Initially we agreed that I would spend approximately a third of my time in Cupertino. I had already been traveling regularly during the previous three years, doing my work for Astarte, so this didn’t seem like it would be too much of a burden for me or my family. I was quite experienced working remotely too, what with Astarte in Germany and me in Minnesota.

I heard this faint voice calling me from somewhere in my subconscious, raising some objections to the idea, but I could not make out the words. I was too excited to be going to work for Apple; something I had aspired to but never dreamed would happen.

The main entrance to the Apple campus – circa 2000

It was left to my judgement how often and how long I actually needed to be in Cupertino. I began by flying out on Sundays, staying the week, then flying home on the following Sunday. After only a couple trips I decided it made more sense to stay a bit longer each time, coming on Sunday and leaving nine or ten days later. This made it easier to follow up with any projects which were started the first week and “spilled over” a bit.

Big Company Perks – Big Company Limitations
Apple has all the services and amenities of a big company, things that seemed downright luxurious to me, having come from years of self-employment and tight budgets. When I decided it was time for me to travel (to Cupertino or elsewhere), I just picked up the phone to the corporate travel group and they made all the arrangements. I didn’t have to worry about the prices or whether or not my stay was long enough to qualify for discounts, or any of that crap. There were two hotels in the vicinity which were Apple favorites, the Cupertino Inn, the Hilton Garden Inn. This was the height of the market craziness out there, so it cost approximately $250 a night to stay in these places, which was a shocking amount considering you could stay in Manhattan for less.

My home away from home

It seemed excessive to me, but the way I looked at it, it was to Apple’s advantage to have me close by and comfortable. It’s the same business logic that motivates many silicon valley companies to provide fabulous dining options for their employees; it keeps them from leaving the campus for long, unproductive lunches.

Four hours out, six hours back
It is roughly a four hour flight from Minneapolis to San Jose. There is also a two hour time difference. Adding in the time to get to the airport, park my car (or return the rental car), waiting for the plane, then getting to my destination when I arrived, the whole ‘commute’ took four hours of ‘clock’ time going from home to Apple, and six hours going back. If you figure I did this trip two or three times each month, that means I was spending 20 to 30 hours a month on my commute. Not bad considering that many people who work at Apple drive an hour each way, each day.

To come:
The duality of my life at Apple…incredible excitement while I was at the office…incredible boredom of living in a hotel so much of my life, without my ’stuff’.

Two sets of everything…

How one third of each month turned into two thirds, and more.

My office became sort of half office, half closet…

Those frequent flyer miles add up…getting spoiled by regular upgrades to first class seats.

Trying to convince Apple to spend half of what the hotels were costing to rent me an apartment.

SoundJam – The best non-Apple MP3 player

But David, who ran product marketing for hardware, and was soon to take over that role for the new software division, asked me to pinch-hit on another project. He wanted me to expand and polish the initial product marketing briefing document for an application that the rumor site ‘AppleInsider’ thought would be called iMusic. The correct name, of course, was iTunes (although I didn’t know it by that name until a bit later.)

Apple had been searching for a fulltime product manager for this new product for a while, but still hadn’t found the perfect person, so David asked me to help. I had been slightly involved in helping him research available CD recording technology for possible inclusion with the Mac OS, so he was aware of my background in that area.
Perhaps more importantly, he knew I had already embraced the whole digital-music-on-computer-thing wholeheartedly. I had tried pretty much every CD-ripping tool, every MP3 encoder, and every player application out there, both Windows and Mac. I was already on my second portable MP3 player (a Rio 500), having outgrown my original Rio. I suppose I was the logical choice to fill in on the iTunes project.

A ‘product brief’ is a document created for use by the product marketing team as they begin to spread the information about a new product launch to the various departments within Apple. It contains detailed information about the products objectives, including features, functions, target markets, competition, launch dates, potential problems, expected demand, and much more. It also contains statements of the product’s strategy and key messages. When a new product moves towards its launch date, many diverse groups need to get involved: advertising, operations, support, events, sales, PR, and more. The product brief becomes is meant to answer all the questions that each group might have about a new product and get them started on their respective tasks. For example, before Apple’s brilliant advertising group can begin to create advertising concepts, they need to know the features and benefits of the product and how it relates to the competition. The product brief gives them this information, and much more.
In the case of iTunes, my task was to take the rough outline that had been created by someone else, identify what as missing, gather the required information and fill in the many gaps.

To come:
Checking out the competition

The SoundJam factor

This chapter will be about the creation of the sample files which would ultimately be included with DVD Studio Pro version 1, and the lessons I learned about Apple’s very high standards.

Not-invented-here vs homebrew vs quality

Changing my bad habits (which came from working for small, budget-constrained clients for most of my career.)

New horizons open before me…

…this ties into the creation of the themes for iDVD…

This was particularly important in my case, as I had some incompatible habits to break. In my work for Astarte and other consulting clients, I was accustomed to speaking to any press person who was willing to take the time to listen. In fact it was a big part of my job to try to ‘get the ear’ of the press. At Apple, getting the attention of the press is never a problem. The opposite is true; the press is anxious for any chance to peak inside Apple. So even though I was only the DVD product manager, journalists could be counted on to ask wide ranging questions about Apple’s products, strategies, management, and more. It was these questions from ‘left field’ that took some training and discipline to deal with.

The workshop involved a lot of role playing, where the trainers would act as journalists and I would be given a hypothetical product to represent. Along with that there would be a set of defined ‘messages’ or talking points. This is basic marketing communications technique, where the product team determines in advance what the key features and benefits of the product are and attempts to distill them down to a few key points that are easy to grasp and communicate. It might be something like ‘the Macintosh is the hub of the digital lifestyle’ or ‘iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket’. Every product had several key messages.

The number one principle of doing a press briefing is to always try to include one or more of your key points in every answer. And in cases where the questions attempt to move things off the topic, you always try to steer things back your direction. This is very simple to describe, but sometimes extremely difficult to do.

In their hunger for interesting tidbits about Apple in general, or Steve Jobs specifically, there could be some truly bizarre questions. I might be in the middle of demonstrating DVD Studio Pro’s ability to preview in realtime when someone would ask ‘is it true that Steve Jobs’ children are vegetarians too?’, or ‘how can Steve have enough time to run both Apple and Pixar at the same time?’. Well even if you’ve thought about such things in advance, it’s still quite jarring to have these questions appear out of nowhere. The training showed some techniques for moving away from these sorts of distracting questions…and trying to get back to the topics…’Apple has a very strong management team which enables us to continually create great products like (insert name of product here)… You get the idea.

To insure that newbies like myself didn’t make too big a fool of themselves when being interviewed, I was always accompanied by at least one person from the PR department. There job was to kick me in the shin (figuratively) if I started to say something stupid.

…flying solo…

…press tour…

…awkward meeting with Newsweek right after Time Magazine had gotten the advance info on the new iMac for their cover story…

View of Central Park from the offices of Newsweek

…not meeting Julio…

…more…

…story of how I never imagined I’d get any closer to Apple…

…Ron Buck, Ron Eibensteiner, and other directors…

…Ron and Ron have lunch with Steve…

The inner lobby area

…more about building layout and ’spirit’

The birthplace of iTunes

…most parts of the building were accessible to most employees, but there were obvious exceptions.

…more to come…

…what was a typical day…

…what did I do when I was working from home…

…what were the hours…

A bit of background is in order:

• The camera Steve was using had been specifically selected because it was easy to turn on and it had an easy to connect USB cable
• This demo had been rehearsed several times and worked perfectly each time
• Apple employees didn’t normally stand at the edge of the stage during the keynote

…what really went wrong?

…you’ll find out.

Our lives were about to change in a big way.

We reviewed our ‘talking points’ for the hundreth time…why our technology was so valuable, how innovative our applications were, how brilliant our engineeering team was, the great skill of our marketing guy (that would be me), and so on. All the points looked so good when I wrote up the proposals, and all sounded completely lame when we thought about them in the context of the upcoming meeting.

At this moment, I was very unhappy that I had seen the movie ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’. I had no idea if the movie was accurate or not, but it kept coming into my head. I couldn’t help wondering if Steve was really like that, and if we were about to be devoured by sharks.

We gathered our notes and our courage and headed to Apple. We were met in the lobby by Tim S., who ran the QuickTime engineering group. He had been my primary point of contact during the ‘mating dance’ which led up to this meeting. He took us to the elevator and up to the fourth floor of building 1 to the board room.

Was it just me? or was the air different up here? I looked around the room. Windows along the far wall looked out over the entry area in front of the building. There was a conference table large enough for about 15 comfortable chairs. In the table top in front of each chair were power and network connections concealed under a trap door. At one end of the room was the usual podium, projection screen and television that you’d see in any nice conference room. But at the opposite end was something you would definitely see only here: five fruit colored iMacs displayed on a long built-in credenza. Each one fairly glowed in the light of a recessed spotlight directly above. It was exciting to be there, but I had only a second to take it in.

Phil and Avie were already in the room waiting. We had a bit of nervous chit chat while we waited for Steve to arrive. It didn’t take long. He introduced himself, we all shook hands and sat down ( I had heard somewhere that he didn’t like to shake hands, but that turned out to be bunk, like some many of the things you hear about him.)

A minute later a women came in to the room with a cup of tea and set it in front of Steve. She left, and we got down to business…

stuff to add: the discussions, Germany and Minnesota, the aftermath, zipping our lips, questions about our financial involvement, timing, relocation questions.