Ego

I think John Sculley said he was going to turn Apple engineers into rock stars. So what's it like being an engineer at Microsoft versus Apple? Are you a rock star?
It's hard to be a rock star if you don't live in Redmond, I think.

That came from Jobs actually. So I think that buzz has been around for a good decade, if not longer. And Sculley, I think, just echoed what Jobs set up and I think that's one of the problems. If you look at the mentality of the people who come out of Apple, Jobs did make a lot of people from the Mac group kind of very famous as programmers. And I think it's hurt them because they got their first debut album and it's very hard to follow up with your second album.

Look at General Magic. Those two guys are one of the best, main contributors to the Macintosh?this is Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld--and Steve made them kind of stars, demigods, and they struggled to follow that up with something that was as revolutionary as the Mac. You might want to tone that down a little bit so you don't have to feel like you have to live up to your past work. Because the Mac was more of a phenomena of the time, being in the right place at the right time. It was a great piece of work that we did, but it was more the world was ready for it and that's what made it such a success. It helps that there was very good implementation of it but it was more so the fact that the technology was there and cheap enough and the world was just waiting for it.

How come you didn't get sort of chewed up in that star-making machine?
Well, I didn't make the cut. In fact, I used to complain to Steve about. You know, my ego was bruised by it.

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But he just said the world cannot focus on 20 heroes. The world can only focus on a handful of heroes and these are the people I chose. So at that point, you kind of said OK. I kind of sneaked in here and there.

Are you glad that you didn't make the cut now?
There's nothing wrong with getting that excitement and getting the credit when you do something good. What's bad is when it goes to your head. And you've just got to be very careful and not believe somebody else's hype. You know today on the Web and there are discussion groups talking about say Newton, and they're talking about Walter Smith leaving Newton, and you've just got to ignore this. It's basically gossip. It doesn't mean anything. Sometimes you want to respond and say you guys got it wrong. But other times, you just say, "This is the price of doing business." Like I said, you've just got to ignore it.

Out of all the things that you've done, what are you most proud of?
That's a tough one. What I go for is to make people smile, to make people enjoy what they're doing. I always like a UI design to be like doing a soundtrack to a movie. The point is the user's work. You're not there to get in the way of the user accomplishing a task or the user enjoying themselves playing a game. The trick is make yourself fade away into the background so you enhance their experience. And that's what a good soundtrack will do for a movie. And that's what a good UI should do. I think there are a lot of examples of UIs that are just in your face that I find totally ridiculous and they become a joke unto themselves, which may be fine. So anytime that I can make people accomplish something that either they didn't think they could accomplish or make them accomplish it with more fun than they had thought possible--anything to make it easier to view stuff--it makes me smile.

So to put that down to one accomplishment, it's tough because that's what I try to do everywhere. So if you look at Newton, the fact that you can walk up to it and write. And you know, if the handwriting gods are nice to you, it will recognize it. The point is you can walk up and do something that you know how to do. You don't think, you just write. I guess my favorite reaction is when enough users or enough purchasers buy the product and then write you these nice long letters that say this thing is really cool. Unfortunately, a lot of the products I worked on like Newton, you get these die-hard fans that just love it, but there's not enough of them. And Jaminator (an electrical air guitar toy) is the same thing. There are people that wax poetically about Jaminator, but unfortunately there's just not enough of them out there. So someday I've got to get it lined up right. But I just say, you know, people are not ready for this stuff yet. I think you're going to see that with Newton. That it does embody what we set out to do. It's going to be a completely snappy experience and hopefully it will be just as easy to use.

I noticed you have two really great loves: technology and thrifting. One points forward one back.
I think trips to the thrift store are a very humbling experience. When you find your product in a thrift store, you have arrived in a certain way. And about two or three years ago, you'd start to see Mac 128Ks there. And now you see Mac 512Ks there. We haven't seen Mac Pluses yet. But I've heard of people buying Mac IIs in thrift stores for $40 so it's just, I think, a way of showing you've arrived, that your technology is still worth something. People didn't throw it away but they gave it away.

It's also just a good inspiration. Most ideas you ever come up with have actually already been done before.

Another thing is there's some cool industrial design. I'll buy products just because they look cool. And they're fun to hold. It's fun to look how they're made just in terms of the materials and the shape.