The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 97

WINDOWS

In the early 1980s, before the introduction of the Macintosh, Microsoft had a good relationship with Apple. In fact, on the day that IBM launched its PC in August 1981, Gates was visiting Jobs at Apple, which was a regular occurrence since Microsoft was making most of its revenue writing software for the Apple II. Gates was still the supplicant in the relationship. In 1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write new versions of its software for the Macintosh, which was still a secret development project. So at their August 1981 meeting, he confided his plans to Gates.

Gates thought that the idea of the Macintosh—an inexpensive computer for the masses with a simple graphical user interface—sounded, as he put it, “super neat.” He was willing, indeed eager, to have Microsoft write application software for it. So he invited Jobs up to Seattle. In his presentation there to the Microsoft engineers, Jobs was at his charismatic best. With a bit of metaphorical license, he spun his vision of a factory in California that would take in sand, the raw material of silicon, and churn out an “information appliance” that was so simple it would need no manual. The Microsoft folks code-named the project “Sand.” They even reverse-engineered it into an acronym: Steve’s Amazing New Device.¹¹¹

Jobs had one major worry about Microsoft: he didn’t want it to copy the graphical user interface. With his feel for what would wow average consumers, he knew that the desktop metaphor with point-and-click navigation would be, if done right, the breakthrough that would make computers truly personal. At a design conference in Aspen in 1981, he waxed eloquently about how friendly computer screens would become by using “metaphors that people already understand such as that of documents on a desktop.” His fear that Gates would steal the idea was somewhat ironic, since Jobs himself had filched the concept from Xerox. But to Jobs’s way of thinking, he had made a business deal for the rights to appropriate Xerox’s idea. Plus he had improved it.

So Jobs wrote into his contract with Microsoft a clause that he believed would give Apple at least a year’s head start in having a graphical user interface. It decreed that for a certain period Microsoft would not produce for any company other than Apple any software that “utilizes a mouse or tracking ball” or had a point-and-click graphical interface. But Jobs’s reality distortion field got the better of him. Because he was so intent on getting Macintosh on the market by late 1982, he became convinced that it would happen. So he agreed that the prohibition would last until the end of 1983. As it turned out, Macintosh did not ship until January 1984.

In September 1981 Microsoft secretly began designing a new operating system, intended to replace DOS, based on the desktop metaphor with windows, icons, mouse, and pointer. It hired from Xerox PARC Charles Simonyi, a software engineer who had worked alongside Alan Kay in creating graphical programs for the Xerox Alto. In February 1982 the Seattle Times ran a picture of Gates and Allen that, as a sharp-eyed reader may have noted, had a whiteboard in the background with a few sketches and the words Window manager on top. By that summer, just as Jobs began to realize that the release date for the Macintosh would slip until at least late 1983, he became paranoid. His fears were heightened when his close pal Andy Hertzfeld, an engineer on the Macintosh team, reported that his contact at Microsoft had begun asking detailed questions about how bitmapping was executed. “I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac,” Hertzfeld recalled.¹¹²

Jobs’s fears were realized in November 1983, two months before the Macintosh was launched, when Gates held a press conference at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan. He announced that Microsoft was developing a new operating system that would be available for IBM PCs and their clones, featuring a graphical user interface. It would be called Windows.

Gates was within his rights. His restrictive agreement with Apple expired at the end of 1983, and Microsoft did not plan to ship Windows until well after that. (As it turned out, Microsoft took so long to finish even a shoddy version 1.0 that Windows would not end up shipping until November 1985.) Nevertheless, Jobs was livid, which was not a pretty sight. “Get Gates down here immediately,” he ordered one of his managers. Gates complied, but he was unintimidated. “He called me down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him, ‘We’re betting our company on graphics interface.’?” In a conference room filled with awed Apple employees, Jobs shouted back, “You’re ripping us off! I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!”¹¹³ Gates had a habit of getting calmer and cooler whenever Jobs worked himself into a frenzy. At the end of Jobs’s tirade, Gates looked at him and, in his squeaky voice, replied with what became a classic zinger: “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”¹¹⁴

Jobs remained angry and resentful for the rest of his life. “They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame,” he said almost thirty years later, shortly before he died. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.”¹¹⁵

The courts ended up ruling that Gates was legally correct. A decision by a federal appeals court noted that “GUIs were developed as a user-friendly way for ordinary mortals to communicate with the Apple computer . . . based on a desktop metaphor with windows, icons and pull-down menus which can be manipulated on the screen with a hand-held device called a mouse.” But it ruled, “Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor.” Protecting a look-and-feel innovation was almost impossible.

Whatever the legalities were, Jobs had a right to be angry. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. Microsoft’s GUI was shoddy, with tiled windows that could not overlap with each other and graphics that looked like they had been designed by drunkards in a Siberian basement.

Nevertheless, Windows eventually clawed its way to dominance, not because its design was better but because its business model was better. The market share commanded by Microsoft Windows reached 80 percent by 1990 and kept rising, to 95 percent by 2000. For Jobs, Microsoft’s success represented an aesthetic flaw in the way the universe worked. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he later said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”¹¹⁶

The primary reason for Microsoft’s success was that it was willing and eager to license its operating system to any hardware maker. Apple, by contrast, opted for an integrated approach. Its hardware came only with its software and vice versa. Jobs was an artist, a perfectionist, and thus a control freak who wanted to be in charge of the user experience from beginning to end. Apple’s approach led to more beautiful products, a higher profit margin, and a more sublime user experience. Microsoft’s approach led to a wider choice of hardware. It also turned out to be a better path for gaining market share.