Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [106]
As Apple’s founders and managers made fumbles and learned to sense each other’s weaknesses, they gradually built a mutual trust. The trust was derived from a sense of their colleagues’ frailties as much as from their complementary strengths. Markkula’s early sales forecasts were quickly shown to be pessimistic, but it also became clear that he wouldn’t scuttle back into retirement. Jobs’s choice of technique for the manufacture of the case, Wozniak’s unwillingness to finish a design, Scott’s refusal to fret about aesthetics, and Holt’s habit of nitpicking all revealed private weaknesses.
The mixture of pedigrees came to the fore in discussions over important details like the system used for numbering parts in engineering. They all had their own ideas for a system which, if poorly designed, could cause horrible complications. Scott observed, “When you’re working on big topics which you don’t know all the answers to, it’s easy to switch to something else really teeny that everyone can get their teeth into.” Jobs, for example, dreamed up his own phonetic system in which an item like a 632 Phillips head screw would be labeled “PH 632.” It was a charming notion but didn’t have the flexibility to cope with oddities like different lengths and distinctions between black-oxide, nylon, and stainless-steel screws.
Jerry Mannock, the case designer, suggested adopting a system like the one used at Hewlett-Packard. Somebody else wanted to copy Atari’s procedures. Others wanted parts to be numbered from the outside of the computer toward the inside. A few considered it more natural to work from the inside toward the outside. Finally Holt wrote a five-page paper detailing a formula based on seven digits which divided parts into categories like nuts, washers, and custom semiconductors. It became the object of religious attachment. “If there wasn’t an engineering print and a specification associated with a part number, then it wasn’t an engineering part number. Then they could go to hell.”
They began to tolerate quirks and idiosyncrasies and solved some of the small pieces of mechanical confusion. After telephone callers kept asking for Mike—not making clear whether they wanted to speak to Markkula or Scott—the former kept his name while the latter became known as Scotty. When a cranky line printer broke down they all knew who guarded the jar of Vaseline that was used to grease the roller. They all learned to endure Holt’s chain-smoking and Bill Fernandez’s piping bird whistles and occasional departures for Bahai holidays. They worked around Jobs’s temperamental car and his complaints that Apple’s first Christmas party couldn’t be catered with vegetarian food. Scott was also delighted to learn about Jobs’s personal cure for relieving fatigue: massaging his feet in the flush of a toilet bowl.
The fishbowl existence brought immediate gratification. Most of the employees tended to hear or see what was going on. When somebody strolled in off Stevens Creek Boulevard and counted out $1,200 for a new computer, Apple’s teenagers could scarcely believe their eyes. Sherry Livingston felt that it was like “a big octopus. Everybody did a bit of everything. I didn’t feel as though there were presidents and vice-presidents. I felt as though we were all peers.” Workdays often started before 8 A.M. and lasted until late into the evening, with breaks for sandwiches. Many of the two dozen or so employees worked part, or all, of weekends. Gary Martin, for example, dropped by over the weekends to sift through the mail for checks. Don Bruener, who helped troubleshoot the printed circuit boards, enjoyed the unpredictable nature