Close Encounters with Steve Jobs

My book partner Robert Scoble has a great post about a chance encounter with Steve Jobs in a San Francisco sushi restaurant. Jobs was characteristically ungracious, and took the opportunity for the 30-second encounter to take a shot at Microsoft, for allegedly steal Apple's stuff, which of course was originally stolen from Xerox Park.

I had a similar encounter with a younger but equally ungracious Jobs in 1980, after he was keynote speaker for event sponsored by the long defunct The Executive magazine. It was the first time I heard the "computers will change the way we work, play and communicate speech," which was prophetic and inspirational to me. Afterwards, I waited outside for him in a cold December rain and when he left the building, I rushed up to him and told him that his talk had inspired me, that I had gone through a period where I had lost direction in life and that he had given it back to me.  I wanted to join Apple and sprreead the word of the promise of his computers to humanity.

He stared at me for a second then asked me what I did for a living.  I stammered that I loved to write, and right now I was working for a PR agency until I could find something meaningful. "My PR flack is Regis McKenna he snapped more than a little impatiently. Go work for him."

In fact, that's exactly what I did.  But I never really worked much on the Apple Account.  As it turned out, that was a good thing.  And I learned something about Jobs that seems to be true all these many years later. He's much more appealing when he's standing in front of 500 people than he is close up.

Technorati tags: Apple, Steve Jobs, Scoble

Comments

[Chris]

Slight correction: that would be Xerox PARC... Palo Alto Research Center.

[peter]

Please stop spreading the myth about Xerox PARC. If you're a writer you should do some research. But then again, you're too lazy to even spellcheck before you post. Yawn.

[Jarod]

Apple didnt steal anything from Xerox. They licensed it. Microsoft on the other is $50 billion dollars worth of the world dumbest and clueless developers! You don't have to take my word for it, just buy a PC and use Winshit, it talks or rather crashes for itself. It would take Bill Gates a million years to do 1% of what Jobs and Apple have done to make our lives a lot more fun and easy tech wise. Get real man. His comment to you was never meant to be rude. A guy like Jobs has a billion things on his mind all the time and you're probably not the only person to come up to him. You probably caught him at a bad time; it can happen to anyone. If you were him, you would do the same thing.

[john]

always nice to see the apple mafia responding so vigilantly :-)

[Anona]

"My PR flack is Regis McKenna he snapped more than a little impatiently. Go work for him."

You are a writer? You can't even put together an alleged quotation. Try this:

"My PR flack is Regis McKenna," he snapped more than a little impatiently. "Go work for him."

After you do that give credit to Jobs for having clairvoyantly spotted a bad writer long years ago. And you're still so ungracious about the fact that he actually bothered to give you advice on what you should do? Then ask yourself why a man in his position owes *you* the time of the day?

[Patrick]

Wow. Uh... this is a blog, not the Harvard Business Review. Typos are allowed. Even for the most gifted writers among us.

[Robert Dvorak]

I remember the time I visited Xerox Park, where the trees blossomed with GUI Ideas ready to be plucked by devious Apple employees.

Why should anyone take 'blogging advice' from you? I think people can learn how to be facetious on their own.

[Mike]

Xerox PARC is actually given more credit than it is due.

A lot of the fundamental ideas were taken by employees who were employed away from Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford when funding there dried up.

These ideas were refined at Xerox, just as they were refined further by Apple in developing the Lisa/Macintosh.

In fact, Apple actually licensed the patent for the mouse (for a mere $30,000) from Stanford, NOT from Xerox as the latter was NOT where it originated.

It also took 5-6 years of development by to turn the germs of ideas that Apple employees saw during their tour of Xerox into a viable product, along the way often inventing stuff they "thought they seen," but really hadn't.

Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. In this case, the giant is Doug Engelbart.

[Bob]

Stumbled upon this from Scoble's place. My reaction is that you took what you wanted from Scoble's post. Sure, he took a pot shot, but he also said:
------
He then said something like "cool, nice to meet you. It's nice to see that you're copying our stuff." Ouch. But then Dean invites him to see the rest of Internet Explorer and Windows Vista and says we have a few innovations to show him. Steve graciously hands over his email address and invites us over.
-------

Seems silly that folks are still arguing over PARC. Doesn't really matter. Microsoft won that war. Apple will always have a more elegant OS. Microsoft will likely always dominate marketshare. And like is happening now, people are unfairly comparing Vista (vaporware) with Tiger (shipping). Compare Tiger to XP or Media Center, then compare Vista to Apple's shippping OS when Vista ships.

[Stewart]

they're called iFascists nowadays, not Apple Mafia :)

[David]

Good God Apple fanatics creep me out.

[xerox]

I ran into the Steves (Spielberg & Jobs) at a small cafe in San Bernadino. I slipped on a wet tile. Jobs was cool about it, but Spielberg seemed a bit pissed off, like he was too good to be bumped into.

I apologized and said, "You guys are great! You both make products that are easy enough for a 12 year old." Jobs smiled. Spielberg started ranting about the holocaust. He didn't calm down until I admitted that Schinler's List and Jaws were among the finest movies ever made - and they definitely weren't appropriate viewing for 12 year olds. They were adult movies. That seemed to smooth things over a bit.

My only regret is that I didn't ask Jobs for a job. I'm sure I would have got one. I mean, it's not every day that someone asks Steve for a job.

I went back to the cafe about a week later, hoping to run into Jobs again, and ask him to give me job at Apple. It turned out the waiter got the job. And the hostess got a part in War Of The Worlds. That's just my luck. I hate those Steve guys.

[Israel Alvarez]

What's all this talk about iFascists and "Apple Mafia"? Have we all devolved to the point where anyone who disagrees with my opinion must be part of some conspiracy? Isn't it more honest to use Occam's razor and look for weakness in your own argument?

That said, I think some of the name calling in the responses here is unwarranted. And anyone who resorts to picking apart syntax on the net is just begging to be ignored.

And THAT being said, it still rankles me that the author of this post buttonholes a semi-famous, successful person (forget that it's Jobs for a second, pretend that it's Scott McNealy or Michael Eisner), fawns all over them, gets a response and a business tip that - to many - could be seen as launching his career, and then *complains* about it because the help was offered "more tha a little impatiently". Shouldn't you be thankful you got help you didn't ask for in the first place? I sure would be.

You people are really strange.

[Stewart]

The point is that any critiscm of Apple/Steve Jobs/iPod/anything they've ever done, is treated as heresy and is then treated to an abusive response by a certain 'fan base' of Apple's, and I submit that if you've never seen that, then you must be living a very sheltered existance on the internet.

Kind regards

Stewart

[Alex]

Pour Journalism to take the whole concept of him being less appealing, just because he didn't offer you a high-end job? Go up to any other CEO ask them for a high end posstion, see if you even get what you got from steve.

and " But I never really worked much on the Apple Account. As it turned out, that was a good thing."
You'd be so lucky to work for apple with what i've read from you.

[Israel Alvarez]

"The point is that any critiscm of Apple/Steve Jobs/iPod/anything they've ever done, is treated as heresy and is then treated to an abusive response by a certain 'fan base' of Apple's, and I submit that if you've never seen that, then you must be living a very sheltered existance on the internet.

Kind regards

Stewart"

Errr...so what? You could say the exact same thing about Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS and Amiga. And if you don't realize *that*, then *you* must be living a pretty sheltered experience on the Internet.

There will always be fanatics rushing to the defense of anything you criticize on the Internet. If you're not ready to deal with that without complaining about the ____Mafia, then you might consider sticking to the printed word, where you'll have a lot more filters between you and the reading public. Or you could stick to purely non-controversial topics, such as how cute puppies are.

[Qwell]

Mac Fans can be over the top at times. I should know, in the past I've done it too.

I'm still amazed at the loyalty the brand commands. I vactioned in the Bay area (from the East coast) a year ago just so I could stop by the Apple campus.

I think people are sensitive about their OS and computer choice because they feel it says something about who they are on a subconscious level. I think we except our computers as the physical extension of our inner selves. In other words we project that voice inside our heads into cyberspace via our OS and hardware of choice, hence we have ownership of the tool we use to project ourselves.

Or I could really be sleepy.

[XParc]

Based on a second-hand account of a 30 second meeting with Jobs (in which the linked poster, a Microsoft employee, expressed surprise at a remark Jobs made about Microsoft copying Apple again - although he made the very same remark publicly earlier this year), and your own 25 year-old recollection which sounds like yet another 30 seconds or so or fame with Jobs, it seems like the road to cheap character attacks is easily traveled these days.

Just to be clear, I'm not defending Jobs here, because in this case it's clear no defense is necessary.

[Marilyn Able]

Being famous invites envy. I'd be willing to bet you would get an even more irritated and less responsive reply had you accosted Mr. Gates after a speaking engagement. Blogging is all about opinion. Don't opine if you aren't up to being challenged. It is obvious that because Jobs didn't recognize your genius, you carry a touch of resentment toward him. Grow up.

[The Magnus]

The only reason why Macs crash less than PCs running windows, is because the system is Apple, and the OS is apple. That is it. Apple programmers are no better than Microsoft programmers. If MS wanted to be bitch and make their OS run on only Microsoft PCs that only they can manufacture, the result would be a Microtosh. Apple isn't innovative. They rehash other people's ideas the same way Apple does. The only difference is, Apple uses metrosexual colors and off white. Just because you use a Mac, that doesn't mean you understand anything about computers. Why do non tech oriented people swear by the Mac? Ignorance and simplicity.

[The Magnus]

P.S. In 1980, Steve Jobs wasn't that big. Most people never even heard of him or Apple. He was a multi millionaire, but he wasn't anyone special. He still isn't anyone special. He got fired from his own company a while back.

[TiJon Cox]

DO ANYBODY KNOW STEVE JOBS EMAIL ADDRESS??