Timothy Leary became a fan of the personal computer, and used them until his death in 1996. This is the famous psychedelic researcher's Macintosh LC III.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)
OAKLAND, Calif.--The phrase is probably about as familiar to anyone who lived through the '60s as any other: "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."
That, of course, was Timothy Leary's exhortation to the world to embrace counterculture, and more specifically, to embrace the many benefits he saw of LSD, or acid.
Leary, as you probably know, was famous for his decades of experimental research into and promotion of the effects of hallucinogens, and over the years became as well known as many of the celebrity artists, writers, thinkers, and performers he hung out with.
Less well known, however, is that Leary, who died in 1996 of prostate cancer, became a serious techie in his later years. He put up a very early Web site, co-produced a late-'80s video game for Electronic Arts, worked on a series of the latest and greatest computers, and, it is said, updated his era-defining catchphrase for the digital age to reflect a newfound belief that computers were the LSD of the '90s: "Turn on, boot up, and jack in."
Today, addiction to technology is probably even more prevalent than devotion to drugs was in the '60s, and most people probably can't even imagine what the physical archives of someone like Leary would look like. After all, isn't everything digitized and online these days?
On Thursday, however, I had the chance to spend some time with a small piece of Leary's 400-carton-large archives--which is housed in a storage facility here--and I was in danger of getting seriously sucked in. In box after box, I found a true treasure trove of letters, photographs, posters and yes, computer equipment and discs.
My visit was in advance of an event on Sunday in San Francisco to celebrate Leary's life, bring together some of his friends and family, and show off some of the contents of the archives.
Several months ago, Bruce Damer, who, among many other things, runs the DigiBarn Computer Museum, told me he was helping Leary's estate try to sell the archives, and that, if possible, I might end up with a chance to go through the countercultural bounty.
Time slipped away, though, and only a couple of weeks ago, Damer alerted me to the fact that this Leary celebration was happening. And, it turned out, I could go and spend some time with the archives before the event.
And, it seems, the photographs I took on Thursday would be among the first of the archives to be publicly seen.
Damer promised me that Leary had been a "true-blue nerd," and that, of course, was catnip to my internal geek culture radar. I was eager to see the physical evidence of the impact the LSD era had had on the development of the modern era of technology, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.
Man of mystery
It turns out that it may be a little harder to trace that evolution through Leary than one might think.
I got in touch with John Markoff, The New York Times reporter who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, to ask him about Leary's role in that shaping.
Surprisingly, Markoff told me that while he had met Leary--at the West Coast Computer Faire--and knew that he had dived deep into technology in the '80s and '90s, he didn't have any real sense of how much Leary's LSD experimentation had affected the Silicon Valley world. Indeed, Leary hadn't arrived in the Bay Area until the '70s, and by then the culture of engineering, drugs, and anti-war sentiment was well established here.
Yet, Markoff said, there is little doubt that psychedelic culture had played a significant role in the development of the modern Silicon Valley, whether or not Leary had anything to do with it.
"I've seen social theorists argue that creativity happens around the edge of chaos," Markoff said. "I have no direct proof of that, but it seems that many early people in a variety of places like the Stanford Research Institute and the Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC were deeply immersed in (psychedelic culture and the anti-war movement), besides being engineers."
Even more prominent in tying the psychedelic culture to the emergence of modern Silicon Valley was the experimentation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
"Steve talked about it, and so has Bill Gates," Markoff said of experimentation with LSD. Jobs said it was "one of the two or three most important experiences of his life, and as a result of those kinds of experiences, he (feels) set apart from some of the more buttoned down corporate America (types) that he deals with."
Ultimately, then, the question of whether Leary himself directly helped birth the modern Silicon Valley with his research and experimentation is besides the point: if it wasn't him, then it was others who were following a similar path.
There's value in archiving
Back at the storage facility, I met Denis Berry, a trustee of the Timothy Archives, and she spent the day with me, taking me through some of the thousands of items tucked away in those cartons, pulling out little gems and helping me find others that I'd heard of.
My impression was that to Berry, the archives meant two very different things. On the one hand, she sees them as a friend and fan of Leary's, someone who can recognize the immense cultural value of the incredible number of artifacts contained in the 400 boxes. On the other, as a trustee tasked with selling the archives, I could see that she was a bit wearied by them.
She explained that after negotiating to sell the archives to a buyer who Damer had sourced up, she had engaged an appraiser to determine their value.
After spending several months going through the boxes, the appraiser declared that the entire collection was worth in excess of $1 million.
To Leary's family--he had made it clear he wanted the archives sold so his family could reap a bit of a windfall--this seemed like very good news.
But after two years of negotiations, Berry said, the buyer pulled out.
"So we're regrouping and looking for a home for the collection," she said.
The value of these boxes is immense, Berry said, when considering what they contain and what they mean to people interested in the history of the 1960s.
"Really, the history of the psychedelic movement is in here," Berry said. "So while it's Tim's archives, it's really much more than that."
Ideally, she told me, Leary's family hopes to find a buyer who will, once taking ownership, donate the the archives to an institution like the Library of Congress.
Times being what they are, however, it may be difficult to find a buyer willing to part with seven figures for something they won't even take possession of. But Berry thinks that the message contained in Leary's life of work is still very current.
She recalled how she had been talking with someone about Leary's work, and had said that, "Kids really related to what he said."
The friend responded, "Of course. He talked about drugs."
But, Berry said, it was really about much more than that. "He talked about fresh ideas and thinking for yourself."
A counterculture treasure trove
Going through the boxes was something I wish every student of the counterculture could do. I didn't see everything, of course, and even missed out on some of the best stuff, like correspondence between Leary and, say, William S. Burroughs.
But I did find letters to Allen Ginsberg, Leary's old Mac, a badge for entry into a John F. Kennedy for president event, and much more.
Berry said she was worried that some reel-to-reel tapes in the collection would soon deteriorate and that she wasn't sure how to digitize them. I told her surely there was a way and that perhaps someone reading this article would know how to achieve such a thing.
Then, upon discovering a box full of Leary's old 5.25-inch floppy disks, I said I had the same worry about those, and that it would be good to find someone who could back up that data before it disappeared forever.
The archives are mainly from the '60s, '80s, and '90s. During the '70s, of course, Leary spent several years in prison for a series of offenses, and before that, he spent a fair amount of time in Europe trying to elude capture.
That's why, despite Leary's being better than almost anybody I've heard of at holding onto the documents and artifacts of every day life, Berry said, there isn't much in the archives from the '70s.
"It's hard to carry boxes with you when you're on the run from country to country," she said. "He was meticulous (though) and I think he did understand the importance of what was going on."
See our special anniversary
coverage here.
January 24 marks the the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Macintosh, a computer that--with its whimsical design, innovative graphical user interface and all-in-one form factor--permanently changed personal computing.
Any student of the history of PCs should know that the Mac project was first championed by the late Jef Raskin and then brought to fruition by Steve Jobs. But the team that built the first Mac was, of course, much larger than those two. In fact, the team had a wide range of personalities and skill sets and seems universally to have been regarded as a singular experience in the professional lives of most who were there.
As part of our commemoration of the Mac's silver anniversary, CNET News asked a number of the team's earliest members to share some of their recollections of helping to change the world. Those memories--which are personal and may have evolved and blossomed over time--paint a revealing picture of what it took to make the Mac a reality, and who some of the people behind the project really were.
Joanna Hoffman was an early member of the Macintosh team. She recalls positioning the computer for the higher-education market in its earliest days.
(Credit: Courtesy of Joanna Hoffman)
Joanna Hoffman
"I was taking a leave of absence from the University of Chicago, and I happened to be listening to a couple lectures at Xerox PARC when I ran across Jef Raskin, who was at the time starting the Mac project. We got into a heated discussion after the lecture about what computers should look like and how they should improve people's lives, and he asked me to come interview at Apple."
"I worked on the business plan, and on defining some of the early markets, including the higher-ed market, which was the market which carried the Mac....When we first shipped it, it wasn't really suitable for the business market, which was obviously the most lucrative. But it wasn't ideally suited for that. So while it was going through its various gyrations and modifications, the higher-ed market was very kind to it. They really liked the product and lots of students bought them, so it really helped Mac into its transition before it discovered its niche in desktop publication and other applications which required graphics."
"I think this one hasn't been really told: When we were working on the Macintosh, all of a sudden, everybody was coming up with PCs. DEC had one, so did IBM and Osborne, and I remember we were sitting with our team and Steve Jobs and (marketing consultant) Regis McKenna in Regis' office, and he was trying to get us to articulate what our competition was. Steve was looking at our team, trying to get us to come up with answers. So of course, we piped up with DEC and IBM and everyone entering the field. And Regis walked up to the whiteboard and crossed everybody out and said, 'You have only one competitor, and that is IBM'...Of course it (ended up being) us against Microsoft, but in those days, it was IBM."
These days, Hoffman is married to fellow Macintosh team member Alain Rossmann, and is spending her time consulting with a series of nonprofits, helping them to run and focus their operations more effectively.
Ed Riddle, an early Mac team member, recalls his interview with Steve Jobs: sitting on a furniture-less floor, staring into each others' eyes--the two men shared a Zen master--followed by Jobs bowing and saying it had gone well.
(Credit: Courtesy of Ed Riddle) Ed Riddle
"I was working just before (joining the Mac team) at a laser company called Coherent Radiation, as an engineer. I knew Rod Holt, and when he moved to Apple, when the Macintosh project started, he called me up and said I should come in. (The role) was not really specific. Originally, it was just that Rod thought I was a good guy, and that I could fit in somehow. (The team) had a really open atmosphere that way.
"We talked about things that I might do, and I thought I might work on the keyboard, because it was something nobody had gotten their hands on. So basically, I designed the keyboard, and the protocol that goes to the Mac, the little coil cord."
The team always allowed "people to express any creativity they might have. I always felt that was a quality of that group. It was really fun that way....I think it was unique. I worked at Atari for a while, and I felt that that there was some of that atmosphere there as well, that, 'Just think of something neat'...I just assumed that it was an Apple thing at the time. I thought it was a Steve Jobs kind of thing. It was a young, energetic, starlit kind of place. Everybody who worked there had a creative urgency. (And) the kind of thing Steve Jobs was trying to articulate (was) that he wanted something to be really neat."
"When I first arrived...the furniture hadn't arrived yet, except for a few benches and desks. It was pretty empty. I don't think there was even 10 or 15 involved.
"It was time for my job interview, and Steve (Jobs) wanted to be the first person to interview me. So we went into this office, and there was no furniture, so we sat on the floor. I said, we have an acquaintance, and I said that I knew his Zen master, Kobun Chino. We sat down cross-legged and made eye contact, and rather than talking, we just looked at each other for the longest time, and I don't think we actually said much of anything during the whole job interview. Mostly it was just making eye contact, and then at a certain point, he smiled, and he bowed, like a Japanese thing, and that was the end of the interview. We seemed to just connect. (Then he added), Well, you still have to run the gauntlet of the technical engineers."
Today, Riddle lives in Oregon, where he's retired and actively involved in local politics, as well as playing in a band.
Daniel Kottke was the first employee Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hired at Apple. Later, he joined the Macintosh team as an engineer, the first full-time engineering job in his career.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum) Daniel Kottke, Apple employee number one
"I was a technician on the Apple III, and I had been asking my management for years, how do I become an engineer? Can I be an engineer now? So I was just happy that Steve (Jobs) agreed to hire me as an engineer."
"As soon as Steve funded (the Mac project) what they did was movie it out of Mark LeBrun's cubicle, and he hired Suite B3, over at Stevens Creek Blvd. (in Cupertino, Calif.), the exact same suite that Apple had started in (after Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak moved the fledgling company out of Jobs' garage) and the same suite as the Lisa project started in. This is like this nondescript office complex, with a bunch of Realtors.
"And there was this sign on the door: 'Danger: Contagious Algorithm Research Area.' Nowadays, you couldn't even do that. People would call the police. I am absolutely sure that Burrell (Smith, a very early Mac team member) did it, because that was his sense of humor.
"I joined in January, 1981, just about the same week as Andy Hertzfeld. I think Andy was a day or two ahead of me in officially joining the team full-time. The very first meetings I went to, Jef (Raskin) would pull all these Nerf balls out of a box, just to get in shape for serious thinking. The very early meetings, we were kind of sitting around in beanbag chairs."
"The flavor of the early Mac group, the combination of the personalities of Jef, Burrell and Joanna, and Randy Wigginton, it definitely got the flavor of the rebel alliance....It was a happy time in all of our lives. It was exciting to work on that project. It's fairly rare, we all had the sense that we knew it was going to be successful--which wasn't as arrogant as it sounds. We had such a great collection of talent, and we were funded. And we knew we had a visionary leader in Steve."
Nowadays, Kottke is working on a start-up called Blinkenlabs, as well as developing co-housing in Palo Alto, Calif.
The signatures of the original Macintosh team members, circa February 1982, nearly two years before the computer was released to the public.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)See also: Special coverage: The Mac at 25
'MacHeads,' a new movie about the Apple and Macintosh culture, will premiere Wednesday at MacWorld.
(Credit: MacHeads)It's a long-established truism in technology journalism: That stories about Apple are pretty much guaranteed to do better than just about any other subject.
And why? It's certainly not because of the total size of the user base of Apple products. Rather, as has been very well chronicled in newspapers, magazines, online and in books, the passion felt by the community of Apple users far outstrips its size.
Now, with the release of MacHeads, you can add movies to the roster of media documenting the full fervor of the Mac faithful and their particular brand of do-it-yourself brand evangelism.
MacHeads, a 54-minute film by the Israeli director and producer team of Kobi and Ron Shely, has its world-premiere Wednesday with a screening at Macworld, a suitable place for a film about 25 years (or more) of Mac fanaticism, especially because much of it was filmed at Macworld 2007.
It's also a bit of an ironic location to launch a cinematic discussion of hard-core Mac fandom, given the recent announcement that Apple will end its participation in Macworld after this year, a development that could well spell the end for the last large-scale physical gathering of the very people the movie is about.
In a way, however, the end of Macworld as we've known it plays right into the hands of the Shely brothers, as one of the chief arguments their film makes is that the newest generation of Mac users depends much more on the Internet for community than Macworld itself or the users-group meetings that have taken place in any number of cities around the world for so many years.
Either way, though, one thing is made abundantly clear in MacHeads: As long as there are Mac users, new or old, on working computers or museum pieces, the so-called cult of Mac will stay alive and well.
As a movie, I found MacHeads to be rather uneven. It struck me as haphazardly edited, and it struck me that the filmmakers were never completely clear with themselves whether their movie was about Mac users, their passion, Apple, the computers themselves or the transformation of a small, yet unbelievably vocal community.
Probably, that's because it's about all of the above. But where MacHeads succeeds in amply demonstrating the extent of the feeling the faithful have for their beloved Macs, it suffers from an obvious lack of clarity.
Still, it's kind of fun listening to the so-called MacHeads opening up to the world about their obsession. It's also not at all unfamiliar. I myself am writing this on a Mac, and between my wife and I, we have five Macs, two iPods and two iPhones. And she would probably recount proudly that she nearly dumped me early in our relationship when I told her that I was considering buying a PC for my next computer.
In the film, this distaste for all things Windows takes many forms, some funny and others even more funny.
Early in the movie, for example, the well-known sex author and blogger Violet Blue, says, with only the slightest hint of irony, "I've never knowingly slept with a Windows user. Ever. Ever. That would never, ever happen."
Later, DigiBarn computer museum co-founder Bruce Damer talks about Apple taking on IBM and PCs as "the force fighting against the beige banality."
While the Mac--in its many iterations--is the technological focus of the devotion of the MacHeads, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is clearly the human form.
And together, Jobs and the products his company makes comprise a church of sorts, with thousands, if not millions, of followers.
"If you go online and look up the definition of a cult," Shawn King, the executive producer and host of Your Mac Life, says in the film, "Mac users are a cult. You know, complete fealty to one leader."
Fealty and devotion often have a physical component, and for some Mac fans, that's a tattoo. MacHeads, then, features at least two cases of users with Apple logos emblazoned on their legs.
But some Mac users clearly think of their computers as an extension of themselves--a sentiment that some might laugh at, but which others will understand fully.
"Only Mac people really put stickers all over their laptops," digital media strategist Deborah Schultz says in the movie, "and I think it's indicative that this is kind of something that is close to me like my clothing and it's an identification."
These days, with Apple flying high on the strength of the massive success of the iPhone, the iPod and the Mac line, it's easy to forget that in the mid-90s, the company was on the verge of failure. And for the 25 million or so Mac users at the time, events at the time like Macworld were a place to come and share their hopes and fears about their future computing.
"You have to be an optimist to be a Mac user," said former MacAddict columnist Joseph Holmes in the film, "because there were those tough times when we thought, you know, maybe I'll have to use a Windows system. Maybe there won't be a Mac in a couple of years. It was kind of tough."
Or, as fellow Mac fan Debroah Shadovitz put it, "We would have entered the dark ages if Apple went away. We couldn't let that happen."
As is the basis for endless business school case studies today, of course, Jobs returned from the Siberian exile of forced life away from Apple, and brought the company back to glory, first with the iMac and then with the company's next--and maybe biggest--game changer, the iPod.
Oddly, MacHeads hardly covers the iPod, and its importance in making Apple what it is today. I think that's because the whole point of the film is to focus on the passion of a niche group of tech users, and the iPod has been such a mainstream hit that it is the dominant portable music player today, hardly the kind of device that establishes the us against them mentality that many of the Mac fans in the film evince.
Yet, the movie feels like it has a hole without a discussion of the iPod, and I think that's evidence of the lack of clarity I talked about earlier--the indecisiveness as to what the film is really about.
Because this is well-covered ground, there is little in MacHeads that would surprise anyone who is familiar with the cult of Mac. Yet, because that community is so visible and outspoken, the movie is bound to have an audience--at least of the already converted. Whether it will appeal to those outside the fold is less likely, to me, at least.
No matter, though. Apple's fan base alone is large enough to give the Shely brothers a sizable potential audience, even if many of those people really just want to see how their kind is portrayed on film.
After all, in the end, what makes the cult of Mac powerful, and interesting, is the people.
"It's the community that you want to talk about," says Shawn King in the film. "Don't love Apple, love the community."
At Macworld 2008, Apple fans got their first hands-on look at the MacBook Air. Without participation by Apple at Macworld after 2009, scenes like this will be a thing of the past.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)Apple's decision to make January's Macworld its last offers fodder for endless speculation. But another big question is how this will go down with the Mac faithful who have flocked to this annual event through good times and bad.
To be sure, there will be official Apple events in the future, like the Worldwide Developers Conference. But most fans--the civilians--likely won't be able to gain access to such events, which are usually reserved for press, analysts, VIPs, and developers.
So, as one colleague of mine put it, Macworld has long been the public carnival for Mac fans, and Apple's decision to get out after the 2009 version doesn't bode well for Macworld's future or for the future of a single, mass event for the hardcore Mac community.
"It's a big disappointment," said Leander Kahney, the author of The Cult of Mac and Inside Steve's Brain. "A lot of Mac fans will be royally bummed. It's a huge part of being an Apple fan--looking forward to what Steve (Jobs) will unveil at Macworld. It's like Christmas for grownups."
For Mike Leeds, a Mac technician at a Portland, Ore., college, one of the biggest losses of an Apple-free Macworld will be the chance to hobnob with the company employees who staff the event.
"I got to wander around and talk to the Apple employees that are on duty manning the show," Leeds said. "With luck, you manage to find a particular employee that actually knows the particular issue that you might have, and can give you some background on a) what their plans are for addressing the issue or b) other ways of dealing with it. Half of the time I'm down there...I'm walking around and talking to Apple employees, and that's going to be gone."
For Leeds, then, not having Apple participate in Macworld means he likely won't make the annual trip to San Francisco for the event. And he's not alone.
"It matters a lot that people get to see Jobs," said Kahney. "This is the big show for Jobs' fans. People look forward to this all year. They camp out overnight and take a vacation to go to Macworld and travel from all over the world. It's the big gathering of the tribe."
Further, Kahney pointed out that for many Apple fans, Jobs' keynote speeches have provided a regular sense of spectacle, something worth traveling to San Francisco for, and which will be sorely missing both next month--when Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, gives the keynote speech--and in the future, when Apple doesn't participate.
"Jobs is hugely entertaining," Kahney noted. "There's nothing like it, in tech or anywhere else. It's marketing theater at its best. And with concerns about Jobs' health, people want to see him in the flesh--see if he's OK."
For its part, Apple had no comment related to Jobs' health.
Of course, Mac fans aren't the only ones who would be disappointed by an Apple-less Macworld.
"What a bummer for everyone," Kevin Mathieu, a Bay Area artist who has been going to Macworld for 17 years, said about the news. "From Mac fans to local union workers and local bars," which will undoubtedly lose business.
Still, Kahney pointed out that the faithful will still have places to congregate.
"Luckily, there's the local Apple stores," said Kahney, "which have a ton of community events. They're not just stores. They really are community gathering places, especially the flagship ones in New York and Los Angeles."
But to some, the end of Apple's involvement in Macworld spells trouble for the continuity of the cohesiveness of the Mac faithful community.
At Macworld, Kobi and Ron Shely, two Israeli filmmakers, will be debuting their documentary, MacHeads, which is about the Mac and Apple community. Kobi Shely said a big part of the movie is an exploration of just the issues raised by Apple's Tuesday announcement.
"Apple is on an ongoing process that started back in 1998 when the Internet started to take over," Shely said. "The Mac community was based on in-person meeting places such as the Mac users groups. What's holding it all together is the hundreds, if not thousands, of communities across the world spreading the passion and creating the myths. Their meeting place is Macworld."
But Shely added that while making MacHeads, he found that Apple and its community, while deeply connected, are indeed separate.
"And today I think...is the most significant sign (of) that relationship," Shely said. "The Internet has changed the community. Today the young generation doesn't need to get together in groups. They can get online. But at least they had Macworld. In my view, the Mac faithful will have difficulties continuing the fandom without that direct contact. I hope Macworld will continue to be the gathering place of 'Mac heads' and the shelter for Mac users all over the world."
Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, gave his unique view on Web 2.0 and other issues at the Web 2.0 Expo Friday morning.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)SAN FRANCISCO--If there's one person in the world of Web 2.0 technology--or tech in general--who hasn't yet been skewered by the infamous blogger Fake Steve Jobs, get ready: He's coming for you.
In a frenetic keynote address Friday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here, Fake Steve--otherwise known as Forbes writer Dan Lyons--gave his unique take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.
Fake Steve began his talk with a discussion about the issues related to surviving backlash from audience members at conferences. I was rather pleased to see that as his prop, he used an article I'd written earlier this month on the subject.
Of course, as is his style, he lampooned the concepts in the story. He pointed out that in some ways, the article had focused on Web 2.0 Expo and so he said that based on the story, he had been fearing getting in front of 5,000 angry audience members ready to jump him if they didn't like what he had to say.
"I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you're never going to get back," Fake Steve/Lyons said. "Please don't Twitter attack me."
He also teased Social Media Club club founder Chris Heuer for comments he made to me for that story.
"Time is our most valuable asset, and if it's being wasted, we're not going to take it," Heuer had told me. "We want our time to be well-invested."
To Fake Steve, that comment was well worth a bit of his wit.
"If you're the founder of something called the Social Media club, you've got a lot of balls talking to me about wasting my time," said Fake Steve, adding that as he understood it, the club was for people to talk about what's being talked about on Facebook.
"It's like Webkinz for adults," Fake Steve said of Facebook. "It's the biggest waste of time ever invented."
He proceeded to explain how, over the course of the time that he's been writing his Fake Steve Jobs blog, he has pretty much killed his reputation with some of his antics. The point? That it doesn't really matter what people think of him or what he says.
"I have no reputation," he said.
Some examples of those antics: His portrayal of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as a baboon, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as a pimp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz as a My Little Pony doll--"I did that before I knew he was (speaking at Web 2.0 directly) before me"--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Uncle Fester and, perhaps best of all, his take on Microsoft's shipping of Vista, which he had portrayed on the blog with a picture of an elephant defecating and the headline, "Vista drops tomorrow."
"So," he continued, "Oh God, I hope no one impugns my reputation. I'll never get that job at BusinessWeek."
He then continued with a history of how he came to start his blog. He explained that as he saw traditional media organizations getting their lunch eaten by bloggers, he wanted somehow to join the new generation of media players.
So he said that he asked Forbes.com, the Web venue of his employer, Forbes magazine, if he could start a blog. They said no, he reported.
Instead, he began his own blog, and began--with impersonating Steve Jobs as if he was really saying what he felt instead of being little more than a PR voice like many corporate bloggers--being Fake Steve Jobs.
Right away, he said, he attracted a large audience--90,000 unique monthly viewers after six months--and a worldwide manhunt to figure out who he was.
The best part of that, he said, was when Forbes' editor put out a bounty to uncover his identity.
Even better, Fake Steve said, was when he wrote to the editor offering to write the blog for Forbes.com.
"He wrote back, 'Oh, Fake Steve, you're a genius, we'd love to hire you,'" he said.
So, rather than carry on the subterfuge, he told Forbes that he was, in fact, Fake Steve Jobs, and thus began his official relationship as Fake Steve with his own employer.
Ultimately, though, he said that the best part of the experience of writing the blog has been that it has created what he called a "platform" for others to come and "perform" via the comments section.
He said there is one commenter, known as Fake Vladimir Putin, who appears nowhere else but in the Fake Steve Jobs blog comments section.
And that, he seemed to say, is really the essence of Web 2.0.
At least, it seemed to be. With Fake Steve Jobs, the snark level always makes it a little difficult to tell what the real message is.
For years, the Steve Jobs biography has been a staple of the technology business publishing press.
The genre has been highlighted by titles such as Alan Deutschman's 2000 book, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs and 2005's iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey Young and William Simon. The latter was attacked by Jobs himself for being an unauthorized biography, and by Deutschman for being eerily similar to his own book.
There was also, of course, Forbes writer Daniel Lyons' (aka "Fake Steve Jobs") 2007 parody, oPtion$: The secret life of Steve Jobs.
Leander Kahney's new biography of Steve Jobs is built around insight into the Apple CEO's thought process.
(Credit: Portfolio )And now into the mix comes Inside Steve's Brain, by Wired News editor Leander Kahney, the latest attempt to distill the mysteries of Apple's enigmatic co-founder and CEO.
My quick takeaway from Kahney's book is that while it covers a lot of ground that has been well explored by others, it also picks up where Deutschman, Young, and Simon left off, and takes us into the present--the era of the iPhone, the MacBookPro, the backdating scandal, and much more. Essentially, as influential as Apple was when the previous biographies were published, it is now a more important technology company than ever before, and Inside Steve's Brain catches us up. And rather than talk about Apple and Jobs from an outsider's perspective, it attempts to tell the story from, well, inside Jobs' psyche--explaining his thought process and his motivations and culling lessons that can be learned along the way.
Does it work? I would say so. I came away from the book feeling like I had a better understanding of Apple's successes and failures of the past 30 years, as well as how the thought processes in Jobs' mind have directly influenced so much of what has gone on in Cupertino, Calif.--where the company is headquartered--and the lives of the millions of people who use Macs, iPods, and iPhones.
The book itself comes in an unusual form factor. It is small--about 7-1/4 inches by 5-1/4 inches--and seems almost bible-sized.
In fact, the book was originally titled Chairman Steve's Little White Book, Kahney told me, but his publisher's lawyers freaked out, worried that Jobs would sue, since that title implies that the book is an authorized biography. Indeed, Kahney said that Apple's PR department contacted him to say Apple wouldn't participate--even before he asked. And he also said that he had to sign a $1 million defamation and libel insurance policy as part of his book contract.
Ultimately, Jobs' lack of participation in the book is disappointing, though not at all surprising. It makes writing a book that purports to explain the Apple CEO's mental processes all the more challenging without being able to include direct and original interviews.
Instead, Kahney relies on numerous interviews with Jobs from previously published articles. And I must say, he uses these interviews to very nice effect. One trick of the book intended, no doubt to avoid getting the reader bogged down in attribution language, is that it uses copious footnotes. This allows Kahney to weave in many quotes from Jobs and others and have it all fit in seamlessly into the narrative.
As I mentioned above, there is a lot in Inside Steve's Brain that is familiar ground for veteran Jobs followers. But there is also plenty that is new, especially in the approach to telling the story.
One nice innovation of Kahney's book is to use the commentary of others, including some original interviews with former Apple employees and veteran Apple commentators, to draw informed conclusions about how Jobs arrived at a particular decision.
In one anecdote explaining the way Jobs rules by intimidation and fear--a common thread throughout the book and in other Jobs biographies and articles--Kahney relates a story from a 2000 Apple sales rep gathering. Using quotes from former Apple engineer Edward Eigerman, he shows how Jobs verbally dressed down a sales rep for losing a contract to Hewlett-Packard.
And while Eigerman said he was impressed by the sales rep having stood up for herself, Kahney wrote, "Perhaps most significantly, the public humiliation of the unfortunate rep put the fear of God into all the other sales reps. It sent a clear message that everybody at Apple is held personally accountable."
Kahney is a longtime Apple reporter and has written two previous books on the company and its products--The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. And there is little doubt that he is both a fan of the company's products and fascinated by Jobs' machinations.
So while it is standard fare in books like this to devote endless pages to Jobs' well-chronicled strategy of inspiring great work by engendering great fear--something Kahney does at great length--it was refreshing to also see him mix his admiration with sections on some of Jobs' failures.
Among them is an examination of the doomed Mac Cube, a product that received stellar critical praise but barely sold.
"The Cube was Jobs' baby: a beautifully designed, technically advanced machine that represented months, maybe years, of prototyping and experimentation," Kahney wrote. "But aside from a few design museums, few were interested in it. At about $2,000, it was too expensive for most consumers, who wanted a cheap monitor-less Mac like the Mac mini that succeeded it...Jobs had badly misjudged the market. The Cube was the wrong machine at the wrong price. In January 2001, Apple reported a quarterly loss of $247 million, the first since Jobs had returned to the company. He was stung."
But Kahney doesn't leave it at that. Rather, he continues and explains how Jobs' mindset had led to this rare disaster, talking about how Jobs has always liked incorporating cubes in his work--the NeXT Cube and the huge glass cube that rises above Apple's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan--and that while Jobs tries to always focus on the user experience, he lost sight of how this particular product didn't really have a place in the market.
The user experience--and the ways that Jobs focuses on it--is a major theme of the book. Again and again, Kahney uses anecdotes and quotes to illustrate that at the core of Jobs' thinking is a committed, if somewhat maniacal, desire to give those smart enough to be Apple customers the world's best customer experience.
If you've read any of the previous Jobs biographies, or articles about him, much of Inside Steve's Brain will feel familiar to you. Yet, Kahney's approach to the subject matter is refreshing and provides new context to what has previously been presented as mere business fact.
By delving into the intellect and the thought processes behind Jobs--including his approach to hiring, firing, product development, marketing, and such things--Kahney gives readers a way to draw lessons from the storied career of Jobs.
In fact, most of the book's seven chapters conclude with a bullet-pointed cheat sheet of "Lessons from Steve."
For example, at the end of the chapter titled, "Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos," Kahney culls these lessons: "Work in small teams. Jobs doesn't like teams of more than 100 members, lest they become unfocused and unmanageable; don't listen to yes men. Argument and debate foster creative thinking. Jobs wants partners who challenge his ideas; engage in intellectual combat. Jobs makes decisions by fighting about ideas. It's hard and demanding, but rigorous and effective."
Some of the lessons may be hard for anyone other than Jobs to employ with any effect. Those include: "It's OK to be an a--hole, as long as you're passionate about it. Jobs screams and shouts, but it comes from his drive to change the world; use the carrot and the stick to get great work. Jobs praises and punishes as everyone rides the hero/a--hole rollercoaster; become a great intimidatr. Inspire through fear and a desire to please."
I came away from those lessons wondering if the benefits of behaving like that is worth the downside. It's true that Jobs is one of the most respected people in business, but then again, how many people want to punch his lights out? Probably more than just a few.
Still, the point of Inside Steve's Brain is to give students of the technology business an--albeit unauthorized--insider's view of how Jobs and Apple have risen to the top of the heap. Some might argue that Apple isn't really at the top, given that its computers are still far outsold by Windows machines, but few could argue that Apple has not achieved amazing successes in business in the last few years or that with its digital lifestyle strategy it is not years ahead of everyone else and laying the path that other companies will follow.
And for anyone who wants to understand how that happened, this book paints a pretty good picture of the intellect and intellectual processes that got Jobs, Apple, and the many top-flight people who work there where they are.
I do feel that Kahney's publisher let him down a little bit with less-than-stellar editing. As someone who has written a book myself, I know that authors depend on editors to make sure that things appear just right on the printed page. And throughout Inside Steve's Brain, readers come across many sets of facts or anecdotes multiple times, something that will slightly annoy the alert reader. These kinds of things are the printed page equivalent, as a professor of mine once declared, of seeing a microphone boom sticking out of the top of the screen in a movie. And Kahney's editors should have done more to help avoid this.
But in the end, I found the book to be enjoyable, well-written, very informative and, most important, up to date. Jobs will no doubt always be a source of fascination to many people, and it's a treat to get a volume like this, with a unique approach, about him, from someone as steeped in Apple's culture and history as Kahney.
If you want to look at how the personalities of Apple's two co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, differ, perhaps one way would be to measure their responses when asked to pose for pictures.
Let's start with Woz. Though he claims to have been acutely shy in his early life, these days Woz is a social butterfly. He shows up at tech event after tech event in Silicon Valley, such as the 30th anniversary of Apple, or the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and is almost eager to glad-hand anyone who comes by. Want a picture of you and Woz? Get in line.
Now, let's examine Jobs. Everyone knows he is one of the greatest business and technology visionaries in history. Onstage, say, at Macworld, he has a bright smile and an extremely charismatic and engaging manner. He looks like he'd be fun to talk to. Yet his reputation is for managing by fear and for having little patience for the public.
At Macworld Wednesday, popular technology and sex columnist Violet Blue wrote that she saw Jobs on the show floor and decided to go talk to him.
"I saw that Steve Jobs was just hanging out on the Macworld Expo floor, not in conversation, not talking to anyone, and poking at his iPhone in the middle of the wandering public, so I walked over," Blue wrote on her SFGate.com Open Source Sex blog Thursday. "Thinking a girl--in this case, a fangirl, me--will never get anything if she doesn't ask for it, I lightly touched his arm and said, 'Hi.' He looked at me, and I blushingly asked if it would be OK for me to take a picture with him. I didn't say my name or give credentials or anything else, I was just any girl. He told me curtly, flatly, that I was rude. And turned his back to me."
Moments later, Robert Scoble caught up with Blue and filmed her reaction to the snubbing.
Blue, of course, does not fill in the contextual blanks that might explain whether Jobs was having a bad day, was in the middle of an IM conversation with someone, or anything else. But is anyone really surprised that Jobs would so abruptly snub a fan, even at Macworld? I'm not.
In fact, Jobs is able to maintain his so-called "reality distortion field" in part because he is above us all. We can't engage him in conversation the way we can with Woz. Want to talk to Woz about his favorite video game? Go ask him. Want to ask Jobs a question about, well, anything? Good luck getting through his phalanx of PR people.
You might think that I love to bash Jobs and Apple since I'm writing this. In fact, between my wife and me, we personally have four Macs, two iPods, a couple of AirPorts and, oh, I'm sure there must be more. I had my religious conversion from Windows to Mac nearly four years ago. And I'll be the first to grant that Jobs towers above anyone else in tech when it comes to imagination and understanding what his customers want.
But boy, is the man cold-hearted. What does he expect to happen if he walks the floor at Macworld? He's surrounded by the most fan-boy of the fan-boys. He's going to get approached, swarmed even. If he doesn't want to be, then he shouldn't be on the floor.
The Macworld Expo starts Tuesday, and I'm sure there are countless people out there who simply don't know what to do with themselves in those long hours until Steve Jobs steps onstage at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
As I sat at my desk this afternoon, pondering my next few days, an e-mail came across about free passes to the show, and for reasons that I can't fully explain, it got me writing a little bit of Macworld haiku.
Sure, it's silly, but then, so what.
So I thought I'd offer mine up and give you all the opportunity to share your own with the world (in the comments section). Remember, haiku is five syllables, then seven, then five more.
Macworld Moscone
once a year, very big lines
Will John Mayer sing?
Steve Jobs speaks loudly
Reality distortion
Apple fans bow down
iPod, Mac, iTunes
Who's got the scoop on what's new?
here is one more thing
Blue jeans, black sweater
Is it a new pair each year?
How 'bout the glasses?
A MacBook tablet
That's what I would like to see
Just six days to go
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