Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (11 page)

The thing is, it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

—JONY IVE

On the morning of July 9, 1997, several dozen members of Apple’s top staff were summoned to an early-morning meeting. In an auditorium at company HQ, Gilbert Amelio, who’d been Apple’s CEO for approximately eighteen months, shuffled onto the stage. “Well, I’m sad to report that it’s time for me to move on,” he said, then quietly left the auditorium. Apple’s board had just fired him.

Fred Anderson, the interim CEO, said a few words before Steve Jobs took the stage. Jobs had been brought in as an adviser when Apple bought NeXT, his struggling software company, and, after firing Amelio, the board asked him to take over.

Jobs looked like a bum, wearing shorts and sneakers and several days’ stubble. It was almost exactly twelve years since he had been ousted from the company over a previous July 4th weekend.

“Tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said to the group.

Before anyone could reply, he burst out: “It’s the products. The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore.”

Jony was in the room, sitting toward the back. He wanted to quit. But as he sat there thinking about returning to England with his wife, Jobs said something that gave him pause. Jobs told the group that Apple would be returning to its roots. “I remember very clearly Steve announcing that our goal is not just to make money but to make great
products,” Jony later recalled. “The decisions you make based on that philosophy are fundamentally different from the ones we had been making at Apple.”
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Much was about to change in how Apple was run, beginning with the product lineup. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had forty products on the market. To appreciate the baffling nature of Apple’s kitchen-sink strategy at the time, consider the company’s computer lineup.

There were four main lines: the Quadra, the Power Mac, the Performa and the PowerBook. Each was split into a dozen different models, which were delineated from one another with confusing product names straight out of a Sony catalog (for example, the Performa 5200CD, Performa 5210CD, Performa 5215CD and Performa 5220CD). And that was just computers. Apple had branched out into a wide-ranging product portfolio, selling everything from printers, scanners and monitors to Newton handhelds.

To Jobs, this made no sense.

“What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products,” Jobs later said. “It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. If I couldn’t figure this out . . . how could our customers figure this out?”
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The product line was so complicated that Apple had to print elaborate flowcharts to explain to customers (and as a cheat sheet for employees) what the differences between Apple’s products were.

As chaotic as Apple’s portfolio was, it had nothing on the anarchy of Apple’s organization chart. Apple had grown into a bloated Fortune 500 company with thousands of engineers and even more managers, many of whom had overlapping jobs and responsibilities. Lots of them were exceptionally talented, but there was no central command and control.
“Apple, pre-Jobs, was brilliant, energetic, chaotic and nonfunctional,” recalled Don Norman.

In fact, Apple’s restructuring was under way before Jobs returned. Jobs joined the fray. He looked at everything: product design, marketing, the supply chain. Jobs started a thorough product review; he set up in a large conference room and called in the product teams, one at a time. The teams, often numbering twenty or thirty people, would present their products and take questions from Jobs and other executives. At first they wanted to give PowerPoint presentations, but Jobs quickly banned them. He saw PowerPoints as rambling and nonsensical; he preferred getting people to talk and asking them questions. In these meetings, it soon became clear to Jobs that Apple was a rudderless ship.

After several weeks, during a big strategy meeting, Jobs had had enough.

“Stop!” he screamed, “This is crazy.”

He jumped up and went to the whiteboard. He drew a simple chart of Apple’s annual revenues. The chart showed the sharp decline, from $12 billion a year to $10 billion, and then $7 billion. Jobs explained that Apple couldn’t be a profitable $12 billion company, or a profitable $10 billion company, but it could be a profitable $6 billion company.

That meant radically simplifying Apple’s product pipeline. How? Jobs erased the whiteboard and drew a very simple two-by-two grid in its place. Across the top he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional,” and down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.”

Welcome to Apple’s new product strategy, he said. Apple would sell only four machines. Two would be notebooks, the other two desktops. Two machines aimed at pros, two machines aimed at consumers.

It was a radical move, cutting the company to the bone. Under Amelio, the plan had been to offer more and more products. Jobs
proposed the opposite. In a single stroke, Jobs doomed dozens of software projects, and eliminated almost every product from Apple’s hardware lineup. Over the next eighteen months, more than 4,200 full-time staff were laid off. By 1998, Apple had shrunk to only 6,658 employees, half the 13,191 the company had in 1995.
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But the balance sheet was brought back into control.

The most controversial decision of Jobs’s first months was the late 1997 killing of the Newton, Apple’s PDA, which, after Jony’s Lindy, was in its seventh generation. A money loser from the start, Amelio’s administration had tried to spin off the Newton into its own division but the then-CEO had changed his mind at the last minute. As an adviser, Jobs had tried to persuade Amelio to shut down the Newton. It had never really worked right, and it had a stylus, which Jobs hated. Despite a small and dedicated following, it hadn’t taken off with a mass audience. Plus, Jobs saw it as John Sculley’s baby. Though it was the only really innovative thing Sculley achieved under his tenure, Jobs had many reasons to end the Newton’s brief life.

Most executives would have thought twice about killing a well-loved product, and Newton lovers flooded Infinite Loop’s parking lots with placards and loudspeakers. (“I give a fig for the Newton,” one sign read.) PDAs were on the rise, thanks to the success of handhelds like the Palm Pilot, but to Jobs, the Newton was a distraction. He wanted Apple to concentrate on computers, its core product.

Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn’t want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom.

Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn’t command the same market share and margins
as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way as a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Rather than competing with commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq and Gateway, why not make only first-class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products? The company could make much bigger profits from selling a $3,000 machine rather than a $500 machine, even if they sold fewer of them. Why not, then, just concentrate on making the best $3,000 machines around?

The potential merits of Jobs’s strategy for the company finances were clear. Fewer products meant less inventory, which could have an immediate effect on the bottom line. In fact, Jobs was able to save Apple $300 million in inventory in just one year, and avoid having warehouses full of unsold machines that might have needed to be written off if they failed to sell.

Jobs’s plan for Apple was more than a matter of B-school economics: He planned to make industrial design the centerpiece of Apple’s comeback. Since his first incarnation at Apple (1976–1985), it had been apparent that design was a guiding force in the trajectory of Steve Jobs’s life.

Unlike Jony, Jobs had no formal design training, but he possessed an intuitive design sense that dated to his childhood. Jobs, early on, learned that good design wasn’t just on the exterior of an object. As Mike Ive had been for Jony, Jobs’s father was a formative influence on his son’s appreciation of design. “[My father] loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see,” Jobs recalled. His father refused to build a fence that wasn’t constructed as well on the
back side as it was the front. “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
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Jobs grew up in a house inspired by the tract homes of Joseph Eichler, a postwar developer who brought a mid-century modern aesthetic to the architectural landscape of California. Although Jobs’s childhood home was probably a knockoff of an Eichler (what Eichler fans call a “Likeler”), it left an impression. Describing his childhood home, Jobs said, “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much. It was the original vision for Apple.”
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For Jobs, design amounted to more than appearances. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Jobs famously said. “People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
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With the development of the Macintosh, Jobs got really serious about how-it-works industrial design, which he believed could be a key differentiator between Apple’s consumer-friendly, works-right-out-of-the-box philosophy and the bare bones, utilitarian packaging of early rivals like International Business Machines.

In 1981, with the PC revolution not yet five years old, 3 percent of U.S. households had a personal computer (including toy systems like the Commodores and Ataris). Only about 6 percent of Americans had even encountered a PC at home or work. Jobs understood that the home market presented a huge opportunity. “IBM has it all wrong,” he would say. “They sell personal computers as data-processing machines, not as tools for individuals.”
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Jobs and his chief designer, Jerry Manock, went to work on the Mac, with three design constraints. To keep it cheap and make it easy to manufacture, Jobs insisted on just one configuration, an echo of his
hero Henry Ford’s Model T. Jobs’s new machine had to be a “crankless computer”: A new owner should just be able to plug the machine into the wall, press a button and it would work. The Macintosh would be the world’s first all-in-one PC, with the screen, disk drives and circuitry all housed in the same case, with a detachable keyboard and mouse that plugged in the back. In addition, it shouldn’t take up too much space on a desk, so Jobs and his design team decided it should have an unusual vertical orientation, with the disk drive below the monitor, instead of to the side like other machines at the time.

The design process continued for several months, with a sequence of prototypes and endless discussions. Material evaluations led to the use of tough ABS plastic that was used to make LEGO bricks, which would give the new machine a fine, scratch-resistant texture. Troubled by the way earlier Apple IIs had turned orange in sunlight over time, Manock decided to make the Macintosh beige, initiating a trend that would last twenty years.

As Jony would do in the next generation at Apple, Jobs paid close attention to every detail. Even the mouse was designed to reflect the shape of the computer, with the same proportions, and a single square button that corresponded to the shape and placement of the screen. The power switch was put around the back to stop it being switched off accidentally (especially by curious kids), and Manock thoughtfully put a smooth area around the switch to make it easier to find by touch. “That’s the kind of detail that turns an ordinary product into an artifact,” Manock said.
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The Macintosh looked like a face, with a slot for the disk drive resembling a mouth and a chinlike keyboard recess at the bottom. Jobs loved it. This is what made the Macintosh look “friendly”—an anthropomorphic smiley face. “Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” designer
Terry Oyama said later. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”
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It took five years—the Macintosh, conceived in 1979, was released in January 1984—but the product represented the first distillation of Jobs’s design philosophy. Unfortunately, the Macintosh was the last product that Steve Jobs would see to market during his first tenure at Apple. About eighteen months after launching the Mac, in September 1985, Steve Jobs lost a boardroom power struggle. John Sculley, the ex-PepsiCo marketing executive Jobs himself had recruited, took over. His design philosophy, though, would continue to be influential throughout his absence.

Before his departure, Jobs talked about making Apple in the eighties what Italy’s Olivetti had been in the seventies, the undisputed world champion of industrial design. Design was hot in the eighties, especially in Europe, with groups like Italy’s Memphis Group
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of architects and designers earning accolades for their bold, colorful designs (memorably described as “a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher-Price”
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). In March 1982, two years before the Macintosh was unveiled, Jobs decided Apple needed a world-class industrial designer to craft a uniform design language for all the company’s products.

At the time, Apple’s hardware was all over the place. The company’s different divisions—the Apple II division, the Mac division, Lisa peripherals—were all using different designers with different ideas. Apple’s products looked like they came from four different companies, not one. It drove Jobs crazy.

Jobs had Manock set up a design competition, in which potential candidates were asked to draft seven products, each named after a dwarf from Snow White. The name was inspired by the storybook Manock was reading to his young daughter; Jobs loved that it conjured up images of products that were distinctive, friendly and with personality.

Almost from the start, the front-runner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German industrial designer then in his mid-thirties. Like Jobs, Esslinger was a college dropout. He had gained notice designing TVs and other consumer electronics for Sony and Wega, a German company that Sony eventually bought. One of his TV designs for Wega was in bright green plastic, which the CEO of the company nicknamed “frog.” This no doubt influenced Esslinger to name his company Frog Design, which is also an acronym for Esslinger’s homeland: Federal Republic of Germany.

In May 1982, Esslinger flew to Cupertino to meet Jobs. They were alike—both natural entrepreneurs, brash and opinionated—and they bonded over a love of Braun and Mercedes. Jobs was particularly impressed that Esslinger had worked for Sony, a design-centric company that Jobs wanted Apple to emulate.

A master at pitching his ideas and philosophy, Esslinger also knew how to work hard. His group labored through four major design phases, and after months of work, put on an overwhelming show for Apple’s brass. While the other contenders in the competition made a handful of models, Esslinger’s group turned out forty beautifully finished models, two or three variations for each product. The other groups pitched designs in dark plastic with hard edges (like Sony’s stereo components from the eighties), but Esslinger’s designs were simple and sophisticated, made from lightly textured, cream-colored plastic. Like Jony, Esslinger wanted to differentiate Apple from the masculine design of eighties electronics and create a design language based on recurring elements that echoed the consistency of software that the Mac already provided.

Jobs was delighted with the formal presentation of Esslinger’s work in March 1983: Esslinger was declared the winner of Show White and soon emigrated to California to set up his own studio, Frog Design, Inc., having agreed to provide exclusive services to Apple for an unprecedented $100,000 a month, plus billable time and expenses. Billings would
quickly add up to $2 million a year, far more than competing design firms were earning from their clients.

Jobs unceremoniously told Manock and the other in-house designers that they would be working for Esslinger, who was essentially an outside contractor, albeit one with special status. Manock was killing himself designing the first Mac, but Jobs told the hapless designers that they should consider themselves lucky to be in a position to learn from the talented Esslinger. Most worried about their tenuous jobs and, indeed, the move more or less ended Manock’s career at Apple.

Esslinger’s emerging Snow White style made Apple’s best design efforts look clumsy and outdated. Snow White designs would eventually win all the major industry awards and be so widely copied that it became the de facto design language for the entire PC industry. It was too late to redesign the Mac, at that point, which had already been tooled at great expense, so Frog’s first major product for Apple using Snow White would be the Apple IIc, the fourth in the line of Apple IIs and the first attempt at a portable computer (the “c” stood for “compact”). More important, it was Apple’s first design-driven product (designed from the outside in, rather than the inside out); even with Jobs gone, he left behind a design evolution as his legacy.

That shift in emphasis was compelling beyond the design department: Apple’s engineers bent over backward to accommodate Esslinger’s designers, rather than fighting their ideas. It was a small but subtle shift; an early attempt to make Apple design driven rather engineering driven. By the time he returned, however, the old paradigm, with the engineers wielding the power, had returned, as Jony Ive had discovered.