Apple Computer bought NeXT in after its own efforts to upgrade the Macintosh operating system failed. Steve Jobs. The NeXT combined powerful hardware and software in ways that had never been done before. Between them they were senior controllers, engineering managers and marketing people.
Not only were they important at Apple but they were inextricably involved with every detail of the company — and yet here was Steve Jobs, extricating them. After Jobs presented his list of the people he was going to take away with him to a new company, CEO John Sculley discussed removing Jobs as Apple chairman. That sounds asinine as Jobs had reportedly made clear he was leaving but in a formal letter Jobs recounted what had happened.
On Friday, after I told John Sculley who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple's willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my new venture. Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of my resignation. Just to make certain his position and version of events was widely known, Jobs sent copies of that letter to newspapers.
On Monday September 23, , Apple filed a lawsuit claiming Jobs was misappropriating Apple secrets and breaching his fiduciary responsibility by his planning to create a new company and bring people with him, all while still Chairman.
Jobs again turned to the press and told journalists that the lawsuit was absurd and a shock. He told the New York Times that he and Apple had been negotiating a way to proceed. Apple would quite quickly settle out of court: the case concluded the next January. The agreement reached was that Jobs would not hire any more Apple people for six months and that NeXT machines would be more powerful than any of Apple's computers. That last seems a peculiar stipulation but back then there was a view that there were personal computers and there were workstations.
The former were on their way to becoming mass-market consumer items and the latter were much higher-powered, much more expensive tools for corporations and academia.
Apple didn't want the workstation market. While all of this was going on, there would be one more piece of publicity that radically changed the fortunes of NeXT. One evening in November , businessman and later politician H. It featured Steve Jobs and this is what Perot saw. The next morning, Perot phoned Jobs and offered to invest in his company. Jobs then waited a week so as not to appear desperate, but he took up the offer the moment he could. It wasn't that NeXT had no money.
This was an outside investor contributing significantly and also taking a seat on the board. Perot reportedly hoped to see a tenfold return and said: "in terms of a startup company, it's one that carries the least risk of any I've seen in 25 years in the computer industry". In practice, engineers could get more elsewhere so NeXT sometimes added in incentives such as a substantial signing bonus or relocation package.
He designed the NeXT logo. You've seen his work before. Rand, then aged 71, had famously designed IBM's striped logo and reportedly is who persuaded the firm to go by initials instead of International Business Machines.
He was officially working for IBM in , at least to the extent that he felt working for NeXT would be a conflict of interest. Jobs had to get IBM to agree to his using Rand. Even then, though, Rand wasn't about to get caught up in Jobs's company.
He offered a one-shot, take it or leave it deal: he would design a logo and he would not then change it in any way. This part of the story is often reported and it's made to sound as if Rand sketched out the NeXT logo and pocketed a hundred grand.
Logo design is far more intensive than that: you typically ended up with a very thick book of instructions. There would be the logo but then that same logo at different sizes, for different purposes such as print or online.
There would be four-color versions and black and white ones. Back in the days when people wrote letters, we've seen design books that specified the positioning of a logo on the page. Stationery printed to the design specifications also sometimes included a tiny dot to mark where you were supposed to start typing. We don't know the exact details of Rand's proposal but you can see the book, you can see his June presentation of the logo to NeXT in this profile of the company released in They'd moved there after some months working out of Steve Jobs's house at Mountain Home Road and would later settle in offices in Redwood City.
Perhaps they should've stayed in Jobs's spare rooms a little longer. For all that NeXT started with very few employees, it had big plans from the very beginning. He quotes Susan Barnes, cofounder and chief financial officer, as explaining that: "The necessary organization was already in place for the time when NeXT would be a billion-dollar company, Barnes proudly said, 'so that we won't be breaking down just at the time we get that big.
The year became and then and still there was nothing to actually show anyone. Purportedly, you couldn't even see a NeXT prototype if you were offered a job at the company: you had to take the position first.
Jobs broke that rule whenever he liked yet still managed to keep an air of mystery about the computer. So much so that when he took to a stage to reveal the NeXT computer three years after he left Apple, it was an event. Newsweek claimed that there were 3, people in the audience. It's also known that some 4, invitations were sent and hundreds of those invited got there early to queue up.
According to Stross, one of them was noted photographer Richard Smolan who flew in overnight from the opposite coast. As with the Macintosh launch in and again with the iPhone in , Steve Jobs took the audience through a demonstration that hid how unfinished the devices were.
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