Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [19]
It worked—eventually. Microsoft supported OS X from the get-go, thanks to Jobs’s 1998 deal with Bill Gates that cemented five years of software support. But Adobe and Macromedia weren’t so quick to convert their big applications like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Both companies eventually ported them over, but they refused to rewrite their consumer applications for OS X, a decision that eventually had a major impact on Apple and its business: it led Apple to develop its own hugely popular application software suites (iLife and iWork) and, indirectly, to the invention of the iPod and iPhone.
While it was no secret Apple was working on OS X, the fact that it had a new interface was. The interface was designed in intense secrecy. Only the handful of people working on it knew it was being overhauled. One of Jobs’s stated rationales for keeping the new interface secret was to prevent others—Microsoft in particular—from copying it.
But more important, Jobs didn’t want to kill sales of the current Macintosh operating system. He wanted to avoid what’s known as the Osborne effect, in which a company commits suicide by announcing cool technology still under development, before it is ready to be sold.
As soon as OS X development started, Jobs directed everyone at Apple to stop criticizing the current Mac OS in public. For years, Apple’s programmers had been quite frank about the system’s problems and shortcomings. “OS X was his baby, so he knew how great it was,” said Peter Hoddie. “But he said for the next few years we’ve got to focus on Mac OS because we’ll never get there without it. He was like Khrushchev, banging his shoe on the table. ‘You’ve got to support the Mac OS, kids. Get this through your heads.’”2
Jobs unveiled OS X in January 2000 at Macworld, after nearly two and a half years of work by almost one thousand programmers. OS X was a colossal undertaking. It was—and arguably still is—the most sophisticated computer interface designed to date, with complex, real-time graphics effects like transparency, shadowing, and animation. But it had to run on every G3 processor Apple had on the market, and it had to run in as little as 8 MB of video memory. It was a very tall order.
While introducing OS X at Macworld, Jobs also announced that he was becoming Apple’s permanent CEO, which drew huge applause from the keynote crowd. Several Apple employees have noted that Jobs didn’t become the company’s permanent CEO until after OS X shipped in March 2001. By this point, Jobs had been at Apple’s helm for two and a half years, and had replaced almost all the directors and senior staff, fixed marketing and advertising, reinvigorated hardware with the iMac, and reorganized sales. Ratzlaff noted that with OS X, Jobs had overhauled the company and all of Apple’s major products. “He was waiting for the last big parts of the company to be running to his standards before he took on the role of Apple CEO,” said Ratzlaff.
Jobs’s Design Process
Having revamped OS X, Jobs turned his attention to some of Apple’s other software, which in some cases underwent a radical overhaul. For many years, Apple encouraged strict adherence to its Human Interface Guidelines, a standards bible designed to ensure a consistent user experience across software applications. The HIG told designers where to put menus, what kind of commands they should contain, and how to design dialog boxes. The idea was that all Mac software would behave alike, no matter which company it came from.
The guidelines were first drafted in the 1980s, when computers were used primarily to produce things, such as creating and printing out documents. But in the Internet age, computers are used for communication and media consumption as much as they are for printing documents and editing video. Software for playing movies or videoconferencing with friends can be much simpler than applications like Photoshop or Excel. Often, only a few functions are required, and all the drop-down menus and