The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [21]
“Zeez eeez Feee-LEEEP Kahn!” he exclaimed. “Zeee Macintosh sucks!”
He hung up the receiver and they laughed hysterically.
Then Heidi dialed Steve’s number again. This time, Bill pretended to be a disgruntled Next engineer who had finally summoned the nerve to tell his boss to fuck off.
Inspired by the alcohol and the camaraderie, they all broke into hysterics again.
The next day, when they were finally sober, Bill asked Heidi: “Who were we really calling last night?”
“Steve Jobs!” she said.
Shit! They really had called Steve Jobs!
Bill didn’t know that he was really leaving a message on Steve’s answering machine. He thought it was all a pretense!
Heidi had to play the diplomat. She made an appointment to see Steve, who kept her waiting in the Next lobby at Deer Park Road for an hour and forty-five minutes. An eternity. When Steve finally emerged, she calmly explained the embarrassing situation.
“That was dumb,” Steve said.
Still, he didn’t fully grasp what had happened.
“What was Philippe Kahn doing at Bill’s house?” he wondered aloud.
Time passed, and eventually Steve and Bill were slated to appear together on a panel discussion at an industry conference. As they saw each other on the dais, Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape—the kind that’s found in answering machines.
“This is the tape,” he said mischievously, as if he intended to play it for the crowd.
• • •
THE ANTICS BETWEEN Bill Gates and Steve Jobs hinted at a rivalry that would become one of the most enduring and fascinating in American business. It was more than a competition for money and media attention. Each man quietly envied the other’s image. The media portrayed Steve as the visionary and Bill as the businessman. But Bill believed that he, too, was a seer of the technologic future. While only a trivial percentage of the population owned personal computers, he predicted that there would be a computer on every desk and in every home (all running his software). The media recognized Bill for his tough dealmaking skills, the way that he had gotten the better of IBM in the deal of the century, but Steve was just as fierce and unyielding a negotiator. Bill envied Steve’s movie-star charisma, his ability to captivate an audience of a thousand people, and Steve watched along with the rest of the world as Bill became the richest person on earth. But each man saw himself as the complete mogul rather than his typecast character in the press.
But they did represent opposite approaches to business and technology. Bill was the ultimate pragmatist. He put out bad software, buggy and flawed, but he got it out to the market, and then he fixed some of the problems in the next version, and then the next and the next. He persisted and he struggled and eventually he wound up with a good piece of software. He was poor Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, but he kept pushing. It was a messy process, it was infuriatingly incremental, it was full of angst, but it worked. He had a bias for action. He took pride in the fact that his company shipped products.
Steve, in contrast, was the ultimate perfectionist. When he came out with a new computer, it had to be revolutionary, astonishing. In his own words, it had to be “insanely great.” He wanted a huge leap forward, not an incremental push. He wanted something that people would love, not tolerate grudgingly because they had no other viable alternatives. He conceived of his engineers as artists and even had them sign their names on the inside of the Macintosh. He had exhorted them with the mantra “Great artists ship.” Picasso and Matisse didn’t hold on to their canvases for years; they finished them and sold them off.
But Steve had trouble shipping.