Steve Jobs’ Biggest Trick

Microsoft’s biggest trick was making people believe that Windows is an open standard. Certainly it isn’t, “open” doesn’t mean “common.” Linux is open, Windows and Macs have torturous EULAs. Still, say something long enough and people will tend to believe it.

A “trick,” of course, implies some level of subterfuge, spin that people wouldn’t accept if the facts were plainly laid out to them. The obfuscation of the plain truth is often justified by asserting that the lie is serving a greater good. Or a trick can be just plain mean. To illustrate, compare and contrast the following examples:

Scenario 1:
An excited, tail wagging dog is staring at the tennis ball in your hand, You cock your arm back and make a motion that gives every indication that you have, indeed, thrown the ball. The dog, looking for a surrogate bunny to chase, takes off at maximum Scooby Doo speed. Moments later the beast is stymied, cocking his head quizzically he wonders, “Just where is the yellow orb?” Ha ha funny for the biped throwing the ball, but not the ideal situation for the canine. Dogs want a crazily jumping ball that replicates, on some level, a wee beasty they can bloody and kill.

Scenario 2:
A sick child is in your house. The tyke is clearly in major discomfort, you can tell by stomach fluids emanating from every orifice. Having had unfortunate experiences with medicines before, the child, you are certain, will refuse to take the pharmaceutical product that is both palliative and curing. You, realizing that in this case the cure tastes like candy, go into the kitchen, babbling about finding candy, and return with the medicine. The child, trusting and sick, ingests the medicine thinking that he was getting a tasty treat.

In both cases a trick has been played, in one case you’re a cold-hearted (yet entertained) swine. In the other scenario, you’re simply a loving parent doing the right thing for your child.

Which brings us to Steve Jobs’ greatest trick. Those that opine Steve deftest move was convincing Apple to buy NeXT¹ are mistaken. Convincing Gil Amelio that NeXT was the path to future prosperity was the equivalent to cajoling someone into buying girl scout cookies instead of a box off the supermarket shelves. The customer knows they need cookies, the only question is the source.

Steve Jobs most adroit move was convincing Mac users that OS X would still be a Mac. Since the first Mac rolled off the assembly line and made it into the hands of a consumer, Apple’s mantra was all about ease of use. To cite one example, you can look for a command line on any Mac running a classic OS and you won’t find one. It wasn’t that a command line would have been impossible to implement, it was omitted purposefully to keep the Mac equally accessible to all users.

Another major difference between OS X and earlier Mac OSes is the inclusion of programming languages. The later forays of Classic OS into programming were easy to use programming environments like the brilliant, but horribly promoted, Hypercard and AppleScript. Any clever user could use either of the examples to do some nifty things, but it was clear that Apple didn’t was keeping them simple on purpose.

OS X, conversely, ships with a plethora of programming options. A quick example is in order. Fire up your non Universal copy of Excel and invoke the factorial function. You’ll find you quickly hit a limit (with Excel v.X the limit is around 170!). Fire up the terminal, invoke Python, and you can, with just a little bit of typing, crunch some amazingly large factorials (>5000!). It’s a largely useless exercise for real world needs, but instructive as to the power of the command line. Clearly, OS X has deviated from the idea that if something isn’t accessible to everyone it must be excluded to a more flexible credo of it’s there but you won’t have to use it.

Since most users won’t ever invoke the terminal or use factorials, a less esoteric argument is in order. For the average Mac owner nothing personifies the computer more than the look of the interface. When Mac users first started seriously thinking about the next generation OS what they really wanted was the classic Mac OS with preemptive memory protection. Mac users were conditioned to the classic interface, the way the finder and folders worked, and they were satisfied. What they weren’t satisfied with was trying to type something while the computer burned a CD (a near impossible task when using the Mac classic). When they got a look at OS X many were shocked, there just isn’t much OS 9 look or feel in OS X.

There are, of course, many more differences between OS X and OS 9 but further examples would only belabor the point: there’s no real reason to think of OS X as a Mac variant or even the next logical step in the evolution of all things Macintosh. Yet, users embraced the wildly different OS X as part of the Macintosh family. How could Mac users be so persuaded that OS X was still a Mac?

The first move Apple made to convince users they were still using a Mac was to make the Apps very similar under both OSes. For example, if you were running iMovie using OS 9 and fired iMovie up in OS X the interface looked nearly identical. This was a key move, since users tend to spend their time working with programs rather than banging around the finder.

More important than the consistency between programs was the overall improvement in the OS. The experience of Mac users at the local newspaper illustrates this. As the paper transitioned, in late 2005 no less, from OS 9 to OS X there was the expected grousing. After a few weeks the complaining stopped. OS X was so obviously superior that the folks in the ad department stopped pointing out the differences in OS X and OS 9 and started wondering why the place hadn’t made the jump sooner.

For die-hard Mac zealots the experience was much the same. Once they got around to trying OS X they found it to be much, much better than any earlier Mac operating system. The truly convinced, those that maintained that the Mac OS is always the best OS without regard to the objective truth of the matter, faced a choice. The could either admit OS X was much better than, say OS 9 but wildly different or they could accept OS X as a Mac and maintain that the Mac, as always, had the best OS known to man.

In the end, it is clear that Steve’s greatest trick was getting users to accept OS X as a legitimate version of the Mac OS, after all you don’t hear people pining for the good old days of OS 9. The methods used to achieve this end, program consistency, allowing people to convince themselves and rapid fire updates were clever transitional moves but Steve was never completely forthcoming. Likely, for good reasons, if Steve had come out and said, “The Mac OS currently sucks², we’re going to give you something much better” those with deep attachments to the Mac would have rebelled en masse. So, was Steve’s trick a dog-befuddling fake toss, or a shrewd method to get the faithful to accept the inevitable with minimal fuss?

1. An Apple employee said of the move that returned SteveJobs to Apple: “Steve will ***k Gil so hard his ears pop.” Whether this quote says more about Dr. Amelio’s trusting nature or the average geeks grasp of anatomy is left as an exercise for the reader.

2. While Steve never said explicitly that the Mac OS had become a mess his actions spoke more loudly. When he first returned to Apple he refused to use Macs, instead relying on a machine running the NeXT OS.