Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 16

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A podcast tribute to Steve

The latest edition of the Double D Guys podcast has arrived, and it is titled Fake Steve Jobs Remembers Steve Jobs. It's also available on iTunes, as always. This one takes a somber tone. We recorded it last Friday, less than two days after the news broke. I did most of the talking, and explained how the Fake Steve blog began (it was totally a joke, never meant to be permanent) and how, through the blog, I came to learn about Steve Jobs and to admire him. People are often surprised to hear this, but before I started the blog I really didn't know much about Steve Jobs. I was trying all sorts of fake CEO blogs and this one just happened to be the one that caught on. When that happened I had to go buy some biographies and start learning about him. When I read Steve's life story I really became intrigued. He was such a complex, complicated figure. He was good and bad, dark and light. I came to believe that the dark energy inside him was what fueled his brilliance, and that his challenge was to harness the power of that dark energy without being consumed by it. Needless to say, he succeeded. As Woz told me in our long conversation, "If he were to sit back and say, `When I was young, what was my dream in the world?" well he achieved that 100 times over."

Also: I contributed a small piece to the Newsweek special edition about Steve. It's called "Garage Band," and talks about the early days, which I have always found fascinating. I hope you will check it out and enjoy it.

Bono talks about Jobso

He tells Rolling Stone:

This dude, my friend, and I'm proud to say, my colleague – he changed music, he changed film, he changed the personal computer. It's a wonderful encouragement to people who want to think differently, that's where artists connect with him. … That anarchic West Coast "fuck off" attitude actually rules the 21st century. That's what's happening on the streets of Cairo, that's what's happening in North Africa – received wisdom is being balked at. A gnarly, singular point of view, like Steve Jobs, feels like a lighthouse spinning: When you're in the fog, you just go, "I'll go over there."

No mention of the time they were driving on the 280 and smashing into people on purpose. I guess because that never actually happened. Oh well.

My chat with Randy Wigginton, Apple employee #6

Last week in the course of reporting articles for Newsweek about the death of Steve Jobs, I spent some time on the phone with Randy Wigginton, who was one of the first employees at Apple. Wigginton started working at Apple when he was a 14-year-old high school kid. He had met Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. His first job was writing software for the Apple I, for which he was paid $2.50 an hour. He left Apple in 1985, later worked at Google, and now works at Square.

So you were at Apple in the garage days.

Actually I was there in the couch days, before we were big enough for a garage. It was just me and Woz. I was 14 and writing software.

I read that you used to get up at 2:30 in the morning to write code before you went to school.

Yes, I was pretty crazy.

How did you hook up with Jobs and Wozniak?

I met Woz because he was going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, and I was going too, but I wasn't old enough to drive. So it was a challenge for me to get a ride every week. One day I asked if anyone from the Cupertino area could give me a ride, and Woz volunteered.

What was Steve Jobs's role in the early days?

Steve never viewed technology as valuable for technology's sake. It was only valuable for solving problems, for doing something. Woz was enamored with technology just for the sake of technology, like many of us in the industry. Steve did not attend a lot of Homebrew Computer Club meetings, probably four or five altogether. The only reason he went to meetings was to try to sell the Apple I — to find people who would buy the boards.

Did you have any idea the company would become so huge?

No, even Steve admitted that in his wildest dreams he didn't think Apple would become as big as it did. There was not a lot of forward thinking. It was just, "Hey, this is cool." When we got to $250,000 in sales in a quarter we had a big party at Mike Markkula's house. That was a big achievement.

You left in 1985. What happened?

Jobs had left. Scotty (Mike Scott, Apple's first president) had left. It was like Apple was becoming very corporate and bureaucratic.

What was your job in those days?

Well I worked on the Apple III. That was a debacle. But the main thing I did was I created MacWrite for the Mac project.

Did you ever end up going to college and studying computer science?

No, I'm all self-taught. I learned mostly from Woz at Denny's. On the way home from Homebrew meetings we would stop at a Denny's and order chili fries and he would just talk for an hour and a half and I would soak up what he said.

What was the relationship between Jobs and Woz like?

They got along but it was funny. It was more like Woz would put up with Jobs. Jobs would bug him to get stuff done. I'll never forget the night Jobs called all of Woz's friends and wanted us to call Woz and tell him to quit HP and start Apple. Woz wanted to stay at HP. So we did it. Until that point, Woz was undecided.

Why was he reluctant? Did it seem too risky?

Neither Jobs nor Woz ever cared about the money or the fame. Woz was concerned about being a great engineer and doing cool stuff. Steve was about creating his vision. He thought computers were too hard to use. He wanted to change that. With the Apple II the slogan was, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. He spent one evening explaining how he chose the wording for that. He was totally into it.

Do you think that even way back then Steve had a vision for where everything was headed? Did you guys know from that start what things would be like today?

No. No way. Nobody did. That's just crazy. He brought out the Macintosh, and then brought out desktop publishing. I think he helped to create early networking. But none of us saw what was coming. It was crazy. It was amazing. It was so much fun. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Did you get rich?

I got wealthy, but all that money disappears over itme. Bad decisions on my part. I had some stock in the company early on. And even a small amount turned into a fair amount of money. You have to feel worse for Ron Wayne. He sold a 10-percent stake in the company for $900. That has to be one of the all-time bad decisions.

Was Steve really as difficult as people say?

Steve was always very demanding. He liked things to be done right. He didn't like things to be done poorly. That was important to him. To a lot of people that seems like you're being overly demanding. But with Steve, if you paid attention when he said what he wanted you could get a glimpse of his vision. That made all the difference.

In the early days, was it apparent to all of you guys that Steve was brilliant?

Coming from an engineering point of view, no. He was never an engineering. He could never program. I don't believe he ever designed any circuitry himself. He used other people to get that done. So that's why in the early Apple days it was more a case of putting up with Steve than doing what Steve said. He owned a third of the company and we all saw that he actually had a drive to get things done. He wanted to see things happen. And we liked it.

But if you had asked me back then who would change the world I would have said Woz. He was the most brilliant engineer I'd ever met. Or if not Woz, then Markkula. Markkula was a marketing genius. Markkula did a lot of great things at Apple, but he'll never claim that he changed the world as much as Steve did.

Do you think Steve became a better businessman during his time in exile, after the board pushed him out in 1985?

Absolutely. I think the board made the right choice in not letting Steve run the company at that point. He needed to go out and grow up. We had all grown up with Apple and that's all we know. That was our world, our universe. There was so much out there beyond us that we didn't see.

Like what?

The fact that Windows took over the world. That MS-DOS took over the world. That MS-Office took over the world. We didn't understand that. The whole Internet. We never glimpsed that. Plus Steve had to grow up in terms of his ability to deal with people. Not being so blunt and rude. When you own a third of the company no one can tell you you're being rude but outside of Apple he had to learn how to deal with that.

Was he always rude, even back in the garage, before Apple was successful?

Well, rude is the wrong word. Steve was never rude. He was just very straightforward. He said what was on his mind. There was no censoring between his brain and his mouth. He wasn't rude. Rude implies some kind of malice. He had no malice.

But was he always direct like that?

Oh absolutely. One time he tried having me do hardware and he looked at my work and said, "Well I'm going to have to have someone else do this." And it's like, okay, fine, if you knew Steve you didn't get offended. That's just how he was. If you were used to corporate speak or political correctness, absolutely you'd be offended.

You now work at Square, which is run by Jack Dorsey, a guy that many people say reminds them of Steve Jobs. Do you see that similarity?

Yes, Jack has a vision for things taht don't exist yet. And he also believes that things should be well done. They should be beautiful and not just rushed to market to make a profit then spun off and sold. He is obsessed with every detail of things. I truly believe he is the Valley's next Steve Jobs. He's like Steve in that he's not enamored with technology for technology's sake. He's interested in people, in solving human problems.

A conversation with Woz

Last week, in the course of reporting articles for Newsweek on the death of Steve Jobs, I spent two hours on the phone with Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder. Woz reminisced about his friendship with 16-year-old Steve Jobs, their early days listening to Dylan bootlegs and what it was like as Apple took off. He recalled the times when they disagreed — but never, ever had a face-to-face fight or argument, he insists — and why he believes that Steve died happy. Woz told me about the early days when he and Steve were going door-to-door in the dorm rooms at Berkeley selling blue boxes, illegal electronic devices that let people make free long-distance phone calls. He told me about a prank call they made to the Vatican, and about getting robbed at gunpoint. Finally, Woz revealed that, owing to some kind of miscommunication, he never participated in the forthcoming Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs.

I'm publishing this here because as often happens in the world of print journalism, there was no room for all this material in Newsweek. But I'm hoping people will find it as interesting and informative as I did. (Apologies for any typos. Point them out and I will fix them.)

When I talked to Woz it was Friday morning. He was wrung out and exhausted. He'd been up until midnight on Wednesday, the day the Steve died. He slept for two hours then got up when the camera crews started showing up at 2 a.m. Thursday for the East Coast hits. He gave interviews all day Thursday, went out for dinner, and finally came home and got some sleep.

Are people coming up to you in restaurants, wanting to talk?

No, they are being polite. The waiters are always saying things. But people are holding off more than normal. Usually people come up to me when I'm out at dinner. Everyone wants to express their own emotions and feelings which are strong and deep. They look for, "Where can I express it?" I don't want to be the focal point. But my phone was ringing constantly.

What was Steve like in the early days?

Steve was very organized and operational minded. He never tried to do any computer design stuff when I was around. He knew it was pointless. From the day we met he found other ways. I was just such a hot shot designer of things, so ahead that nobody would try to do things around me.

How did you and Steve come up with the idea for the first Apple product, the Apple I?

Oh, a lot of people saw the Apple I before Steve Jobs even knew about it. I was in the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve was up in Oregon, working at an orchard, in a commune. We were really not in touch. But I got inspired to help this revolution. People in our club thought the personal computer would affect everyone's life. We thought everyone would have a little computer, a little thing with switches and weird numbers on it, and people would learn to program to operate a computer. We didn't think it would be normall stuff like it turned out to be.

I never wanted to run a business. I had a perfect job for life at HP. I went to club meetings every week and I passed out my schematics for the Apple I, no copyright, nothing, just "Hey all you guys here is a cheap way to build a computer." I would demo it on a TV set.

Then Steve Jobs came in from Oregon, and he saw what the club was about, and he saw the interest in my design. I had the only one that was really affordable. Our first idea was just to make printed circuit boards. We could make them for 20 dollars and sell them for 40 or something like that. I had given the schematics away. But Steve thought it could be a company.

This was actually our fifth product together. We always were 50-50 partners. We were best friends. We first did the blue boxes. The next one I did was I saw Pong at a bowling alley so I built my own Pong with 28 chips. I was at HP designing calculators. Steve saw Pong and ran down to Atari and showed it to them and they hired him. Whether thought he had participated in the design, I don't know and I could not care less. They offered him a job and put him on the night shift. They said he doesn't get along with people very well, he's very independent minded. It rubbed against people. So they put him on the night shift alone.

Our next project was when Steve said that Nolan (Bushnell, head of Atari) wanted a one-player game with bricks that you hit out. He said we could get a lot of money if we could design it with very few chips. So we built that one and got paid by Atari.

The legend is that Steve cheated you out of some money on that deal.

The legend is true. It didn't matter to me. I had a job. Steve needed money to buy into the commune or something. So we made Breakout and it was a half-man-year job but we did it in four days and nights. It was a very clever design.

The next project we did together was we saw a guy using a big teletype machine that cost as much as a car hooked up to a modem dialing in to the Arpanet. You could get into 12 universities and log in as a guest and do things on a far-away computer. This was unbelievable to me. I knew you could call a local time-sharing company. But to get access to university computers was incredible. So I went home and designed one myself. I designed a video terminal that could go out over the modem to Stanford and then on to the Arpanet and bring up a list of university computers.

The far-away computers would talk in letters on my TV set. Instead of paddles and balls in Pong, I put in a character generator. The terminal was very inexpensively designed. We sold it to a company called Call Computer. They now had a cheap terminal. Steve and I split the money.

Tell me about making the blue boxes.

These were counterculture days. I was anti-war. Steve was into the hippie thing too. I didn't do it to make money but just to build a device to explore it, not to save money on phone calls. I was so honest I would not use the blue box to make long-distance calls. But if I wanted to play pranks, like route signals around the world and make them come back to the phone next to me. We did prank calls. I would call a hotel in Paris and make a reservation. At the dorms in Berkeley we would go door-to-door selling blue boxes. One hundred and fifty bucks was the price.

Did you really once call the Vatican and pretend to be Henry Kissinger?

Yes, I did. We were doing a demo of a blue box in a dorm room. I called Italy, then asked for Rome, then asked for the Vatican. I told them I was Henry Kissinger calling from a summit meeting in Moscow. It was 5:30 in the morning in Italy. They told me to call back in an hour. I did, and I spoke to a bishop who said he had just spoken to Henry Kissinger in Moscow.

We also got robbed at gunpoint once. This was in a pizza parlor in Sunnyvale. Two guys looked like they might be interested. We took them back to a pay phone and made a call to Chicago for them. They were enamored and wanted the blue box, but they had no money. We got out to the car and they show up with a gun and stick it in Steve's face. We gave them the blue box. But they didn't know how to use it. They gave us a phone number to call so we could tell them how to use it. I came up with this idea of telling them a method that would get them caught by the police, or one that would get them billed. We didn't do it. But boy it would have been funny. But you don't want to be dealing with someone who is pointing a gun in your face.

You guys seem like an unlikely pair.

We were very similar. We would hunt through stores in Berkeley looking for Dylan bootlegs. Steve was interested in computers, and he really wanted to find a way to build a computer out of these new devices called microprocessors. He thought that someday they could replace big computers and everyone could have their own computer relatively cheap. Steve had a background working in computer stores buying stuff cheap and selling it for a lot more. I was shocked when he told me how you could buy something for 6 cents knowing he could sell it for 60 bucks. He felt that was normal and right, and I sort of didn't. How could you do that? I was not for ripping people off. But then we started Apple and I went with the best advice which is that you should make good profit in order to grow.

Steve was willing to jump right into that. Mike Markkula was the mentor who told Steve what his role would be in Apple, and told me mine. He was the mentor who taught us how to run a company. He's very low-key. He stays out of the press and he's not that well-known. But he saw the genius in Steve. The passion, the excitement, the kind of thinking that makes someone a success in the world. He saw that in Steve.

Mike Markkula had worked at Intel in engineering and marketing. He really believed in marketing. He decided that Apple would be a marketing driven company. He was introduced to us by Don Valentine. Don had come to the garage and I ran the Apple II through its paces and he said, "What is the market?" I said, "A million units." He asked me why that was and I sad, "There's a million ham radio operators and computers are bigger than ham radio." We didn't quite get the formula. Steve Jobs and I had no business experience. We had taken no business classes. We didn't have savings accounts. We had no bank accounts. I paid cash at my apartment — I had to, because of bounced checks.

Was Steve more into business than you were?

He understood the technology well enough to know that I was the best designer. He knew that. He had seen other companies and he knew that you need a businessman who understands technology. He was very much a technologist business. He wasn't an engineer. He didn't do any hardware or software.

Randy Wigginton told me that in the early days you were the most impressive one, not Steve Jobs.

Well I was a super brilliant engineer. HP turned down my idea for the personal computer five times. Then later when they saw the Apple II they said it was the best product they had ever seen. I was highly regarded for my engineering skills. But I never wanted money. I would have been a bad person to run a company. I wanted to be a nice guy. I wanted to make friends with everybody. Yes I came up with the idea for the personal computer but I don't want to be known as a guy who changed the world. I want to be known as an engineer who connected chips in a really efficient way or wrote code that is unbelievable. I want to be known as a great engineer. I'm thankful Steve Jobs was there. You need someone who has a spirit for the marketplace. Who has the spirit for who computers change humanity. I didn't design the Apple II for a company. I designed it for myself, to show off. I look at all the recent Apple products, like the iPhone, the iPad, and even Pixar, and it was like everything Steve worked on had to be perfect. Because it was him. Every product he created was Steve Jobs. You're not going to let an imperfect you go out. That's why he was so tight and controlling of the quality of things.

Are you surprised that Steve Jobs became this huge cultural icon? Randy said that in the early days he would never have bet on Steve becoming so important.

Nobody would have bet on it except a few rare people, ones that know that greatness and great companies come from people who have a certain kind of spirit, a way of thinking beyond what other people might think. Randy was really young in those days. So it would have been hard for him to see that. It was hard for me to spot that in Steve. But Mike Markkula spotted it. Mike really thought we would have one of the biggest companies ever.

In the early days of Apple Steve deliberately injected himself into every decision. I said, "Look if I try to pretend that I know how to do marketing, it's better to be silent and thought a fool than open your mouth and leave no doubt." So I sat there in staff meetings and I did what I was excellent at — printer interfaces, floppy disk interfaces, serial interfaces. I did my job. Steve wanted an important say in every division of the company. Mike defined that was Steve's role. Get in and learn. Get a footprint in every department so over time Steve got very confident about telling anyone what to do. Because he was the founder and he was protected.

Is it true you originally didn't want to join Apple?

I said no to Apple at first. I was philosophically pure and I always said I would not be corrupted by money. I would not take big money from Markkula and give up my dream of being an engineer at the greatest company ever, HP, for life. I said no to Apple. I said I could design computers in my spare time. Markkula said I had to leave HP. I said, "No, I don't have to leave HP, I'll moonlight." Then all of my friends started calling me and telling me I had to go to Apple. My friend Alan Baum said, "You can stay at HP and become a manager and get rich or you can go to Apple and stay an engineer and get rich." That's what I needed to hear. I realized I don't have to run anything. I didn't want to run a company. I was so non political that I would have been thrown out, probably. Steve had a way of being offensive to people. He was always jumping at people always trying to be at the top and out in front. I was quiety. I never had that kind of ADHD life that so many of my friends in technology have. I was calm. No big ups and downs.

Did you guys have a falling out at some point? I read that you were upset when Steve started emphasizing the Mac instead of the Apple II.

Well I had worked on the Mac. I believed in that technology so thoroughly. I saw it as Apple's future. But I didn't believe we should cut off the Apple II product line and stop mentioning it in public. The Apple II was the big cash cow. The Apple II people felt bad, but not me. However, I did speak out on their behalf. Steve didn't talk to me personally about these issues. But he didn't like what I was saying. The closest thing we ever had to an argument was when I left in 1985 to start a company to build a universal remote control. I went to Frog Design to do the design. Steve dropped in there one day and he saw what they were designing for me and he threw it against the wall and said they could not do any work for me. "Anything you do for Woz, belongs to me." I was on my own, but I was still friendly with Apple. But Steve had a burst-out there. The people at Frog told me about it. That was the only time there was ever a fight between us, but it wasn't actually between us. Nobody has ever seen us having an argument.

Were you still working together closely in 1985 when you left to create the new company?

We were much more distant by then. The first couple of years at Apple we were very close. But then Steve was the businessman at the top, and I was an engineer. We were in different parts of the company. We weren't communicating much. We were different people by then.

But even after you left to start the new company you remained an Apple employee. You're still an Apple employee today, right?

I get 200 bucks every two weeks. A tiny salary.

When did you first move out of the garage?

It turns out that from our Apple I sales in the garage and by not paying salaries to ourselves we had established a bank account with about $10,000, and that was enough to move to an office space in Cupertino. I think we moved in before we even got the initial investment funding from Mike Markkula. We had a few desks, and no walls. We hired a president, Mike Scott. I really liked Scotty. He could be stern and strict but he also had a light side. He took Apple to the IPO. You never hear about him, but boy he was so important. He created a manual that was just filled with all of my designs and information. I wanted it to go out with the computer. Steve Jobs thought I wanted the information out so people could use our computer, but no, I wanted the information out there so people could learn what computers were and how they were built. I can't tell you how many times I run into CEOs and they tell me they went through that manual and learned it all and that is what brought them into computers. If we published taht manual today I don't think Apple would let anything out that had all those little details.

What is the deal about Steve parking in handicapped spots? Was that true?

To me, I would just laugh and enjoy it as a joke. He was always flying around to buildings in his car and you know what it's like when you can't find a parking spot, so he would just drive up and pull in. There's a story that someone once keyed his Mercedes at Apple so from then on he would park his car in a handicapped spot near a window so it was always being watched.

And what about him having a car with no license plate? How did he do that?

You can get a permit for that. Steve was always trying to be anonymous, and hidden. That's the opposite of how I am. I don't call reporters, but I don't hide from people who I am. I get tons of email a day and I try to answer all of them.

Do you remember the first time you met Steve?

I took a year off from college to earn money for tuition. I was working as a programmer and I told the company that I knew how to design minicomputers. This exec said "If you can design one, we'll get you the parts." So I designed a very simple computer, and they got me the chips. I was working on it with a friend, Bill Fernandez. We were in his garage building this thing. Bill said "You should meet this guy Steve Jobs, he's at our high school and he knows about this digital stuff. And he's played some pranks too." So Steve came over. We talked about what pranks we had done. Then we started talking about music. I was turned on to Dylan, reading the words and analyzing them. We agreed Dylan was more important than the Beatles because he had words that meant things. He was serious. He was not just about enjoyment. We started going to Dylan concerts together. We would go through music stores looking for Dylan bootlegs. We found some pamphlets with Dylan interviews, and then we drove down to Santa Cruz to meet the guy who wrote the pamphlets. He showed us some rare pictures of Dylan and we listened to some rare music of Dylan.

Steve's lifestyle was the young hippie who has nothing, who is getting by on almost zero dollars. I always had a job, always had money. But I admired everything I read about the hippies. This was the Vietnam War days. I became distrustful of authority. That matched the hippie philosophy of Steve. We admired the students who were protesting. We had a lot in common. People think we were way different but not really. With Steve, maturity came to him, but less maturity came to me in my life. He took on the responsibilities of business. I always wanted to be a young person. I wanted the fun in life forever. When you die you should die happy. For some people that's all about making a business success, tangling with people, yelling at them on the phone, that's what makes them happy. Steve was a more serious capable disciplined person. I'm still young and undisciplined. I have a lot of fun.

Do you think Steve died happy?

Of course! If he were to sit back and say, "When I was young, what was my dream in the world," well he achieved that 100 times over. I think Steve when he was away from Apple he was unhappy but obviously he died happy. I think he died mature and cognizant and aware. I think you are lucky when you have time to see it coming. You can make sure you go out with the right things done.

Will you go to the funeral?

I don't know about it yet. I haven't been informed. Will Steve Jobs even have one? Is he the kind of person who would have one? I haven't seen him for many years. Just phone calls here and there. I don't know if I was the right person in that crowd. We had an unbelievably important relationship. I never said anything bad about Steve. We never had a fight. Not in person, between us. One time we disagreed when I was designing the Apple II and I wanted eight slots and he wanted only two slots and I said, "Well go get another computer." My design was good and those slots turned out to be an unbelievable part of the Apple II's success.

What happened to Steve during the years when he was thrown out of Apple that made him such a great CEO when he came back?

I think Steve learned a lot of discipline. Not just personal discipline but discipline for the company, how to make sure the company met its goals. When he left Apple he was still just flying around believing in his own directions but ignoring the directions of other people. When he left Apple he some quiet words for me. He told me he was going to start this other company because he felt his purpose in life was to create great computers.

Years later, after Pixar came out with "Toy Story," Steve told me that all these others were making animated movies but what matters is whether the story is any good. The problem is you don't really know which one is the good one. But he knew. That's the vision thing. There is some very different genius involved in having everything a home run out of Pixar. I don't know everyone is talking about "Apple, Apple, Apple," after Steve's demise, because Pixar is another one. And it's a whole diferent realm. I always liked the comparison of Steve to Disney more so than to Edison.

What was Steve's biggest strength?

Everyone else will say vision, and gosh darn that's important but that doesn't go anywhere without operational discipline. Steve once told me that Apple only lost money when they built junk. It was his focus on good products that I believe was the biggest thing. All we have to do is make great products. If you have a big market. Apple had millions of fans, such a huge user base. Another strength was that he came back and put together a new board of directors. He organized the company to have good tight controls. Watching everything he could — that is operational excellence. Lots of CEOs just look at little points of data and make a decision. Steve was so much more than that. It's rare. It does take a lot of work and time. I always felt bad setting up even a lunch with him, because he must have been the busiest person in the world.

Did you talk to Walter Isaacson for the biography of Steve?

I got a call from someone writing a book about Steve Jobs, saying it was an official book, but I turned him down. I didn't want to talk about Steve. I was afraid he wouldn't want it. So I never spoke to Walter for the book. I feel so bad about that. Then again, so much stuff that I've said is already out in the public.

This can't be real, can it?

Much love to the reader who sent in the link. Very high ick factor here. But is this really any worse than the special promotion that St. Croix is running on Steve-style turtlenecks?

A classic New Yorker cover

I still can't believe Mark Zuckerberg did not win the Nobel Peace Prize

Yesterday there was speculation that Zuck was going to get it. But then they gave it to three women who as far as I know don't even have a startup or even an iPhone app. I tried looking them up on CrunchBase, and guess what? They're not even there. Just goes to show, this whole Nobel thing is totally rigged.

R.I.P., Steve Jobs

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

O shaman,

O wizard,

O golden son of Zeus and mortal woman, you

defied the gods, stole fire & gave it to mankind.

For this they struck you down.

Bastards!

"One more thing."

That was your catch phrase.

Or was it the one about putting a dent in the universe?

I like them both, but you have to admit,

"One more thing" is punchier.

Jon Ive says you inspired people

but you could also be difficult at times.

A bit unkind of him, I think.

What genius isn't difficult?

Picasso was a jerk. So were Tolstoy and Beethoven.

So was Michelangelo, I bet,

though to be honest

I really don't know anything about Michelangelo

because I missed class on the day we discussed him.

But based on his work I'd bet he was a total dick.

What beauty can ever be created without pain?

What great art has ever been produced without suffering?

And don't say "Seinfeld" because (a) that wasn't as easy as it looked

& (b) twenty years later it really hasn't held up as well as everyone

thought it would, has it.

What you did, however,

now that will be remembered forever.

I don't mean the products.

The Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.

Yes, you invented them & yes, we have heard of them

but no, Steve Jobs, your greatest accomplishment

was not some piece of hardware, not some lines of code

not the mouse and the graphical user interface

which let's face it you really kind of just

borrowed from Xerox PARC & "borrowed" might not be

exactly the right word for what you guys did

but on this day of all days let's not quibble about word choice.

No, Steve Jobs, your greatest accomplishment

is what you did to us. You gave us joy.

You restored our sense of childlike wonder.

You enabled us to live in a world where

we always believed that something amazing & magical

was just around the corner and that

the future would be better than the past

because in fact, as long as you were alive, it was.

Your name, old friend, is the definition of hope.

Not literally, I mean, not if you look up "hope"

in the dictionary, but you know what I'm trying to say.

And now, with you gone, what happens to us?

Have we reached our peak? Our zenith? Our apogee?

Or some other word that means the highest point

you can reach?

I think maybe we have. Because here's what I see.

I see America in decline:

a civilization unsure of itself, adrift, confused, puffed up

with phony patriotism, an empire run by number crunchers,

by MBAs & investment bankers, by quick-flippers & angel investors

who make nothing

who build nothing.

You, Steve, flew in the face of that.

You were the one who invented, who created,

who said no, that's not good enough,

go do it again. Go make it

amazing

astounding

profound

perfect

& stop being such a whiny little bitch

because your kid is in a school play

& and you don't want to work late.

People call you a visionary. I believe that was literally true.

I believe you had a vision, way back in the early days,

of where everything was headed & once you'd had this vision

you set out to make it real, the way a sculptor sees

a finished statue inside a block of marble

& slowly chips away until everything unnecessary

has been removed & the vision becomes real.

Steve, I'm sorry.

I wrote this lame-ass poem a while ago

because I believed that when this day came

my mind would go blank & I would not be able to write

& all I would want to do would be to go out walking in the woods

alone, by myself, not talking to anyone.

I was right. That's all I want to do.

In fact that's where I am right now.

I'm out in the deep woods where there is

no sound except the wind moving through the trees,

shaking the high branches.

All around me the leaves are letting go, drifting to the ground.

I hear my footsteps on the wet path. I hear my breath. I think of nothing.

I do not want to talk or write or sing your praise.

I do not want to cry or mourn.

I will not say that life is pointless or empty without you,

because the truth is, no matter what happens, life is good.

Too short, of course. But always good.

So here in the woods, alone, I make peace with your leaving.

I offer you one last namaste.

I press my hands together & bow to honor the divine inside you.

I pray you will forgive me for going on too long,

& I promise: no more words.

Because words mean nothing.

Words fall short.

Words scatter like dry leaves,

stirred by the wind,

swirling, rising upward,

tangling with each other,

like some incantation gone awry,

unable to bring you back.

RIP, Steve Jobs