Steve Jobs

rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
    Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs’s emotional responses and manipulation techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft symbiosis had become a scorpion dance, with both sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either could cause problems for both. After the confrontation in the conference room, Gates quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was being planned for Windows. “Steve didn’t know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could either say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a piece of shit.’” Gates was thrilled, because it gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s a nice little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions. “During the course of this meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And then there’s a part where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off.’” Gates responded by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”
    As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested they go on a long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to De Anza college, stopping at a diner and then walking some more. “We had to take a walk, which is not one of my management techniques,” Gates said. “That was when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing.’”
    As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 readyfor shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.
    Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.” In a legal sense, Gates was right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it was inevitable that other companies would develop similar graphical interfaces. As Apple found out, the “look and feel” of a computer interface design is a hard thing to protect.
    And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft created a crudely copied series of products, it would end up winning the war of operating systems. This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

     

ICARUS
     
    What Goes Up . . .
     
    Flying High
    The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984 propelled Jobs into an even higher orbit of celebrity, as was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the time. He went to a party that Yoko Ono threw for her son, Sean Lennon, and gave the nine-year-old a Macintosh. The boy loved it. The artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were there, and they were so enthralled by what they could create with the machine that the contemporary art world almost took an ominous turn. “I drew a circle,” Warhol exclaimed proudly after using QuickDraw. Warhol insisted that Jobs take a computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived at the rock star’s townhouse, Jagger seemed baffled. He didn’t quite know who Jobs was. Later Jobs told his team, “I think he was on drugs. Either that or