Uploads from jurvetson, tagged steve

They remember Steve Jobs

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:12:22 -0800

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Every time I see the duuudes with serious thrill issues, I get a a zen sense of deep-breathing calm.

They swim at Steve Jobs’ favorite vacation spot, Kona Village, a string of grass-roof hales with no television, phones or internet. I first saw the dudes in late 2003, and emailed the other SJ to remark on how many of the newly released Finding Nemo characters I found in those waters.

He fired back immediately “How can you get internet access at Kona Village?”

“RIM Blackberry. Works wherever there is cellular coverage” I replied.

This was 1.5 years before iPhone development begun.

Here's the video medley of snorkeling Kona, and more photos of the dudes over the years:

my first computer

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 09:17:32 -0700

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My Dad just scanned these old photos from the 70’s, back when floppy discs were actually floppy and televisions were embedded in wood like furniture. I was such an Apple fanboy… I clearly couldn’t get enough of those stickers.

This powerful tool was something my father never had growing up. But during the 70's, he manufactured memories, and I remember plugging in banks of his chips to boost the programming capacity of my precious Apple ][ from 16K to 48K (which I used up with my Adventure game written in BASIC).

Seeing this time capsule brings back many fond memories and reminds me that each generation provides more compute resources to the next.

While the generations are bound to the metronome of biology, the power of our cognitive prostheses grows exponentially.

What was NeXT

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:48:55 -0700

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For the special tribute issue of BusinessWeek that is coming out tomorrow, I tried to honor Steve Jobs in a small way with my memories of the NeXT days.

Here is the version I wrote (the print edition has several sentences edited out).

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The book of Jobs is a powerful parable of passion.

Steve Jobs was intensely passionate about his products, effusing an infectious enthusiasm that stretched from one-on-one recruiting pitches to auditorium-scale demagoguery. It all came so naturally for him because he was in love, living a Shakespearean sonnet, with tragic turns, an unrequited era of exile, and ultimately the triumphant reunion. At the personal and corporate levels, it is the archetype of the Hero’s Journey turned hyperbole.

The NeXT years were torture for him, as he was forcibly estranged from his true love. When we went on walks, or if we had a brief time in the hallway, he would steer the conversation to a plaintive question: “What should Apple do?” As if he were an exile on Elba, Jobs always wanted to go home. “Apple should buy NeXT.” It seemed outrageous to me at the time; what CEO of Apple would ever invite Jobs back and expect to keep their job for long?

The Macintosh on his desk at NeXT had the striped Apple logo stabbed out, a memento of anguish scratched deep into plastic.

The NeXTSTEP operating system, object-oriented frameworks, and Interface Builder were beautiful products, but they were stuck in what Jobs considered the pedestrian business of enterprise IT sales. Selling was boring. Where were the masses? The NeXTSTEP step-parents sold to a crowd of muggles. The magic seemed misspent.

Jobs was still masterful, relating stories of how MCI saved so much time and money developing their systems on NeXTSTEP. He persuaded the market research firms IDC and Dataquest that a new computer segment should be added to the pantheon of mainframe, mini, workstation, and PC. The new market category would be called the “PC/Workstation,” and lo and behold, by excluding pure PCs and pure workstations, NeXT became No. 1 in market share. Leadership fabricated out of thin air.

During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation.

But Jobs was sleepwalking through backwaters of stodgy industries. And he was agitated by Apple’s plight in the press. Jobs reflected a few years later, “I can’t tell you how many times I heard the word ‘beleaguered’ next to ‘Apple.’ It was painful. Physically painful.”

When the miraculous did happen, and Apple bought NeXT, Jobs was reborn. I recently spoke with Bill Gates about passion: “Most people lose that fire in the belly as they age. Except Steve Jobs. He still had it, and he just kept going. He was not a programmer, but he had hit after hit.” Gates marvels at the magic to this day.

Parsimony

Jobs was the master architect of Apple design. Often criticized for bouts of micromanagement and aesthetic activism, Steve’s spartan sensibilities accelerated the transition from hardware to software. By dematerializing the user interface well ahead of what others thought possible, Apple was able to shift the clutter of buttons and hardware to the flexible and much more lucrative domain of software and services. The physical thing was minimized to a mere vessel for code.

Again, this came naturally to Jobs, as it is how he lived his life, from sparse furnishings at home, to sartorial simplicity, to his war on buttons, from the mouse to the keyboard to the phone. Jobs felt a visceral agitation from the visual noise of imperfection.

When Apple first demonstrated the mouse, Bill Gates could not believe it was possible to achieve such smooth tracking in software. Surely, there was a dedicated hardware solution inside.

When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard, where I already had Woz’s signature. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice.

And he dove deep into all elements of design, even the details of retail architecture for the Apple store (he’s a named patent holder on architectural glass used for the stairways). On my first day at NeXT, as we walked around the building, my colleagues shared in hushed voices that Jobs personally chose the wood flooring and various appointments. He even specified the outdoor sprinkler system layout.

I witnessed his attention to detail during a marketing reorganization meeting. The VP of marketing read Jobs’s e-mailed reaction to the new org chart. Jobs simply requested that the charts be reprinted with the official corporate blue and green colors, and provided the Pantone numbers to remove any ambiguity. Shifted color space was like a horribly distorted concerto to his senses. And this particular marketing VP was clearly going down.

People

Jobs’s estimation of people tended to polarize to the extremes, a black-and-white thinking trait common to charismatic leaders. Marketing execs at NeXT especially rode the “hero-shithead rollercoaster,” as it was called. The entire company knew where they stood in Jobs’s eyes, so when that VP in the reorg meeting plotted his rollercoaster path on the white board, the room nodded silently in agreement. He lasted one month.

But Jobs also attracted the best people and motivated them to do better than their best, rallying teams to work in a harmony they may never find elsewhere in their careers. He remains my archetype for the charismatic visionary leader, with his life’s song forever woven into the fabric of Apple.

Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality.

Pray for Jobs

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:39:52 -0700

jurvetson posted a photo:

Steve Jobs and my dad are my heroes. Have been ever since I can remember the concept.

Having worked with Jobs in the tortured NeXT days, watching his beloved Apple flounder, I’m just glad that he was able to preside over Apple’s greatest moments, and chose to leave this time, knowing that he has secured symbolic immortality.

At the personal and corporate levels, it is the comeback story archetype turned hyperbole.

Remember the sentiment when he took the helm for the second time? The WIRED 1997 cover is a reminder.

What does his resignation mean? Who knows? Prognosticators should write their thoughts at this fascinating time to avoid the cloud of revisionist retrospection.

Apple is the exception to so many rules that we have to ascribe superhero status to Jobs.

On one hand, consumer hardware is a brutal business with more folly than franchise (Flip, Palm, etc.). Other than Apple, it’s hard to think of a consumer hardware company that you would have wanted to invest in for the long term. On the other hand, platform businesses can be milked for decades after any whisper of creative genius has long left the building. Witness Microsoft. Or perhaps there is a third hand. When we joined Apple, we all signed up to change the world. Perhaps the cult of Mac can flourish with another demagogue, if the board is wise enough to eschew the empty suits of Scully, Spindler, Amelio and Hancock. Perhaps Neo lies within.

Clone Fusion

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:36:52 -0700

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Tim Draper and I have been thinking about the long-term scalability of our business and how to optimize multipresence.

Instead of three mothers (like Missy below), Sim has three fathers, with fused germplasm from Tim and me, and Frank is still trying to reconcile his surrogate role with his Utah upbringing.

Here he is fresh from Korea, but we kept him under wraps for a while. Like Missy, he shares many of the mannerisms of the Dads, like Tim’s flipped tie fetish. We find that adorable.

We do worry a bit about institutionalized groupthink though.

Ballmer Ponders Windows 7

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:54:21 -0700

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Watching a demo at Microsoft today.

The features demonstrated were similar to Apple’s OS of four years prior (from rapid wakeup, to the dock (task bar), to screen and widget management, to the use of translucency on frames), but somehow that made me feel comfortable, like a leitmotif in the diffusion of design. Imagine how shocking it would be to see something new, even an artistic departure.

The one visual feature that looked like it departed from the OS X look-and-feel was tiled windows (filling the screen instead of overlapping), a feature that came and went in Windows 1.0 and now it’s back.

Then we saw a premier of the Windows 7 TV ad spot. It shows a young girl using a PC to make an animation of how easy Windows 7 is to use… and she ends with a zinger of an Apple-ad allusion: “I’m a PC, and this is getting good.”

I did get a copy of Windows 7 to play with; will need to find a PC at work.

The most interesting demo and discussion for me was around Bing. Imagine that. Badda Bing, badda boom! It is like a coral reef of specialized post-processing and data integration in the canonical verticals. Barney Pell called it “the professionalization of search, like with data mining and databases before, from one-size-fits-all, to specialization around common tasks.”

Ballmer was full of vigor and pithy quips, as usual (I had a prior conversation with the Microsoft team on what is on and off the record, and in striking that balance, I left out the gratuitously funny comments, as they may be a bit embarrassing out of context… but they sure made the day fun):

“In Search, we are like The Little Engine that Could. Anyone with single digit market share has to take that perspective.

We are absolutely committed to get to scale in the search business.

The next 5 years of search will bring more innovation than the past five years. Especially in the user interface. Think of how dull a search page is. Visualization and Natural Language processing are the two big future areas.

In retail today, there is Best Buy and Apple. And that makes Best Buy more pro-Apple than they otherwise might be. On Oct 22, we will open a couple stores.

In phones, PCs and TVs, I don’t think the hardware and software will come from one vendor. There’s a natural layering. In low volume products, like music players or game boxes, they can be integrated. But for high volume products, one vendor can’t do it all.

It’s very unlikely that we would do a phone. The BIOS has not yet been defined. The abstraction between hardware and software is not done yet.”

Muglia showed a snazzy demo of Excel 2010 linked to SQL Server with 100 million lines of data. He claims it is a main memory database, and what we saw were sorts and simple queries with sub-second responses on a “normal $1000 PC”

He also opines:
“Vista was a tough time for us. We are really, really glad to have Windows 7.”

Steve Ballmer on Entrepreneurship

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:48:10 -0700

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As usual, the most interesting material came during the Q&A, and the video just posted, with links to the full podcast from last night.

“This is me when I left Stanford. I still part my hair on the right like I did back then.

We were 30 people when I joined Microsoft. There were no business people.
We actually didn’t have very good people when we started. Bill was good. There were like 4 or 5 really good people.
I went into Bill’s office when I had been there about one month and I said we had to hire 18 more. He said, Steve, our people aren’t very good. Why are you going to hire 18 more?

When I was in business school, most students wanted to be consultants and investment bankers. Those were the hot jobs. I love them, but consultants don’t invent and most of the products investment bankers invented have been largely discredited in the current environment. Entrepreneurs who invent will add to the innovation and the economy and change the world and have a heck of a lot of fun doing it. So despite everything else, now is the time to do it.”

Q&A:

Q: on Microsoft’s search strategy?
“The number one player – Google – is a lot bigger than us in Search. We are more like a startup than a big guy in the search market. We can’t invest in everything that the market leader can. We can’t outdo and outspend someone who’s revenue is so much bigger than ours. (!!?!)

Because we are not the market leader, we can do experiments with new business models like cash back. Because we are not the market leader, we can do experiments with the user interface, which drives revenue and clickthroughs.

We are going to have to be more disruptive.”

Q on how he impacts culture with his aggressive sales videos.
“I feel like I have shaped Microsoft culture a lot.”

Q: from a student who worked on Windows Azure over the summer, and wondered whether Microsoft would commit more resources to it:

A: It’s like that 80’s movie, 3 Men and a Baby. The world is now going to be three screens and a cloud. Phone, PC, TV, Cloud. So it’s super important to us.

You don’t get the name Windows easily around Microsoft. It means you are important to us. (that made me WinCE =)

Q on Yahoo merger:
“First, as to Yahoo, it’s a long and sorted saga. In the end, I’m glad we went down the road. At the end of the day, I think it would have been valuable to get together, but it didn’t work. I still think there exists an opportunity to create a better search product by having more customers and more advertisers to generate more relevant advertising as part of the search offering. That may or may not at some point happen. There may or may not be appropriate discussions. I don’t choose to comment on that today.

Q: on MSFT innovating. What’s the vision?
He highlighted Xbox live and sharepoint. Gave props to the Apple Iphone and facebook as an “interesting concept”.

Q: Most important classes/ advice for students:
“I wish I had taken more computer science classes. To be honest. I wish I had.

I still remember the Kodak vs. Polaroid case: what the market leader should do versus a weak #2. I still quote from the darn case all the time.

The best class of all: By chance, I took a class on managing arts organizations. Engineers and scientists are awfully darned important. Engineers and scientists think more like ballerinas. The soft people management stuff, I lucked into it."

Entrepreneur of the Year

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Wed, 11 May 2005 21:15:13 -0700

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Accepting the award for Apple, Steve Jobs bubbled with pride when asked about the cultural impact of the iPod: “People are listening to more music. Millions of people have rediscovered the joy of music.”

When asked what non-Apple brands he respects, he responded immediately with Yahoo and then added Starbucks and Amazon.com

And then, his iconic Stanford talk, How to live before you die 2005.

Loose Head

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:24:59 -0700

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Does she dream of electric sheep?

Steve Eves’ Model Rocket Record

nobody@flickr.com (jurvetson) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:50:50 -0700

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Steve Eves preps the electronics package for his 1600 pound, 36 foot tall, 1/10 scale Saturn V rocket.

He flew a perfect flight on Saturday at MDRA setting a record for the largest successful hobbyist rocket launch; photos here and below by Neil McGilvray from Rockets Magazine, major supporters of the project.

She lifted off on a cluster of nine motors: a central P10000 surrounded by eight N3800s, all burning solid Loki White AP propellant.

Saturn V Launch Video

(P.S. If you like rocket videos, here’s a fun horizontal launch)