Since starting this book I’ve occasionally been accused of being a Steve Jobs apologist. I can see how it might look that way. Even when I’ve written about being chewed out by Steve, I tended to focus on the positive aspects of the situation. Well, this book is just getting started and this is not one of those situations.
It was August 31, 2001, and I had already been in Richmond, Virginia for three days preparing for Steve’s presentation. He was coming to inaugurate the much heralded program that would give every student in Henrico County an iBook to use. Soon the hall would be filled with hundreds of students, parents, adminstrators and media types.
The gear was all set and and I had finished installing and testing iDVD, along with the sample files that Steve would use in his demo. I was just waiting for Steve to show up to run through the demo and make any last minute adjustments. I felt totally ready (what a fool I was.)
The video clips and photos to be used had been selected a few days earlier at a meeting with Cheryl Vedoe, who was Apple’s Vice President of Education Marketing. For that meeting I had prepared an iDVD project with all the education-focused movies which Steve had approved and used before, and ran through it with Cheryl who made the final selection. The choices were simplified somewhat by the fact that Steve had demonstrated iDVD only a few weeks earlier to a huge audience of educators at the NECC keynote in Chicago. We had spent a lot of time and effort preparing samples for that event, so it was natural to draw on some of the same material.
Once Cheryl ’signed off’ I had to wait for Steve to decide exactly which items he wanted. He would normally do this the day before a keynote, or at least several hours in advance, so there would be enough time to prepare and burn the disc which he would play as part of the demo. In those days it would take a minimum of an hour for iDVD to encode and write even a short disc. After Steve made his choices, I would then set up a clone of that project on my computer backstage and burn the ’show’ disc and a backup. On the whole, the system worked well.
But this presentation was different; Steve was not going to come early to rehearse so I was instructed to organise the files on the computer and burn the finished discs in advance based on the selections Cheryl had approved. When Steve arrived shortly before showtime, I could simply show him where everything was, and we’d be all set.
Too bad Steve didn’t go along with the plan.
It was about an hour before showtime when Steve sat down at the desk. Launching iDVD, he made a new project, chose the ‘chalkboard’ theme and named his main menu. So far so good. Then he went for the folder I had placed on the desktop to grab some movies; he opened it and hesitated. “Where is the ‘gravity’ movie?” he snapped (referring to a short movie that some students had made to explain gravity.) “We didn’t bring it” I said.
“I have to have that one…you know I always use that movie in my demos!” he blasted.
My internal reaction was ‘no, I don’t know that you always use that movie. In fact, you seem to never want to use the same samples twice, which I’m sure is why Cheryl decided not to include that particular movie this time, since you’d already used it at three major events.’ More importantly, I was asking myself why Cheryl wasn’t coming to my aid. I knew she was there somewhere, and it had been her instructions that caused the current dilemma. But she did not appear. Of course I was too much of a coward to actually verbalize any of that, but I managed to respond that ‘I brought the material that I was told to’. Steve insisted he had to have the ‘gravity’ movie. This was a pretty big problem, because I didn’t have that QuickTime movie with me, and even if I did there was not enough time to encode it and burn a new iDVD disc before the show started.
When I told him this, he got even more upset. “you figure out a way to do it…” Then I remembered that I did have that video with me in one form, on an already burned DVD that had been made for another event. Unfortunately, the DVD had completely different themes and menus, so could not be used at this presentation.
In spite of my anger at being chewed out for doing exactly what I was asked to do, I managed to come up with an idea. I called for the producer to see what he thought. ‘What if we have two DVDs?’ I asked him, ‘one with the correct menus and all the other clips and a second disc that just has the ‘gravity’ movie but the wrong menus; could they switch from the video output of one player to the other just when Steve chooses the button to play gravity, while at the same time someone un-pauses the second player that has the correct movie already queued up?’ ‘Sure…maybe…let’s see if we can make that work.’ he responded, not inspiring much confidence. I explained the idea to Steve and he agreed it would be OK.
Now I just had to make it work. I had less than an hour to make a new DVD that looked just like the original iDVD project but had a button with the thumbnail for the gravity movie that jumped to a ‘dummy’ blank menu. Fortunately, I had partly anticipated this type of problem. In advance I had prepared Photoshop files that mimicked the iDVD menu templates which I could use in DVD Studio Pro. They allowed me to create DVDs that looked like they have been done with iDVD. I also had MPEG encoded versions of all the approved movies on my PowerBook’s drive. So all I had to do was figure out how to get a thumbnail of the ‘gravity’ movie from the existing DVD, put it in the menu template, set up a DVD Studio Pro project that looked like Steve’s iDVD project, multiplex it and burn the disc. Piece of cake.
I worked frantically, trying not to misspell any of the button names as I threw the DSP project together in record time. I popped in the blank disc and started the build and burn process. It was going to be a race to the finish. By my calculations there would be only a few minutes to spare once the disc finished, and we really needed to test it at least once. I’ve never seen a progress bar move as slowly as it did that day.
The disc popped out, I ran over to the second DVD player backstage and queued it up. We tried the switchover and it was perfect; looked exactly the same as if it was playing from the first disc. I took my first breath in about an hour.
The presentation was a smooth as silk and the audience was thrilled. In the meantime, I’d just about given myself a heart attack jumping through hoops so Steve could play a silly movie that wasn’t really any better than the one it replaced. As usual, Steve had gotten his way. But I was pissed.
It’s good that you were prepared… I wonder what would have happened had you not had the other DVD and a backup “template”.
Did Cheryl Vedoe explain why she stayed quiet and didn’t come to you aid. Also was this sort of thing common – for example would someone like Phil Schiller find that Steve would sometimes be unreasonable with him too or did he not do this to the most senior executives.
Also another good example of Steve getting people to do the seemingly impossible. Oh, that I could instill such fear in my employees!
BTW did they just happen to carry spare DVD players around with them and was the equipment at Apple’s keynotes/events rented or did it belong to Apple?
Finally, do you know how Steve used that gulfstream jet of his – was it used for Apple stuff or was it private (i.e. for his own personal use only). Did other people fly in it – for example if they were going to the Tokyo keynote. I don’t imagine you ever went in it did you?
The thing that everybody is missing about this story is that Steve Jobs pretended to show a disc made by iDVD to a bunch of schoolteacher when actually it was made by DVD Studio Pro. And the reason that it was made by DVD Studio Pro instead of iDVD is that iDVD was not fast enough to encode and burn the project in time for the urgent deadline. And yet this was intended to be a demonstration of all the glorious virtues of iDVD.
And this all happened without a single person stopping and saying, ‘Say, isn’t there an ethical issue here?’
It makes you understand how fraudulent advertising happens.
DB.
Pierce – Cheryl thanked me later for making it all work. I’m not sure she realized what a spot it had put me in at the time.
Yes, we always had spares of everything.
About Steve’s plane, I don’t have any direct knowledge one way or another. Mike
Dogger – the disc which Steve showed was exactly the same as could be created with iDVD; so the capabilities were accurately represented. And Steve would tell the audience that we had to burn the disc in advance because it takes too long to do it during the presentation. I believe there is no ethical issue at all.
(Did you know that when ice cream companies take photographs of their products for advertising, they don’t use ice cream? They use plastic simulated ice cream or sometimes even mashed potatoes.)
Pierce – I’m pretty sure that Steve got the jet as a bonus. It’s his jet, so it’s probably not limited to company business.
Mike, would you change it, even though you were pissed?
Rick – In my other encounters with Steve’s high pressure motivational approach, I felt that the end result was better than it would have been otherwise. But in this case it made no difference; the quality and impact of the presentation were not changed one bit by all the extra stress and effort.
that ice cream thing is not true anymore. The FTC requires that all of the representations of the purchased food in an ad or other marketing material be the actual foodstuff. The other foods around it can be changed but the actual food item that you buy has to have the exact same ingredients as the food model. Of course, the food is professionally styled.
The best example of how other materials are used is usually in cereal advertising where the “milk” is usually some much more viscous solution like wood glue or something that is much more opaque and white.
Mike
Even though you’re pissed, you gotta be mighty proud of your solution.
Excellent thinking under pressure. Me being who i am would have most likely told him where to stick it initially, but im sure i would have regreted that. You should see my college tutor and work boss when they tell me to do something without asking me, or going mad i did something wrong.
i love that story! it shows that there can and do go things wrong. even when you’re prepared to the limit of precaution. apple always seems to be so perfect and well planned, this finally shows that things can go wrong. and sometimes be perfect anyway.
Thanks for the interesting story Mike. I think a lot of “can-do” types have been in the situation of having to solve a self-imposed “problem” like the one you’ve described. However, unlike you, most of us work for pretenders (managers who pretend to know more than everyone else, who pretend to have vision, who pretend to have experience, etc).
I think your attitude is what makes you valuable and I think you (and Steve and Cheryl) know that. One thing I find odd though is why you thought that you could “predict” Steve’s moves after having worked with him for so long. You must know that you can’t best the master showman – sometimes simply because he won’t let you.