, developers like Avi Tavany and the rest of his team. It's incredible how long it took to get to this moment from 1985 to 1996.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  And finally seeing redemption and finally seeing a moment where there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Think about how many people can go through that for 11 years and deal with that and like wait that long and be that patient. That's why I came away, you know, writing this book with such a deep seated respect for the Next team. You know, people like Danil, people like Avi, and you know, the things that they did for all those years. And how horrific it must have been to go through some of those moments where it looks like failure is just around the corner. And then finally seeing this moment where Apple is going to acquire Next and history is going to be made.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  It really is, it's like out of an opera. It's Wagner, it's Shakespeare. It's just, you know, you don't see this in real life very often. It's a story for the ages.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then there's the, the welcoming of Steve back at the Boston Mac Worlds. Is it 1997 or 1996? I, I kind of remember, I have vague memories of that event too. It was wild. My brother has also, you know, said how exciting that time was when that happens too, which is neat. Danil, so you hadn't been at Next for five years. Like what was going through your mind when all of this was happening? What was your perspective on it?

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  Well, watching what was evolving and seeing Apple struggle was disheartening. I mean, anyone, and we all kind of grew up at Apple in those early days. But I think we were all feeling for Apple at that time. I know even my kids, you know, my, my oldest was 18 months when I brought a Mac home in 1982. And he was pushing the mouse around and turning fat bits on and off and Mac paint. He's 18 months old and all that. So it was disheartening to see Apple struggle so deeply.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  And, you know, no one knew what the inevitable outcome would be or whether there would be any opportunity for Steve or Next to revive Apple, given what was going on again, what's context, what's going on in the industry. And as we all know, in the end, it was kind of the iPod, right? Clearly they repackaged the machine and built the Color Macs and all that kind of stuff. And did, that story's been written, I think, well, but getting the operating system in. But it was, it was a multi-year journey and the disassembly, the creation of new market opportunities by disassembling existing product and approaches to doing things. There were plenty of MP3 players, right?

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  But no one went into the recording, the company went into Sony, who owned all the music and said, if you don't give me your product in 99 cent chunks, one at a time, rather than the whole album, I'm going to ask my customers to steal your product. Right? Remember the billboard? And so all the studios flipped. So then the iPod take, you know, and then my slave convincing Steve to build a Windows app to store music, which gave people a chance on the next PC upgrade to say, ah, it's easier and better on a Mac. I'll buy a Mac to store my music. And then people came back to Macintosh. It took years for those things to go.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  So Apple, the, the Next and Apple team, the Apple, the team that Steve brought with him, they persevered for years to get that flywheel going again. And then disassemble the phone market and then the iPad and, you know, and here we are. Just amazing transformation. But again, not an overnight reality, just people grinding away. And, you know, and Steve as a mature new leader, taking advantage of the talents. And clearly it's wonderful to see what happened at Apple. So I was, I'd say a cheerleader on the sidelines at that time.

• 1:44:42Speaker 03

  I'd gone off to do other things and then I ended up working at Microsoft, which was great and had a great time.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. That's really interesting. And yeah, it's a good point too, right? Like it seems like such a rosy story from here on out, but it's not like, I mean, 97 to 2008. I don't know. Like I remember using, you know, window, I was solely Windows and the exact same thing you described. I got an iPod, opened me up to Mac, the exact same thing, right? Like that.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  And then you back your way back into Macintosh. So, I mean, it was, it was definitely the case. And then my last, you know, seven years, which ended a year and a half ago, was running the computer history museum. So looking really closely. And having, you know, the context on all of this. That's why I was just so pleased to see that Jeff was really doing the research and looking under in every nook and cranny in the world. And, you know, I helped a bit, but encouraged, made sure that everybody participate because even people like John Rubenstein, who most people will know, I'm sure in your audience of his, his background, he started at Next after I left. We're good friends.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  And when I asked him, when Jeff was interviewing everyone, I said, really, John, you know, give it, he goes by Ruby, but it's like, this is important. And he said, well, what do you mean? It says in the book about Steve. And I just said, wait a minute, seven years at Apple, 12 years at Next. And he went, really? And I mean, he was there, you know, for the last four or five and then at Apple. He went, oh, yeah. I mean, people who were there, putting it in the context of 12 years of hard work to get to the point where they could do another 12 years of hard work or solid 10 to get the machine running again and get the Apple flywheel going is what you know today.

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  So seven years, 12 at Next, and then 10 at Apple to get the machine going. That's a long road and a lot of work. And so no one really has chronicled that transition period. And there's more stories to be told about what happened thereafter and maybe we'll see. But all things considered, you know, that's why this book is really important and the story needed to be told. That's why I was kind of really keen on doing my part as best I could in my five years or so to, to help.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  It's awesome. And what I realized pretty early into the book is, oh, Steve Jobs is the hook to sell the book. If, sorry, Geo Jeffrey, I'm not, I'm not trying to say you're marketing, like you're not trying to spin everything, but like you put Steve Jobs name on things, people are going to be interested. But it's a story about Next and Steve just happens to be the main character. That's all. So it's fascinating.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  I mean, that is the reality is it's Next and, you know, and I think the book and Jeff did an exceptional job of teasing out the people's stories that made it work. And obviously there's a technical thread because of the genius of Bud and William Parkers and Jean Marie and a few others that made the early decisions. You know, I mean, Avi was the champion through the acquisition and that at Apple, but all that fundamental work was decided before he arrived. And, you know, by people who, whose story had never really been told until Jeff took the time to, to write it up. And that's why it's, it's worth reading.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Jeff, I think this audience, or maybe just me, would love the sequel to this from Avi's perspective with all the gory guts, the details. Like I, I, I found myself in the book being like, I want to talk to Avi. Like it sounds, it sounds fascinating. Like, so, but anyway.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  We will see. Perhaps, perhaps we continue, we'll see.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  You know, I'd say Bud and, and William Parkers would be in terms of the foundational stuff, the core decisions, super important, really super important because, you know, and then even an untold person in the whole story is Randy Nelson. It's like, who's Randy Nelson? Okay, Randy Nelson is world-class juggler, one of the Karamazov brothers. You've ever seen the knife and the gun thing in the Star Wars? It's like, he sent us a letter and said, you know, I want to come to work for you guys. He'd retired from traveling because he was, he had started a family and was homeschooling the kids.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  And he said, you know, I wanted to write haiku and I needed to know that I needed to learn Japanese to do that. You know, I was a juggler and I juggled the White House and the Kremlin. And it's like, I've been to the mountain and if I'm going to write haiku, I got to understand Japanese. So I learned Japanese and I loved computers and I learned how to program and I want to teach people how to program your machine. And there he was in front of the developers, juggling in real time and bringing objects into the system and teaching people how to do that. So I mean, we had, we had people like that in every discipline.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Approximately what timeframe is that?

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Oh, Randy came to work probably 86, mid, mid, late part 86, probably. So, I mean, it just, it was like that. People were, you know, like William Parkers knocks on the door. He says, you know, I want to work for you guys. You don't have to pay me, just give me stock. You know, he'd just done all the 3D effects for the Macintosh. And he came in and he brought the object story to the table. You know, it's just like on and on. There were so many people who, Steve was the draw, but the filter was that Rocktumbler analogy of how do you create something and then how do you persevere is, is the book so eloquently describes. And the perseverance process is really key. But I love, I, I wanted to tell the Randy story because.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like I need to change my question to what's your, not your favorite Steve story, just your favorite Next story. And like, that is, that is unbelievable.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  It was one of the best because he, he addressed, you know, he, he, I'm still friends. He ended up, he went to Pixar's, helped Pixar University, went back to Apple, did some Apple University stuff, is retired now.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Wow. That is nuts. So Jeffrey, I think what we can do, I, I want to bridge the gap because what just happened there is going to lead into the closing really well, I think. And so just to bridge the gap, let's talk a little bit about what happened next, right? We've got Rhapsody, we've got OS 10. Just a brief recap to kind of close out this history because it is pretty fascinating.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  As Steve Jobs returns to Apple, this is early 1997 and there is immediately a civil war that erupts and the civil war is between software developers who wanted to stick with the previous OS, the previous system. So this is called the blue box. They, they have names for this. So the blue box is the old Apple OS and then the yellow box is going to be the transition. And the transition is Next Step and Open Step, the API being placed on top and port, and eventually ported over. And, you know, the goal is that eventually, originally they said 1999 was the target year that they were going to port over the, the so-called yellow box, which is Next Step and create a new OS.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  But this is a really interesting moment in the history of software because you have two factions that can't quite decide what the future of the Mac OS is going to look like. And even if there should be a new OS, I mean, one of the promises, one of the reasons why Next was acquired was exactly for that, that, you know, Apple was going to have their, their new OS to replace the struggling Copland. But in the end, it becomes clear very quickly. So it takes about eight or nine months before Steve Jobs actually becomes the CEO of Apple. We tend to forget this. We tend to assume that he returned and he was the CEO and he just changed everything.

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

  But there was a long process of getting him to that position where he could go in and he could actually make these changes happen, like take Next Step and turn it into the new OS. So the first stage was that he had to make sure that Gil Amelio, the CEO of Apple who brought him on, was not going to be in a good position, that, you know, he was going to be kicked out eventually. So Steve didn't engineer this. I'm not saying that he went in and said, I'm going to, you know, be the one to take over as CEO and oust Gil Amelio. But he did kind of embarrass Gil Amelio a lot. He at one point sold off all of his shares, 1.5 million shares in Apple that were a part

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  of the acquisition and that caused a stock, the stock price fell and Gil, Gil Amelio confronted Steve and was like, why did you do that? You just destroyed our stock. And now the board is on Gil Amelio's case and they don't want him there anymore. And Steve was just like, oh, you know, I was depressed. I don't like how Apple's going. You know, it was his, it was Steve's admonishment of Apple and Gil and was him saying from the sidelines as a consultant that I've returned to this company and I currently see it as hopeless. But it's interesting because this share sale, without Steve anticipating it, actually started the domino effect that led to the board firing Gil Amelio and then approaching

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  Steve to become what they would call the I CEO, the interim CEO. This is the very first use of the I motive at Apple. So Steve is the I CEO. Then we have iTunes and then we have the iPod and the iPhone and so forth. So Steve himself is, is the I here.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  He's the original I.

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  He's the original I. Yes, yes.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  From firsthand, super close friend who has worked for Gil and was in the room when Gil invited Steve to come to the meeting that he was about to have with, with Gates at Microsoft. And after, after that meeting, the person said to Gil, what did you just do? And Gil said, well, I just invited Steve to come to the meeting with Bill Gates. And the person said, do you not understand if you invite Steve to a meeting, it's not your meeting?

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  Especially with Bill Gates.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  I mean, he did not know what was going on. But anyway, those stories we love for fun. But anyway.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  A phrase comes to mind. Bless your heart. Bless your heart, Gil. So there's Rhapsody, which basically takes Next Step, puts a Mac skin on it. And then there's OS 10. And this is the part that's kind of documented. This is where the book leaves off. But just, you know, going back to that little anecdote about OpenStep and it still lives on today. It's powering our iPods, as you said in the beginning, excuse me, iPhones. As you said in the beginning of the call, it's it's wild. So I have, actually, I was going to close it out with just that one question for Daniel about how it felt. But Jeffrey, anything else you want to add before I do that? We can edit this part out.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  I don't have much else to add. It's just, yeah, I mean, that's, that's really what it took. The company, Apple, was hopeless until Steve and his next team showed up. And once Steve put Avi Tobani in as head of software and John Rubenstein as head of hardware, and then he himself became the I, the original I, the CEO. That's when he was able to do what you just said. That's when he was able to take Rhapsody and to take OpenStep and to, you know, create the Mac OS X. And then from there, you know, web objects goes to iTunes. And there's that NS in Apple code that you see popping up everywhere. That's Next Step.

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's really, I find it fascinating, you know, as I was writing this book, it really did feel as if, you know, you're an archaeologist in a way. I felt as if I had been excavating there. Steve even talked about this in an interview, that there are layers of technology and, you know, everything we build now in 10, 15, 20 years is going to be just one layer with everything on top of it. But what I find fascinating about Next is that it's not really a layer. It started as a layer, but then it was taken as a layer and dumped on top of another layer at Apple. And so now Next is like one of the top layers at Apple. And that's where a lot of the original software prowess comes from. That's why Apple is Apple today.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's awesome. All right. So let's close it out on personal note. Daniel, I find it wild to be talking to somebody who is part of this. How does it feel kind of knowing that you had your own part in this history?

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  I really appreciate the journey, as was occasionally attributed to Steve. And a book was titled thereof, you know, the journey is the reward, right? So the reward was, and the feeling was being part of it and appreciating it. At the same time, you know, there's a level of reflection that, thanks to Jeff, that has resurfaced. And, you know, for a long time, I sat on those. I had codified some of the stories and the one liners that would trigger my memory. And I've got a pretty good memory and I got a lot of documentation as well that I thought would be important to be part of the story that got well documented and professionally delivered, which it has been.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  So I'm thankful for Jeff and bringing this book to life and bringing the story to life, which is, which is super important.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jeff.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, it's nice to know that, you know, I played a little part. A sort of a, an age group peer with some of the giants that built these things. I get to not suggest that I'm a peer, but more of an age group peer. We were all born in 1954, 1955. And that's the irony of the computer industry as we knew it and know it was a small number of people from that era, Gates and Ballmer and, you know, and Bill Joy and Eric Schmidt and Steve and me and whatever, all of us, we were all kind of, you know, a few people a little older, a few people a little younger, but right in that zone, we were lucky and it was timely.

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  And we got, and we got to build it all on the shoulders of, as Jeff said, the defense industry. Silicon Valley exists because the Russians had better rockets and they funded semiconductor development, the government did, to make sure we had lighter payloads. And so here we are again. And so these days, it's less about computing, which is what we were chasing. That was our drag in to build the right computer, I should say, less about computers. We were, we were building these computers and these layers. It's now more about computing and the implementations of computing against different domains and very different scale, global and micro at the same time,

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  from the biology and drug discovery to environmental issues and education and health and things like that. So the world has fundamentally changed. And those who are chasing these things have a new suite of tools that we could never imagine. We were just trying to build them. That was our, if you will, legacy is, is building the tools and the platforms upon which hopefully the world will be a better place. And it's, it's worrisome at the moment because things that can be used at scale can be weaponized. And we see that. And it's amazing what's been done and what's being done the last five years alone have just been incredible.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  You have.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  It's true. It isn't, it isn't things that people hadn't envisioned. Again, going back to the university market in the beginning of Next, it was on the Dartmouth campus in the 1950s that artificial intelligence was discussed and named and gathered among, you know, a handful, six or eight people chit chatting about it. And look what we have today. And the algorithms that are being run are, they're old. We just have the computers to do it on, you know, it's like.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got the power now. The concepts were there.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  And I can't help but just think back to, you know, you were one of the people, Steve had that eye for talent. You were one of those people. It was a team effort. I feel like the more mature Steve recognizes that this was a, was was a team effort. And yeah, it was just very exciting. And Jeffrey, thank you for writing the book. It truly was an excellent book. And Daniel, thank you for being here and, and sharing these, quite frankly, just awesome anecdotes and stories. I really, really, really appreciate you both being here.

• 2:01:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, stories are fun. And we all owe a debt of gratitude to Steve and the industry. And, you know, who knows, things haven't turned out the way we all had expected. But they are the way they are because of a lot of his energy and we all rode on top of it. So it's good.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  For sure. Thank you very much, you guys.

• 2:01:55Speaker 03

  Thanks, Matt. Great.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  Thank you, Matt.