Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [128]
As the employee count lengthened, it became increasingly difficult for Apple to tolerate quirks and idiosyncracies, although some of the demands were extravagant. (One employee, for example, was gravely upset when Apple failed to fulfill a promise to install his eighteen-foot-high, twenty-six-ring pipe organ in one of the office buildings.) In executive staff meetings Rod Holt came to be viewed by some as a disruptive influence while Steve Wozniak became the most notable casualty of growth. After he completed the controller for the disk drive, Wozniak worked on the design of a lower-cost Apple II but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t enjoy the tugs of management, the meetings, committees, memos, and long discussions. “I was lucky to have two hours a day to myself.”
He still indulged in pranks and, at one time or another, covered other people’s clothes in a soluble green slime, filled sodas with a fizzing compound, and pinned tablets of Alka Seltzer to the menus at a nearby Bob’s Big Boy—accompanied by the message “For your convenience.” When mice started to invade the engineering laboratory he showed his colleagues how the creatures would always scamper into paper bags because they mistook the dark opening for the safety of a hole.
However, Wozniak’s rebellious side began to emerge and he became a manager’s nightmare. His position in the company and all the kudos and status that gradually came to be associated with the Apple II converted him into one of the corporate untouchables. Instead of pursuing an assignment he would find a more interesting diversion like computing e to one hundred thousand places. (He calculated that it would take three days to compute and four months to print.) For some weeks he tried to copy diskettes with an electric hand iron, hoping that the heat would cause the magnetic patterns to shift from one diskette to another. He also began to take long weekends to go gambling at casinos in Reno. Dick Huston, a programmer who had watched Wozniak cope with the disk drive, formed his own conclusion. “Woz lost the challenge. People stopped telling him that what he was doing was bullshit. He acquired the status of being a wizard and after a while he believed it. He knew better in his heart but he loved the role. So when someone got on his case he’d get temperamental.” Randy Wigginton looked at his friend and thought, “He didn’t have the same amount of individual importance. He preferred being the Messiah.”
The newcomers brought their own strands and strains. During the first couple of years Apple recruited heavily from Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, and Intel, and the habits and differences in style among these companies were reflected in Cupertino. There was a general friction between the rough and tough ways of the semiconductor men (there were few women) and the people who had made computers, calculators, and instruments at Hewlett-Packard. Part of this was simply due to the different nature of the business. The primary drive of the semiconductor men was to manufacture high volume at low cost. Hewlett-Packard, on the other hand, had not been in a high-volume business until its calculators became popular and even then had steadfastly refrained from chopping prices to gain market share. The recruits from National Semiconductor were more inclined toward sales and opportunism and came from a company that made a religion out of its disdain for luxury and comfort. The Hewlett-Packard crowd tended to favor planning and