The hiring process at NeXT was rigorous, with multiple interviews. In many cases, even one interviewer’s “No” could blackball a candidate. And there were candidates aplenty, vying for the chance to work with Steve. But of course, even at NeXT it wasn’t possible to hire the best of the best without strong financial incentives. So Steve started making exceptions for certain hires. Some folks got extraordinary signing bonuses. Others were simply granted higher salaries than their category would mandate. And when these backdoor deals started to make their way onto that list in the finance department, well, all of a sudden that list became a lot harder to find.
Not only was the Open Corporation logistically and managerially unrealistic; it was emotionally out of synch with the reality of a Steve Jobs workplace. He would repeatedly undermine the vision of harmony, peace, and equality he had promised to foster with his irascible temper and anger and his penchant for using passive-aggressive methods to drive his people harder and harder. Steve was as erratic and verbally abusive at NeXT as he was anywhere else during his career. Moreover, he was an equal-opportunity abuser, yelling not only at his engineers but also at his executive team and his own personal administrative assistants on a regular basis.
His inner circle came to understand the pattern of his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier. Tevanian did his best to protect his software engineers from the wrath of Jobs, by making sure they were away from the office when he informed Steve of a slip on schedule, or when a user interface feature he had ordered up turned out to be unworkable. Barnes, who had become familiar with Steve’s unpredictable anger while at Apple, had clear strategies for herself and her employees. “If he’d get mad and start screaming, I’d hang up the phone. He is the only person I knew that you could hang up the phone on, and then pick it up and call him back and he’d be calmer. I mean, if you hung up the phone on me, I would kill you. But with him, if yelling isn’t getting him what he wants, disengage. Leave the room and he will come back nicer, in a different way. I understood that this was something he could turn on and off, and that he would use if it worked.” As for her staffers, she routinely told them to mentally plug their ears and try to “listen through the yelling.” Explains Barnes: “You had to get through the yelling to the reason for the yelling—that was the important part, something you could try to fix.”
THE SENSE OF urgency around the company ratcheted up as Jobs pressed everyone to prepare for the October 22, 1988, debut of the NeXT computer. Steve always relished putting on a show to unveil his digital creations, but he hadn’t performed onstage since pulling the Macintosh out of the bag, like a rabbit out of a hat, back in 1984. Steve believed that these magic-act announcements not only were good salesmanship but also helped galvanize employees and energize a company that was weary after its Sisyphean struggle to ready the product for launch. His performances would grow more and more elaborate over the years, his stagecraft would show increasing sophistication, and the amount of groundwork involved would increase correspondingly, as well as the stress for anyone involved with staging the event. It was exhausting work, and afterward anyone who could do so would immediately head off on vacation.
Introducing the NeXT computer called for more sleight of hand than ever. The operating system, which was at least a year away from being released, was buggy. The optical storage drive ran too sluggishly for a demo. There were no apps written by outside software developers. With the possible exception of the iPhone nearly twenty years later, Steve would never unveil a product that was less ready for prime time. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Steve needed the event to be a success. The halo of being “Steve Jobs’s next great company” was wearing off; even potential like Steve’s comes with an expiration date.
More than three thousand guests packed Davies Symphony Hall, the sleek modern home of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Security was tight, and dozens of self-proclaimed VIPs were bluntly turned away. Inside, an exhibit of photography by folk rocker Graham Nash graced the curvilinear vestibules, hinting at the possibility of the presence of some real celebrities on the program.
Once audience members stepped into the concert hall they could see a giant video screen serving as a backdrop for the darkened stage. A tall table on the left held a large vase bursting with white French tulips and an array of remote controls. On the right side of the stage, shrouded in black velvet, was what appeared to be a phalanx of computer monitors on an elliptical table. Behind the desk chair facing them stood a pillar about four feet tall with another black velvet mantle draped over it. Befitting the venue, chamber music wafted through the sound system as the crowd settled in. It was a Tuesday morning, yet most of those in attendance were dressed as if they had arrived for a night at the symphony. (I even wore a suit.) That’s just the way Steve wanted it.
The show was so extravagant a success that it really could have been considered NeXT’s first major product. The crowd went silent as soon as Steve, clean-shaven and with his hair neatly trimmed, stepped into the spotlight. He was wearing a dapper, dark Italian suit, a blindingly white shirt, and a burgundy-and-black crosshatched tie. Pausing to soak it all in, he smiled with pursed lips, trying hard not to break into a toothy grin; the applause went on and on.
“It’s great to be back,” he said, after the clapping stopped completely. And then, pressing his hands together in a prayerful gesture, he launched into his comeback pitch. It would last two and a half hours. He had spent months polishing his remarks, which were given as more of a business school lecture than a sales spiel. Steve laid out the new taxonomy of the computer industry—a version of that taxonomy that made his new machine seem like the natural next grand step, of course. He did so using presentation slides that had been meticulously put together by hand, because no computer application yet existed to automate the process. Work on the slides had gone on and on; after days of trying to find the exact shade of green for one slide, Steve finally found a tone he liked and kept muttering, “Great green! Great green!” The phrase became a mantra for the beleaguered marketing team.
He explained how what he was now calling a “personal workstation” fit the needs of sophisticated computer users much better than the workstations that Sun and Apollo were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. While at Apple, he admitted, he had overlooked the significance of linking personal computers such as the Macintosh into networks. The NeXT computer was designed from the ground up to be connected to a network.
Computer scientists already knew this history, of course, but the broader public that was so fascinated with Jobs didn’t. Steve had always been able to describe the potential of obscure yet real technologies with such aplomb that he created something akin to lust in his audience. He had absolute self-confidence that he could sell people a sense of discovery in the form of technological products they previously didn’t even know they wanted, a confidence that was usually justified. When he held up the NeXT computer’s innards and described it as “the most beautiful printed circuit board I’ve ever seen in my life,” the audience gasped and then broke out into applause, despite the fact that at any distance over a few feet every circuit board looks pretty much the same. The audience even clapped when he described the Cube’s ten-foot power cord. On this day, the crowd would follow wherever Steve would lead. When he called big universities “Fortune 500 companies disguised by another name,” they even seemed to believe that this was true.