Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [41]
Carter told his colleagues that he was about to depart on a trip to the Far East to inspect possible parts suppliers and had already begun to place orders. Jobs exhaled at the news.
“This is like a train starting up that takes a quarter of a mile to stop and we haven’t even got the track laid.” He paused and turned to Carter and Belleville. “We’ve got to really test the main logic board. We’ve got to test hot and cold.” He slapped the table. “Details. Details. Details. There’s a lot more money in the digital board than the analog board. If we’re going to have a fuck-up let’s have it in the digital board.”
“We’re really in trouble with the analog board,” Carter countered. “Right now we’re being told it’ll be ready in forty-five days but we’ve yet to see diddly squat. We kicked ’em in the butt and they said they want ninety days. They’re going to have to bust ass even more than they think.” Carter returned to the need to place orders for parts and Jobs mentioned two suppliers: “I like Samsung better than Aztec. Can we negotiate with them?”
“We cannot take the risk,” said Carter. “We’ve got to give them both big incentives.”
The group moved on to consider the possible pricing of the computer. For some months the general aim had been to sell the computer for $1,995. Jobs wanted to be assured by the financial controller, that it would still meet Apple’s profit targets if it was priced at $1,495. Coleman, who had been considering what effect changes in price might have on sales volume, started to draw a graph and curves on a blackboard. Jobs watched for a moment, listened to Coleman as she explained her diagram, and said, “We could pull numbers out of our ass and do anything. Any curve is total crap. If you believe it you’re being fooled.”
“We could print it out on a blotter in color and it doesn’t mean a thing,” Murray echoed.
Jobs had a mischievous idea about how to test the effect of a $500 difference in price. “We should do some test marketing. We should drop the price in L.A. and raise the price in Seattle and hope the dealers don’t talk to each other.” He started to explain the conclusions of a task force Apple had established to set guidelines for building prices from profit targets: “There were eighteen million marketing and finance people who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. We’re always going to make judgments and a lot of it is unknowable. So we just ended up with a rule of thumb for the rate of return we want.” He turned to Coleman and his voice rose half an octave. “Don’t drive us into the land of assholes with graphs. The last thing we want is people trying to out-Visicalc one another.”
Murray began to complain that whatever the price, Apple was not allocating anywhere near enough money to launch Mac. “If we were Kodak or Polaroid we’d have a giant pot of money to launch products.” Jobs played devil’s advocate and pretended he was in charge of the division selling Apple IIs and IIIs. “Let me put on another hat and play PCS manager. The only way I’m going to sell more Apple IIs is to merchandise the hell out of it. I don’t have a hot product. I don’t get free editorial. I don’t get the cover of Byte.”
“I’m trading futures,” Murray said.
“I’m paying the light bills,” Jobs said.
There was some talk of a sales meeting in Acapulco for Apple’s dealers and of a quarterly gathering of four hundred Apple managers at which Jobs was to give a report on progress with Mac. They sorted out which members of the Mac division should attend the two-day meeting. Then Vicki Milledge laughed nervously. She surveyed her boss and reported that all the managers, apart from Jobs, had given her performance reviews on their staffs.
“I hate doing reviews. I like salary increases,” Jobs explained.
“Into every good life some rain must fall,” Matt Carter said consolingly.
HONEY AND NUTS
When Steven Jobs started to sift through university brochures he showed that he was capable of both originality and obstinacy. He approached the task with all the stubbornness he had previously used to persuade his parents to