The Steve, Woz, Sculley dilemma

Hello, lovely people of planet Earth. This is me again, Roy, coming to you direct in a slightly inebriated state. Recently, I have had quite a bit of spare time, and like all human brains, my thoughts too have a tendency to wander around when allowed the luxury of free time. So, I did a bit of that reflection thing and found three characters that kind of sum up my entire dilemma.

It seems like a long time back when we were just a few guys sharing a room, and at times sharing a dream, of putting a dent in this universe. Those were the JEE prep days, and maybe also a bit of Senior Secondary schooling on the side. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve had just come out and the four of us had one copy between us (those were the heady days of Flipkart), we couldn’t decide who got to read it first and so each of us got to read one chapter at a time, and thus the book went around. The excitement around that book carried on for weeks, every nuance, every character trait of his was a topic for discussion. We chided him for his estrangement of Lisa, and hailed him for his vegan quirkiness, for his obsession with A-players and his fixation with straight traces on the circuit board, mocked him for his ‘reality distortion field’, but soon enough Apple was the most valuable company in the world.

It was only a few years later that I read Woz’s version of it all. To be honest, it was kind of a letdown, nowhere close to the thriller that Isaacson had produced, of course under the direction of the maestro himself. Woz seemed way more focussed on the personal work that he had produced, rather than the story that Apple had written, his pride in his designs overshadowing the larger impact that they had. His dad being an electronics engineer at Lockheed, Woz got a really early start into the world of electrons and the plumbing that made them flow, his dad was a true Engineer at heart and instilled in him a pride for Engineering. Woz got hooked, and soon, was miles ahead of his fellow students, this feeling of being the best, at what he believed was the most important profession in the world(Engineering) kept him yearning for more, he didn’t wanna lose that lead. From those very early days, his designs were not just about getting something done, they were a source of pride for him, they were about doing things in the cleverest way possible, they were the canvas for his craft. This obsession led to tweaks here and there, that others would/could not care about, all these small innovations added up. This obsession with electronics also meant that he was constantly creating new designs and devices, each project added to his intuitive understanding of electronics and became a stepping stone to bigger, more complicated projects. All of this experience with TVs, computers, and calculators came together in Apple I to create a truly revolutionary design for that time, a computer that had a display and a keyboard in place of indicating lights and punch cards, a computer that stored a boot up program in ROM, so you didn’t need an hour of fiddling just to get it up. The bits and pieces had already been there, but no one had the cumulative knowledge to connect those dots.

Steve too was a quiet child and though he was also interested in electronics from an early age, he did not have the kind of exposure that Woz had. Steve’s dad was a mechanic and could only teach him some basic electronics. His childhood was kind of a story of missed potential, he got good grades but was bullied at school, to the point that his parents decided to shift in order to get him into a better school, where Steve got introduced to computers. He fell in love with the concept, but could never dive in the way Woz could, after all, Woz had his very own personal Aquaman, his dad. Later on, he would get introduced to Woz and the two of them would become good friends, goofing around, and then starting Apple Computers.

Now, while Sculley did write a book about his time at Apple, I never got around to reading it. So, we will make do with the prevalent public opinion and maybe interpolate a few observations of our own.

The starting of Apple was a two step process

1. Woz invents a revolutionary computer interface
2. Steves takes that idea, puts on a pair of Nikes and runs like hell

If Woz’s story was about pioneering designs, Steve’s story would be about sheer will. While Woz brought Apple into existence with his pioneering design on the Apple I and then the more mature Apple II, it was Steve who kept the ball rolling and ensured that Apple stayed at the forefront of technology, bringing together Engineers who could do it over and over, scouring the globe for technologies that could open up the next frontier, the GUI from Xerox, Capacitive Touch from FingerWorks, Gorilla Glass from Corning, et. al. The important point being that he knew exactly how much to stretch, which products could be made possible with the technology of the day and which ones would trip the company over. He could judge, how much paranoia added to the appeal and when to open up, say putting a USB on the iPod or bringing the Office suite to mac. Steve could take those decisions because he understood the technology, he himself was in awe of what computers could do and was driven to make an impact in the industry. Scully, when given the same mandate, made poor choices, both with product and strategy, this even though he had been a star at Pepsi. Licensing away Software, he diluted away their value proposition, with Newton he chased a product that was not possible in the day. Scully came from a business where his primary job was managing numbers. A technology business is fundamentally different from a bottling business, in a bottling plant the primary concern is to keep the taste constant, tech on the other hand moves really fast, the primary concern being to clamber on and stay at the top of the pile, especially for newer companies. Bureaucrats might be well suited to running cargo ships, but U-boats demand a Barbarian at the helm. Take the recent rise of AMD under Lisa Su(a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering), over Intel under Bob Swan(no Engineering Degrees).

Pick and Choose, Mix and Match –

1. The Bomb Maker – Woz
2. The Guerilla Leader – Steve
3. The Police Officer – Scully