Steve Jobs полностью

Machines of the Year

As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time’s Man of the Year. He arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, Michael Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But Jobs did not end up on the cover. Instead the magazine chose “the Computer” as the topic for the year-end issue and called it “the Machine of the Year.”

Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the reporting done by Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled rock music for the magazine. “With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—so harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and went on to be a partner in the venture firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by complaining that his reporting had been “siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s “reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an excellent King of France.”

To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had forsaken, Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the magazine about Lisa, and he berated him in the Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people. “When the Time reporter asked me if Steve had a daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t let friends deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a jerk and deny paternity. He was really angry and felt violated and told me in front of everyone that I had betrayed him.”

But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year. As he later told me:

Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so I actually cared about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was an edge to him. He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get this story and say, “We can’t make this guy Man of the Year.” That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too excited about things like that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?” And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I actually cried.

In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended his reporting to be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite what he thought. That year the top editors (I was then a junior editor there) decided early on to go with the computer rather than a person, and they commissioned, months in advance, a piece of art from the famous sculptor George Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor. “We never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the computer, so that was the first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We never searched around for a face to be put on the cover.”

Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs paid his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.