Johnson and Jobs rented a vacant warehouse in Cupertino.
Every Tuesday for six months, they
convened an all-morning brainstorming session there, refining their retailing philosophy as they
walked the space. It was the store equivalent of Ive’s design studio, a haven where Jobs, with his
visual approach, could come up with innovations by touching and seeing the options as they
evolved. “I loved to wander over there on my own, just checking it out,” Jobs recalled.
Sometimes he made Drexler,
Larry Ellison, and other trusted friends come look. “On too many
weekends, when he wasn’t making me watch new scenes from
Toy Story
, he made me go to the
warehouse and look at the mockups for the store,” Ellison said. “He was obsessed by every detail
of the aesthetic and the service experience. It got to the point where I said, ‘Steve I’m not coming
to see you if you’re going to make me go to the store again.’”
Ellison’s company, Oracle, was developing software for the handheld checkout system, which
avoided having a cash register counter. On each visit Jobs prodded Ellison to figure out ways to
streamline the process by eliminating
some unnecessary step, such as handing over the credit card
or printing a receipt. “If you look at the stores and the products, you will see Steve’s obsession
with beauty as simplicity—this Bauhaus aesthetic and wonderful minimalism, which goes all the
way to the checkout process in the stores,” said Ellison. “It means the absolute minimum number
of steps. Steve gave us the exact, explicit recipe for how he wanted the checkout to work.”
When Drexler came to see the prototype, he had some criticisms: “I thought the space was too
chopped up and not clean enough. There were too many distracting architectural
features and
colors.” He emphasized that a customer should be able to walk into a retail space and, with one
sweep of the eye, understand the flow. Jobs agreed that simplicity and lack of distractions were
keys to a great store, as they were to a product. “After that, he nailed it,” said Drexler. “The vision
he had was complete control of the entire experience of his product, from how it was designed and
made to how it was sold.”
In October 2000, near what he thought was the end of the process,
Johnson woke up in the
middle of a night before one of the Tuesday meetings with a painful thought: They had gotten
something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the store around each of Apple’s main
product lines, with areas for the PowerMac, iMac, iBook, and PowerBook. But Jobs had begun
developing a new concept: the computer as a hub for all your digital activity. In other words, your
computer might handle video and pictures from your cameras, and perhaps someday your music
player and songs, or your books and magazines. Johnson’s predawn brainstorm was that the stores
should organize displays not just around the company’s four lines of computers, but also around
things people might want to do. “For example, I thought there should be a movie bay where we’d
have various Macs and PowerBooks running iMovie and showing how
you can import from your
video camera and edit.”
Johnson arrived at Jobs’s office early that Tuesday and told him about his sudden insight that
they needed to reconfigure the stores. He had heard tales of his boss’s intemperate tongue, but he
had not yet felt its lash—until now. Jobs erupted. “Do you know what a big change this is?” he
yelled. “I’ve worked my ass off on this store for six months, and now you want to change
everything!” Jobs suddenly got quiet. “I’m tired. I don’t know if I can design another store from
scratch.”
Johnson was speechless, and Jobs made sure he remained so. On the ride to the prototype store,
where people had gathered for the Tuesday meeting, he told Johnson not to say a word, either to
him or to the other members of the team. So the seven-minute drive proceeded in silence. When
they arrived, Jobs had finished processing the information. “I
knew Ron was right,” he recalled.
So to Johnson’s surprise, Jobs opened the meeting by saying, “Ron thinks we’ve got it all wrong.
He thinks it should be organized not around products but instead around what people do.” There
was a pause, then Jobs continued. “And you know, he’s right.” He said they would redo the
layout, even though it would likely delay the planned January rollout by three or four months.
“We’ve only got one chance to get it right.”
Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything that he
had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to
rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked about doing it on
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