Every cliché is built on some truth. The cliché that Steve Jobs was half genius, half asshole is based largely on his actions during the nine years that constituted his first tenure at Apple. This is when his highs would shine most famously, and when his lows were reprehensible. It was the period when he most sought the limelight, and when he was most out of control. He developed followers and he created enemies. This is when his bundle of contradictory qualities unraveled, leaving him, and his company, at loose ends. These years provide a baseline for the rest of his career.
Steve’s personal life, which had been chaotic in the scattered, sloppy way of most twenty-somethings—especially those throwing themselves at a career without regard for sleep, social life, or family—spun out of control in 1978, when he denied the paternity of his own child.
He was twenty-three years old when Lisa’s birth presented him with a clarion call to accept adult responsibility. He rejected the call as fully as he rejected her.
当时才23岁Arthur Rock would later describe Steve’s behavior as “delusional.” Especially for someone as unsentimental as Rock, Steve’s behavior tied in to a pattern of irresponsibility that was developing at Apple. Whether working with his ostensible superiors, such as Rock, or making decisions that widely affected subordinates, Steve could seem indifferent to the impact of his choices. He conveyed a lack of empathy.
缺乏同理心Several years later, Jobs told Susan Barnes, a financial manager at Apple and at NeXT, that December 12, 1980—the date of Apple’s IPO—was the most important day of his career, because only then was he sure that the folks who had driven Apple’s early success would make serious money.
Jobs had a bureaucratic rationalization for doing so: they were hourly employees, and therefore not guaranteed the “founder’s stock” that helped make three hundred longtime salaried employees millionaires. But Steve’s lack of generosity was reflective of something that was starting to seem part of a broader character trait.
“He had this incredible bandwidth,” explains Lee Clow, the Chiat\Day ad director who would become Steve’s close friend after working on the famous “1984” television ad, “but he devoted almost all of it to work.” Prioritizing things in this way, especially as an immature young man, made most people in his life replaceable. Fernandez and Kottke, for example, had been important to Steve three years earlier, but to Steve’s way of thinking they had not kept up. They were not key contributors to Apple, and therefore to Steve’s life, anymore. The bigger priority was to reward the people who were improving Apple at present. It was a cold evaluation by a young man whose work life was exploding into something much bigger than he had ever anticipated. But his logic carried an emotional cost the young man didn’t even consider. Kottke and Fernandez and others like them felt snubbed and unappreciated. Steve’s behavior isolated him within the company. He had little sense at this point of how important it can be to have true allies in a corporate setting. It was a blind spot that would catch up to him eventually.
就跟后续乔布斯吐槽Avie在打高尔夫球一样Apple, which had grown from a handful of people in 1977 to 2,900 employees by the summer of 1981, was riven in more ways than one. In the fall of 1980, its head count had doubled in just three months. Apple “old-timers” took to calling that short stretch of time “the bozo period,” and scorned the newbies.
过快的组织扩张，是个很危险的事情，会让很多人并不真正尊重或者关注公司的文化Steve was rarely showy about his newfound wealth, but he widened the rifts in the company in other solipsistic ways. Broadly speaking, Apple employees were focused either on supporting and milking the revenue from the Apple II or on exploring new products. The Apple II was the breadwinner driving the company’s growth. The work going on around it was the classic, incremental work of improving and deepening the usefulness of a product so that it would be successful for years. Apple II staffers built an extensive retail sales channel of hundreds of resellers; worked with the emerging world of software developers to ensure that they had the necessary tools to write more interesting software that would attract even more buyers; and labored on follow-up machines, like the Apple IIe and the Apple II GS. Their work paid off: the Apple II, in its various models, was a remarkably resilient product, selling nearly six million units before it was finally discontinued in 1993. For a decade, the company would depend on Woz’s reliable old Apple II to fuel its soaring growth. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1988 that Macintosh revenues at long last exceeded those from Apple II sales.
其实Apple II才是那个驱动苹果最初期成功的功臣，一款好的产品，能支撑公司10多年It didn’t take long for Steve, whose official job was to head up product development, to simply stop caring about the Apple II. He felt, in his bones, as he liked to say, that Apple would need a great new product, that the industry was moving at such a rapid pace that the company would be fatally wounded if all it had to offer were slightly improved versions of the Apple II. He made his feelings very clear, and suggested that any engineer or marketer worth his salt would be drawn to working on the creation of the next breakthrough product with him. While Steve’s narrow attitude slighted scores of the company’s hardware and software designers, it was especially insulting to Woz, who eventually chose to nurse along the Apple II rather than join the Mac team. “Some Apple II engineers were being treated like they didn’t exist,” Woz would later say. As the company grew, he and Steve couldn’t help but grow apart.
开发新产品固然重要，但持续优化已有的好产品，也不得不少In a broad way, Steve was correct in thinking that Apple needed a significant new offering, and soon. The best recipe for maintaining steadily rising revenues in the computer hardware business is to have a breakthrough product ready just when your last breakthrough is reaching the peak of its own success. Markkula, Scotty, and the board all agreed that the company urgently needed a new model, ideally one better tailored to the needs of office workers.
The personal computer industry was in its infancy, and everyone was flying blind, including Steve. One important thing he didn’t yet understand was that most breakthrough products result from a long cycle of hit-and-miss prototypes, the steady accumulation of features, and a timely synthesis of existing technologies. He and Woz, on the contrary, had stuck their heads down, worked hard, and on their very first try created something brilliant that the industry had never before seen. That was Steve’s idea of product development. But he was about to discover that that wasn’t the way it worked inside a corporation.
看似轻而易举的新产品的成功，并不是一夜之间，需要非常非常多的努力The success of the Apple 1 and the Apple II had given Steve a little too much confidence in his own technical judgment. He made a series of bad decisions that would be hard to undo later, the most important being his edict that the Apple III, whose footprint had to be small enough to leave lots of open room on an office desk, would be absolutely silent, which meant no internal cooling fan. This slowed the development process to a crawl, because engineers had to figure out how to create convection currents to draw heat away from the motherboard, which held all the semiconductor chips, as well as from the power supply. Without a fan, those components could make the innards of a small computer hot as a pizza oven. The solution the engineers finally came up with was to make the cabinet itself act as a heat sink to help draw out and dissipate the heat; however, that meant making it out of cast aluminum, a good heat conductor but a material that added considerably to the cost and complexity of manufacture.
当时乔布斯的判断其实没有错，只是当时的技术能力，还达不到他的要求，他应该先妥协It wasn’t just Steve’s demands that slowed the Apple III. Since Apple would be wooing customers who might have purchased an Apple II, the company had to make sure that that software created for the II would also run on the III. This “backwards-compatibility” was an annoying requirement that was far more complicated than Steve imagined, and the time his engineers spent learning to accomplish it slowed the project almost as much as his fussy hardware demands. Steve pushed the Apple III engineers relentlessly to solve these problems quickly. It didn’t matter to him that these were gnarly problems to solve. Accustomed to Woz’s magical ability to defy old boundaries and technical obstacles, he expected these new hardware and software engineers to do the same. They couldn’t.
所以有一群技术大牛，多么重要！！！STEVE’S IMPATIENCE WITH the nuts and bolts of corporate life was understandable. Steve was a visionary. It’s a word that is loosely tossed around these days, especially in Silicon Valley, but it legitimately applied to Steve even from very early in his life. He had the ability to see around corners, to envision how the seeds of existing ideas could be combined to create something unimaginable to others. The challenge he faced was to become an effective visionary—that’s what turns a dreamer into someone who changes the world.
我一直在想，假如是乔布斯，他看到AI技术的涌现，他会怎么想，他脑子会有怎样的新产品ideaSTEVE’S IMPATIENCE WITH the nuts and bolts of corporate life was understandable. Steve was a visionary. It’s a word that is loosely tossed around these days, especially in Silicon Valley, but it legitimately applied to Steve even from very early in his life. He had the ability to see around corners, to envision how the seeds of existing ideas could be combined to create something unimaginable to others. The challenge he faced was to become an effective visionary—that’s what turns a dreamer into someone who changes the world.
PARC, as it was known, would become famous for developing the concepts behind any number of important technologies, including Ethernet local area networking, high-resolution video monitors, laser printing, and object-oriented programming. That summer, Xerox had joined a number of venture capital firms in a $7 million secondary investment round in Apple (as part of the deal, Steve sold $1 million worth of his own stock to the investors), and in return had agreed to give Apple a peek at its most advanced technologies, or, as people in Silicon Valley like to say, to “open the kimono.” These visits were nothing short of an epiphany for Steve, because the technology at PARC was the visual expression of everything he believed computers could and should be.
Compared to the black screen with eerie green characters that had preceded it, this “graphical user interface”—or GUI (pronounced “gooey”), as it came to be known—represented at least as radical a break as when silent movies shifted to talkies.
The PARC researchers understood full well how significant a development this was, and were dismayed that Xerox had, in effect, paid for the privilege of giving Steve and the other Apple visitors access to technology this radical and new. They believed, correctly, that Xerox senior management back east was not that interested in building a full-blown computer; rather, they wanted to create better photocopiers, and perhaps a dedicated word processor to compete with Wang’s. Xerox did not come out with a computer using the PARC technology until 1981. Called the STAR, it was an intriguing device that was sold not to individual consumers but to businesses, as part of a networked system of at least three desktop units that sold for about $16,000 each.
施乐没有VisionSteve realized that the Xerox GUI could be the foundation of something very ambitious and very personal. Visual iconography on a screen could make computing almost intuitive for just about everyone. Existing computer interfaces put a wall of arcane commands and typographical symbols that looked like expletives between the user and the results spewed back by the computer. If you replaced those commands with visual icons that could be easily manipulated via a mouse, harnessing the data-processing power of a computer might feel more like going to the library and pulling a book off the shelf, or like engaging in a discussion with a really smart friend or teacher. This interaction, this feeling of comfort with the back-and-forth with a computer, could lead to the realization of Steve’s overarching goal, the creation of a truly personal computer for ordinary people. Steve even had a metaphor for what that computer could be—a bicycle for the mind. After visiting PARC he was a changed man; these were technologies he wanted to bring to everyone in the world.
NOW STEVE FACED the challenge of delivering on this promise within the gnawing confines of Apple. It would be a staggeringly ambitious project—one that no one at Apple but Steve could have imagined, and one that no one but he could have made so maddeningly complicated. The long road had many detours and would be pockmarked with collateral damage, but it would eventually lead to the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984.
The Lisa was supposed to be for businesses, but Steve focused almost exclusively on what would make the machine accessible and friendly for an individual. Once again, he had the right idea for the long run—years later, easy-to-use computers would make personal computing ubiquitous across businesses both small and large—without the perspective needed to succeed in the short term. He paid lip service to the special needs of corporations and institutions, but what really fascinated him were the rounded edges of the icons on the Lisa’s “desktop” interface.
Twice now, in rapid succession, Steve had failed when trying to lead a team to create a computer for the business market. While more and more people in the computer industry were keenly in tune with the needs of enterprise customers, Steve wasn’t one of them.
But Steve knew that Scotty had borne the heaviest load as Apple morphed from a startup into a real operation. After his departure, Steve reportedly experienced a sudden bout of guilt; he was quoted as saying, “I was always afraid that I’d get a call to say that Scotty had committed suicide.”
After he and Allen discovered that hobbyists were giving away pirated copies of their Altair BASIC interpreter, Gates wrote a kind of manifesto, asserting that developers of software for microcomputers should be paid for their programs. If that happened, Gates predicted, an entirely new kind of software industry would arise that would benefit software developers, microcomputer makers, and users alike. This would represent a huge change: at that point, software development was mostly in the hands of the makers of computer hardware, who buried the development costs in the final price of the devices they sold. The prospect of making money by building software, Gates believed, would spur innovation and help the new microcomputer manufacturers take better advantage of the breakneck pace of improvement in semiconductor technology promised by Moore’s law.
确实，也让普通用户使用到了更好的软件、更丰富的生态Gates was right. Accepting the fact that software was worth paying for led to the emergence of a dynamic new industry. One could argue that Gates’s greatest contribution to the world was not Microsoft, or the MS-DOS or Windows operating systems, or the Office productivity applications that hundreds of millions of people use. It was his role as the first champion of the concept that software itself had value. The mind that could envision all that was a mind suited for the organizational matrixes of the corporate world. In those early days, Microsoft never lacked for enlightened leadership, unlike Apple.
In fact, their rush to market had led them to acquiesce to a historic deal with Gates, allowing him the right in the future to license MS-DOS to other computer makers. It was a decision they would forever regret, since it ultimately tilted power from hardware manufacturers to Microsoft—thereby proving the validity of Gates’s manifesto and setting the stage for virtually the entire industry to adopt MS-DOS as a standard that would marginalize Apple, which did not license its operating system. But on that fall afternoon, no one Gates spoke to at Apple seemed aware that their world was about to change, much less acted worried. Years later, Gates remembered that “I kept walking around, asking, ‘Isn’t this a big deal?’ But no one seemed concerned.”
确实，主动权从电脑硬件厂商那里，来到了软件提供商
也是后来乔布斯高度评价Gates开创了一个新的产业的原因Steve’s reckless immaturity and authority issues had left the company rudderless, and Markkula was an ambivalent leader who did little to give staffers a clear sense of direction.
主要当时Markkula已经财富自由，也没有太多动力去奋斗Steve’s personal courtship of Sculley, then the president of PepsiCo, has been endlessly documented. It’s the story of two men who saw exactly what they wanted to see in the other, who salivated at the thought of how pairing up might transform their lives, and who both wound up sorely disappointed.
As Steve spun tales of Apple’s potential, Sculley seemed full of ideas of how his expertise could fuel Steve’s notion of where the company should go. The fact that he played hard to get only heightened Steve’s infatuation. He turned down Apple’s initial offer of a salary of $300,000 a year, plus options for 500,000 shares of Apple stock, which at the time were worth about $18 million.
30万美金年薪，但股票期权1800万！！Standing together on a balcony thirty stories up, Sculley told Steve that before he’d even consider coming to Apple, they’d have to agree to pay him $1 million in salary, plus a $1 million signing bonus, and a guaranteed $1 million severance payment if things didn’t work out. It was a stunning demand for the time, but Steve was undeterred. He said he’d pay it out of his own pocket if necessary.
100万美金薪水，100万美金签字费，100万美金遣散费，好惊人的条件One of his first hires upon arriving in Cupertino was a technical assistant to help him bone up on digital technology and master the Apple II in his office.
显然这样的人，是不适合领导Apple的Raskin quit in a huff. But before he left he fired off a memo to his bosses that still stands as an angry summary of Steve’s weaknesses. “While Mr. Jobs’s stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy, in practice he is a dreadful manager.… He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the workers when deadlines are not met,” he wrote, adding that Steve “misses appointments … does not give credit … has favorites … and doesn’t keep promises.”
Burrell Smith, like Woz, could never say no to an engineering challenge. His central breakthrough was to find a way to multiply the flow of digital data from the 68000 processor through the rest of the circuit architecture, a trick that ingeniously allowed the computer to take full advantage of the increased processing power without requiring more support chips or circuits. The result: detailed and responsive graphics, exactly what was essential for a machine that employed a mouse and made bitmapped images. Smith literally lived in his lab for a month, while others in the company took off for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. He didn’t even stop to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday on December 19. But he accomplished the impossible.
好了不起的目标，原来还有这号硬件人物
乔布斯很了不起的一点是：能召集起周边非常非常牛的一批人Personality traits that failed him elsewhere worked here. As always, he could be more temperamental than his subordinates, but with this group of artiste engineers he was afforded considerable leeway. “If you could take Steve, he made you up your game,” says Lee Clow. “People who were too thin-skinned to deal with his abusive approach to demanding what he wanted walked away. But I want to prove to guys like that that I can do it. I’m the kind of person who steps up.” So were many of the other stars on the Mac team.
Lee Clow的评价的非常中肯Steve led the group on retreats every once in a while, which gave him occasion to have the team all to himself, separate from the distractions of the rest of Apple. He was an inspirational speaker. “The work fifty people are doing here,” he told them, “is going to send a giant ripple through the universe.” His language changed over the months as the project, predictably, took longer than he had expected. “The journey is the reward” and “It would be better to miss rather than turn out the wrong thing” gave way to “Real artists ship.” But the phrasing always gave his team the sense that he did indeed see them as artists, as creative innovators. “He was so protective of us,” one of them told Fortune, “that whenever we complained about somebody outside the division, it was like unleashing a Doberman. Steve would get on the telephone and chew the guy out so fast your head would spin.”
他真的是一个很不错的领导者，前提是手下的人要足够牛逼，能交付他想要的东西The best of them felt truly empowered and gained Steve’s respect by challenging him directly, using facts, ability, and persistence to change his mind. Sometimes they would simply ignore him outright. One of the Mac hardware engineers, Bob Belleville, worked with Sony to develop a new, much smaller disk drive for the Mac, despite being ordered directly by Steve to not do so. In the end, Sony’s disk drive made it into the Mac and prevented a potentially disastrous delay. Jobs applauded Belleville for sticking it out on his own.
Over two years, the team performed heroic work. Steve drove them as relentlessly as he drove himself. He reminded them that the fate of the company hinged on their work. He harangued them for failing to meet deadlines and for falling short of perfection. The pressure grew steadily over time. It was taxing on both mind and body, and some members burned out so completely that they were never able to work in the high-tech industry again. Others found the experience exhilarating, but not something they’d want to repeat, and left Apple to find a less stressful employment environment. And then there was the small group of folks who loved it so much they stuck around, ready to do whatever it would take all over again, in order to work in the rarefied, exhilarating, and charged atmosphere that Steve created when he was running the show. When the job was over, Steve had the signatures of the forty-six key players on the team engraved on the inside of every Mac. Even people working on the Apple II found Steve’s performance inspiring. “We used to say that the Mac people had God on their side,” said one only half jokingly.
确实，Mac那里的表现，确实跟有God相伴一样THE DEBUT OF the Macintosh established Steve as a master showman. Between the famous “1984” ad, which played just once, during the Super Bowl broadcast on January 22, 1984, and the Mac’s official presentation at the Flint Auditorium on the campus of Cupertino’s De Anza College on January 24, 1984, Steve transformed expectations of what a product introduction could be. “Steve was P. T. Barnum incarnate,” says Lee Clow, a plain-spoken man who sports a wizardly beard and sprangly white hair. “He loved the ta-da! He was always like, ‘I want you to see the Smallest Man in the World!’ He loved pulling the black velvet cloth off a new product, everything about the showbiz, the marketing, the communications.”
Working with a team of marketers and PR execs, Steve would rehearse endlessly and fastidiously. Bill Gates made appearances at a couple of these events, and remembers being backstage with Steve. “I was never in his league,” he remembers, talking about Steve’s presentations. “I mean, it was just amazing to see how precisely he would rehearse. And if he’s about to go onstage, and his support people don’t have the things right, you know, he is really, really tough on them. He’s even a bit nervous because it’s a big performance. But then he’s on, and it’s quite an amazing thing.
“I mean, his whole thing of knowing exactly what he’s going to say, but up on stage saying it in such a way that he is trying to make you think he’s thinking it up right then …” Gates just laughs.
你看到的自在得意，来自于一遍遍的排练
乔布斯都如此努力，你怎么能不努力？According to Clow, it showed the CEO and Jobs walking together through a park. Steve is telling Sculley, “Ya know, I think technology can make the human race better.” The thought bubble above Sculley’s head reads, “I’m gonna win over the board. This kid’s gonna be out of here within six months.”
Truth is, the Mac that Steve had delivered was deeply flawed. It was a brilliant piece of engineering and a gorgeous vision of where computing could go, but it was far too underpowered to be useful. Trying to hold the Mac to a $1,995 retail price, he had refused to include more than 128K of memory—about a tenth of what came with the higher-priced Lisa. The Mac’s bitmapping technology soaked up power. The lines and characters that appeared on its screen were pretty, but they sometimes took forever to show up. In fact, the original Mac did just about everything at a glacial pace. It came with a floppy disk drive rather than a hard drive, so copying files from one floppy disk to another was an arduous process in which the user had to pop the two floppies in and out of the computer multiple times. Adding to the machine’s woes: the Mac launched with hardly any software, because the operating system was still being tweaked right up to the day of launch. No wonder sales dried up. In his effort to realize a vision, Steve had slighted the machine’s utility.
Mac的这一面，确实少有人提及，In fact, shortly after the Mac shipped, he was officially put in charge of the division overseeing both the Lisa and the Mac. But Steve wasn’t interested in supervising incremental improvements for either model. His career to date consisted of a couple of failures—his work on the Apple III and the Lisa—and a couple of breakthrough products. After creating an industry, and then capturing the world’s imagination with another revolutionary computer, he couldn’t be bothered with the heavy lifting required to make the Mac succeed as an ongoing business.
做出产品后，持续改进产品，以及让产品成功，非常非常重要Steve had alienated the critical software developer community throughout the entire development of the Mac by making it seem that it would be a grand privilege if he allowed them to develop applications for his precious machine. “We’d go down to Cupertino,” remembers Bill Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘This thing is so fucking cool; in fact, I don’t even know why I’m going to let you guys have anything to do with this. You know, I heard what a bunch of idiots you guys are, and, you know, this thing is so golden. It’s going to ship for $999, we’re about nine months away.’ ” Other times, Steve would betray his own insecurities. “And then the second day we’d have another meeting,” remembers Gates, “and Steve would be like, ‘Oh, shit, is this thing any good? Oh, God, can you help us out with this?’ ” Either way, he wasn’t easy to work with.
因为以前犯过错，所以后来苹果，极其重视开发者，重视开发者生态Years later, after Steve’s death, Gates told me, “Steve’s a tough character, but he didn’t direct his anger at me all too often.” (Like many of the people we interviewed, Gates slipped into the present tense when talking about Steve, as if he were still alive.) When I asked him if there was anything Steve was terrible at, he laughed: “Sitting in meetings where he wasn’t the person presenting, and the subject was something mundane. Steve was hopeless at that.”
In March 1985, Sculley decided that Steve would have to step down as head of the Mac product division. Steve tried to dissuade him for several weeks, with both flattery and scorn, the tools he’d used to great, if isolating, effect on those who had worked for him. But Sculley persisted and brought the matter to the board on April 11. The board sided unanimously with Sculley, even though it included Markkula, Rock, and others who had invested so much in Steve over time. For someone who had given his all to the company he had founded, who was known entirely for what he had accomplished at Apple, the prospect of such a demotion was devastating.
Back in California, he visited the Graphics Group, made up of leading-edge computer graphics technicians who were working for film director George Lucas of Star Wars fame, and began to think that the possibilities for computing with high-end, 3-D graphic images were limitless. So he suggested that the Apple board might want to consider buying the group from Lucasfilm. “These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead,” Steve later told me. “They were way, way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important.” But the board wasn’t paying much attention to Steve anymore, and they passed on acquiring what would eventually become known as Pixar. Indeed, Steve, the cofounder of Apple, wasn’t even consulted on most meaningful decisions anymore.
有Vision与没有Vision的领导人，完全不一样Sculley made clear that he would take the company in a more “market-driven” direction. Apple would now respond to the demands of its customers, instead of dictating to the market, as Steve had tried to do. Product decisions would be led by the sales and marketing teams, not the engineers. It was a rational decision by a CEO trying to sharpen an organization that had flailed every time it tried to establish some consistency. But it wouldn’t re-create the Apple dream that had drawn so many employees to Cupertino, especially the veterans who had experienced the thrilling and terrifying highs and lows of the Mac development. One employee told Fortune, “They’ve cut the heart out of Apple and substituted an artificial one. We’ll just have to see how long it pumps.” Susan Barnes was one of those who felt the company was becoming mundane, losing its edge. “We were going the wrong way,” remembers Barnes. “Apple was reorganizing, and you had to go down seven levels of management to find an engineer. That’s a really dangerous place for a technology company to be.”
用心学，能从苹果和乔布斯身上，学到非常多He went to Europe on company business, but he made time to visit museums and enjoy the life of a tourist. He spent a lot of time alone, or with his girlfriend. “Apple had been formed when he was twenty-one,” says Barnes, “so he never really had any time off to think about what he really wanted to do with his life.” It seemed as if this was a time to reflect, to take to heart the hard lessons learned at Apple. It could have been a time to think about what had gone wrong, to understand his own contributions to the quandary that he and the company were in. In some meaningful way, Steve and his followers were right: Steve was the heart of Apple, and without him the company was headed straight for mediocrity. How had he let things get so out of hand?
希望苹果不要走向平庸Self-reflection didn’t come easy for the thirty-year-old. In Europe he was still hailed as a revolutionary business figure, and his visits to heads of state, university presidents, artists, and others reinforced his vision of himself as an extraordinary person who had been done in by a conventional bureaucrat. That kind of ego inflation was accompanied by the real pain and insecurity resulting from getting rejected by the company he had founded. Later that summer, Steve phoned Barnes from Italy, so depressed that she started to worry that he might be suicidal.
Interviewer: what is it about this machine? Why is this machine so interesting? Why has it been so influential? Jobs: Ah ahm, I'll give you my point of view on it. I remember reading a magazine article a long time ago ah when I was ah twelve years ago maybe, in I think it was Scientific American . I'm not sure. And the article ahm proposed to measure the efficiency of locomotion for ah lots of species on planet earth to see which species was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B. Ah and they measured the kilocalories that each one expended. So ah they ranked them all and I remember that ahm...ah the Condor, Condor was the most efficient at [CLEARS THROAT] getting from point A to point B. And humankind, the crown of creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down...