Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [70]
Sculley recalled a trip he and Jobs took to Japan to meet with Akio Morita, the legendary cofounder of Sony. Morita presented the pair with two of the first Walkman players off the production lines. “Steve was fascinated by it,” Sculley recalled. “So the first thing he did with his was take it apart and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done. How it was built.” 22
Jobs often took staff on tours of museums and to special exhibits to educate them about design or architecture. He took the Mac development team to an exhibit by the great Art Nouveau designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, because Tiffany was an artist who commercialized his work. At NeXT, Jobs took a group on a field trip to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania to study the great architect’s design. At NeXT, Jobs would often wander over to the Sony offices across the hall. He’d pick up Sony’s brochures, carefully examining the fonts and layouts and the weight of the paper.
On one occasion, Sculley found Jobs madly dashing around the parking lot at Apple’s HQ examining cars. He was analyzing the details of their design, looking for cues that he could use in the design of the Macintosh case. “Look at the Mercedes design,” he told Sculley, “the proportion of sharp detail to flowing lines. Over the years they’ve made the design softer but the details starker. That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”23
Jobs has had a long-standing interest in German design. In the eighties, his bachelor mansion was empty except for a grand piano and a big black BMW bike. He’s always greatly admired Braun, the German electronics manufacturer best known for its clean industrial design. Braun blended high technology with artistic design. Jobs has said several times that he thinks technological creativity and artistic creativity are two sides of the same coin. When asked by Time magazine about the difference between art and technology, Jobs said, “I’ve never believed that they’re separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don’t believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don’t see that. People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, ‘I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science,’ and I’ve never forgotten that. I think that that’s possible, and I think a lot of people have tried.”24
Flexible Thinking
Apple used to be fiercely proprietary, fielding its own technology and shunning industry standards. During its early years, it used nonstandard technology for almost everything. Keyboards, mice, and monitors all used nonstandard connectors. But since Jobs has returned, Apple has become much more flexible and practical. It is shedding a lot of its baggage. Across the board, Apple uses as many standard components and connections as possible, such as USB or Intel’s chips. The Mac even supports the two-button mouse.
Creativity is being open and flexible, and not protecting your business model. There’s got to be an element of reckless abandon, a willingness to bet the company on the next new thing. One example is Jobs’s decision to open the iPod to Windows. Initially, the iPod was conceived as Mac-only. Jobs wanted to use it as bait to snare Windows users. He hoped it would be an incentive to switch to the Mac. There was a long, hard debate inside Apple. “There was a long discussion,” said Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple’s hardware and iPod divisions. “It was an important decision for us. We didn’t know what the effect was going to be, so we debated