Bloomberg Businessweek
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Almost anyone who came in contact with Steve Jobs seems to have a story to tell—about his brilliance, curiosity, quirks, kindness, or meanness. Here are some vignettes from people who dealt with the co-founder of Apple up close.
“I want that for Apple”
Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design
While Steve Jobs found plenty of brilliant engineers to design his computers, Silicon Valley was short on industrial designers who could make the products look as good as they worked. Hartmut Esslinger, one of the first designers to focus on tech products, bid on a sweeping contract in 1982 to define the look and feel of the Mac and Apple’s overall brand. When it was time to meet Jobs, he was warned that “Steve can be a bit crazy sometimes.”
Good crazy, from Esslinger’s point of view.
The young CEO, who was wearing a ratty, faded T-shirt, looked at the work Esslinger’s design firm, known today as Frog, had done for Sony and said, “I want that for Apple.” When Esslinger advised that Apple should create its own design style rather than copy anyone, Jobs loved that idea even more. Frog got the job.
Esslinger and his team got to work on creating concept designs for a range of products—not just the Mac, but also futuristic gizmos such as laptops and touchscreen computers. One morning, Jobs called Esslinger in his office in the Black Forest town of Altensteig, Germany, at about 10 a.m. Excited by the project, Jobs, who was in London, said he would be there by 5 p.m.—setting off a frantic day of drawing sketches and building makeshift models.
The meeting was a milestone in defining “Snow White,” the name given to the clean, white, minimalist look of Apple’s products in the 1980s. (That night, the innkeeper where Jobs was staying called Esslinger, worried that the barefooted American wouldn’t be able to pay the huge phone bill he was racking up. Esslinger assured him the young multimillionaire was good for it.)
The simplicity of Jobs’s marching orders—“to have the best design in the world”—became a constant of his career, Esslinger said. But rather than impose his own aesthetics, Jobs from the start sought to collect the best design talent he could find. “He was like Lorenzo de’ Medici—get the best people on earth and get them to do amazing things.”
Esslinger said Jobs has shown that inspired design done right is not a cost to be held down, but a massive competitive advantage. He said Jobs proved that it’s only by looking beyond the dollars and cents that it works.
“His death is incredibly sad, but without him design would not be what it is,” he said. “If anyone proved the point that you win by design, it’s Steve.
“It wasn’t about a personal ambition to be successful,” Esslinger added. “He was on a mission to beautify the world. It was a privilege to have been able to work with him.”
“What’s this Internet thing?”
Barry Schuler, former chief executive officer of AOL
Steve Jobs was a genius, but he knew his limits.
“He was never a guy who tried to make believe he had expertise in something,” said Barry Schuler, now a partner at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
That was clear to Schuler when he got a call from Jobs in early 1997 to come over to his old offices at NeXT Software in Redwood City, Calif. Jobs, at that point, hadn’t yet agreed to run Apple on a permanent basis.
“What’s this Internet thing?” Schuler recalled Jobs asking. “I don’t get it. What are people doing on it? What do they like about it?”
