EPISODE 1971
 
[INTRODUCTION]
 
[0:00:00] Announcer: The popular story of Steve Jobs is that he co-founded Apple, got pushed out, wandered through a failed venture called NeXT, then returned to save the company and usher in the iPod and iPhone. It's a memorable story, but it treats his years at NeXT as a footnote. In reality, they were among the most consequential of his life and career. Geoffrey Cain is the author of Steve Jobs in Exile, which draws on previously unpublished material and new interviews to illuminate the next years. The book argues that NeXT was not a failure, but the hidden turning point. Its operating system, NeXTSTEP, became the foundation of Mac OS X, and later, the iPhone, and its fingerprints are still visible in Apple's code today.
 
Dan'l Lewin was an early Apple employee who led the initial launch of the Macintosh into higher education. In 1985, he left the company alongside Steve Jobs to co-found NeXT, where he served as VP of Marketing and Sales. Over more than 30 years in Silicon Valley, he went on to hold senior roles at Sony and Microsoft, and later served as President and CEO of the Computer History Museum.
 
In this episode, Geoffrey and Dan'l joined Matt Merrill to discuss the story behind NeXT, the 1980s computing landscape that shaped it, the technical bets, like objective C and dynamic binding that gave Apple a long head start, why the university market mattered so much, and how the company ended up shaping the devices in our pockets.
 
Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in back-end development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at DEPT Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com.
 
[INTERVIEW]
 
[0:02:16] MM: All right. Hello, everybody. I'm Matt Merrill, and I am here with Geoffrey Cain and Dan'l Lewin. Geoffrey is the author of the book Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary. It's a very unique and excellent book about Steve Jobs before he became the legend he is today. Most people know that Steve Jobs started Apple, but what you may not know is that Jobs was forced out of the company. And after he left, he created a new company, NeXT, with the idea of creating a powerful computer for the academic market. We have Geoffrey here who wrote the book and did all the research, and we have Dan'l, who was actually a Co-Founder of NeXT and left Apple to create the company with Steve Jobs in 1985.
 
I think that I looked you up on LinkedIn, Dan'l, and you have probably the only phrase that anybody could accurately say, "Left Apple to establish a pioneering startup with Steve Jobs." I don't think anybody else can accurately say that.
 
[0:03:17] DL: There were a couple others with us, but yeah.
 
[0:03:22] MM: So, welcome. I'd like to ground the audience and assume that not everybody knows this history. I'm hoping, Geoffrey, maybe you can give us a quick dive into some of this history and what the book is about, and we'll take it from there.
 
[0:03:37] GC: Sure, Matt. One of the most fascinating things I found diving into the story of NeXT Computer is that the memory that we all have of it is off. It's just not completely accurate. The way that events actually happened with Steve Jobs and Apple versus how we remember them today are significantly different in the sense that our memories have been warped by pop culture, by film, and everything out there about Steve Jobs.
 
There's a storyline out there about Steve and about Apple, and the usual story goes that Steve co-founded Apple in the garage with Steve Wozniak. They built Apple, they released the Macintosh. It was all a great success, and Steve Jobs was brilliant from day one. Then, this is something that people have told me. They thought that Steve Jobs was so creative that he was kicked out of Apple, that Apple didn't like him, because he was outshining them, and he was removed, and then he wandered in the wilderness for 12 years. He built a failed company called NeXT Computer, and then he returned to Apple. They realized how smart he was, and he saved Apple from bankruptcy. It was about three quarters away from complete bankruptcy, would have probably gone out of business had things gone differently.
 
Then we got the iPhone, we got the iPod, the iPad, and so forth, and Steve Jobs was memorialized as the great legend we all know. This is the popular narrative, and it's that Steve Jobs was this brilliant visionary from day one, and from day one onwards. He was always doing things right, but then he was just misunderstood, and then he became great later in life. What was so fascinating about this book is that as I dive deeper and deeper into the story of NeXT Computer, I found that the real story of what happened here, the real story of Steve Jobs, was the inversion. It was actually that Steve Jobs founded Apple with Woz. They built great stuff. It was a successful company. They had an IPO. They built the Macintosh. But Steve Jobs was not well liked by certain factions within Apple.
 
There was the CEO, John Sculley, former PepsiCo CEO, who he had brought on to help run the company. He was pushed out. The real story is that the Macintosh computer was not a commercial success, that the company was bleeding money. It had inventory piling up. In these final years of Steve Jobs, in Apple version one, these final years were actually quite difficult, and Steve was quite a divisive figure in the company. I mean, people either loved him, or hated him, and then eventually, he tried to oust his CEO, who he brought on, and they brought both of them before the board, and ultimately, Steve was sent off into his exile, which became NeXT Computer.
 
The real story is that NeXT Computer, despite people living today, software developers, technologists, going back and looking at this incredible story, we think of NeXT Computer as the ultimate failure. That everything that Steve Jobs touched in this company just didn't hit the market. It wasn't doing well. Ultimately, they say that the company failed, but that's actually not what happened. NeXT Computer was a success, and it was a success, because it developed a type of software. NeXTSTEP, the operating system, which was based on object-oriented programming, I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with this, something that became really popular in the 1990s and 2000s. Object-oriented programming became the basis for the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, and the acquisition of NeXT Computer.
 
Because what happened is that Apple needed this operating system, NeXTSTEP. They needed a new operating system. Apple was struggling. They saw that Steve had been developing at NeXT this exact system for about 10 years. He was developing things in the years, 1987 and '88, that would appear in 2008 with the iPhone. I mean, this is the operating system that powers a lot of the Apple software today, and it's just something that's everywhere.
 
What I found in this book, and this is the story that I feel hadn't been told, it's that the story that we think we know isn't actually the real story of Apple and Steve Jobs. It's really NeXT Computer that was the turning point. That's where he both learned to lead, learned to trust and delegate to his people, but then on the other hand, also developed extremely advanced software and operating system, a kernel that would be needed decades down the road. Once the world saw what this was really capable of, then Steve Jobs was able to return to Apple and to bring it to the greatness that we know today.
 
[0:08:34] MM: What a great overview. I have to say, again, I was joking before we started. I'm not trying to butter you guys up, but the book is written in such a way that it's not dramatic, but it really tells quite a nice story and weaves the human element into this very nicely. It's a great book, truly. What's funny is, as you say that, I didn't know a lot about NeXT. I was saying before we started that my brother was a big NeXT fan. That framing of NeXT being a failure, that's actually not something I was terribly aware of, until I read the throughline of the book. I walked away from it just being absolutely blown away at how ahead of the times, specifically NeXTSTEP was. Truly, highly recommend reading this book.
 
Now that we've gotten the history lesson, thank you, Geoffrey. We have one of the founders of NeXT here, Dan'l. I'm going to start with a bunch of questions for you. I've been super excited to talk to you. Let's start with a framing of it's 1985, you've started up NeXT. What was the problem NeXT was trying to solve, and what was so revolutionary about it, and how did Steve convince you to leave a company like Apple to start this up?
 
[0:09:54] DL: Yeah. It's 1985, 1986 were amazing years for the computer industry. Apple was on its way to a billion-dollar run rate. 1 billion annual sales. The beginning of the computing industry was blossoming. When I say the computing industry, I mean networking and the cornerstone by which internet protocol emerged. The essence of the Internet, which was the connection of major research institutions, building up distributed network, etc.
 
What people don't understand, and I think it's important to put in context, is time sharing the notion of sharing a mainframe computer was invented on the college campus of Dartmouth College. Stanford wrote their own time-sharing system called LOTS, Low Overhead Time-Sharing System. The connection capability to put the Macintosh, just to fast forward a little bit to 1984, the connection capability to bridge Macintosh into the LOTS network spun out and became the company known as Cisco.
 
[0:11:04] MM: I did not know that. Okay. Wow.
 
[0:11:08] DL: 1986 Microsoft went public, Adobe went public, Oracle went public, Sun Microsystems went public. These were companies that were a couple hundred million in sales with a couple hundred-million-dollar market caps. That's the way the world was. IBM at the same time was a 40 billion dollar a year company.
 
[0:11:31] MM: Wow. That contrast is stark. Wow. That's stark.
 
[0:11:36] DL: It's running to appreciate where we were and what we were thinking about. The answer to your question is, I had been part of Apple from really, the beginning of the Lisa computing project, which was a precursor to Macintosh. Without Lisa, Macintosh would not exist. The Lisa was built, essentially, by the people who were at Xerox PARC, who had done all the original work on small talk and the Bravo architecture, which was WYSIWYG word processing, What You See Is What You Get, Tom Malloy, Charles Simonyi, they were at PARC. Charles went to Microsoft. Tommy came to Apple.
 
There were these interesting technologies that were bubbling up mostly out of research parks and universities. When I was working on the Lisa project, it was to do market development into the Fortune 500. I wore a suit and tie. I was in my early 20s and I was dealing with CEOs of major corporations. That was my job was to wear the suit. We always had the CEO and the others needed to be officers. We brought 80, or 90 companies through to look at this technology at the time when they were steeped in IBM mainframes, and had some digital equipment for many computers for their research scientists and things like that.
 
What I found is the Fortune 500, which is where Apple wanted to sell, was uninterested in the Lisa system for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of, which was they were running on mainframes and we were programming in Pascal. We were pushing this notion of a SQL database. Oracle was this little startup. What came of it was me, I spent time doing research on the university community. I said to the division chief and the executives, I reported right into the, basically, the CEO's office, it's like, we should be selling this to the people who invented these technologies, because we don't have to sell to them. They invented it. They'll buy it. The division chose not to. That's what led me to go to work for Steve and the Macintosh division when he took over that division. 
 
I looked at what they were trying to do out of the division. There were 10 people in the group and they had an idea. Johanna Hoppen had an idea about the university community. I'd done all this research and written it all up. They said, "You need to be the one to come figure this out." I did it not reluctantly. I did it with full energy and enthusiasm under three conditions. One, that I could undo what they were doing, because it was way off base. Two, that Steve helped me, but only when I asked him. Three, that they paid me, because I knew he was a meddler. They paid me when it was done, because I had a young family and I was going to be flying all around the country, and that would have been a new part of my role. Two out of three is not bad. I'll let you guess.
 
We set up the university consortia with 24 institutions. At the moment of the launch of the Macintosh, we had two dozen major institutions, one of each kind, some liberal arts colleges, etc., but a lot of the mainstream computing from Stanford and MIT and Carnegie Mellon in Utah, where all the graphics were developed and on and on. That saved Apple for a while, because Macintosh sales stalled at four units a month per dealer, when the manufacturing ramp was going to 80,000 units a month, a million units a year.
 
We had a 90-day window when that inventory stacked up to turn down the supply chain commitments, because they were long lead, and to put 50,000 computers, round number, into the university market in August and September of 1985. That saved Apple's bacon, because they could turn down the inventory supply chain and all the costs and penalties associated with that. It spread the word through the kids can't wait. We had these wheels for the mind initiative. Sometimes you can go find a poster on the web about the kid on a bicycle with the Macintosh mouse trailing off the back. I set all that up. That was part of Steve's vision about bicycle for the mind, but I set those programs in motion.
 
The punchline was, these were people who desperately wanted to put NeXT generation computing to work for educational purposes. When Steve was fired, we were underway building Rich Page, one of the co-founders, and I were working - Rich was doing obviously the design work, but I was working with the market. We were interested in designing this notion of a 3M machine, which Geoffrey identifies very clearly in the book. It's a really important part of reading the process about why the company existed, why I went along with it, and why Steve frankly needed me to do what I was doing for them, as opposed to continuing to do that at Apple.
 
It was a very magical time and we were basically servicing a market was the key. I can stop now and you can carry on, or tease things along as you see fit. But it was a wild time in the industry. Took multiple years to build these kinds of things. We were fearless. We had a blank sheet of paper and market context and a lot of energy.
 
[0:16:51] MM: That sounds incredibly exciting, also probably very nerve-racking for somebody in their 20s with a new family.
 
[0:16:56] DL: Yeah, for sure.
 
[0:16:59] MM: The 3M concept, that is very important. Can you talk about that just briefly, just so we can ground people?
 
[0:17:05] DL: Yeah. I mean, the access of it was imagine if you will, again, Macintosh 128K of RAM and no operating system. Just a read-only memory ROM with a bunch of routines that you could call. I'm out there talking to computer science departments about using Macintosh as to teach. They said, "What's the operating system like?" The answer was, well, from your point of view, there is no operating system. But there are these interpretive Pascal program that you can use to teach people. It's like, okay, a teaching machine. That's good.
WHAT they really wanted, and it was defined primarily at Carnegie Mellon University, was this notion of a machine that would have a million pixels on the screen, would process a million instructions per second and have a megabyte of RAM.
 
[0:17:54] MM: It's 1986. That was remarkable.
 
[0:17:55] GC: 1 megabyte.
 
[0:17:56] MM: Yeah. It was remarkable.
 
[0:17:58] DL: It was a big deal. It needed to cost, roughly speaking, less than $3,000. Then they were going to deploy them everywhere. That was the idea.
 
[0:18:07] MM: It was the dream. Yeah.
 
[0:18:09] DL: It was the dream. That's right.
 
[0:18:11] MM: Also, one thing, as you were describing that time SQL itself was pretty new, right?
 
[0:18:18] DL: Truly. Yes. I mean, again, we were touting Oracle when I was at Apple as a partner in proposing the notion of SQL interactive for database work at a time when it was IBM.
 
[0:18:33] MM: Was DB2 a thing then, or was that late?
 
[0:18:36] DL: DB2 had Fortran, everything. They wanted Fortran. We were at the time, Pascal was the rave. Yeah, it was just another world.
 
[0:18:46] MM: Man. Wow. Wow.
 
[0:18:49] DL: Networking was all proprietary. There were fights going on about different types of networking, token ring versus the proprietary stuff that everybody was building. Then in background, one of my classmates from college, Eric Schmidt, most people know who Eric is.
[0:19:08] MM: He was your roommate in college.
 
[0:19:09] DL: Not my roommate. We were classmates.
 
[0:19:12] MM: Oh, excuse me. I miss Eric, too. Okay.
 
[0:19:14] DL: No, no, no. He went to Berkeley with Bill Joy, and they put internet protocol in the Berkeley distribution. What people don't actually know is that as an undergraduate at Princeton, Eric was the ringleader among four or so undergrads who petitioned Bell Labs for rights to the Unix operating system, which they were under the consent decree with DOJ to make available their technology. They got a copy of Unix and ported it to the only computer on the Princeton campus in 1975, 76, which was an IBM mainframe. They learned how to port Unix as undergraduates.
 
Then when he went on to get his PhD with Bill at Berkeley, they were weaving internet protocol into the Berkeley distribution, which as the distributions went out to the computer science departments around the country, which were all new, because they were all EE prior to that time. That's how things got strung together. The universities were also crazy about what we were doing with NeXTSTEP, which was based on the Berkeley distribution. Engineering a kernel that would allow for all kinds of interesting long-term things around parallelism and portability and all kinds of the rest.
 
[0:20:33] MM: That's a great segue. Because NeXTSTEP is the thing that as Geoffrey was talking about, it still lives today, which is absolutely bonkers to me, in a good way. The choices that led to that, the way you described that makes a lot of sense. Then NeXT and Steve also hired Avie Tevanian for his work at Carnegie Mellon on the mock kernel, and you're using BSD. Can you talk a little bit more about those choices and how it shaped where NeXT was going and why it was - I mean, I think you've already touched on why it was so revolutionary.
 
[0:21:07] DL: Well, yeah. No, there's more to it, so it's a very good and fair question. We were pretty far down the pike having selected Berkeley distribution as the foundation. We made a series of other choices, which I'm sure you'll want to talk about around what we're going to do with interface builder and object orientation and objective C, as opposed to C++ and all the things that went into the whole stack were really important. We were licensing a lot. I mean, the compilers we licensed from Richard Stallman at MIT. That was my turf, right?
 
I was smart enough to know what I didn't know when I was at Apple. And so, the university people adopted me when I would just say, "I don't know. Tell me." Then they were educating me all the time. I was learning who was doing what, where in the university community and how that could be pieced together into what they wanted at the end of the day. The thing about Carnegie Mellon is there were so many interesting projects there.
 
Rick Rashid, who was running that project and Avie was one of his students, Rick went on and founded Microsoft Research. He left CMU and became the founder of MSR, Microsoft Research, which is the last standing major research lab and a corporation in the world, for the most part. He did amazing things. He was fostering this new cadre of under, well, PhD students. Avie had worked, obviously, at Rochester as well, where Rick was.
 
The idea, obviously, was flexibility, portability, the multithreaded capability, parallelism, and things. Basically, having the protected memory space at the low level under control, which would just help the whole process of stability and growth over time. We were really trying to pick - and taking risks to take research projects and productize them. We were also doing a lot of other things that were unique. NeXT software distribution bundled a Sybase database with every machine. We bundled the full function SQL database with every machine. We bundled Mathematica, Richard Wolfram's technology, with every machine. We bundled Shakespeare. I mean, we bundled all kinds of things with every machine, so that there would be a kernel of ideation and capability in these machines that other people could extrapolate and build on.
 
Then with Interface Builder, you could envision corporate databases, which gets into the discussion about IBM and things. Corporate databases being the place from which data would resign on a desktop and easily developed applications would allow for enterprises and intelligence communities, and others will talk about to actually do amazing things with these desktop machines.
 
I'll close in a second, but basically, what we're doing is taking extreme workstation functionality and putting it in a PC business model. Because another thing about that moment in time is that some microsystems and Apollo and all the other workstation companies, they sold under the same business model as the mini computers. They sold you the product and then you had a monthly maintenance fee for the operating system. The PC model was you get the operating system and you might pay for an upgrade every year or two. But you get the operating system with every machine.
 
We were doing PC model and workstation plus functionality. We were really, in the distribution strategy was very, very different as well. All these things we were looking to your earlier question, the context of the industry and the markets. Then how to service a market that was exceptional in the sense that the university is a superset of the real world. It's not a subset market. More things happen in universities than happen in the real world. They're researching and they're exploring, they're doing what have you. What better place to start than now?
 
[0:25:10] MM: An absolute academics dream in one package that they own, as opposed to pay a subscription for. Sorry, Geoffrey. Did you want to hop in?
 
[0:25:18] GC: I had nothing more to say. I mean, I think Dan'l covered the university market quite well. I will just say that that was one of the more interesting stories that I went into and wrote about in the book. It was the significance of the university market. I think that's something - it's something that in hindsight, we tend to forget, because today we live in an age of screens everywhere, phones everywhere. Whether you're a scientist, or a researcher or just a regular person using your phone, we all have access to high-powered tools down. With AI, we can get one of these high-powered expensive NVIDIA machines. Apple is coming out with new Mac minis that are getting ever more powerful that do local AI processing.
 
We really live in an age now when things that were once rare are now available to all of us for relatively cheap. I think that you look at the whole history of Silicon Valley. It's not even just Apple, look at how research laboratories were so intertwined with companies like Fairchild, Semiconductor, and Intel in the early days. Really, it's that federal government complex, that military industrial complex, as they call it, that allowed for the chips to be made, that allowed for the workstations to be made, that created demand. If there were no government involvement in Silicon Valley in the early days, then the Valley, as we know, it might not even exist today. Universities are a huge part of this story. It's something that I think we tend to forget these days.
[0:26:52] MM: You just made me think of a personal anecdote. My brother was a PhD candidate at Stanford in the early 90s. I remember him coming home on break and he had his computer and he would dial into. I think it was the Stanford network. I had no idea what he was doing, right? At the time, I was just a little kid. He's much older than me. It's just making me think back to that, because he was on the forefront of that. He was in that academic space doing these things. It's so wild how ubiquitous it is now. Back then, it was folks like him that were doing this stuff.
 
[0:27:26] DL: Absolutely.
 
[0:27:27] MM: Man, fascinating. You mentioned interface builder, which is pretty crazy, because a little fun fact in Xcode today for iOS and Mac development, there's a file called a .nib, N-I-B. Stands for NeXT Interface Builder. Holds the compiled user interface layout. It still lives today, which is pretty nuts. Interface builder was ahead of its time. You started to talk a little bit about that. If we can help frame how that helped pivot into business use cases and just how crazy this was for the time, I would love to hear about it.
 
[0:28:04] DL: Sure. First, I would say, most of the credit the unsung hero on the whole approach was William Parkhurst, who did a lot of 3D effects for the Macintosh. He was a developer in that community when we launched the Mac, and he too was a Stanford grad. He did the accelerated computer science and management program at the same time. Highly, highly capable computer scientist and world-class big wave surfer, too. He's a real character. William was deeply involved in the object community, the whole OOPSLA thing of the day.
 
There was a Mac event, one of the Mac World, or whatever was going on. Jean-Marie Hullot was there. He was building things for the Macintosh. As a result of those community connections from the object community, Jean Marie came and visited NeXT and showed off what he was doing. It became obvious that what we needed to do, particularly when you start to think about university professors wanting to build simulations and all this other.
 
Oh, by the way, to do a quick look back to Xerox PARC and Smalltalk for those in your audience that are generally familiar, Smalltalk operating system, living, working environment and user interface all rolled into one. It's living and breathing.
[0:29:32] MM: Right. And one of the first object-oriented -
 
[0:29:34] DL: The first thing.
 
[0:29:36] MM: - languages, yeah.
 
[0:29:37] DL: That's exactly right. It wasn't like people weren't aware, but the idea of productization and shipping it in a commercial machine as a way for your customers and your audience who were both users, but also developers, because they all had these ideas they wanted to implement. That was one of the benefits of the university community and that market and the enthusiasm that they brought to bear for helping us, guiding us, sticking with the company over time as well.
 
It was really Jean Marie coming to the company. He unfortunately passed away some time ago. But he was at Inria in France, where he did a lot of the early research and he's a professor academic type as well. But he was just a super gentle person and a genius in the field at that moment in time of thinking through how to build a kit, if you will, that would sit on top of the object library that will let you build these things. Because of the choice that, again, William and Bud Tribble were party to of objective C and the notion of dynamic binding at runtime was key.
 
Everybody else had gone another direction with C++ and the rest. That was a very, very important and pivotal moment. The teeny little company, I think they were based in Connecticut conciliary, and there were just a handful of employees, and we bet on them.
 
[0:31:10] MM: Just to make sure I'm tracking. This is objective C in -
 
[0:31:13] DL: Correct. Right. Which made interface builder a rational thing to have, because you'd be building interface widgets, etc. You'd want to, rather than going away compiling, it's like in runtime, you want to introduce capability that would express itself and then be bound into the system, or the application layer. Those things were, I mean, people had seen them because of Smalltalk. But no one had ever really shifted in an aggressive commercial way. There are lots of arguments with the Parcplace folks about why Parcplace didn't succeed, and they were the ones that commercialized Smalltalk.
NeXTSTEP was the pioneer. Therefore, in the long run, 15-plus-year lead time, and anyone else pulling those things together, that gave Apple a lot of running room after the acquisition of NeXT.
 
[0:32:06] MM: Wow. That dynamic binding thing, I mean, I really went down a rabbit hole preparing for this. I was watching some demonstrations that Steve did that are still on YouTube, which you can still find. I think it's fascinating. Go take a peek of him creating something with interface builder. Now this framing that you've given, just how mind blowing that is at the time that he was able to in what was it, like three or four minutes, create a little database application. That's crazy.
 
[0:32:34] DL: That's right.
 
[0:32:36] MM: Also that, I feel like for a subset of our audience who's done iOS, or Mac development and Objective C, maybe it's my age where the iPhone came out and we're like, "We have to learn Objective C? What is this? Why can't it be Java? Why can't it be something else?" Just knowing why that was the case and how important that one, I was going to say little decision. It's not a little decision at all, but that's mind blowing.
 
[0:33:03] DL: Yeah. They would bet your company depends on small partners. Again, you think the size and scale of the industry. With hindsight, we look back and it was crazy. In the moment, everything was possible and small groups of people could do amazing things. Maybe they can now as well with the new-new world.
 
[0:33:23] MM: Yeah. I've got an agent running on that laptop right there. I think it's going to change the world.
 
[0:33:27] DL: Yeah.
 
[0:33:28] MM: You mentioned Jean-Marie Hullot. Is that how you say his name?
 
[0:33:32] DL: Yeah.
 
[0:33:32] MM: That was a really interesting story about how he got recruited. Something that came out to me in the book and really, I'd love to hear both your opinions on this based on what you know is that Steve - I think it was Steve. You can tell me if I'm wrong, seem to have just an absolutely incredible eye for talent. You think of Avie, you think of Jean-Marie Hullot, there's others as well, and he was very loyal to them. Avie stayed with Apple until 2006. Can you talk a little bit about how he identified talent and how he built his teams? I find that fascinating.
 
[0:34:10] GC: This is one of the first things that almost everybody told me. I sat down with more than 110 former NeXT executives and employees. Early in the conversation, they would say exactly what you just said, Matt. They would say that Steve's greatest talent and perhaps his greatest contribution as well to the world of technology was that he could look right into your soul and figure out who you are, what you wanted, what you were good at, and he could find ways to bring out the very best work that you had ever done.
 
We think of Steve as somebody who is mercurial and difficult and hard to work with, but they always emphasize that side of Steve that when he were at NeXT computer, they always said it was the most magical place of their careers, that nothing else came close. The graphic designer said it, the engineer said it, that everything they did at NeXT was just far above and beyond what other companies asked of them. It's something that really, they would describe it as a more intuitive talent. It's not something you can measure and structure and place on a computer screen. There's no compiler, there's no code. It's more of a human-to-human connection that somehow Steve was able to make.
 
He would bring in, he would select the very best people to begin with. They told me about the interview questions that he would give. One of the favorites that a lot of people talked about is he would ask them, "Are you the best designer in your field? Are you the best engineer in your field?" If anybody hesitated, or said, "No. I'm good, but I'm not the best," he would just shut down the interview and say, "I would rather talk to them." Screen them out right away, got rid of the ones he didn't want to work with.
 
He really looked for people who had a force of will, a force of personality. He wanted people who could push back on him, who could defend their ideas. A lot of times, what Steve would do, they talked about how he would walk around the hallways randomly and he would check in on people and ask what they're working on. When he was asking questions, the questions would be difficult, but he wasn't asking the questions just to be difficult. He was trying to see if you could stand up for your idea and defend it in front of him, that you wouldn't cower and quiver and step back and say, "Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here." He really wanted people who believed what they were doing, who believed that they were making a contribution to technology.
 
To answer your question, it's one of those talents that you don't come across much. It's just not something that a lot of people have with this level of force. It seems to be something that he might have been born with, or that he at least learned early in life. Because it's something that he was able to channel and to put out there in the company and in the world. The mistake that he made early on was that his force of personality, this ability to cut through people's soul, there was something called the hero-shithead rollercoaster. One day you're a hero, you're awesome. He's holding you up. The next day you're a shithead and he's cutting you down and telling you you're doing a terrible job.
 
Early in life at NeXT computer, at the early Apple, this was the stuff he was known for. It was more about the process of not erasing this side of him. But what people observed was that he was learning how to fully form this aspect of him, learning how to not make it a chop down, a cut down. You're not chopping down the trees. You're trying to allow the forest to grow. You want the garden to grow. Over time, he developed an ability to not only foster the loyalty of the people around him. I mean, he had eight years at Apple when he returned to Apple, eight years of executive stability, which I mean, what company has that now in 2026? It's so rare to see any public company out there that has eight years of executive stability. It just doesn't exist in many places.
 
Steve just had this incredible ability over time developed from this period of struggle to place trust in people who he hired to identify them as talented, but to learn how to harness their talents more and more as time went on. It was a universal story. Everybody talked about this. I didn't hear one dissenter. I've done a lot of journalism and books in my career. When you go into a project like this, you usually get lots of dissents. You get a lot of people who have different memories and they say, "No, no. That's not how he was. That's not what happened. I disagree with what that person said about this person." Books are a bit complicated projects with many memories, many people with their own points of view. But I was quite amazed and just awestruck by the universal agreement with everybody who I talked to who said that that was what Steve was great at, finding talent, harnessing it. That's also what he learned to harness better and better as time went on as he learned from his struggles.
 
[0:39:29] DL: Yeah. I'll comment on that, because I witnessed a lot of these things. Steve is known for blending science and the humanities. That's the thing. When asked about Microsoft, his comment, "Well, successful, but they have no taste." I'll give you one example, both in terms of hiring, but also just the longer thread. The hiring process, there were - when I left NeXT, more than half the company worked for me. We all interviewed everyone. That was the way it worked. This executive staff interviewed everyone that we hired. There were a lot of capable people in the world when you look at their resume. We could filter through that pretty quickly.
 
There were a smaller number of people who had a calling for what we wanted to do as a mission and a purpose. In particular, in those early days, no one saw what we were doing. We didn't show them models. We didn't show them the software. They all had to take a leap of faith. The last C was character. To Geoff's point, etc., was Steve had a good way of appreciating the character. That came from the surrounding of those that he trusted, who were part of the interview process with him. If it was someone that I wanted to hire, it would be my tail that would be on the line. He'd participate. If he saw something, you listen, because he did have this incredible ability to see these things and to draw things out, which was really important.
 
What I would say in terms of over time with Steve and everyone looks back on this fondly, both because of the ride that we were on at NeXT, and then the inevitable outcome of NeXT, which was, it was along with the new mature Steve, the savior of Apple, which, again, to Geoff's book and the notion of an origin story for Steve, it's the Macintosh. In the end, that's what brought him around. But the thing that I think is important, and to some extent, I would say, I wrote the foreword thanks to Geoff. Ed Catmull wrote the afterword.
 
[0:41:45] MM: CEO of Pixar? Is that correct?
 
[0:41:47] DL: Yeah.
 
[0:41:48] MM: Yeah. Okay.
 
[0:41:49] DL: In 1985, we founded NeXT. In early 1986, Steve bought Pixar from George Lucas. I was there when we did that. The articles of incorporation for Pixar were exactly the same word for word, except NeXT was changed to Pixar, and the ,Inc. remained the same. The cap table was exactly the same. The founders got the same shares. The table was the same for employees and Steve put in the same amount of money upfront. As NeXT was meandering and dissolving the hardware business and they were, you'll read all about it, you got to read this book. It's really good. The punchline is that by the end of it all, Steve had put the majority of his personal net worth into keeping Pixar alive.
 
Ed, who was the genius behind Pixar, and he and I were in parallel universes over the exact same period of time, Steve did not get to run rampant through Pixar. He was only allowed in on Fridays and he couldn't contribute on the technology, because these guys were wizards in special ways with graphics. He wasn't a storyteller like they were. He's a different kind of storyteller. He grew under that. I think his humanness came from Pixar turning digital into what looked like analog.
 
[0:43:13] MM: Yeah. Yeah. Truly a blend of humanities and tech.
 
[0:43:18] DL: Right. I mean, they always recognize the uncanny valley and they never made the humans look too real. But -
 
[0:43:25] MM: I mean, Toy Story still holds up.
 
[0:43:27] DL: Toy Story still holds up. Steve, he had a vision to support what Ed and Alvy wanted to do, because they were really clear from the time that Lucas - Because there were three things. By the way, we stole all the marketing from Lucas for the Macintosh. We used all of the Star Wars marketing techniques. Star Wars, there were three things. There was Droid Works for sound, Pixar for imaging, and then Industrial Light & Magic. Those are the three companies that he spun up. Then they typically would dissolve them after the movie. They didn't know it was going to be a franchise like that, right?
 
All things considered, I think this universe of Pixar being the entity which actually gave him the financial success and confidence at that level to trust people in a new and different way. He clearly had to trust people at NeXT towards the end as well, because just keeping it going was very, very different. He started to actually believe some of the things that we tried to do early on that he didn't want to do. You just have to read the book to get a picture of that.
 
Anyway, I just think there's this blending of digital and analog and that he grew up and the Pixar thing was really party to him, recognizing he's got to let people do their jobs and trust them. He's good at identifying these people, but you got to trust them.
 
[0:44:48] MM: That's fascinating. The other thread that I mentioned earlier, I thought the book told this really nice human story, when he had his son. He got married and had his son. People report that there was this change in him. I mean, I've experienced it, too. It changes you. It absolutely changes you. It was very sweet to hear. I think there's one anecdote in the book where somebody said, Geoffrey, you mentioned he would walk around the offices and ask what you were doing and it would put people on the defensive. That changed. They felt this shift change to, he was just curious. He just wanted to hear what they were doing. I thought that was - This is really interesting. Really interesting. So many fascinating things.
 
[0:45:33] DL: Oh, for sure.
 
[0:45:35] MM: I'm going to come back to the cube and quake and WWW. There's a really good moment in the book where the story of how IBM almost licensed NeXTSTEP. There's this hypothetical, Geoffrey, that you positively, that there's a world in which NeXTSTEP eclipsed windows as the world's most popular OS. Dan'l, I think that this intersects nicely with your experience at next and how you left the company. With the benefit of hindsight, can you talk about that a little bit and why you ended up leaving?
 
[0:46:08] DL: For sure. IBM didn't almost license NeXTSTEP. They did. They never shipped, but they definitely licensed it. Again, you got to remember what was going on in the world at that time, just a quick history lesson. IBM came out with a micro channel architecture for the PC and they were working with Microsoft to build OS2 for essentially, a proprietary version, if you will, of an operating system on a proprietary hunk of hardware. The industry coalesced around that and created the EISA bus consortium, which was the extended architecture. The compact was the leader, and that's where the clone market came from. The four horsemen showed up, if you will. It was what, Packard, Dell. I forget all the names back in the day.
 
[0:47:06] MM: Yeah. Oh, man. Taking me back.
 
[0:47:08] DL: Yeah. IBM was left out there. They were very clear. This is out of the vice chairman's office and the CEO's office and the CFO's office. They designed a joint logo plate that had NeXT and IBM's logo on it by the same designer who did the IBM logo and the NeXT logo. They were going to manufacture a computer and go global with it. They were going to put NeXTSTEP on every employee's desktop and do away with their internal electronic mail system, which was called props that was run on their mainframes. They were all in.
 
The deal that fell apart, and this after I left, because it was falling apart, that's why I quit, is we were going to go with Perot Systems and ESL into the government market and into the corporate market with a Sybase database on every NeXT machine, hooked into an IBM mainframe so that they could start to build desktop apps with IBM mainframe data in this proprietary NeXTSTEP environment, which IBM was willing to license on a non-exclusive basis, and only wanted to share with us on the royalty streams if we licensed it to anyone else. This was at a time when Windows 2.0 was on the market.
 
[0:48:26] MM: Wow.
 
[0:48:26] DL: It took Windows 3.1 to put networking extensions in place, which was in what? 1980. No, 1992, or 3. Maybe even '94, because it was '95 with Windows 95. This is when companies were selling TCP/IP as a standalone thing. I knew consultants making 4 or 5 million dollars a year implementing it inside of corporate firewalls.
 
[0:48:49] MM: Oh, my God. That is wild.
 
[0:48:53] DL: Goofy era stuff. The reality is the distribution infrastructure, the global opportunity, and IBM walked away, because they wanted to have the NeXTSTEP, the app kit, the interface builder, and everything run on top of their version of Unix, which was AIX, which would have been easily done. They would have done the work and they were doing it on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. They needed that, because that's how you sell to the government. You needed POSIX standards and we didn't have them.
 
I had hired a guy who worked for the regional sales manager in Pittsburgh, who worked for the head of sales, who worked for me, who would run IBM's federal systems division. It had a 2.2-billion-dollar quota selling to the federal government for IBM.
 
[0:49:47] MM: 2.2 billion. Oh, God.
 
[0:49:49] DL: Yeah, 2.2-billion-dollar quota. In 1986, '87, when Apple was a billion-dollar company. Just to the US government. Perot Systems had implemented all 600 million dollars' worth of PCs into the Navy.
 
[0:50:04] MM: Can I just pause? My AI might be wrong, but that 2.2 billion in 1987 is 6.5 billion today. That's nuts.
 
[0:50:14] DL: The market contacts in IBM, as they said to us, we are out of balance with Intel and Microsoft. We need to go a different direction and you are our ticket to run. I was in so, so many meetings and I have all the documentation that went back and forth. Any level of high-level stuff that Geoff wrote about is all grounded and black and white on paper.
 
[0:50:42] MM: Oh, my God.
 
[0:50:44] DL: Yeah. It might have been a very different world.
 
[0:50:48] MM: Just repeat. We don't have to go and read the book for the details, but just high level, what happened?
 
[0:50:54] DL: I left and the bridge back to getting Steve to do rational things went away.
 
[0:51:05] MM: Oh, that's amazing.
 
[0:51:06] DL: IBM called me and said, "What are we going to do?" I said, "You want me to intervene?" They said, "Well, you really can." I said, "Yes, I know." It's like, "I'm sorry." It's like, "Good luck."
 
[0:51:15] MM: That story in the book is mind-blowing. I got stressed out reading it. I'm not going to lie. I was just like, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God."
 
[0:51:25] DL: Oh, the other thing, people remember Silicon Graphics and the indie workstations that they did all the Jurassic Park stuff in the early 90s and all that. Yeah, we licensed them to backplane architecture and they were building boards to plug in and do color in the NeXT machine. All that blew up, too.
 
[0:51:41] MM: Oh, my God.
 
[0:51:42] DL: This is why I left, because all these things were on the table and the distribution infrastructure to make it work. This is, so be it.
 
[0:51:51] MM: That's unbelievable. The logo was being created. What's the name of the designer? Because that's an interesting story there is that Steve spent an ungodly amount of money for the NeXT logo.
 
[0:52:03] GC: Well, that was one of the most well documented stories in this book, I found, because Paul Rand, who is forgotten today outside of graphic design circles, he's just somebody who -
 
[0:52:14] MM: He's a big deal. I work with a lot of designers. He's a big deal, yeah.
 
[0:52:18] GC: He's massive, yeah. He designed the logos, the logos for IBM, designed UPS, ABC, University Press, all the major 20th century corporations that are still massive today. He was the guy. He's like, if you were to open a book of logos from the last 70 years, his fingerprints might be on a huge number of them.
 
I've actually known the former associates of Paul Rand for a long time from previous work I've done. Our world collided again when it came to the NeXT computer. I had been asking them earlier about IBM and all these other companies, and so forth. Paul Rand he's a - Steve Jobs in an interview described him as a cranky man with the heart of a teddy bear. I'm paraphrasing, but that's roughly - He used those words, the heart of a teddy bear, and described him as a man who was a master of his craft, who combined the intellectual with the emotional resonance that a logo needs.
 
For him, it was an intellectual project, because he wanted to make something that both advanced the arts that contributed somehow to the art form, but also was something that resonated with the usual consumer who just opens a book, or looks at a TV screen and sees the logo. What do they see in it? Very much a man of many worlds, who one day you could talk to him and he would be talking about the ancient cave art of France in the caves that have been around for a long time. Then the next day, he would talk about the Louvre and the architecture of the Louvre and then he would go to modern logos and he could fit like a modern - He would design the IBM logo and describe it as something that moves along the course of history with the whole history of art and not just a corporate logo.
 
Something that really encapsulates his worldview is just this ability to bring together all of history into all the work that he was doing. That was something that really impressed Steve. It was so fascinating learning about Paul Rand's approach. I went to the Yale University Archive, where his archives have been left. He died in 1994. One of his students was tasked with putting together all of his old notes. He was famous for scribbling on napkins. He wasn't the type who we need to sit down in a studio all the time. A lot of the logos that he created were literally just on the back of a napkin. He'd be sitting in the hotel lobby. He left all these napkins from both NeXT computer, but many other companies too in this archive.
 
I was there and I was picking up these laminated napkins, these 40-year-old napkins and it would say, "Stanford Court Hotel," and then there are 10 different doodles of a NeXT computer logo and they're all different. I remember, it was funny, because then there would be a doodle of Steve Jobs. He draws Steve and he's got his turtleneck on and I'm just thinking, this is a creative genius at work and he's thinking about NeXT and thinking about Steve and putting it all together into this grand vision.
One of the things I discovered is that this logo, it's actually often been criticized as too expensive. It was just something that was unnecessary for NeXT. A $100,000 logo, that was the deal. He said, "You get one logo. You can't make any changes. It's $100,000 and that's that." I found an old interview with Steve from the 90s in which he actually described the process of choosing Paul Rand and why did he want to get that $100,000 logo. It wasn't simply that he was indulging and overspending. He described a specific business problem and then it's this problem that if you were in the business, it takes 10 years or more and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a brand and an image and an imprint that's memorable. What IBM had, what UPS has, what Microsoft has today, their logos, their imprint in the mind of the regular consumer is something that was built over decades and decades of marketing and work and resources and talent and people.
 
Steve wanted to find a shortcut. He wanted to figure out, how can I develop a logo that would be memorable as something, like a stamp that you could put on a Christmas gift and people would recognize it? That's how he described it. He figured out that, "Well, I can spend $100,000 upfront and I can get this beautiful, memorable logo from the best person in the business, or I can go the other route which is I'll go cheaper on a logo as a startup and maybe in 10 years we'll have something that's memorable." Steve was impatient at this point in life. He had already been a success at Apple. People knew who he was and he didn't want to sit around and wait another 10 years to build this logo that would be memorable.
 
Yes, the logo was expensive, but as a result of him finding Paul Rand and spending this money on the logo, the NeXT computer logo is now one of the classics. It's studied today in graphic design schools. It's studied in all kinds of art schools. When I was going through the archives, I found pieces. I found old documents containing this logo that were signed by Paul Rand and they're sitting in an archive and there probably worth thousands and thousands of dollars and they're just sitting there and that's because Paul Rand put his blessing on it, because he was such a luminary of his time. I have to give a lot of respect to Steve and NeXT for this that art, design, beauty was held to the very highest standard.
 
You look at the typical PC, the typical beige box computer over the years and how many people actually keep their computer? You throw, them away after five years. It ends up in the landfill. But with NeXT computer, these things were so beautiful, the logo, the design, the perfect cube, this exotic magnesium casing. Even today you look at it and it's beauty, it's art. It's still in museum casings around the world and it's auctioned at Sotheby's auction houses in London. Very, very few pieces of technology get that far. I think that's one of the lessons that we can draw from NeXT is reaching from the world of technology into the world of art and finding that ground where they can both fuse and become one. It's a powerful place to be.
 
[0:58:56] DL: Yeah. We should give Susan Kare the credit for introducing Paul to Steve, educating him on that topic. Again, it's a level of his filtering for people who have skills in particular areas and appreciating their work, in Susan's case, obviously on the Macintosh and then she did a lot of stuff from Microsoft under contract for Win 95 as well and she's world-class unto herself. But she brought Paul to the table.
 
[0:59:26] MM: That level of trust, too, of he's paying all this money and you don't get any revisions. You get what you get and you don't get upset, as we say to our kids. Yeah, that NeXT logo does hold up. If any listeners right now, just go Google the NeXTcube and the NeXT logo and if you put yourself in that context that Dan'l had of 1986. When did the cube come out? Was it '87?
 
[0:59:46] DL: Well, we showed it off at the launch that was in '88.
 
[0:59:50] MM: In '88. You put yourself in 1988 and you look at that piece of hardware and even the logo and it was so ahead of its time.
 
[0:59:57] DL: Yeah, for sure.
 
[0:59:58] MM: All right. Before we move on to post-Dan'l NeXT, Dan'l, what's your favorite Steve story? Just got to ask, from working with him.
 
[1:00:07] DL: Different points in time, different eras working with Steve. Maybe I mentioned it earlier when he recruited me to come work in the Mac division, when he pushed Jef Raskin out of that project and took over the project. The story of, we care about what you care about and you know how to do it, so you should come work for us. I said, okay, here's three things that I need do it my way. You help, but only when I ask, and then pay me. Steve was notoriously cheap. He did only help me when I asked, and I did it my way. That's one.
 
Another one at NeXT that was really fun was long before we had the ability to run the software, debug the software, really know how to enter into some stage of completion, we didn't even have any of that work, we were just rolling along building stuff, doing what we were doing.
 
[1:01:10] MM: The audience will appreciate this. You didn't have Jira. I don't know if that means anything to you guys, but the audience will.
 
[1:01:17] DL: Geoff writes about this quite well. There was the person running manufacturing who left and then another person came in to run manufacturing. The guy that came in to run manufacturing turned out to be a bad hire. Anyway, it's my opinion, of course. He put together this plan that was called Plan 10,000. He put together this big binder with his team about how they were going to build 10,000 computers a month in this little factory that we had built with these single line of robots all painted the same shade of gray. Manuals needed to be translated from Japanese into English, because they were fresh off the boat, literally from Japan.
 
We were designing the motherboard across the bay in Silicon Valley. The factory was in Fremont. We were able to push the layout to the factory over a T1 line and do a unit of one down the line. Anyway, Steve came in and dropped this binder on my desk and said, "Manufacturing is going to build 10,000 units a month. How are you going to sell?" This is, I'm just with such a ludicrous thing that you did. Because I'm more than confident and always have been, I think, I said, "Okay, we got that one."
 
The NeXT retreat, which we did regularly, we put together a presentation in my sales product marketing and marketing organizations, because that's what I was running is everything that wasn't engineering, or finance. We called it POB, P-O-B. It was Plan One Billion. Because it was going to be a billion dollars' worth of revenue if they built that much. We were so far away from. We were going to do it like tomorrow, this kind of thing.
 
We orchestrated this layering project. I built organization charts about what the structure of the sales and marketing organization would need to look like in order for us to sell a billion dollars' worth of product. Because in Steve's mind, we were going to do all this with 300 people, right? It's like, we were going to build the whole company out of a 10,000 square foot building when we started. We were going to do manufacturing on the first floor of a 10,000 square foot building. I mean, and we were going to have a gym in the corner and hired the guy who trained Christopher Reeves to be Superman to come in and teach everybody how to do weightlifting. Because I had done a lot of that, I was in charge of ferreting that out and went to LA and went to Cher's house to look at the equipment that we were going to buy from her, because it was used. I could go on with these stories.
 
[1:04:01] MM: Wait, did you say Cher, as in the singer?
 
[1:04:05] DL: Yeah. Anyway -
 
[1:04:05] MM: Oh, God. Okay.
 
[1:04:07] DL: There was another book here. Geoff and I have to work on this.
 
[1:04:09] MM: I do think that there's an outtakes version of this book.
 
[1:04:15] DL: Anyway, Plan One Billion turned into this charade of my entire team, each coming up and doing a layer of what needed to be done. We all put it into this little briefcase that I bought. Then I in the end cracked all these eggs and said, "This thing's going to have to rise like you've never seen." I used a whisk and I lift the eggs that I was going to make a souffle out of it. I pretended to pour it into the briefcase. Got a standing ovation from the 150 people who were in the company, whatever it was, including Steve, who realized what a farce the whole ask was. We turned it into just the best time of all and everybody that might had fun and drank, and we moved on to the NeXT retreat another 90 days or so later.
 
[1:05:05] MM: He got a kick out of it.
 
[1:05:08] DL: Hey, like Geoff said, Geoff said it so well. It's like, the reason why Steve hired me at NeXT is when I set up the university stuff at Apple, he came in the night before I had 100 academics coming out right before we launched the machine to do this full day work job. He came in and totally blew it up with just his behavior. The NeXT, and I had it and then he left, it's like he shows up and then he leaves. I had to work it all, get everybody back on the bus and the whole thing. The next morning I'm in my office on my Apple III writing a memo, because there's no electronic mail. I was going to send him a memo that just said, "You are so bad."
 
He came walking into my office and I saw him and turned around and stood up and walked up to him and I said, "Hey, I said, I will never in my life ever be right for doing the wrong thing again." I said, "Forget it." He just went, "Oh, okay." He sent through and I walked out. It's like, he wants people to stand up. If you didn't, and I think Ed Catmull made reference to that in some of his comments, perhaps. I've talked about this and I think it's in his comments in the book about Steve letting some directors go at Apple and asking them not to serve on the board, not because they weren't good directors. He's just said, "They don't challenge me. They're not just mean."
 
[1:06:35] MM: Yes. Yeah, that isn't the book. Yeah.
 
[1:06:37] DL: Part of it was this constant testing and looking for the best ideas. He was really good at getting that out of people, especially as he matured and became more trusting of those interactions. Anyway, enough.
 
[1:06:51] MM: No, that was fascinating. I also love that you said, yeah. I wonder this hypothetical if you had pushed back if he actually would - I get the sense that you knew pushing back was not the option. You just had to do this and show him how crazy it was.
 
[1:07:09] DL: You don't know my background, but I'm capable of pushing back.
 
[1:07:15] MM: You just rolled with it. That's awesome. Oh, man.
 
[1:07:18] DL: We should go offline, if you want to know what I learned when I was a kid, but that's different. It's the psychology of life.
 
[1:07:26] MM: Yeah.
 
[1:07:27] DL: Then, when I left NeXT, when I quit, I called them the day before the day of my two-week notice, because, of course, I gave two weeks' notice. I didn't come into the office. They didn't want me in anyway. I just said, "I want to take you to lunch." I said, "Let's have lunch." He just said, "Oh, I'm busy." I said, "No, no, no, no. I'm buying. You're going." He bursts out laughing. He said, "Okay." We went to lunch. He asked me, "What do you really think we should do?" I said, "I'm fighting with you for well over a year about all the things that I think you need to do and you need to listen to the people around you. I just can't fight with you anymore. I'm tired of it. I'm going to go do something else. Good luck."
 
[1:08:11] MM: That must have been exhausting.
 
[1:08:13] DL: Yeah. It's just at some point, and that's true for most of the founders at the end of the day. Everybody is like, "All right, enough." Again, later on, loyalty about success breeds a lot of that when your shares are extremely valuable.
 
[1:08:30] MM: Yeah. Oh, man, that's fantastic. Let's move on to post. Don't worry, Dan'l, I still have more questions for you, but let's move on to post-Dan'l NeXT, and let's flash forward to 1993. NeXT isn't selling computers at Hope. Too expensive. It starts to deliberately I'll say, but you correct me if I'm wrong, shift into software and Apple's not doing well either. Geoffrey, can you talk a little bit about this inflection point? It sets up a lot of the legacy that you teased in your history lesson at the beginning.
 
[1:09:03] GC: Right. By the early 1990s, NeXT hardware, the computer that's called the Cube was failing. It just simply wasn't selling. I believe the total sales over its entire lifespan were about 50,000. It wasn't even 50,000 units being sold. A lot of them were - they were technically sold, but they were given to distributors on credit. They hadn't really even paid for it. The whole thing was inflated.
 
When I went through the actual numbers that I could find in writing from the time period, I saw anywhere between about 50 cubes to maybe 300 at the most sold per month. Per month over a lifetime of five or six years. I mean, that's -
 
[1:09:49] MM: Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Important framing here, too. How much was a cube at this period of time?
 
[1:09:54] GC: It was just over $10,000 for -
 
[1:09:58] MM: In 1993 money.
 
[1:10:00] GC: In 1988 money, 1987 money even.
 
[1:10:03] MM: 1988 money. Yeah.
 
[1:10:04] GC: Yeah. It was released October 1987. It was just so beyond what anybody could afford, sadly. A beautiful machine, highly capable, had some of the cutting-edge technology of the time, including this optical disc that Steve was so fond of. But when he added up all the costs, so you needed to have a hard drive at minimum, but the hard drive wasn't add-on to make it work, because the optical disc wasn't good enough to run on its own. When he added all these things together, it was just over $10,000 for the package that actually worked as a machine.
 
The target customers who were university buyers, these are giant bureaucracies and institutions that have set budgets. The budget is $3,000 or less. That's what they told Steve from the beginning. Once they got news of this new price, they just said, "Look, we can't buy this." I mean, some of them, what they would do is they would buy one cube, they would buy a few cubes and put them in the corner and they would test them and work with them. They often found them quite impressive in terms of what they were capable of, but just not worth the investment of getting - You didn't want to get a 100 of these, or 200 of these. There were other big competitors, like Sun back in the day. IBM was making their own workstation. There wasn't a whole lot of market practicability to actually getting a cube.
 
By the time we get to the early 1990s, this is four to five years after release, there are a few more NeXT computers that have been released and they're getting cheaper in price, but they're still not what the market wants. One of the big problems that Steve ran into in this time is that he wasn't listening to his customers. He was so married to his vision and his idea of how things were supposed to work, that he completely overlooked what the customers were asking him for.
 
There was a financial firm specifically called O'Connor that was doing some of the first experiments in extremely fast trading. This is something that we take for granted today. What they found when they used NeXT software, NeXTSTEP, they can design their custom apps. Still a new thing at the time. They can use it to do high-speed trading. Like, right when something hits the market, they do the trade, they make a lot of money at it, and that's what they wanted. But they were getting constrained by buying these cube computers, because the hardware - It's like, if you put the software only on one hardware piece, you're trapped in this prison. What customers wanted was software that they could port and move around and they could put it on different systems. They wanted NeXTSTEP, but they just didn't want the hardware that was burdensome and expensive.
 
After they kept advising him, "Look, this is what we need." He kept resisting. Then finally, the company was effectively bankrupt. There was a chief financial officer who I talked to, a man named Marcel Gani, who was recruited. Steve called him one night at 2am, and Steve had a habit of calling people at 1, 2am to give them the news. He said, "I'm going to give you the job as CFO, but I don't want you to be able to look at the balance sheets. What we want to do is we want to hire risk takers. We're not going to show you our spreadsheets. You're just going to have to join and trust me that the company is in good shape." Marcel told me that he joined.
 
[1:13:26] MM: This is the seat hiring for the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer.
 
[1:13:29] GC: The CFO, yeah. The CFO was not allowed to look at the finances before he joined. He decided to join and Steve used an investor from Intel's evidence. Well, we have Intel behind us, so therefore, it'll be okay. Canon also was a company. Marcel joins and then he opens the books and he says, "Oh, this company is actually bankrupt. I just joined a bankrupt company." Then it was shortly after that, that the domino started falling and people could not hold off any longer. It was a dramatic few weeks. It was in late 1993. They decided that they had to call up Canon, their biggest investor, and do what they called a cram down. They said, "All right, time for the cram down."
 
They told Canon, "You've got to invest 20 million dollars by the end of the weekend. It should be in our bank on Monday, or we're closing the doors." Steve played this game with them. The game was, you're all in, it's the sunk cost fallacy. Canon had, at this point, had invested 100 million dollars or more. If NeXT went up in flames, then Canon was going to lose all that money. They got their last 20 million from Canon, put that in the bank. That was just a safety measure, so they don't go totally bankrupt. They closed the hardware division. The announcement that the hardware division was going to be closed, leaked to the press a day before the announcement was going to go out. NeXT hardware employees were literally driving to work and turned on the radio and heard a radio announcer say, "Oh, by the way, they're closing the entire hardware division at NeXT." That meant that they were going to lose their jobs.
 
They told me that they went into an auditorium. People cried. They felt literally, like family members had died. Literally about three weeks later, Steve's father, Paul, actually did die, which is just horrific timing. Put yourself in the shoes of Steve Jobs. You've invested everything you have, your own personal money. It's not a public company in NeXT, and also Pixar. Pixar at the time was not yet a success. NeXT is going bankrupt. Hardware is closed. You've laid off your staff. People are upset at you and angry. Your investors are angry at you. The press is tearing you down. Even Fortune magazine called Steve Jobs a snake oil salesman, when this news went out, they said that he was going to be written out of history. All this happened in just a space of weeks in the life of Steve Jobs.
 
It must have been devastating to have to go through that, to see your business blow up in flames and then have your father die just weeks later. It really had a massive impact on him. Then to add insult, there were lawsuits coming in. People were upset, because NeXT had shipped off their last shipment of cubes the same day that the leak went out. They sent it off and then they billed them and they said, "This is discontinued hardware. You have to pay it for it." It was a mess. It was a total mess. It was such a mess that one of the NeXT developers, one of the NeXT fans actually got a few cubes from NeXT and he got it from Rich Page, the hardware chief. They brought it out to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which is a federal nuclear science laboratory near Berkeley, California. They brought it out and they decided that they were just going to light up these cubes in flames. The cubes were built so that we can't light them up.
 
They brought it out. They had a federal government pyrotechnician come out and he set up torches and tried to burn them symbolically, but they wouldn't burn because Steve set it up so you can't burn them down. They were telling me all these stories and they were just laughing at it. I mean, in hindsight, laughing. At the time, it was tragic. But they were thinking like, "Oh, my God. All this just happened. We're just trying to see what happens if we literally burn a cube to see what happens and we can't. It's like, Steve had set up everything he can to make sure that we can't seek justice in this situation." Everybody was just having a hilarious time joking about these stories, even though it was so hard for them at the time.
 
This is the ultimate tragic moment for Steve. This was the moment. I don't ever recall that you had told me that there was a quote from an Ernest Hemingway novel, "the sun also rises," and it summed up what Steve was going through. It was when one character asked him, "So, how did you go broke?" Then the other character says, "Well, it was slowly and then suddenly." That's what happened here. This is the turning point when things have to change. If they don't change now, then Steve Jobs and NeXT are going to be in even deeper trouble.
 
[1:18:10] MM: In retrospect, I'm sure they're joking, but I cannot imagine how intense. I mean, Dan'l for you, how intense this was at the time, and especially that - That's what I mean about this human story underneath all this. It's crazy. Just a little bit of nerdy trivia for our audience. One of the things that happened after this is that NeXT out of this shift was that OpenStep was created. Can you just talk a little bit about what OpenStep was and how it's part of the partnership with Sun? Then I'll give that little trivia bit afterwards.
 
[1:18:42] GC: Sure. The deal with Sun, it was set up by a software engineer named Bud Tribble, who was the Chief of Software at NeXT. He was there from the beginning. What happened was that since NeXT partner was failing and NeXT had to find a way to port the NeXTSTEP operating system and NeXT software to other people's hardware, other companies' hardware, so we're talking Compaq, HP, maybe Gateway 2000 a little later on, all these other firms and also Sun. Sun was a major player. The idea was to create, I guess, you would call it the API in software terms. The idea is that OpenStep would be the layer of NeXTSTEP that sits on top of the Sun systems. This was something that Sun and NeXT did together.
 
It was a lifesaver, because the people who worked on it told me that it comprised about 40% to 50% of NeXT revenues at the time. Without OpenStep, which is a very obscure project that we don't remember today, NeXT would have died. Without OpenStep, Steve Jobs would not even have returned to Apple. Apple would have probably gone out of business, or been acquired, and there would be no more Apple as we know it today at least. This is one example. What I found as I was writing the book, it was so fascinating. There's the butterfly effect, the idea that butterfly flaps its wings and creates a storm somewhere far off. I found that that's the case, as I was writing this book, that Steve Jobs, or the NeXT team would do something at the time that seems small, or not so relevant. Nobody could see what the future would look like. But Steve and his team, Avie Tevanian and Bud Tribble, they all had such a far-reaching vision that they would do something that seems small, but when he actually looked at it, it was quite profound.
 
They were taking object-oriented programming and they were finding ways to layer it on top of these Sun Sparc stations, these Windows machines, Windows NT needed this sort of thing. The software was so far ahead of its time and so much more powerful, but it was just a question of reaching that critical mass and getting enough people to use it. People knew that it was good software. But the question is, how do you latch it on to another company's success? You can go with their hardware and it can grow. I think that was the problem they ran into.
 
[1:21:12] MM: It almost seems like it was so far ahead of its time that people didn't know what to do with it in some cases.
 
[1:21:17] GC: Right, absolutely.
 
[1:21:19] MM: This is just the thing that I find extremely fascinating. I don't know if the audience is going to agree with me, but so OpenStep, the original classes and Objective-C, they were called NX Image, NX Browser, etc., etc. With OpenStep, they got renamed to an NS prefix. Any developers in the audience who've written an iPhone app, or Mac OS software, you probably seen NS string and NS array. There's some debate on the NS prefix. Some people think it stands for NeXTSTEP. Some people think it stands for NeXT Sun. I just think that's wild. Still today, that lives, those concepts live. That's how powerful it was. That's how ahead of its time it was. They've survived a company sale, three CPU architecture changes, and a new programming language. It's still used in Swift, which is nuts. I have no further comment, but it's mind-blowing.
 
[1:22:13] DL: Yeah, for sure.
 
[1:22:15] MM: That partnership didn't go so well. I mean, then we have Java, which competed with it. Geoffrey, you want to give a little quick history on that, because I think that that's interesting, too, to our software developer audience putting Java into this picture as well.
 
[1:22:31] GC: Right. From Steve's point of view, Steve was very much a spinner of stories, and he would present the partnership as Sun was betting its future on NeXTSTEP, which actually wasn't true. Sun executives responded to that, and they told me, actually, Steve was just making stuff up. Nobody was paying attention to NeXTSTEP as the future at this point. That wasn't known until later on.
 
Sun was simply spreading its cards across the table and trying to figure out what language, what operating system, what software was going to be the software of the future, because at this point, this is the mid-1990s. The operating system wars are in full swing. Microsoft Windows 95 is about to come out, and that's going to be the big game changer that's going to make Bill Gates a billionaire. Apple at this point is also exploring its own object-oriented possibilities. There was a failed operating system called Copland that just never really took off, and it was a total mess. Too many engineers adding too many features into software that just wasn't working.
 
The world of software in the mid-1990s is very much up in the air, and you wouldn't have guessed that NeXT was actually going to be the future. Java is the web-based language that Sun was developing. Java, back when I was young, I played with Java. I was learning Java, and I was developing web apps with it in my free time. I was very young at the time, but I found it fascinating. Sun had that scalability that allowed for Java to catch on. The web was such a frontier at the time, and there were so many tinkerers. I remember it in my youth, all the Wild West feeling, the tinkering, the playing around with things, and figuring what was going to happen. It's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, we would make websites on geo-cities, and it was just mind-blowing at the time. You could make a website.
 
[1:24:28] MM: CGI scripts.
 
[1:24:30] GC: CGI scripts, Javascripts, mini files that play on your website as you open them. Steve was looking at all this, and saw that the web was fundamentally going to be an interactive medium. That led to one of his breakthrough successes that was going to bring NeXT from the brink, and that was software called WebObjects. WebObjects was the result of many years of contemplation and trial and error. Sir Tim Berners-Lee had created the worldwide web on a NeXT computer, six years before this software WebObjects was created. What happened is that NeXT software developers were experimenting with exactly what we were talking about, object-oriented programming, the way that the web was structured, and they discovered that because the web was created on NeXT, that actually made the web the natural home for NeXT computer, and they realized that they could create this app called WebObjects.
 
You have to remember that websites at the time were static. You just go on, there's one website, and that's that. But if you wanted to engage in anything serious, if you wanted to sell products, or you wanted to update a search engine, or you wanted to buy a car and choose the color and the make and the model, you needed a web that was self-creating, that was self-replicating, and that could update itself, without a human having to go in and to constantly go into HTML and change the code. I mean, what a nightmare that would be.
 
Steve saw this very early on, and he realized that this was going to be the big transition, and this was going to be the real purpose of the web. There was a fascinating interview with Steve with Wire Magazine in 1996, just as this WebObject for evolution was just starting, he made such a fascinating observation, and it was that technology by itself doesn't change the world. There's an assumption out there that Steve Jobs was just out changing the world all the time, and that was his mission. But as he matured, and as he had a family around him that was taming him, he started to realize that a lot of web, the web and a lot of technology was going to be a tool, just simply a tool. Whether you wanted to buy and sell, or you wanted to get information online, he actually said that this stuff doesn't change the world, so why don't we focus on the practical usages for people who need it?
 
Don't put a computer in front of somebody and say, "Here's my grand vision, buy my computer. If you don't buy it, you're not smart. You don't understand what I'm talking about." That was the old Steve Jobs at the young Apple, at the young NeXT. But this is where the transition happens, and this is where the new Steve is saying, "Here's something that I've created to solve a problem that you have, and you can give me feedback, and I'll take it into account, and I'll make it better for you." It's a huge gap between old Steve and new Steve.
 
WebObjects is his attempt to address this problem on the web. What they find is that they can create, so for companies, for IT companies, for companies like Dell and Disney, and the BBC, these are major institutions. He's no longer selling this to consumers. Consumers were originally the people that he wanted, but now he's selling to companies who need dynamically updated websites. This is one of the lightbulb moments, and this is where the true power of NeXT comes into view, and this is where people like Michael Dell show up, Bill Gates showed up, the who's who, Larry Ellison, this is the who's who of Silicon Valley builders, they're all coming and knocking on the door of NeXT, because they've realized what this software can truly do for them, and where the power can be unlocked, and this is where the story turns around.
 
[1:28:33] DL: There's a couple of things that historically you might want to layer into Geoff's comments, which I think are spot on. One is Sun was marketing themselves back on that day as the network is the computer. Java was all about the browser becoming a platform, as opposed to anything else.
 
[1:28:54] MM: Yeah. I always forget that's Java's origins. Yeah.
 
[1:28:56] DL: Right. It was all about putting real-time into a browser, because Sun was out of the desktop workstation business and transitioning exclusively into selling servers. They were going through a major infrastructure shift and how they marketed what they sold and what their P&L looked like, because they were turning into a server company with no desktop sales, because PCs had taken the cake by then.
 
The second thing is CommerceNet, thank goodness for Al Gore inventing the Internet, but I mean, CommerceNet, he did shepherd in the notion of actually doing anything commercial on the Internet, because you couldn't do anything commercial on the Internet back then. That was the mid-90s. It wasn't until '97 that we had XML and the web standards start to emerge. This is all before that.
Then the last thing about the Sun deal with NeXT, which most people have not written about, or documented, is yes, they licensed the software, but more importantly, they got the intellectual property, and they had the patent rights, and that's what was required for Sun to stay alive before they were bought by Oracle, because that's what Microsoft ran into an antitrust case. The intellectual property around NeXTSTEP was way ahead of its time and fully documented. Those were all those dynamics in the early 90s, mid 90s.
 
[1:30:27] MM: Man, you framed the mid-80s, now framing the mid-90s. Yeah, totally forget that Java's origins were -
 
[1:30:34] DL: Yeah. You got to look at it and go, what was going on, and why were these things important, and why did people spend that money, and do they really care about shipping it? Probably not. Was Steve marketing that they were going to ship it, because he needed it? You bet you. But very different.
 
[1:30:52] MM: Geoffrey, to your point of these things at the time probably seemed inconsequential. I don't know if that's the right word, or just choices that are made to save a company and man, wow, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but look where it turned out. For me as a dev, and our audience, this might resonate with some of our audience, I was doing some research and trying to figure out for myself, what did that landscape look like for web development back in 1995? We had CGI scripts, Perl, and things like that. They worked. It was cobbling things together with duct tape. I was like, but wait, Microsoft had active server pages, we had JSPs, Java server pages from Java. What I did not realize is just how much WebObjects pulled all this together. It was component-based, kept state on the server, had an object relational mapper in 1995. Basically, you didn't see that again until 2002 with ASP.net. I could be wrong on all that.
 
[1:31:57] DL: But you were in range. That's right. Right.
 
[1:32:00] MM: Yeah, people can correct me. But that's wild. That is absolutely wild that it was that ahead of its time. Also, fun fact, in one of my engagements that I just did in the past couple of years, I worked on a project that is still alive, was on WebObjects. It was very hard for me to find documentation on it. Also, I think it's fascinating that WebObjects actually powered the iTunes store, up until some very - very late in the or the aughts, the 2000s. That's pretty crazy, too, to talk about scale. Like, man, wow. That's nuts.
 
[1:32:39] GC: Right. That's one of the things, actually, that I found in my research that when the Apple acquisition happened in the NeXT, people weren't really sure what to do with WebObjects. There were even fights between the WebObjects team and the NeXTSTEP team. It wasn't until, this is another example of doing something now that maybe doesn't seem so relevant that turns out to be relevant later. Once iTunes was coming out, WebObjects became the go-to software for that. It was just perfectly made for what they were doing with iTunes. WebObjects was redeemed after a period in the desert with nothing going on.
 
[1:33:14] MM: All right. This was flashed in 1996. Apple's at its lowest point. They buy NeXT. They get Steve as an advisor, as well as a lot of NeXT employees, about 427 million dollars. Why did Apple need NeXTSTEP at the time? Let's talk about that history about moving forward.
 
[1:33:34] DL: Oh, my. Go, Geoff.
 
[1:33:38] MM: Just a small question. Small question. Yeah.
 
[1:33:42] GC: Apple software was stuck in the previous decade in the 1980s. For people who could remember there was the spinning ball of death. You booted up your Mac. You were working on your word processing document, and then that spinning ball of death struck, and you had to turn off your Mac and you lost all your data. There was no, if I recall right, no memory protection in the Mac software and the OS at the time. Everybody knew that this was a disaster, and with the onslaught of Microsoft's Windows and the advances by other software companies, everybody knew that Apple was going to be dead meat if they didn't upgrade their operating system. Copland, the code name for their operating system was a complete disaster.
 
As I recall, Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time, wrote that when he was appointed to turn around Apple, he was a turnaround artist, he went in. There was something like 500 engineers working on Copland and they were all putting their own things in there that they wanted. It was it was a featureitis situation, where the software was, it was lagging, it was behind, it was going to be years behind schedule. At this stage, it just wasn't going to work. Gil Amelio and his lieutenant, the CTO, a woman named Ellen Hancock, who he brought over from his previous company, they decided that the way to go was going to be to acquire a software company.
 
Where does the NeXT operating system come from? It's going to come from one of a handful of companies. They talked about maybe Sun, the Solaris being one option. They talked about a few others. They talked about a company called Be, which was run by Jean-Louis Gassée, who was the rival to Steve Jobs originally. The man who overtook Steve's Macintosh division back when Steve was fired in 1985. Something of a personal rivalry, something that border on hatred between these two. Steve once called Jean-Louis a very evil man. That's a quote from Steve. You can see that this gets very personal very quickly.
 
Steve eventually, so NeXTSTEP was not in the running at first. It wasn't until later. I should say that there are variations to this story. There's not one single event that happened. In my book, the way that I wrote it, which is it's accurate, it's true, is that there was a call from a NeXT employee in Garrett Rice, who called Ellen Hancock and she managed to call back and then they got NeXTSTEP. I should stress that it wasn't one single phone call that started the whole cascade of this acquisition. There were other people who were lobbying to see, even other people who called Apple and said, "Check out NeXTSTEP."
 
From what I can gather from studying the archives and the history, this was the most prominent call that actually got the response and that was confirmed by Steve as the event that really started moving things forward, despite all these other phone calls happening. NeXT gets the attention of Apple. They decide that there's going to be this thing called a shootout. That's what Gil Amelio, the CEO, calls it. They're going to bring in Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Jobs with Avie Tevanian, his software chief. These two are going to do their own presentations and they're going to decide who wins.
 
Jean-Louis Gassée goes in, he goes in for his presentation. He's already done a lot of presentations for Apple. He thinks that the deal is done and he blows it, because he is arrogant, brushes them off, tells them, "You have what you need, just by the software. That's that. We already have this deal set." Steve and Avie come in. For their own presentation at the Stanford Court Hotel, and they just blow it away. It is just a stellar presentation, where things are just incredibly well done. He's showing these quick-time videos on the screen and everybody's impressed. The Apple team pretty much decides on the spot that they're going to acquire NeXT. This is the moment that changed -
 
[1:37:50] MM: Geoffrey, can I hop in there? I think the -
 
[1:37:53] GC: Yeah, sure.
 
[1:37:54] MM: - one thing that it - I actually had to reread this sentence in the book, because it didn't sink in at first. He was playing something like 11 movies at the same time, or something like that, right?
 
[1:38:03] GC: Right. Playing multiple movies at the same time in 1996.
 
[1:38:06] MM: Yeah, which that's crazy. Because I read it at first, I'm like, "Oh, okay. He's playing a movie, big deal." It's like, no, no, no. He's playing 11 at the same time. That is amazing for that time. Sorry to interrupt you.
 
[1:38:17] GC: No, no, no. It's not an interruption. It's just mesmerizing for the period. This is the moment when the story of NeXT comes full circle, because think about how long Steve and his team have been working on this, the toil, the hardship, the struggles, the losses, the near bankruptcy, the ridicule that came from the press and from investors and consumers. I mean, Steve was almost written out of history at one point. And here he is finally making his comeback with the help of brilliant engineers, developers like Avie Tevanian and the rest of his team. It's incredible how long it took to get to this moment from 1985 to 1996 and finally seeing redemption and finally seeing a moment where there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
 
Think about how many people can go through that for 11 years and deal with that and wait that long and be that patient. That's why I came away writing this book with such a deep-seated respect for the NeXT team, people like Dan'l, people like Bobby, and the things that they did for all those years and how horrific it must have been to go through some of those moments, where it looks like failure is just around the corner. Then finally seeing this moment where Apple is going to acquire NeXT and history is going to be made. It really is - it's like out of an opera. It's Wagner, it's Shakespeare. You don't see this in real life very often. It's a story for the ages.
[1:39:54] MM: Yeah, and then there's the welcoming of Steve back at the Boston Mac World, is it 1997, or 1996? I remember, I have vague memories of that event, too. It was wild. My brother has also said how exciting that time was when that happened, too, which is the - Dan'l, so you hadn't been at NeXT for five years, what was going through your mind when all of this was happening? What was your perspective on it?
 
[1:40:21] DL: Well, watching what was evolving and seeing Apple struggle was disheartening. I mean, anyone, and we all grew up at Apple in those early days, but I think we were all feeling for Apple at that time. I know even my kids, my oldest was 18 months when I brought a Mac home in 1982 and he was pushing the mouse around and turning fat bits on and off and Mac paint, and he's 18 months old and all that. It was disheartening to see Apple struggle so deeply and no one knew what the inevitable outcome would be, or whether there would be any opportunity for Steve, or NeXT to revive Apple, given them what was going on, again, what's context, what's going on in the industry.
 
As we all know, in the end, it was the iPod, right? Clearly, they repackaged the machine and built the color Macs and all that stuff, and did NeXT story's been written, I think, well, but and getting the operating system in, but it was a multi-year journey. The disassembly, the creation of new market opportunities by disassembling existing product and approaches to doing things. There were plenty of MP3 players, right? But no one went into the recording. The company went into Sony who owned all the music and said, "If you don't give me your product in 99-cent chunk one at a time rather than the whole album, I'm going to ask my customers to steal your product." Remember the billboard.
 
All the studios flipped, so then the iPod take. Then my slate convincing Steve to build a Windows app to store music, which gave people a chance on the NeXT PC upgrade to say, "Yeah, it's easier and better on a Mac. I'll buy a Mac to store my music." Then people came back to Macintosh. It took years for those things to go. The NeXT and Apple team, the team that Steve brought with him, they persevered for years to get that flywheel going again. Then disassemble the phone market and then the iPad and here we are. Just amazing transformation. But again, not an overnight reality. Just people grinding away, and Steve as a mature new leader taking advantage of the talents and clearly is wonderful to see what happened to Apple. I was, I'd say, a true leader on the sidelines at that time. I'd gone off to do other things and then I ended up working at Microsoft, which was great and had a great time.
 
[1:43:05] MM: Oh, wow. That's really interesting. Yeah, that's a good point too, right? It seems like such a rosy story from here on out, but it's not. I mean, '97 to 2008. I don't know. I remember using Windows. I was solely Windows and the exact same thing you described, I got an iPod, opened me up to Mac. The exact same thing, right?
 
[1:43:29] DL: Then you're way back into Macintosh. I mean, it was definitely the case. Then my last seven years, which ended the year and a half ago was running the Computer History Museum. Looking really closely and having the context on all of this, that's why I was just so pleased to see that Geoff was really doing the research and looking under and every nook and cranny in the world. I helped a bit, but encouraged, made sure that everybody participated. Because even people like John Rubinstein, who most people will know, I'm sure in your audience of his background, he started at NeXT after I left. We're good friends.
 
When I asked him, when Geoff was interviewing everyone, I said, really, John give it - he goes by Ruby, but it's like, this is important. He said, "Well, what do you mean?" He says, "A book about Steve?" I just said, "Wait a minute. Seven years at Apple, 12 years at NeXT." He went, "Really?" I mean, he was there for the last four or five and then at Apple, he went, "Oh, yeah." I mean, people who were there, putting it in the context of 12 years of hard work to get to the point where they could do another 12 years of hard work, or solid 10 to get the machine running again and get the Apple flywheel going is what you know today.
 
Seven years, 12 at NeXT and then 10 at Apple to get the machine going. That's a long road and a lot of work. No one really has chronicled that transition period. There's more stories to be told about what happened there after and maybe we'll see, but all things considered. That's why this book is really important. The story need to be told. That's why I was really keen on doing my part as best I could in my five years or so to help.
 
[1:45:26] MM: It's awesome. What I realized pretty early into the book is, oh, Steve Jobs is the hook to sell the book. Sorry, Geoffrey. I'm not trying to say your market - you're not trying to spin everything. But you put Steve Jobs' name on things, people are going to be interested. But it's a story about NeXT and Steve just happens to be the main character. That's all. It's fascinating.
 
[1:45:48] DL: I mean, that is the reality is it's NeXT. I think the book and Geoff did an exceptional job of teasing out the people stories that made it work. Obviously, there's a technical thread because of the genius of Bud and William Parkhurst and Jean-Marie and a few others that made the early decisions. I mean, Avie was a champion through the acquisition and then at Apple, but all that fundamental work was decided before he arrived, and by people whose story had never really been told, until Geoff took the time to write it up. That's why it's worth reading.
 
[1:46:27] MM: Yeah. Geoff, I think this audience, or maybe just me would love the sequel to this from Avie's perspective with all the gory, guts, the details. I found myself in the book being like, "I want to talk to Avie. It sounds fascinating." Anyway.
 
[1:46:44] GC: We will see. Perhaps, we can continue. We'll see.
 
[1:46:49] GC: I'd say, Bud and William Parkhurst would be in terms of the foundational stuff, the core decisions, super important. Really super important, because - An untold person in the whole story is Randy Nelson. It's like, who's Randy Nelson? Okay, Randy Nelson is world-class juggler, one of the Karamazov brothers. You've ever seen the knife and the gun thing and the star? It's like, he sent us a letter and said, "I want to come to work for you guys." He retired from traveling, because he had started a family and was homeschooling the kids. He said, "I wanted to write haiku and I needed to know that I needed to learn Japanese to do that. I was a juggler and I juggled the White House and the Kremlin. It's like I've been to the mountain. If I'm going to write haiku, I got to understand Japanese. I learned Japanese and I love computers and I learned how to program. I want to teach people how to program your machine." There he was in front of the developers juggling in real-time and bringing objects into the system and teaching people how to do that. I mean, we had people like that in every discipline.
 
[1:48:06] MM: Approximately, what timeframe is that?
 
[1:48:08] DL: Oh, Randy came to work probably '86, or mid, late prior to '86 probably. I mean, it was like that. Like William Parkhurst knocks on the door. He says, "I want to work for you guys. You don't have to pay me. Just give me stock." He just done all the 3D effects for the Macintosh. He came in and he brought the object story to the table. It's just on and on. There were so many people who Steve was the draw, but the filter was that rock tumbler analogy of how do you create something, and then how do you persevere as the book so eloquently describes. The perseverance process is really key. I wanted to tell the Randy story, because he was convenient.
 
[1:48:56] MM: I feel like I need to change my question. Not your favorite Steve story, just your favorite NeXT story. That is unbelievable.
 
[1:49:03] DL: He was one of the best. I'm still friends. He ended up, he went to Pixar's. Help Pixar University, went back to Apple to Samantha University stuff. He's retired now.
 
[1:49:15] MM: Wow. That is nuts. Geoffrey, I think what we can do, I want to bridge the gap, because what just happened there is going to lead into the closing really well, I think. Just to bridge the gap, let's talk a little bit about what happened next, right? We've got Rhapsody, we've got OS 10. Just a brief recap to close out this history, because it is pretty fascinating.
 
[1:49:40] GC: As Steve Jobs returns to Apple, this is early 1997. There is immediately a civil war that erupts. The civil war is between software developers who want to stick with the previous OS, the previous system. This is called the blue box. They have names for this. The blue box is the old Apple OS. Then the yellow box is going to be the transition. The transition is NeXTSTEP and OpenStep, the API being placed on top and eventually ported over. The goal is that eventually, originally they said 1999 was the target year that they were going to port over the so-called yellow box, which is NeXTSTEP and create a new OS.
 
This is a really interesting moment in the history of software, because you have two factions that can't quite decide what the future of the Mac OS is going to look like and even if there should be a new OS. I mean, one of the promises, one of the reasons why NeXT was acquired was exactly for that, that Apple was going to have their new OS to replace the struggling conflict. In the end, it becomes clear very quickly. It takes about eight or nine months before Steve Jobs actually becomes the CEO of Apple. We tend to forget this. We tend to assume that he returned and he was the CEO and he just changed everything. But there was a long process of getting him to that position, where he could go in and he could actually make these changes happen, like take NeXTSTEP and turn it into the new OS.
 
The first stage was that he had to make sure that Gil Amelio, the CEO of Apple who brought him on, was not going to be in a good position, that he was going to be kicked out eventually. Steve didn't engineer this. I'm not saying that he went in and said, "I'm going to be the one to take over as CEO and oust Gil Amelio. He did kind of embarrassed Gil Amelio a lot. He at one point sold off all of his shares, 1.5 million shares in Apple that were a part of the acquisition. That caused a stock - the stock price fell. Gil Amelio confronted Steve and was like, "Why did you do that? You just destroyed our stock." Now the board is on Gil Amelio's case and they don't want him there anymore. Steve was just like, "I was depressed. I don't like how Apple's going." It was Steve's admonishment of Apple and Gil and was him saying from the sidelines, as a consultant, that I've returned to this company, and I currently see it as hopeless."
 
It's interesting, because this share sale, without Steve anticipating it, actually started the domino effect that led to the board firing Gil Amelio and then approaching Steve to become what they would call the ICEO, the Interim CEO. This is the very first use of the I motive at Apple. Steve is the ICEO. Then we have iTunes and then we have the iPod and the iPhone, and so forth. Steve himself is the I here.
 
[1:52:47] MM: He's the original I.
 
[1:52:48] GC: He's the original I. Yes, yes.
 
[1:52:51] DL: From firsthand, super close friend who has worked for Gil and was in the room, when Gil invited Steve to come to the meeting that he was about to have with Gates at Microsoft. After that meeting, the person said to Gil, "What did you just do?" Gil said, "Well, I just invited Steve to come to the meeting with Bill Gates." The person said, "Do you not understand if you invite Steve to a meeting, it's not your meeting." Especially with Bill Gates.
 
[1:53:29] MM: Oh, my God.
 
[1:53:31] DL: I mean, he did not know what was going on. Anyway, those stories we love for fun. Anyway.
 
[1:53:38] MM: A phrase comes to mind, bless your heart, bless your heart, Gil. Yeah. There's Rhapsody, which basically takes NeXTSTEP, puts a Mac skin on it. Then there's OS 10. This is the part that's documented. This is where the book leaves off. Just going back to that little anecdote about OpenStep and that still lives on today, it's powering our iPods, as you said in the beginning, excuse me, iPhones, as you said in the beginning of the call, it's wild. Actually, I was going to close it out with just that one question for Dan'l about how it felt, but Geoffrey, anything else you want to add before I do that? We can edit this part out.
 
[1:54:15] GC: I don't have much else to add. It's just, yeah, I mean, that's really what it took. The company Apple was hopeless, until Steve and his NeXT team showed up. Once Steve put Avie Tevanian and his head of software and John Rubinstein, his head of hardware, and then he himself became the I, the original I, the CEO, that's when he was able to do what you just said. That's when he was able to take Rhapsody and to take OpenStep and to create the Mac OS X. then from there, WebObjects goes to iTunes. There's that NS in Apple code that you see popping up everywhere. That's NeXTSTEP NS.
 
It's really, I find it fascinating as I was writing this book, it really did feel as if you're an archeologist in a way. I felt as if I had been excavating. Steve even talked about this in an interview that there are layers of technology and everything we've built now in 10, 15, 20 years is going to be just one layer with everything on top of it. What I find fascinating about NeXT is that it's not really a layer. It started as a layer, but then it was taken as a layer and dumped on top of another layer at Apple. Now NeXT is one of the top layers at Apple. That's where a lot of the original software prowess comes from. That's why Apple is Apple today.
 
[1:55:41] MM: Yeah.
 
[1:55:42] DL: Right.
 
[1:55:43] MM: It's awesome. All right. Let's close it out, on personal note, Dan'l, I find it wild to be talking to somebody who is part of this. How does it feel knowing that you had your own part in this history?
 
[1:55:56] DL: I really appreciate the journey, as was occasionally attributed to Steve and a book was titled thereof. The journey is the reward, right? The reward was, and the feeling was being part of it and appreciating it. At the same time, there's a level of reflection that thanks to Geoff, that has resurfaced and for a long time, I sat on those. I had codified some of the stories and the one-liners that would trigger my memory. I've got a pretty good memory, and I got a lot of documentation as well that I thought would be important to be part of the story that got well documented and professionally delivered, which it has been.
 
I'm thankful for Geoff and bringing this book to life and bringing the story to life, which is super important. Thank you, Geoff. Yeah, it's nice to know that I played a little part, sort of an aid group here with some of the giants that built these things. I get to not suggest that I'm a peer, but more of an aid group here. We were all born in 1954-1955. That's the irony of the computer industry as we knew it and know it was a small number of people from that era, Gates and Ballmer and Bill Joy and Eric Schmidt and Steve and me and whatever, all of us, we were all a few people a little older, a few people a little younger, but right in that zone, we were lucky and it was timely.
 
We got to build it all on the shoulders of, as Geoff said, the defense industry. Silicon Valley exists because the Russians had better rockets, and they funded semiconductor development, the government did to make sure we had lighter payloads. And so, here we are again. These days, it's less about computing, which is what we were chasing. That was our drag and to build the right computer. I should say, less about computers. We were building these computers and these layers. It's now more about computing and the implementations of computing against different domains and very different scale, global and micro at the same time, from the biology and drug discovery to environmental issues and education and health and things like that. The world has fundamentally changed and those who are chasing these things have a new suite of tools that we could never imagine. We were just trying to build them.
 
That was our, if you will, legacy is building the tools and the platforms upon which, hopefully, the world will be a better place. It's worrisome at the moment, because things that can be used at scale can be weaponized and we see that. It's amazing what's been done and what's being done the last five years alone has just been incredible.
 
[1:58:52] MM: They have.
 
[1:58:53] DL: It's true. It isn't things that people had an envisioned. Again, going back to the university market in the beginning of NeXT, it was on the Dartmouth campus in the 1950s that artificial intelligence was discussed and named and gathered among a handful six or eight people chit-chatting about it and look what we have today. The algorithms that are being run are, they're old. We just have the computers to do it.
 
[1:59:20] MM: Yeah, and we got the power now. The concepts were there.
 
[1:59:24] DL: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
[1:59:25] MM: I can't help but just think back to, you were one of the people, Steve had that eye for talent. You were one of those people. It was a team effort. I feel like the more mature Steve recognizes that this was a team effort. Yeah, it was just very exciting. Geoffrey, thank you for writing the book. It truly was an excellent book. Dan'l, thank you for being here and sharing these quite frankly, just awesome anecdotes and stories. I really, really appreciate you both being here.
 
[1:59:54] DL: Yeah, stories are fun. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Steve and the industry and who knows things haven't turned out the way we all had expected, but they are the way they are, because of a lot of his energy and we all rode on top of it, so it's good.
 
[2:00:10] MM: For sure. Thank you very much, you guys.
 
[2:00:12] DL: Thanks, Matt. Great.
 
[2:00:13] GC: Thank you, Matt.
 
[END]