Going your own way
When I was at Carnegie Mellon in the late ’80s, Steve Jobs came to pitch his latest creation, the NeXT cube. We sat in one of the lecture rooms and watched Steve’s presentation with awe. Here was the legendary garage-man himself, with this beautiful black box. That cool magneto-optical drive. Built-in Ethernet. Laser Printer. Amazing Graphics. Everyone was stunned by the coolness of it all.
Steve came to pitch us because, of course, he based NeXT’s OS on the mach kernel, developed at CMU. That and the fact that he desires to be a perpetual student, deciding to limit sales of the cube only to college students. With Steve’s excellent pitch skills, he dropped the bombshell - $6,000. Everyone thought he was joking.
The NeXT debacle was in the middle of a string of decisions that continued Steve’s trajectory of doing what Steve wanted while flying in the face of what his customers wanted. The Macintosh family is ripe with examples, such as the fixed, built-in monochrome monitor when color monitors of various sizes were already available. The single button mouse, in the name of ease-of-use. The closed architecture. PowerPC processors. Industrial design over functionality.
Unless you’ve been dead for the past few months, you’ve heard about the iPhone, the latest version of Steve’s way. This beautiful looking device has no buttons. How do I adjust the volume without taking my ear away from the phone, thus not being able to tell when the volume is correct without multiple iterations of moving the phone to the ear, checking the volume, than moving the phone away to adjust the volume again? Most other phones have a very simple, well understood rocker/scroll wheel volume interface that’s been around almost since the dawn of the radio itself. How do I do one touch dialing? With my Moto Razr, I flip open the phone, and press and hold one of the number keys. My 9 most used phone numbers are pre-programmed. I can do all of this without even looking at the phone!
Another innovative product shown at CMU at around the same time as the NeXT was the Chrysler TC by Maserati. Here was the first attempt at marrying Chrysler with European design. One of my mechanical engineering friends had gone to work at Chrysler, and brought a TC back for show-and-tell at the homecoming parade. He said his biggest issue was with Lee Iacocca himself. Apparently, Iacocca looked at the back end of the car during the design phase, and drew an exhaust outlet. From that point on, the size, shape, and exit location were fixed, regardless of the implications to cost, performance, or efficiency.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Lee Iacocca learned from Henry Ford — you can have it any way you want it as long as it’s my way. And Steve has learned from both of these iconic leaders that you can be successful with this philosophy. As an entrepreneur, I respect this very much. But I still hate the Apple user interface!