| BlueSky Business Aviation News | |||||||||||||||||
| . | |||||||||||||||||
Even though I bought my first Apple product in 1986, well ahead of the curve, I was already a bit late to the party. Apple Computers had incorporated back in 1977 and went public in 1980, thereby creating the largest number of millionaires in a single moment up to that date; it was, in fact, the largest and most successful IPO since Ford. Apple was hugely successful before I had ever heard of the Macintosh. Indeed, the glory days of Wozniak's designs, the Apple I and Apple II, were actually in the late 1970s, and by the time Apple went public, Wozniak had sort of disappeared into a sea of other engineers--by his own choice--and then drifted out of the daily affairs of the company (though to this day, Woz is an Apple employee), starting another company, sponsoring and funding music festivals, and perhaps most tellingly, teaching the 5th grade.
Luck of the draw Woz is a clear case of the right person with the right skills in the right place at the right time. Had he grown up in Houston, we would never have heard of him, we would never have heard of Steve Jobs, we would never have heard of Apple Computers. But, he didn't. Instead, Wozniak grew up in Sunnyvale, a small town in the Santa Clara Valley, what we now call Silicon Valley, not because of the computer and software companies that were famously founded and funded there, but because of the chip manufacturing companies that came before them: Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory which begat Fairchild Semiconductor which begat Intel. "Intel," by the way, is a portmanteau of INTegrated ELectronics. These companies, and others like Hewlett Packard, formed the foundation for the computer hardware industry, which in turn, formed the foundation for the software industry, which spawned the dot com revolution. Woz came in on the ground floor. His Dad was an electronics engineer. Steve was a certified genius. His IQ was tested at 200 (max on the scale) while in school. He was a ham operator--built his own ham radio from component parts--by the time he was in the sixth grade, a tremendous success by someone who barely had two digits in his age. Feel free to try it yourself if you doubt the magnitude of that technical achievement. With his father's help, at least at first, Woz entered the science fairs at school and consistently won first place, time and again, for increasingly complex electronics projects including his first electronic game (a hardware version of the class Tic Tac Toe) and a circuit that added and subtracted in exactly the same way that computers do today. He did all this as a school kid. Because the Santa Clara Valley was a hotbed of electronics development, and digital computers were just becoming vaguely affordable for medium sized companies, there were a lot of computer companies formed there, but most importantly, there was a tremendous amount of design information lying around. For example, some Sylvania engineers gave Steve a copy of "The Small Computer Handbook" which explained how the PDP-8 worked. The PDP-8 was the very first successful minicomputer; it was designed and built by Digital Equipment Company. Just about everything prior to the DEC PDP-8 was a mainframe, extraordinarily expensive heavy iron for large corporations. The information in that manual entranced Wozniak and he began to design computers--in high school. He continued this passion for designing computers for years and years, building several in his garage, eventually including the first truly modern desktop computer, one with a keyboard and a monitor: the Apple I. As appears to be the case with so many leading figures in the exploding computer industry, Woz never finished a degree. There were issues of family financing, as well as problems with authoritarian administrations. I completely empathize with Woz here because I’m anti-authoritarian myself and because I’ve never seen a university that did not have a blatantly authoritarian administration, at least with respect to the students. I came by my anti-authoritarianism genetically, the Woz learned his during the Vietnam War era. The Pentagon Papers scandal broke in 1971, and thus began Steve’s disillusionment with the people in government and his awareness of himself as anti-war, or at least, anti-Vietnam War. Probably the tensest moments were when the San Jose draft board screwed him over, not once, but twice. For those who are too young to remember, the war was not well supported by the general public, and the economy was doing well, so there were few people willing to volunteer for the military. In order to support the force levels demanded by the military, the government re-instituted the draft, lapsed since the Korean War. In essence, they could force you at gunpoint to leave wherever you were, whatever you were doing, and risk your life in a war that only the defense contractors truly supported. After those experiences, Wozniak was distrustful of government, not to the insane levels of the Georgia Militia, but more of an awakening of someone who had joined the Young Republicans in college because his Mom was a Republican. Interestingly, during this period, Woz wore his hair long, got a sense of Eastern philosophy, and learned to love the hippy movement. Everything except the drugs. Like a lot of extremely intelligent people, Woz lived in his head and didn’t want anything to interfere with his ability to think. At that time, though, anyone who looked like a hippie, but didn’t do drugs made people nervous (think “narc”). Nevertheless, the hippie philosophy of love and peace made perfect sense to him. While attending De Anza College near home, after the scarring events of UC Boulder, Steve found a job at a local mini-computer company, Tenet, programming in FORTRAN. This is a sign of the explosive growth of the computer industry at the time. A sharp young college student can be hired full-time as a developer. No real work experience, no degree, just being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs in the garage workshop of a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez. Fernandez, in fact, introduced them; he felt they had a lot in common, though Jobs was several years younger and still in high school. And they did. Jobs and Wozniak were the best of friends till Jobs died last month. Their first business venture together was selling “Blue Boxes,” a piece of utterly illegal phone phreaking equipment that Woz designed and built and Jobs marketed. This was during the hey day of the infamous phone phreaker Captain Crunch, John Draper. As you might imagine, this was way before the advent of the internet or even desktop computers, so the most fascinating technical network in the world at the time was the telephone system. A lot of very smart people became absorbed in how the phone system actually worked, the holes in the system, the security weaknesses, backdoors, and all the other things that computer hackers are interested in today. Different era, different system, same kind of people. Not long after that, the Woz got a job at Hewlett Packard working on the design of their insanely great scientific calculators. This is early 1970s, and the very first handheld scientific calculator, the HP 35, had just come on the market. It was stunning. The old sliderule was dead (let me tell you how dead: my spell check doesn’t even recognize the word). This, of course, was the old Hewlett Packard, prior to the devastation wreaked by Carly Fiorina. This was back when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard still ran the place as an engineering company and engineers could work there for their entire careers. Sadly, HP is now just another electronics manufacturer; they used to be world class. While working at HP, Woz decided that he never wanted to be in management. He was a designer. He didn’t like authority, didn’t trust it, and didn’t want to have to exercise it himself. That classic, old-school HP environment allowed him to make that decision. Engineers there could go their entire career without having to go into management to make decent money. This was (and still is) unusual in a US company. Steve also felt that in a choice between a high-pressure life with great wealth, or a low-pressure life with modest income, he preferred the lower pressure. Steve decided in his early twenties that he wanted to enjoy his life. This is a different model. During that time, Woz continued with his incredible electronics projects. Remember Pong? I was amazed when I saw my first one in a restaurant. It was such a huge change from the usual pinball machines. Woz liked it so much he designed and built his own. Single player, too. You have to understand, there were no computer monitors then. There weren’t any small computers to use as a base. There was no software base to work from. It had to all be done in hardware with a handful of chips using a standard television as a screen. He did it. In fact, he did it again a little later, on a somewhat grander scale, for Atari in just four days. They called it “Breakout.” The Woz had game as a circuit designer. He was quite possibly the best electronics designer in the world at that time. And he was about to peak. After the Atari thing, he was invited to a group that met in Gordon French’s garage, the Homebrew Computer Club; he and Jobs were some of the earliest members, along with Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein, the Jobs and Wozniak of Osborne Computers. The Osborne 1 was the very first successful portable microcomputer. In an interesting parallel, Felsenstein was a member of the Free Speech movement in the ‘60s. There were many, many discussions at the Homebrew Computer Club about how pervasive computing would impact people’s lives for the better. People there were very forward looking, very positive, and very much interested in making things better for everyone. They were the forerunners of today’s ubiquitous computing advocates. The atmosphere was distinctly revolutionary. Out of this experience with the Homebrew Computing Club, Woz designed what is now the Apple I. He and Steve Jobs essentially began Apple Computers to sell the Apple I, mostly to hobbyists. What we may find hard to appreciate is just what a milestone the Apple I computer really was. Prior to it, all computers had a front panel filled with lights and switches like something out of the old TV show “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea.” Woz set the new standard with a keyboard and a monitor together with the CPU, so that anyone could sit down in front of a computer, type something, and see it immediately on the screen in front of them. This was unprecedented. And to be able to do it for a couple hundred dollars was simply genius. It was genius combined with opportunity. It was being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. Woz was and he hit it out of the park. That brilliant design of Wozniak’s was first offered to Hewlett Packard. As an HP employee, essentially anything Woz designed, they had right of first refusal over. They refused for various reasons, and signed all rights to the design over to him. That may seem insane, but Woz understood the reasons why HP could never build the Apple I. Later, HP did decide to do a microcomputer project, but they didn’t invite Woz to work on the project. That hurt. Not terribly long after that, the two Steve’s organize Apple Computers to manufacture and sell the Apple I, but the Woz stayed on with his day job at HP. This would eventually have to end. Arguably Wozniak peaked with the Apple II. This was the design that put Apple on the corporate map. This is the computer that made the Apple IPO so successful. Without the Apple II, there would be no Macintosh, no iMac, no iPod, no iPhone. The Apple II was the foundation of what we know today as Apple, Inc. The Apple I, argues Woz, was a hack. It was stuff he had already designed, with a microprocessor integrated into the middle of it. Yes, it was ground-breaking. Yes, it set the new standard for microcomputers forever, but for Woz, it was just a bit of a stunt. There wasn’t anything there that really pleased him technically. Being who he was, he wanted something better, something insanely great. That something was the Apple II. It was the first personal computer with color. It was the first personal computer with a plastic case. It came with eight expansion slots. It could use a variety of input devices, including game controllers. It had floppy disk drives, a first for personal computers and a truly awesome technical tour de force that Woz completed in two weeks by himself. The Apple II was a killer machine. It sold millions. Literally. It was the first personal computer to sell more than a million units. Jobs wanted the Apple II design for Apple Computers which meant he needed Woz, but Woz didn’t want to leave HP. I know it sounds strange now, but Woz did the design of the Apple II while he was still at HP and again, HP signed the rights to the design back over to him. Eventually, enough people talked to Steve that he agreed to quit his dream job at HP and join Apple as a founding employee. But not as a manager. Never as a manager. He wanted nothing to do with management. He didn’t want to tell other people what to do. One can argue that this refusal to be a part of management led to a self-fulfilling prophesy. The Apple III, a computer designed by a committee of managers. It was a terrible computer, a terrible product, but no one in management would admit to it. It was the Apple II that sustained the company, but the Apple II division got no respect internally. It’s a long, complicated, but ultimately familiar story that led to Woz leaving Apple to do something else not long after the IPO. Music festivals, a start-up electronics company, and other activities filled his life and the Woz was as happy as he could be. This is a different model. Make no mistake. Steve Jobs was incredibly smart and passionate marketing guy with as clear a vision and as deft a touch in picking winning technology as anyone ever. Jobs was a great designer, but he was not a design engineer. They really are two different breeds of cat. Wozniak was a design engineer, someone who could bring together existing parts and invent the ones that didn’t exist to bring something new into the world. He, too, had a vision, but it was very different from the sort of vision that a Steve Jobs has. A Jobs will know sort of what he wants, and a Wozniak will know sort of how to make it. Both go through an iterative process of trial and error, building on past experiences to break through to something great. We need both kinds of people to truly succeed. Unfortunately, in the here and now, we seem to only generate respect for the Steve Jobs of the world and not the Steve Wozniaks. Senior managers act as though great designers like Woz are a commodity. This is wrong. This is insanely wrong. There cannot be a Steve Jobs without a Steve Wozniak. No matter how exact one’s feel for the future of technology may be, there still has to be someone to invent that new technology. One of the major lessons we learn in business school is that an A-level marketing group with a C-level product will always out perform a C-level marketing group selling an A-level product. Personally, I think this is more of a statement about the average person than it is about the importance of design, but what do I know? I’m just a design engineer. I have an MBA. I have worked in marketing. I have a lot of respect for what a sales and marketing organization can do for a firm. However, I’m not convinced that everything can be solved by a new, more expensive marketing campaign. Recently, I saw someone write that what we have is not a problem of innovation, but a problem of marketing. Wrong. If that were true, we’d all still be sitting in caves wondering if rocks were edible. We need innovation at the most fundamental levels and we can’t get there with just marketeers (no, that’s not a typo). We must have brilliant designers, people who can not only envision marvelous products, but also build them. We need the Wozniaks of the world more than we know. Terry Drinkard is currently consulting on an aviation start-up. His interests and desire are being involved in cool developments around airplanes and in the aviation industry. Usually working as a contract heavy structures engineer, he has held positions with Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace and has years of experience in the MRO world. Terry’s areas of specialty are aircraft design, development, manufacturing, maintenance, and modification; lean manufacturing; Six-sigma; worker-directed teams; project management; organization development and start-ups. Terry welcomes your comments, questions or feedback. You may contact him via terry.drinkard@blueskynews.aero Other recent articles by Terry Drinkard:
|
|||||||||||||||||
