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

this
for?” he snapped at one stop. “This is a piece of crap! 
Anybody
could build a 
better drive than this.” Although most of his hosts were appalled, some seemed amused. They had 
heard tales of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now they were getting to see it in full 
display.
The final stop was the Sony factory, located in a drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs, it looked 
messy and inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated it. Back at the hotel, Belleville 
argued for going with the Sony disk drive. It was ready to use. Jobs disagreed. He decided that 
they would work with Alps to produce their own drive, and he ordered Belleville to cease all work 
with Sony.
Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore Jobs, and he asked 
a Sony executive to get its disk drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it became 
clear that Alps could not deliver on time, Apple would switch to Sony. So Sony sent over the 
engineer who had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a Purdue graduate who fortunately 
possessed a good sense of humor about his clandestine task.
Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate office to visit the Mac team’s engineers—
which was almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly find somewhere for Komoto to hide. At 
one point Jobs ran into him at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized him from the meeting in 

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Japan, but he didn’t suspect anything. The closest call was when Jobs came bustling onto the Mac 
work space unexpectedly one day while Komoto was sitting in one of the cubicles. A Mac 
engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a janitorial closet. “Quick, hide in this closet. Please! 
Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but he jumped up and did as told. He had to 
stay in the closet for five minutes, until Jobs left. The Mac engineers apologized. “No problem,” 
he replied. “But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”
Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the folks at Alps admitted it would take them at 
least eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony drive into production. At a retreat in 
Pajaro Dunes, Markkula grilled Jobs on what he was going to do. Finally, Belleville interrupted 
and said that he might have an alternative to the Alps drive ready soon. Jobs looked baffled for 
just a moment, and then it became clear to him why he’d glimpsed Sony’s top disk designer in 
Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said. But it was not in anger. There was a big grin on his 
face. As soon as he realized what Belleville and the other engineers had done behind his back, said 
Hertzfeld, “Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right 
thing.” It was, after all, what he would have done in their situation.

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