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Through the Looking Glass.
After Alice laments that no
matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why,
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the
front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.
All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad news. When it
came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product
demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and thousands of
dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced
what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a
single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered applause. But his panel of academic
advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between $2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that
Jobs had promised to do so. Some of them were appalled. This was especially true once they
discovered that the optional printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical
disk would make the purchase of a $2,500 external hard disk advisable.
There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we will have our
0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end users.” There was a bit of
nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the real release of the machine and its software,
known as the 1.0 release, would not actually be happening in early 1989. In fact he didn’t set a
hard date. He merely suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the
first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback,
from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear it would be
more than two years later.
The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a violinist from the San
Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto in a duet with the NeXT
computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed release were
forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter asked him immediately
afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years
ahead of its time.”
As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to
anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the cover. This time he went
one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request from
Business Week
’s
Katie Hafner for exclusive access to him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal with
Newsweek
and then with
Fortune.
What he didn’t consider was that one of
Fortune
’s top editors,
Susan Fraker, was married to
Newsweek
’s editor Maynard Parker. At the
Fortune
story
conference, when they were talking excitedly about their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she
happened to know that
Newsweek
had also been promised an exclusive, and it would be coming
out a few days before
Fortune.
So Jobs ended up that week on only two magazine covers.
Newsweek
used the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it
proclaimed to be “the most exciting machine in years.”
Business Week
showed him looking
angelic in a dark suit, fingertips pressed together like a preacher or professor. But Hafner
pointedly reported on the manipulation that surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled
out interviews with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That
strategy worked, but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the
side of Steve Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to control
events.”
When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially since it
was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry chief scientist at rival Sun
Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie workstation,” which was not an unalloyed compliment.
Bill Gates, as might be expected, continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m
disappointed,” he told the
Wall Street Journal.
“Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the
Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with another
computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT machine was not like
that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft
would continue its plans not to write software for the NeXT. Right after the
announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely
suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever
wrote.”
When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn
out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a month. The
beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT continued to
hemorrhage cash.
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