The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [60]
“I’m a tyrant and I have strong beliefs,” he said. “You don’t have to listen to me, but if you’re wrong, there are consequences.”
Afterward, the Pixar delegation was taken to meet with some of Disney’s animators and directors, who were encouraged to talk freely without Jeffrey in the room.
Jeffrey is a tyrant, they said unflinchingly. But he’s almost always right.
• • •
JOHN LASSETER wanted to go ahead, but still, nothing happened. The two companies needed to negotiate detailed terms, but months passed without a meeting. The problem was that Disney had a huge fiefdom that still created animated films the old way, with hundreds of people who might easily believe that their jobs were threatened by Pixar’s strange new high-tech approach. They were also threatened by the very idea of hiring an independent outside contractor to do the work that they had always done better than anyone else.
Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted a Pixar movie, but the idea was opposed by his lieutenant, Peter Schneider, who ran feature animation. Now the Pixar people were afraid that Peter was dragging his feet and trying to kill the deal. Their optimism began to fade.
• • •
FOR A SHORT TIME, a new sense of hope for Steve’s career came from the Next side. He was readying for the public debut of the new, second version of the Next computer in September 1990. He wanted to re-create the excitement and buzz of the original Next unveiling two years earlier, and he even rented the same impressive venue, Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
The new machine was called the NextStation, and its most striking differences were visible at a casual glance. The computer’s outer casing was still made of the sleekest blackest magnesium, but it was now shaped like a rectangular pizza box, a more conventional design that was easier and cheaper to manufacture than the Cube. And the monitor displayed color, an overdue improvement over the old monochrome monitor.
Onstage at Davies Hall, Steve’s most dramatic moment came when he showed a clip from The Wizard of Oz on a computer’s screen. The clip began with Dorothy living in a black-and-white world. She opened the door, and suddenly the tableau exploded in color.
The audience went berserk at the stunt, applauding wildly. Hardly anyone had ever before seen a movie playing on a personal computer. Computers weren’t that powerful yet.
It was simply hard to believe, and for good reason: it was a hoax. The movie wasn’t coming from inside the black computer box. It was coming from a laser disk player hidden behind the curtain. It was all smoke and mirrors, like the Wizard of Oz himself.
The NextStation was supposed to be capable of playing a movie stored in digital form on its own disk drive. But that required a special new video chip, and Next’s supplier hadn’t come through and delivered the chip. So Steve went ahead anyway and faked it all.
Steve’s slick trickery wooed the handpicked crowd at the event, but later, in the outside world, the response to the NextStation was underwhelming. The new machine wasn’t going to save the company. It wasn’t a technological breakthrough, and it didn’t have a clear target market: if you were a businessperson who mainly needed to run spreadsheets, you’d do perfectly well buying a standard Intel-Microsoft PC for thousands of dollars less than a Next. Steve’s prices had come down, but he still wanted to command a premium for his famous name and his aura. At $7,995 for a color NextStation or even $4,995 for a low-end model with a black-and-white monitor, Steve’s new machines were two to three times more expensive than a PC that was perfectly serviceable for the needs of the average user. And if you wanted high performance computing, you’d get a Sun Microsystems workstation, which was faster than a NextStation. Sun used RISC, a newer, more advanced approach to microchip design, while Next’s engineers had stuck too long with what they were familiar with: the slower CISC chip design that Apple had always used in the Macintosh.
As the