Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products (10 page)

Just before the release of Twentieth Anniversary Mac, Brunner quit. He went to join Pentagram, the prestigious international design firm founded in London, which had courted him earlier that year.

Brunner’s resignation had been in the cards for months. Early in 1996, he had taken an extended leave of absence. Though he returned that fall, things had gone from bad to worse within Apple and the design department. Everyone was frustrated. Two other longtime designers announced they were leaving before Brunner took his departure in December.

The decisive factor in his leaving was undoubtedly the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. After all the battles to get it to market, Brunner believed bungled positioning and pricing led to the machine’s failure. “It was never intended to be a special edition thing,” said Brunner. “It was intended to be higher-end but a mainstream product. . . . [I]t was a
very provocative, forward-looking design, and it foretold what was coming six or seven years later.”

More important, Brunner said, the process—fraught and hard fought as it had been—represented a line in the sand from the design group, an attempt to change Apple’s internal culture. “That was when we as a design group said we are not going to be a service to other parts of the organization. We are going to take these ideas and push them forward on our own. It pissed people off but it also opened people’s eyes up to what a truly design-driven process can do.”

As the failure of the anniversary Mac indicated, Apple had become dysfunctional; it was a struggle to get products out, and there were constant battles with engineers and executives. “I quit for two reasons,” explained Brunner. “One, the job wasn’t fun, and to be brutally honest I was losing interest in it. I was spending more and more time in management meetings where I would be there for eight hours and only really needed to be there for thirty minutes. You feel like you are atrophying, you are wasting away. I’m not the kind of person that can just do the job even though you fucking hate it. Can’t do it.”

With Brunner’s departure, Apple faced growing chaos. There was pressure once again to conduct a search for a name-brand designer, just like the company had done five years earlier. Brunner advised against looking outside for their next design leader. Most of the design team would depart, he warned, and besides, Apple already had a superstar. The job should go to his deputy, Jony Ive.

“He had quiet leadership qualities and he was super respected,” said Brunner. “Not to put the other guys down at all, for me there was no other choice.”

For some at Apple, Jony’s age and inexperience were at issue. He was only twenty-nine, but Brunner recommended Jony because he admired
his quiet commitment. “He was very consistent, very strong, and he was very ambitious,” said Brunner. “Not in the wear-it-on-your-sleeve kind of ambition that many people have, but he was very strong and insistent. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it well.”

Most of all, Jony had what Brunner called “the full spectrum mentality.” He saw the big picture and the details.

“Jony is very much the craftsman,” Brunner explained. “He loves the big picture but he also revels in the details, being in the factory and knowing exactly where every screw goes. . . . I just knew he had the qualities to be successful.”

In other words, Jony had what it took to succeed in a corporate environment. He was willing to sit through the endless meetings and battle middle managers to get his designs made.

“It would have been a disaster if they had hired a headhunter and hired a guy that had a name and offered him a ton of money,” Brunner said.

Jony got the job. “It was probably one of the better recommendations I ever made,” Brunner said.

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Jony inherited a legacy at Apple that would help him thrive. “The Brunner era (1990–95) was by far the most productive and interesting period in Apple’s design history,” Paul Kunkel would write in
AppleDesign
. “IDg became the most visible and prestigious corporate design group in the world, won more design awards than the rest of the computer industry combined and reached a level where further improvement meant using its own work as a yardstick rather than the competition’s.” A string of successful and groundbreaking products set the template for the future, including the PowerBook (which anticipated today’s MacBooks); the Twentieth Anniversary Mac (the flat-screen iMac); and the Newton, which was a crude precursor to the iPhone and iPad.

Perhaps even more important, Brunner built the studio, hired great talent and set up the culture. “Bob did more than lay the foundations for Jony’s design team at Apple—he built the castle,” said Clive Grinyer. “After Bob, it was the first time that an in-house design team was cool.”
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No design slouch himself, Brunner became a partner in the San Francisco office of Pentagram in 1996. He worked with Amazon on the original Kindle, and with Nike and Hewlett-Packard, among many others. In 2007, Brunner helped create the Beats by Dr. Dre brand of headphones, which have been a mega success. In mid-2007, Brunner founded Ammunition, a design consultancy in San Francisco, where he’s worked with Barnes & Noble, Polaroid and Williams-Sonoma. He’s won a ton of awards, and his work is included in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

But Brunner likes to joke that the only thing he’ll be remembered for is bringing Jony to Apple. “When I die, my tombstone is going to say: ‘The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive!’”

Brunner quit just in time—at least, for him. Just days after Jony took over, Apple warned that the crucial holiday buying season for 1995 would fall far short of expectations, thanks to an overabundance of cheaper, low-end systems, and a shortage of more profitable PowerBooks and high-end desktops.

“Our warehouse was full of Yugos at a time when everyone was buying Mercedes,” said Satjiv Chalil, the VP of marketing at the time.
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Until then Apple had appeared to be flying high. But that troubled holiday quarter would be followed by two years of plunging revenues, a free-falling stock price and a rotating door of lackluster CEOs. Apple’s
tumble was quick and dramatic. In 1994, Apple commanded nearly 10 percent of the worldwide multibillion-dollar market for personal computers, making it the second biggest computer manufacturer in the world after the giant IBM.

But in 1995, Microsoft released its new operating system, Windows 95, which took off like a rocket. Windows 95 was Microsoft’s most shameful rip-off of the Mac operating system yet, but the software made their PCs good-enough facsimiles of the Mac. Cheap, utilitarian Windows 95 machines flew off the shelves, while Apple’s overpriced, incompatible machines did not.

Microsoft licensed its operating system to dozens of hardware makers, who competed stiffly and drove down prices. To stay afloat, Apple tried a desperate tactic. It licensed the Macintosh operating system to several computer makers, including Power Computing, Motorola, Umax and others, but the Mac market remained flat.

In the first quarter of 1996, Apple reported a loss of $69 million and laid off 1,300 staff. In February, the board fired CEO Michael Spindler, who had taken over for John Sculley, appointing in his place Gil Amelio, a veteran of the chip industry with a reputation as a turnaround artist. But in the eighteen months that Amelio was on the job, he proved ineffectual and unpopular. Apple lost $1.6 billion, its market share plummeted from 10 to 3 percent, and the stock collapsed. Amelio laid off thousands of workers, but he was raking in about $7 million in salary and benefits while sitting on $26 million in stock, according to the
New York Times
. He lavishly refurbished Apple’s executive offices and, it was soon revealed, negotiated a golden parachute worth about $7 million. The
Times
reported employees’ view that Apple’s governance during this period was a “kleptocracy.”

Internally, the company was extremely fractured, split into dozens of different groups, each with its own agenda, which often conflicted. To make matters worse, Apple had become an experiment in extreme
democracy. In reaction partly to the tyrannical ways of Steve Jobs, the company had transformed itself into a bottom-up, rather than a top-down organization.

There had to be consensus on every decision, involving all the interested parties. Steering committees would be set up to guide new products to market. As product designer Terry Christensen put it: “A lot of people considered Jobs’ approach tyrannical and misguided. Funneling an entire project through one person, be it Jobs or another visionary leader, inevitably resulted in lopsided products that exhibited all the strengths and weaknesses of its creator, like the first Mac. Instead, the steering committee approach brought every discipline involved in a project together—engineering, software, marketing, product design, industrial design, manufacturing—and required discussion and consensus at every stage of development.”
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Product development by consensus proved extremely bureaucratic. Whenever a new product was proposed, three documents had to be drawn up: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document and a user-experience document. Mark Rolston, SVP of creative at Frog, summed it up this way: “Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is ‘Here’s how people like to do things.’”
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The three documents would be sent upstairs to be reviewed by a committee of executives. If they were approved, a team leader (the “champion”) would be assigned to the project and the design group would get a budget. Then it would go back to the marketing, engineering and user-experience groups for more work. Don Norman: “The team would work on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hoped to meet the marketing, engineering and user-experience needs—figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details and the like.”
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Norman said in some ways, it was “a well-structured process” but he
acknowledged its shortcomings. Not only was it slow, cumbersome and bureaucratic, it inevitably led to compromises. When one team wanted to do it like this, and another team like that, feature creep took over, resulting in a lack of cohesion in the product.

“The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road,” said Brunner. “It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.”
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Even if a great idea came along, it was impossible to get anything done. Norman described just such an occasion.

“I remember vividly Jony Ive coming to me one day,” said Norman. “Then, high-end Apple customers would buy a machine and the first thing they wanted to do was take it apart and add a lot more memory, or add a video card or a second processor. And it was a pain to open the machine and you couldn’t access the memory and you had to take out some parts. And Jony had figured out a way to get around this, with a desktop computer that had two fasteners which you simply unhooked . . . making it trivial to add and change the machine’s memory. And I thought this was marvelous.

“The problem was, the hardware people refused to build it. So Jony and I went around the company going from vice president to vice president trying to convince them. If they said the idea would be too expensive, Jony presented them a price analysis showing that it wasn’t; if they said it would take too long to produce and ship the new idea, Jony would show them that he had already spoken to the factory, and they could do it in the amount of time available. It went on and on, for several weeks. Finally the CEO adopted Jony’s idea and it was accepted. But that was the old Apple—it wouldn’t happen like that today.”

Jony’s idea for easy access to the insides eventually made its way to market with a Power Mac 9600 in August 1997, and became a mainstay for all the Macintosh tower designs that followed.

Sometimes the fiefdoms, the bureaucracy, doomed solid new ideas. The most interesting product to come out of Jony’s design group in the late 1990s was the eMate, a small, inexpensive plastic computer for schoolkids. It was a curvaceous clamshell made of translucent green plastic, whose see-through look would be copied for the first iMac. Everyone wanted one. It had a huge lust factor, but it bombed.

“This product was driven by industrial design and it died because it didn’t have the right champion at Apple,” Norman said. “It died because there was a fight over it among the different divisions. Should it run Newton software? Should it run Apple OS software? Which existing computer was it going to compete with? No one came forward and said, ‘This could be a great computer for schools. What kind of software should it run, and how are kids going to use it?’ No one looked into its use backwards, starting from what kids would want to do with it and so what should go into it. And so due to the lack of cohesion at Apple, the eMate died.”

The eMate’s uniqueness was a rarity in the interim that followed Brunner’s departure. Most of the products were boring me-too designs, which reflected the engineering-driven culture at the core of the company. Much of their work was skin jobs. The chaos of trying to create in what seemed like an increasingly adversarial environment wore on Jony. Only a few months after being put in charge of the design group, he also was thinking of quitting.

“It was a company that certainly wasn’t innovating,” Jony said at the time. “We lost our identity and looked to competition for leadership.”
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Amelio had little appreciation for design. “There wasn’t that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made,” Jony said. “All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.”
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Before Jony could quit, Jon Rubinstein, his new boss, talked him out of it. Just recruited as Apple’s head of hardware (the same job he’d held working with Steve Jobs at NeXT), Rubinstein gave Jony a raise and told him, going forward, things would be different.

“We told him that we were going to struggle to get through where the company was then, and that once we turned the company around, we were going to make history. Those were the terms we used to keep him at Apple—and also that henceforth, design was going to be really valued at the company.”
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Rubinstein’s promise would be fulfilled. The era during which it took three years to get products out the door did end; in the coming years, the rate at which new products and new ideas were adopted—many of them from Jony Ive’s fertile brain—would be nothing less than remarkable.