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Inside Steve’s Brain: The Leander Kahney interview

Lonnie Lazar — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:12:56 -0500

In the May issue of Mac|Life, we interviewed Leander Kahney, managing editor of Wired News, contributer to the Cult of Mac blog, and author of the new book Inside Steve’s Brain (Portfolio, $23.95). The book, in bookstores now, is part management theory text, part history of Apple and technology, and part Steve Jobs biography—a lively, enthralling look into the people and processes behind the success of Apple, and a glimpse into the motivations and passions of the man who guides and controls the company like no other CEO in business today.

We spoke with Kahney to peek inside his brain and find out what it was like to write about the biggest personality in the computer industry. Here’s the full transcript.

Mac|Life: Apple is notoriously secretive -- its employees rarely speak to the media, even after they’ve left the company. Yet you scored interviews with some key players in the Apple story. How were you able to get people close to Steve Jobs to speak on the record?

Leander Kahney: It was tough. I met between 50 to 70 people for the book, and almost all of them turned me down. I approached people who were high up at Apple, and people who worked in the mid levels, people who knew people who worked at Apple, and nobody, nobody wanted to talk.

Silicon Valley is a small town. There are some pretty dire consequences if you fall out of favor. But I think also, people tend to be very loyal to [Steve].

More often than not, he doesn’t get good press. Almost everything that’s been written about him is negative, and that has a kind of chilling effect on people’s willingness to talk.

I managed to get guys who were pretty high up, who’ve known Steve for years, they have pretty good relationships and I assured them I wasn’t digging for dirt, it was more about what does he do right, how does Apple produce one great product after another?

I think they trusted me that I wasn’t interested in his personal life, the tantrums he throws, and I wasn’t going to mess up their relationship with Steve by getting them into an interview.

ML: Does Apple’s secretiveness comes from the development of the company itself, is it the nature of business in a fast-moving industry, or is it a manifestation of Job’s personality?

LK: [Laughs] It thinks it’s all three of those things. It’s the culture of Silicon Valley, it’s the land of the NDA, technology is the most important thing the company has, and to people outside the company they think the secrecy is a bit weird, and kind of unfriendly, but from the company inside, every one I talked to they think its foolish to be talking about what they are doing. They’re giving clues to their competitors, and they think its strange that anybody should think they should operate any other way.

But of course the customers are intensely curious and they want to gossip and they want to know what’s going on so there’s a tension there that will never be satisfactorily satisfied.

ML: Were you surprised by anything you learned -- about Jobs or about Apple?

LK: He’s not an asshole all the time. In fact it’s just a small amount of the time. It’s kind of like ‘Asshole Theater’ -- he sort of puts it on every now and again to scare the shit out of everybody, but he has these really long-term relationships and he’s part of this really deeply collaborative process.

I was impressed with the contributions that everyone else makes. He’s at once the least important element because everyone else is doing the work, but he’s also the most important element because he’s bringing it all together.

ML: Did you try to get Jobs to sit down for an interview?

LK: Yeah, yeah. They told me straightaway they wouldn’t be doing that.

ML: Apple’s success is so identified with Jobs, in his incarnation as co-founder and again as savior, do you think the company will succeed in the inevitable post-Jobs era?

LK: You could argue in a lot of ways the company will do just fine without him because as I spell out in the book, he’s put into place a lot of processes there, the regime of meetings and reviews, all the prototypes they make, the people he’s recruited to head up the different departments, they run those things independently. I think the company will thrive without him unless somebody steps in and wrecks it; if they follow his current methodology, the company would do OK.

ML: Can the company continue pushing the innovation envelope the way it has the last decade?

LK: I think they will definitely continue, in fact it kind of looks like they are just getting started. I’ve never seen a company that’s so very focused and very, very disciplined. They are making very, very clever use of their core technology and their core expertise.

ML: From the book’s title, one could get the impression it’s a Jobs biography. And while it’s got a good amount of personal history and personality detail, it’s really a history of Apple, and a history of the development of computer technology in America. Did you start out intending such a broad sweep?

LK: The original idea was to do a management book in the mold of a Jack Welch-type, management secrets: how Jack Welch resurrected GE, or drove it to success -- the same thing was how Steve Jobs saved Apple.

It was supposed to be a critical look at how Jobs drives the company’s success from a management experience approach, and it kind of turned into a personal biography as a secondary thing.

I was originally going to tackle it as a critical analysis of how does the company mange to do these things so well – design, marketing, and intuitive software -- but then I realized Jobs’ influence and control of that company is pretty singular… There aren’t many other CEOs who allow their personality to be expressed so closely through the company, so it occurred to me that you could look at the company through the lens of different aspects of his personality. It seemed to be a perfect way to segment the story.

As I got into it, I got a lot of information about the completely different tack they take to things like innovation, and I got a bit of the process in there, and what I was hoping was that you could look at Apple’s process and other people could learn from it and apply it to their own situations.

One of the problems with Steve Jobs is that he’s so singular, a lot of what he does is so contrary to a lot of management advice, I found myself advising people to behave like Jobs when so few can get away with that.

ML: As the company grows, do you think it will be able to continue hiring A players, or will it have to take on a few bozos?

LK: [Laughs] Well, I think they are going to stick with the tried and true and try to avoid the bozos. You look at the Apple Store, there was an interesting statistic that said they reject more applicants than Stanford does. It’s definitely not like going to Circuit City, where you’re being served by some kid who hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about.

ML: Because technology moves so fast and book publishing is a slow moving beast, are there developments at Apple you think the book missed or that you wish you’d have explored more?

LK: There’s a ton of stuff I left out. The whole thing with writing is it’s a learning process. The big thing I was freaking out about was the iPhone, of course.

I tried really, really hard to get the iPhone story and got nowhere.

As a writer, it’s a kind of a self-defeating subject because you’re trying to write about a company that is so obsessively secretive, you’re bound to come up frustrated. It’s worse than writing about the CIA.

ML: What do you think of iPhone 2.0, coming in June, and its integration with Microsoft Exchange server?

LK: It was a surprise for me, but I guess it’s the same position that Palm found itself in when they launched the Palm Pilot, that was initially a device for consumers but they quickly realized a lot of CIOs and business people were picking these things up and using them for work, so the next order of business was to make these things corporate friendly.

For them the exclusive contract with AT&T is not a big impediment. Corporations would quite happily buy millions of iPhones and pay the contracts if it has this kind of business capability, so, there’s clearly a big opportunity there for [Apple] moneywise.

ML: What will be the good and bad outcomes to the SDK release for the iPhone?

LK: It means Apple can concentrate on consumer friendly applications like iPhoto or whatever, and leave the business stuff to third party developers.

The good is that this thing is a little mini computer that is always connected to the Internet so you can do some really cool things with that. There should be some really cool apps that will affect gaming, and there is a lot of really interesting experimentation that can be done with exceleramotism with a touch interface, so there can be some really, really cool apps.

The downside…[Pause] Uh…that you’d spend half your paycheck on these things?

ML: Has Jobs put a ding in the universe?

LK: Oh yeah. From the very get-go.

The guy is a fascinating guy and he’s become one of the most powerful industrialists, capitalists, his influence is astonishing, it’s not just in business it’s in culture, and he’s sort of reinvented all these different industries.

Look at the Apple II. That was the first packaged personal computer for consumers. That was the first real PC.

That alone should have sealed his place in the history books.

We are a completely computerized society. The computer has managed to mediate everything we do -- live, work, play -- and even though most of them are Windows machines, that is essentially a Macintosh interface they are using.

And now you’ve got these new consumer devices that are little mini computers, the Internet appliances, the iPod, the iPhone the Apple TV, I think the next decade is going to be Apple’s to own.

An Interview With Spore’s Infectious Designers

Zack Stern — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:01:21 -0600

In a word, Spore is overwhelming. This ultimate simulation is coming to Macs and PCs simultaneously on September 7, 2008. But somehow, this simulation of early life, evolution, tribal interactions, rise of civilizations, and interplanetary colonization makes “overwhelming” a good thing. On top of that, players create their own automatically animated creatures, vehicles, buildings, and more. (Check out our exclusive screenshots and deeper impressions in the April issue of Mac|Life magazine.)

We recently stopped by EA’s Maxis office to try the game and speak with its developers. Spore Chief Designer Will Wright created SimCity, The Sims, and founded the original Maxis. Spore Executive Producer Lucy Bradshaw previously helped develop several The Sims games, most recently as Executive Producer. Both spoke with us about planetary phases, potential expansion packs, iPod and iPhone plans, and your personal Brian Eno.

The scope of Spore is just immense. What are some things that you’ve been able to include in this huge scope that you’re like, “Wow, I didn’t think we’d be able to get that into Spore?”

Will Wright: It depends on when you ask that question. [Everyone laughs.] … Probably 50 percent of it, you know. Because the initial thing--actually initially, it was going to be everywhere from the end of evolution into space. And then it kind of got expanded to, “Oh, let’s go all the way to microscopic and the beginning of life.”

But there are things that were fairly recent additions like, you know, the development of the pollination system [that sends user-created elements to other gamers], tagging [those elements with keywords]--all that is fairly recent. Procedural music…. A lot of music is generative in the game that Brian Eno has been working on with us.

Lucy Bradshaw: In fact he helped us design the generative music system. He really gave us some great insights and made us believe that we could execute it. Before we got involved with him--

Both: --we’d given up.

Is that like the background music for the game or your civilization theme music?

Will Wright: Different parts of the game. It’s like your city music is procedural. You can also go in and customize and change and fiddle with it…. Depending on what you’ve put on the creature you’ve designed, there’s a different theme playing. In fact, you’re composing the music as you’re building the creature.

Lucy: So it changes over time.… And the ambient music of the planets and everything [also changes].

Anything else that you’re surprised that you were able to include?

Will Wright: I think the galactic simulation of the empires--the way they interact and stuff--ended up being more elaborate than we were originally envisioning. What else? The diversity of planets and planet types ended up being much broader than we originally envisioned…. There are of course millions, literally millions of different ones. You know every single one is unique.

Lucy Bradshaw: Some of the tricks that our graphics team has pulled off… When you’re playing and over the horizon, and you see a planet coming. And there you are playing the Creature Phase, and when you finally zoom out with your spaceship and see your whole planet for the first time and realize, “There I am in my solar system. I saw that planet across the horizon.” That sort of sense of depth and wonder.

Will Wright: The sky that you see at night when you’re in evolution. You look up, you might see these planets and moons and stars. They’re actually doing the real thing. They’re actually being simulated doing their real orbits. When you get [into space] you realize, “Oh I’m seeing that one so much because it’s my moon. And this one I see very infrequently because it’s so far out in orbit.”… You’re actually seeing the apogee and perigee of these things being simulated. And once you get to Space Phase, you realize you were looking at something that wasn’t an imposter but was the actual physical motion of the planets around you.

Lucy Bradshaw: So those are surprising moments that even now they kind of catch my breath.

And what about things that you wish that you could have included in this huge scope that you just had to cut?

Will Wright: [Laughing] A million things.

Lucy Bradshaw: Some of them are very large-- The whole bit about sculpting planets out of gasses would have been a whole phase that went on.

Will Wright: We had hundreds of prototypes which involved you actually controlling the birth of a star. And the formation of the planets on the planetary disc. And other areas of the game that I think we’ll probably eventually develop and we ended up cutting because they didn’t seem like a good return on investment. Like the evolution of the water in the multi-cellular sense, we kind of cut out. We kind of made a firm jump from microbial life to living on land. You know without the underwater evolution phase. That’s another big area.

Will the future of Spore let you release those sorts of versions of it at some point?

Will Wright: I’m sure at some point down the road we’ll be expanding in all sorts of directions, and we’ll be watching what the players do with it.

Lucy Bradshaw: And not only that, but I mean, some of the areas that are of interest are just what we can do with these creators and, you know, how versatile they are and where we might be able to take those.

Will Wright: The tools.

Lucy Bradshaw: The tools themselves. The creature creator and vehicle creator, and being able to take a direction that’s even apart from what we’ve done.

Why make a Mac version of it? Is it a romantic decision or a business decision or somehow both?

Lucy Bradshaw: ... First of all, games that Will had made befor--SimCity--originated on the Mac, had a strong following on the Mac, and I think launching first on the Mac was part of the reason for its success, because journalists were on them… [With Spore,] there’s sort of this energy with [the Mac] audience.

Will Wright: We want to see what weird, unexpected things people will do with these tools. And I think the Mac group will be over-represented and the people that surprise us with the weird stuff they do with tools.

Lucy Bradshaw: We’re kind of excited to take it to that platform and see what happens with it.

Why use TransGaming and a Cider port versus a native Mac translation?

Lucy Bradshaw: … When you talk about just the economies in terms of the Mac gaming audience as opposed to the amount of time and effort it takes to port something going native, with as much work as we’ve got, we can move it to the Mac audience a lot faster by using this approach. While I think there may be some advantages to going native, I think this gets you probably the best of both worlds. You get that game on the Mac where as a lot of games don’t move over there. And you’re really tapping into… Spore at the same time. So often it’s like six to nine months later.

We’ve partnered with Aspyr [on other games]. They’re really great. They did native versions before… like Sims 2. It took them, almost--I think Sims 2 Mac launched about nine months after the original. And every single expansion pack, it’s like six months after the original.

Will Wright: And that’s actually pretty fast.

Lucy Bradshaw: I think there’s a lot of benefit to doing a simultaneous launch.

[Editors note: EA is publishing all versions of Spore. They are not partnering with Aspyr for Spore on OS X. We apologize for any confusion.]

Will we see Spore on iPods or the iPhone?

Will Wright: I’d love to.

Lucy Bradshaw: It’d be interesting, and I think there’s conversations, but it’s not something we could announce right now.

Will Wright: [Pulls an iPhone out of his jeans pocket] This is my favorite device. [Everyone laughs.]