His inner circle came to understand the pattern of his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier. Tevanian did his best to protect his software engineers from the wrath of Jobs, by making sure they were away from the office when he informed Steve of a slip on schedule, or when a user interface feature he had ordered up turned out to be unworkable. Barnes, who had become familiar with Steve’s unpredictable anger while at Apple, had clear strategies for herself and her employees. “If he’d get mad and start screaming, I’d hang up the phone. He is the only person I knew that you could hang up the phone on, and then pick it up and call him back and he’d be calmer. I mean, if you hung up the phone on me, I would kill you. But with him, if yelling isn’t getting him what he wants, disengage. Leave the room and he will come back nicer, in a different way. I understood that this was something he could turn on and off, and that he would use if it worked.” As for her staffers, she routinely told them to mentally plug their ears and try to “listen through the yelling.” Explains Barnes: “You had to get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling—that was the important part, something you could try to fix.”
THE SENSE OF urgency around the company ratcheted up as Jobs pressed everyone to prepare for the October 22, 1988, debut of the NeXT computer. Steve always relished putting on a show to unveil his digital creations, but he hadn’t performed onstage since pulling the Macintosh out of the bag, like a rabbit out of a hat, back in 1984. Steve believed that these magic-act announcements not only were good salesmanship but also helped galvanize employees and energize a company that was weary after its Sisyphean struggle to ready the product for launch. His performances would grow more and more elaborate over the years, his stagecraft would show increasing sophistication, and the amount of groundwork involved would increase correspondingly, as well as the stress for anyone involved with staging the event. It was exhausting work, and afterward anyone who could do so would immediately head off on vacation.
Introducing the NeXT computer called for more sleight of hand than ever. The operating system, which was at least a year away from being released, was buggy. The optical storage drive ran too sluggishly for a demo. There were no apps written by outside software developers. With the possible exception of the iPhone nearly twenty years later, Steve would never unveil a product that was less ready for prime time. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Steve needed the event to be a success. The halo of being “Steve Jobs’s next great company” was wearing off; even potential like Steve’s comes with an expiration date.
More than three thousand guests packed Davies Symphony Hall, the sleek modern home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Security was tight, and dozens of self-proclaimed VIPs were bluntly turned away. Inside, an exhibit of photography by folk rocker Graham Nash graced the curvilinear vestibules, hinting at the possibility of the presence of some real celebrities on the program.
Once audience members stepped into the concert hall they could see a giant video screen serving as a backdrop for the darkened stage. A tall table on the left held a large vase bursting with white French tulips and an array of remote controls. On the right side of the stage, shrouded in black velvet, was what appeared to be a phalanx of computer monitors on an elliptical table. Behind the desk chair facing them stood a pillar about four feet tall with another black velvet mantle draped over it. Befitting the venue, chamber music wafted through the sound system as the crowd settled in. It was a Tuesday morning, yet most of those in attendance were dressed as if they had arrived for a night at the symphony. (I even wore a suit.) That’s just the way Steve wanted it.
The show was so extravagant a success that it really could have been considered NeXT’s first major product. The crowd went silent as soon as Steve, clean-shaven and with his hair neatly trimmed, stepped into the spotlight. He was wearing a dapper, dark Italian suit, a blindingly white shirt, and a burgundy-and-black crosshatched tie. Pausing to soak it all in, he smiled with pursed lips, trying hard not to break into a toothy grin; the applause went on and on.
“It’s great to be back,” he said, after the clapping stopped completely. And then, pressing his hands together in a prayerful gesture, he launched into his comeback pitch. It would last two and a half hours. He had spent months polishing his remarks, which were given as more of a business school lecture than a sales spiel. Steve laid out the new taxonomy of the computer industry—a version of that taxonomy that made his new machine seem like the natural next grand step, of course. He did so using presentation slides that had been meticulously put together by hand, because no computer application yet existed to automate the process. Work on the slides had gone on and on; after days of trying to find the exact shade of green for one slide, Steve finally found a tone he liked and kept muttering, “Great green! Great green!” The phrase became a mantra for the beleaguered marketing team.
He explained how what he was now calling a “personal workstation” fit the needs of sophisticated computer users much better than the workstations that Sun and Apollo were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. While at Apple, he admitted, he had overlooked the significance of linking personal computers such as the Macintosh into networks. The NeXT computer was designed from the ground up to be connected to a network.
Computer scientists already knew this history, of course, but the broader public that was so fascinated with Jobs didn’t. Steve had always been able to describe the potential of obscure yet real technologies with such aplomb that he created something akin to lust in his audience. He had absolute self-confidence that he could sell people a sense of discovery in the form of technological products they previously didn’t even know they wanted, a confidence that was usually justified. When he held up the NeXT computer’s innards and described it as “the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve ever seen in my life,” the audience gasped and then broke out into applause, despite the fact that at any distance over a few feet every circuit board looks pretty much the same. The audience even clapped when he described the Cube’s ten-foot power cord. On this day, the crowd would follow wherever Steve would lead. When he called big universities “Fortune 500 companies disguised by another name,” they even seemed to believe that this was true.
The tricky part of the show came when he had to explain that this radically new computer would have to make do with black-and-white and grayscale graphics, a cost-cutting decision (it saved NeXT $750 per machine) that had become unavoidable as Steve’s persnickety meddling had delayed the machine and driven up its cost. No matter. Steve simply presented the screen as a magnificent design element. He bragged about the subtle shades of gray in a way that almost demeaned a color screen as an unnecessary extravagance. As the demo went on, Steve’s claims became more grandiose, as if these NeXT machines might revolutionize the academics of not just science but the arts as well. Given all this potential, he suggested, it was remarkable that the NeXT computer would cost only $6,500; that its printer was priced at a mere $2,000; and that customers who wanted a conventional hard drive to augment the machine’s storage capacity would pay just $2,000 more. Still, he couldn’t completely conceal the reality that a fully functioning NeXT computer system would cost well over ten grand—some seven thousand dollars more than it was supposed to have.
Steve knew he had to end the show with something that would obscure this unfortunate detail, something that would bring the concert hall crowd to its feet. And that something was music. For the previous six weeks, he had pushed Tevanian, who had been with the company just a few months, to build a music synthesizer software application that could show off the Cube as a more multitalented computer than anything else around. Developing that music synthesizer capability was a tricky bit of programming, and one night, after weeks of effort, Tevanian finally figured out how to make it work. “Suddenly, this circuit board was producing sound! I thought, This is amazing!” Tevanian remembers. “It’s eleven o’clock at night, though, and there is nobody there to show it to. So I run to the building next door, and lo and behold, Steve is still working. I said, ‘Steve, I’ve got to show you something.’ So we run back over to the engineering lab and I show him. And he just starts swearing at me. ‘Why did you show this to me? I can’t believe you did this!’ he yells. And I say, ‘Steve, you don’t understand, it works!’ And he says, ‘I don’t care, because it sounds horrible. I don’t ever want to see anything like this again.’