{"id":222951,"date":"2025-10-05T20:04:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T01:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/what-was-next"},"modified":"2025-10-05T20:04:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T01:04:26","slug":"what-was-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/what-was-next","title":{"rendered":"What was NeXT"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For the special tribute issue of BusinessWeek that is coming out tomorrow, I tried to honor Steve Jobs in a small way with my memories of the NeXT days. Here is the version I wrote (the print edition has several sentences edited out) with some italics added to summary sections:<\/p>\n

The book of Jobs, a parable of passion Steve Jobs was intensely passionate about his products, effusing an infectious enthusiasm that stretched from one-on-one recruiting pitches to auditorium-scale demagoguery. It all came so naturally for him because he was in love, living a Shakespearean sonnet, with tragic turns, an unrequited era of exile, and ultimately the triumphant reunion. At the personal and corporate levels, it is the archetype of the Hero\u2019s Journey turned hyperbole.<\/i> The NeXT years were torture for him, as he was forcibly estranged from his true love. When we went on walks, or if we had a brief time in the hallway, he would steer the conversation to a plaintive question: \u201cWhat should Apple do?\u201d As if he were an exile on Elba, Jobs always wanted to go home. \u201cApple should buy NeXT.\u201d It seemed outrageous to me at the time; what CEO of Apple would ever invite Jobs back and expect to keep their job for long? The Macintosh on his desk at NeXT had the striped Apple logo stabbed out, a memento of anguish scratched deep into plastic. The NeXTSTEP operating system, object-oriented frameworks, and Interface Builder were beautiful products, but they were stuck in what Jobs considered the pedestrian business of enterprise IT sales. Selling was boring. Where were the masses? The NeXTSTEP step-parents sold to a crowd of muggles. The magic seemed misspent. Jobs was still masterful, relating stories of how MCI saved so much time and money developing their systems on NeXTSTEP. He persuaded the market research firms IDC and Dataquest that a new computer segment should be added to the pantheon of mainframe, mini, workstation, and PC. The new market category would be called the \u201cPC\/Workstation,\u201d and lo and behold, by excluding pure PCs and pure workstations, NeXT became No. 1 in market share. Leadership fabricated out of thin air. During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve\u2019s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation. But Jobs was sleepwalking through backwaters of stodgy industries. And he was agitated by Apple\u2019s plight in the press. Jobs reflected a few years later, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many times I heard the word \u2018beleaguered\u2019 next to \u2018Apple.\u2019 It was painful. Physically painful.\u201d When the miraculous did happen, and Apple bought NeXT, Jobs was reborn. I recently spoke with Bill Gates about passion: \u201cMost people lose that fire in the belly as they age. Except Steve Jobs. He still had it, and he just kept going. He was not a programmer, but he had hit after hit.\u201d Gates marvels at the magic to this day. Parsimony Jobs was the master architect of Apple design. Often criticized for bouts of micromanagement and aesthetic activism, Steve\u2019s spartan sensibilities accelerated the transition from hardware to software. By dematerializing the user interface well ahead of what others thought possible, Apple was able to shift the clutter of buttons and hardware to the flexible and much more lucrative domain of software and services. The physical thing was minimized to a mere vessel for code. Again, this came naturally to Jobs, as it is how he lived his life, from sparse furnishings at home, to sartorial simplicity, to his war on buttons, from the mouse to the keyboard to the phone. Jobs felt a visceral agitation from the visual noise of imperfection. When Apple first demonstrated the mouse, Bill Gates could not believe it was possible to achieve such smooth tracking in software. Surely, there was a dedicated hardware solution inside. When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a s\u00e9ance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard, where I already had Woz\u2019s signature. He burst out: \u201cThis keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It\u2019s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.\u201d And with his car keys he pried it right off. \u201cHow about this F2 key?\u201d Off they all went. \u201cI\u2019m changing the world, one keyboard at a time,\u201d he concluded in a calmer voice. And he dove deep into all elements of design, even the details of retail architecture for the Apple store (he\u2019s a named patent holder on architectural glass used for the stairways). On my first day at NeXT, as we walked around the building, my colleagues shared in hushed voices that Jobs personally chose the wood flooring and various appointments. He even specified the outdoor sprinkler system layout. I witnessed his attention to detail during a marketing reorganization meeting. The VP of marketing read Jobs\u2019s e-mailed reaction to the new org chart. Jobs simply requested that the charts be reprinted with the official corporate blue and green colors, and provided the Pantone numbers to remove any ambiguity. Shifted color space was like a horribly distorted concerto to his senses. And this particular marketing VP was clearly going down. People Jobs\u2019s estimation of people tended to polarize to the extremes, a black-and-white thinking trait common to charismatic leaders. Marketing execs at NeXT especially rode the \u201chero-shithead rollercoaster,\u201d as it was called. The entire company knew where they stood in Jobs\u2019s eyes, so when that VP in the reorg meeting plotted his rollercoaster path on the white board, the room nodded silently in agreement. He lasted one month. But Jobs also attracted the best people and motivated them to do better than their best, rallying teams to work in a harmony they may never find elsewhere in their careers. He remains my archetype for the charismatic visionary leader, with his life\u2019s song forever woven into the fabric of Apple. Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality. \u2014 It was daunting to reflect on such a great man, from a refined set of exposures\u2026 but he was my childhood hero, and I convinced him to let me do a study of his management style while a lowly employee at NeXT. Nevertheless, I wondered if I captured his essence in those years of exile from Apple. So, I was floored when the BW editor wrote back \u201cI think this piece is one of the best things I have ever read about Steve.\u201d :)) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the special tribute issue of BusinessWeek that is coming out tomorrow, I tried to honor Steve Jobs in a small way with my memories of the NeXT days. Here is the version I wrote (the print edition has several sentences edited out) with some italics added to summary sections: The book of Jobs, a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":716,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,1523,9,1512,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-computing","category-military","category-mobile-phones","category-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/716"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}