The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [56]
He struggled to figure out how Pixar could make money. Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith would drive down to meet with Steve at Next’s new bayside headquarters, bringing along their marketing executive, Pam Kerwin. They would put incredible care into preparing their own agenda, but it just didn’t matter. Seconds after they sat down around the conference table, Steve would be bounding energetically, writing with Magic Markers on the whiteboard and convincing them about some harebrained new scheme. Steve would talk spellbindingly, and they would be totally captivated by his enthusiasm. It was only when they were back on Highway 101 that they would realize his ideas were crazy.
• • •
EVEN AS STEVE was slashing the staff at the failing company, he nonetheless conceived of a grand ambition for it and convinced himself and the others that it could work. If he had to remake Pixar as a software maker, then he wanted its software to be everywhere, to be found on every personal computer—inescapable, ubiquitous, essential. That’s how Microsoft was making its fortune: by creating a “standard.” Steve wouldn’t say out loud that he wanted to emulate Bill Gates, who was still an envied rival. Instead, Steve would talk about how the success of a company called Adobe offered a terrific model for Pixar. Adobe’s PostScript software turned the uninspiring text characters on the screen into a great variety of beautifully shaped “fonts.” PostScript was becoming a standard for the industry, a common language of computers. Adobe was profiting mightily by licensing the software to Apple and many other manufacturers of personal computers. Adobe’s cofounder and chief executive, John Warnock, was a friend and something of a father figure to Steve. John was a brilliant, gentle, professorial type who had been at the University of Utah with Ed Catmull and Jim Clark at the genesis of the computer graphics movement in the 1970s. Steve had great respect for John, who was one of the strongest influences on his thinking.
John Warnock had given millions of ordinary people the magical stuff to turn their prosaic words into artistic typography. Now, in Steve’s new vision for his own company, he would give the masses the mystical power to turn their rough sketches into artistic 3-D images and animations. “Steve thought that he could license Pixar’s software on everyone’s computer so they could make beautiful pictures,” recalls Pam Kerwin.
At first Pam was discouraged by the new strategy. Even as Steve conceived of his defiantly ambitious new software scheme, he cut back mercilessly on Pixar’s budgets and staffing. Pixar’s engineers created a version of their software to run on Macs and PCs, but with little money for marketing and a sales force that hardly existed anymore, who would sell it?
It didn’t matter. Before long, the Pixar people realized that Steve’s new vision wasn’t going to work. The problem was that Steve didn’t seem to grasp that the technology was incredibly difficult to use. John Lasseter had pushed the engineers to make the software easier for artists to work with, but it was still extremely complicated. To create 3-D pictures you needed gifted artists who were also technical virtuosos, which is rare, or gifted artists who were technophilic and could work closely with the programmers. It took a Disney star like John Lasseter collaborating with a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s. This just wasn’t something that ordinary people were going to play around with at home for their own amusement.
Besides, the general population wasn’t yet very sophisticated at using computers. In 1989, the typical PC owner didn’t even have a graphical user interface with a mouse, windows, pull-down menus, and icons. Microsoft wasn’t even close to releasing the first viable version of its Windows software. Except for Macintosh users, people were still staring at a single font of fluorescent text on a dark screen. The Mac’s exceptional graphics capabilities were creating the boom in desktop publishing, but that meant that people