Steve Jobs

One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had always been fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and his tools in order, and his son was proud to show that he could do the same. Coleman came along to give the tour. “Steve was, like, beaming,” she recalled. “He was so proud to show his father this creation.” Jobs explained how everything worked, and his father seemed truly admiring. “He kept looking at his father, who touched everything and loved how clean and perfect everything looked.”

Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-admiring wife of France’s socialist president François Mitterrand asked a lot of questions, through her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about overtime pay. He was annoyed, so he described how automation helped him keep down labor costs, a subject he knew would not delight her. “Is it hard work?” she asked. “How much vacation time do they get?” Jobs couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so interested in their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell her she can come work here any time.” The translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment Rossmann stepped in to say, in French, “M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and your interest in the factory.” Neither Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator looked very relieved.

Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he was going just over 100 miles per hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After a few minutes, as the officer scribbled away, Jobs honked. “Excuse me?” the policeman said. Jobs replied, “I’m in a hurry.” Amazingly, the officer didn’t get mad. He simply finished writing the ticket and warned that if Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would be sent to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to him,” Rossmann marveled.

His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a few months after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just completely obnoxious and thinking he could get away with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had arranged a formal dinner with French software developers, but Jobs suddenly decided he didn’t want to go. Instead he shut the car door on Hoffman and told her he was going to see the poster artist Folon instead. “The developers were so pissed off they wouldn’t shake our hands,” she said.

In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s general manager, a soft rotund guy who had come from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was not impressed with his team or his sales strategy. “You don’t deserve to be able to sell the Mac,” Jobs said coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction to the restaurant the hapless manager had chosen. Jobs demanded a vegan meal, but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish out a sauce filled with sour cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She whispered that if he didn’t calm down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.

The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give them any allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably,” Hoffman recalled.

It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in France. Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s allocations if Gassée didn’t jack up sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”

Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted to. François Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous—computing for all—and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers in all of its schools. Paris also brought out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and Negroponte tell tales of him pining over women while there.

Falling

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that. Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code, whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.

Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”