Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [30]
“You just said it,” Goldberg noted.
“The question is not Apple but which Apple,” Goldman amplified.
“This way,” Goldberg said, “you’re not running any downside risk. There’s no downside here.”
“We’ve got the line,” Whitfield said. He pointed toward Goldman. “He gave me the line. It was so memorable I’ve already forgotten it.”
“Evolution. Revolution,” Goldman said.
Goldman explained that Regis McKenna, the head of the public-relations agency retained by Apple, was trying to arrange stories that would coincide with the company’s stockholders’ meeting and the announcement of Lisa. “McKenna is talking about a front page on The Wall Street Journal and they’re also talking about a cover on Business Week. That should enhance the editorial launch of these products.”
“The stockholders’ meeting should reestablish your personal computer company,” said Goldberg. “It should reestablish everybody’s personal computer company.”
“They should say, ‘Buy stock, buy computers, buy everything, ’” said Goldman.
The four also had to grapple with the fact that there would be a four-to-five-month gap between the announcement of Lisa and the day when it would be available at dealers.
“When Lisa is in the store we drop a business insert into the world,” said Whitfield. “It’ll say ‘See this wonderful, mouse-activated computer.’ Then when Mac’s available we start with ads saying that mouse-activated computers are taking over the friggin’ world.”
“Are you concerned,” asked Goldberg, “that another competitor could preempt all this?”
Goldman calmed his fears. “We’ve got pretty good G-Two. Unless there’s the tightest security in the world on this.”
“The day of the stockholders’ meeting someone is going to stand up on a podium and they’re going to announce the bloody thing,” said Whitfield.
“What happens if editorial press ever pumps McKenna about a low-cost Lisa?” asked Goldman.
“If they do that, we’re friggin’ dead,” said Whitfield. “We’d be in real deep trouble. It’ll kill the sales. People can ask it and we’ll have some line like we’ll be coming out with a low-cost computer in a couple of years.”
THE CONDUCTOR
Stephen Wozniak, Bill Fernandez, and Steven Jobs came to view each other’s peculiarities through the telling eyes of friends. They were introspective and wrapped up in the privacy of their own worlds. When they stopped to look, each thought the others were shy and withdrawn. They were loners. Fernandez first encountered Jobs after he arrived at Cupertino Junior High School: “For some reason the kids in eighth grade didn’t like him because they thought he was odd. I was one of his few friends.” Neither Jobs nor Fernandez was as obsessed with electronics as Wozniak. They didn’t pore over computer manuals, or linger around computer rooms or spend hours messing with instruction sets on sheets of paper but they still found electronics an engaging and diverting pastime.
Fernandez and Jobs meddled together in the quiet of their garages. They struggled in their combined ignorance to build a box with a photocell that, when a light was flashed, would switch another light on or off. They didn’t know enough mathematics to form a model but they drew diagrams and tried to build the device with relays and transistors and diodes. When Paul Jobs started to work as a machinist at Spectra Physics, a company that specialized in lasers, Fernandez and Jobs fiddled with the laser parts that, in due course, dribbled back to Los Altos. They played rock music, balanced mirrors on stereo speakers, pointed lasers at the mirrors, and watched images play against a wall.
Like Wozniak and Fernandez, Jobs found the forum provided by science fairs irresistible. While he was still at Cupertino Junior High School he entered a science fair for which he built a silicon-controlled rectifier, a device that can be used to control alternating current. So when he began to attend Homestead High School it was natural for him to enroll in John McCollum’s electronics class. Unlike Wozniak he