Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BUILDING THE MAC
The Journey Is the Reward
Competition
When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and 
dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa called it “a half-assed, hackneyed 
attempt,” and there was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned command-line prompts and didn’t 
support bitmapped graphical displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate 
technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM 
rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters 
for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took 
them a year to realize what had happened.”
Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the 
Wall Street Journal
with 
the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly positioned the upcoming computer battle as a 
two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM, 
conveniently relegating to irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that 
were doing just as well as Apple.
Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil 
empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect 
foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition, but as a spiritual 
struggle. “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is 
that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years,” he told an 
interviewer. “Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation.” 
Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM 
was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for 
evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.”
Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at another perceived competitor to his Macintosh: the 
company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He had been ousted from that group, and now 
he wanted to beat it. He also saw healthy rivalry as a way to motivate his troops. That’s why he 
bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. The problem was that the rivalry 
became unhealthy. Jobs repeatedly portrayed his band of engineers as the cool kids on the block, 
in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types working on the Lisa.
More substantively, when he moved away from Jef Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive and 
underpowered portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a desktop machine with a graphical 
user interface, it became a scaled-down version of the Lisa that would likely undercut it in the 
marketplace.
Larry Tesler, who managed application software for the Lisa, realized that it would be 
important to design both machines to use many of the same software programs. So to broker 
peace, he arranged for Smith and Hertzfeld to come to the Lisa work space and demonstrate the 
Mac prototype. Twenty-five engineers showed up and were listening politely when, halfway into 
the presentation, the door burst open. It was Rich Page, a volatile engineer who was responsible 
for much of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa!” he shouted. “The 
Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!” Neither Smith nor Hertzfeld responded, so Page continued his 
rant. 
“Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn’t let him control it,” he said, looking as if he 
were about to cry. “Nobody’s going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you 
don’t care!” He stormed out of the room and slammed the door, but a moment later he barged 

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back in briefly. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld. “Steve Jobs is the 
problem. Tell Steve that he’s destroying Apple!”
Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with 
incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the 
Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.