Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?

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Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Later, he would speak about these tasks as if they were Great Works, but he must have known better. When Steve Jobs taunted him "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" it marked the turning point for Sculley. Sculley's move to Silicon Valley in 1983-a journey the particulars of which he later accounted with Homeric gravity-was the opportunity to make his own dent in the universe. In the Silicon Valley and at Apple in particular, bottom-liners in suits were regarded by the true hackers as necessary evils, but irrelevant in the big scheme. Bozos. Sculley, who hated neckties anyway, resisted this characterization. Though he certainly demanded his corporite due-at a base salary of $2 million, and millions more in stock options, his compensation boosted him high on the Business week chart of most-highly-paid executives-he also sought recognition as a deep thinker, a scientist, the sort of guy who would vacation in Paris to hang out at the Louvre, then, sketchbooks in hand, wander to the Left Bank.

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Atkinson believed that in order to avoid a similar disappointment with his new creation, he would have to leave the company. No less a luminary than Alan Kay heard about Atkinson's imminent departure. Kay, who had become a sort of high-tech Rasputin to Apple's chairman, alerted Sculley, who immediately requested an audience with the disgruntled software artist. Atkinson showed Sculley the prototype, and the former sugar-water salesman was blown away. It was exactly the kind of world-changing innovation that he wanted to be associated with. "What do you want?" he asked Atkinson. "I want it to ship," said the Apple Fellow. They cut a deal-Apple would either bundle HyperCard with every computer it sold, or grant full ownership of the product to Atkinson, so he could sell it elsewhere.

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The real numbers could not be ignored, however, and soon Apple's board of directors began to think that either Steve Jobs or John Sculley-or both-had to go. After a few months of stunned quiescence, Sculley began to fight for his job. He would keep it by neutering Steve Jobs. Jobs, for his part, argued that his leadership was necessary to maintain Apple's status as a visionary institution. The business press covered the struggle as if it were a combination of Greek tragedy and soap opera. John Sculley was consumed with overthrowing the man most deeply associated with the company, the man who had lured him from his executive position at PepsiCo-seduced him, as Sculley would later concede. Months before, they were the Siamese twins of Cupertino; their grinning pusses graced a late 1985 cover of Business week, and in the background a Hawaiian sunset framed them like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Standing together on a balcony thirty stories up, Sculley told Steve that before he’d even consider coming to Apple, they’d have to agree to pay him $1 million in salary, plus a $1 million signing bonus, and a guaranteed $1 million severance payment if things didn’t work out. It was a stunning demand for the time, but Steve was undeterred. He said he’d pay it out of his own pocket if necessary. He sealed the deal by challenging Sculley with a line that would become a famous part of the Steve Jobs lore: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

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Spindler would be fired in the weeks ahead, after which Anderson found himself being courted as the first big hire of Apple’s next CEO, Gil Amelio, a former semiconductor executive who had been a member of the Apple board of directors for less than a year. Ultimately, it wasn’t the sales pitch from Spindler or Amelio that swayed him. It was more as if Anderson sold himself on the Apple job, using the same logic Steve Jobs had used on John Sculley when wooing him with that famous taunt, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Anderson liked the idea that he might help save a great American success story from oblivion. “There was a part of me that said, ‘You know, I’d hate to see that company die,’ ” he remembers. “That’s reason number one.

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And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ” Sculley got cold feet and told Chiat\Day to sell off the expensive Super Bowl ad space it had purchased. The agency unloaded a thirty-second spot, but lied to Sculley and told him they couldn’t sell the longer one. Marketing chief Bill Campbell decided to air the ad despite the worries of Sculley and the board. Hayden, who was as talented in his own right as Clow, later drew a cartoon that summed up his feelings about Sculley. According to Clow, it showed the CEO and Jobs walking together through a park. Steve is telling Sculley, “Ya know, I think technology can make the human race better.”

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

He added that never before had he worked for someone he really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person who could teach him the most. Jobs gave him his unblinking stare. Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should just be friends and he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time you’re in New York, I’d love to spend time with you.” He later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’”

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In his kitchen: “Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought.” At Stanford, 1982: “How many of you are virgins? How many of you have taken LSD?” With the Lisa: “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” With John Sculley in Central Park, 1984: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” In his Apple office, 1982: Asked if he wanted to do market research, he said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” At NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.

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Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were so alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became. Canny observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized what was happening and knew that it would make the inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve made Sculley feel like he was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated, because Steve projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that he didn’t really have. When it became clear that Sculley didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion of reality had created an explosive situation.”

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Apple, in preparation for its inevitable toe-to-toe battle with IBM, made several significant moves. In 1983, the firm hired a new president, former Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley, to manage its underdog campaign against IBM. That Apple, no longer the dominant company in an industry still in its infancy, could attract the heir apparent to the presidency of huge PepsiCo was a tribute to the persuasive powers of its cofounder, Steve Jobs. “You can stay and sell sugar water,” he told a vacillating Sculley, “or you can come with me and change the world.” Sculley came. Then, in January 1984, Apple introduced its Macintosh computer. * * * Figure 88. The original Apple Macintosh It had 128K of memory.

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Apple Without Jobs Without Jobs, Apple is just another Silicon Valley company, and without Apple, Jobs is just another Silicon Valley millionaire. –Nick Arnett, Accidental Millionaire Meanwhile, Steve Jobs found a use for some of the millions that he hadn’t put into NeXT, and at his former company, the engineers were getting restless. Sculley Moves On When Scully squeezed out Del Yocam and bypassed Jean-Louis Gassée, the Apple engineers were outraged. It wasn’t just that this former sugar-water salesman Sculley had the gall to name himself CTO of Apple, but Gassée, whom they would have picked as CEO had they been asked, was being shown the door. Apple employees exhibited a lot of so-called attitude about their status within the industry.

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In a marathon board meeting that began on the morning of April 19, 1985, and continued into the next day, he told the Apple board that he was going to strip Jobs of his leadership over the Mac division and any management role in the company. Sculley added that if he didn’t get full backing from the board on his decision, he couldn’t stay on as president. The board promised to back him up. But Sculley failed to act on his decision immediately. Jobs heard about what was coming, and in a plot to get Sculley out, began calling up board members to rally their support. When Sculley heard about this, he called an emergency executive board meeting on May 24. At the meeting he confronted Jobs, saying, “It has come to my attention that you’d like to throw me out of the company.”

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

He ran the company as a business and was not there to lead the cause. It is worth considering how such a bad fit as Sculley even got the job at Apple in the first place. Simple—he was manipulated. Sculley did not approach Jobs and ask to be a part of Apple’s cause. The way the real story unfolded made the fallout almost predictable. Jobs knew he needed help. He knew he needed a HOW guy to help him scale his vision. He approached Sculley, a man with a solid résumé, and said, “Do you want to sell sugar water your whole life or do you want to change the world?” Playing off Sculley’s ego, aspirations and fears, Jobs completed a perfectly executed manipulation.

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Chapter 12: Split Happens 189 In the fall of her freshman year in college, Christina Harbridge set out to find a part-time job: Christina Harbridge, personal interview, November 2008; http://christinaharbridge.com/blog/. 191 Dwayne Honoré has for the past ten years run his own commercial construction company: Dwayne Honoré, personal interview, December 2008; http://www.dhonore.com/explore.cfm/ourcompany/owner/. 193 Though Gates abdicated his role as CEO: “Gates exits Microsoft to focus on charity work,” MSNBC News Services, June 27, 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25408326/. 194 “A PC in every home and on every desk”: http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/ourbusinesses/profile.mspx. 195 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley: Andrew Pollack, “Apple Computer Entrepreneur’s Rise and Fall,” New York Times, September 19, 1985, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7DA1739F93AA2575AC0A963948260&scp=3&sq=apple%201985%20jobs%20resigns&st=cse. 195 Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record: “Marketing Genius for Pepsi and Apple: John Sculley III, WG’63,” Wharton Alumni Magazine , Spring 2007, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/alum_mag/issues/125anniversaryissue/sculley.html. 196 “Do you want to sell sugar water your whole life or do you want to change the world?”

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Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound. Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo. At Pepsi, he created the wildly successful Pepsi Challenge taste test advertising campaign, leading Pepsi to overtake Coca-Cola for the first time. But the problem was, Sculley was a bad fit at Apple. He ran the company as a business and was not there to lead the cause.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

The next week, Mike Murray led John Sculley around the engineering area since Steve was out of town. He brought him by my cubicle to see the modified Window Manager demo. I opened the windows one at a time, saving the Pepsi caps and cans for last. He seemed genuinely excited to see the Pepsi stuff, but oddly cold for most of the demo. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem all that interested in the answers. A few weeks later, we found out the real story. The purpose of John’s visit was to interview for CEO of Apple, and he took the job after being convinced by Steve’s famous line, “Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or would you like a chance to change the world?”

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Bouncing Pepsi caps in the Window Manager demo Steve Jobs came by the software area one evening a couple of months later, excited about someone he had recently met in New York City. “Hey, I want you to do a demo next week for this guy I met yesterday, John Sculley. He’s the president of Pepsi,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is. If we impress him, we can get Pepsi to buy thousands of Macs. Maybe even five thousand. Why don’t you try to come up with something special to show him?” Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak at the Apple IIc introduction in April 1984 It sounded a little bit fishy to me; we hardly ever demoed to potential customers at that point. But I asked Susan to draw some Pepsi imagery, and she came up with tiny little Pepsi caps, as well as Pepsi cans, in John’s honor, and I put them into the Window Manager demo.

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Steve Hayden and Brent Thomas put together an intriguing storyboard, envisioning a visually striking, highly symbolic, miniature science fiction epic featuring a young female athlete who liberates the subjugated masses from totalitarian domination by throwing a sledgehammer and smashing a huge screen displaying Big Brother. Macintosh marketing manager Mike Murray and Steve Jobs loved it, but they needed to get new CEO John Sculley’s approval for such a large expenditure. Sculley was a bit apprehensive (after all, the commercial hardly mentioned the Macintosh), but he gave his OK for an unprecedented production budget of over $750,000 to make the one-minute commercial. Chiat-Day hired Ridley Scott, the best science fiction–oriented director they could find, whose previous movie, Blade Runner, possessed the visionary dystopian feel for which they were striving.

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

Unprotected by barriers, companies do not produce exceptional returns. THE APPLE VERSION A year or so before Ben Rosen realized that Compaq needed a major recasting of its business strategy, John Sculley began to entertain similar thoughts about Apple. A marketing wiz at PepsiCo, Sculley had been recruited in 1983 to become Apple’s CEO by Steve Jobs, one of the company’s founders. Jobs was forced out two years later, leaving Sculley as undisputed leader of the company most emotionally identified with the PC revolution. In 1990, Apple was still one of the leaders in the business. It had more than 10 percent of the global marketplace, measured by revenue, the highest share it had ever enjoyed since IBM’s PC was introduced in 1981.

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It had more than 10 percent of the global marketplace, measured by revenue, the highest share it had ever enjoyed since IBM’s PC was introduced in 1981. Its operating margins exceeded 13 percent, down from an earlier peak though still healthy by the standards of the industry. But Sculley was looking forward, and what he saw convinced him that Apple needed to take action. The company Sculley analyzed in 1990 stood apart from the other firms in its segment of the industry. Alone among the major box makers, it used its own operating systems, both a text-based system for its Apple II line and the more exciting graphical user interface (GUI) operating system for its Macintosh line.

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Also, the evolution of the industry toward separate major players in each segment argued strongly against the existence of significant advantages from vertical integration. TABLE 6.2 Sculley’s other moves were more questionable. He committed the company to introducing a series of “hit products,” either new or refashioned offerings, on a very tight schedule. Some were successful, like the PowerBook, Apple’s first competitive notebook computer. Some were innovative, like QuickTime, a multimedia software package that established Apple’s leadership position in that field. The strategy did refresh Apple’s product line, but it also required the company to maintain a large staff of programmers and product designers. Sculley also decided that Apple needed alliances with other companies in the industry in order to capitalize on its software strengths.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Whittaker redeemed his bitter loss to Stanford’s Stanley several years later in the third Grand Challenge, in 2007. His General Motors–backed “Boss” would win the final Urban Driving Challenge. One of the most enduring bits of Silicon Valley lore recalls how Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi CEO John Sculley to Apple by asking him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life selling sugar water. Though some might consider it naive, the Valley’s ethos is about changing the world. That is at the heart of the concept of “scale,” which is very much a common denominator in motivating the region’s programmers, hardware hackers, and venture capitalists.

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Brought to Apple as chief executive during the personal computing boom, Sculley started his tenure in 1983 with a well-chronicled romance with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs. Later, when the company’s growth stalled in the face of competition from IBM and others, Sculley fought Jobs for control of the company, and won. However, in 1986, Jobs launched a new computer company, NeXT. Jobs wanted to make beautiful workstations for college students and faculty researchers. That placed pressure on Sculley to demonstrate that Apple could still innovate without its original visionary. Sculley turned to Alan Kay, who had left Xerox PARC first to create Atari Labs and then came to Apple, for guidance on the future of the computer market.

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Kay’s conversations with Apple’s chief executive were summarized in a final chapter in Sculley’s autobiographical Odyssey. Kay’s idea centered on “a wonderful fantasy machine called the Knowledge Navigator,”4 which wove together a number of his original Dynabook ideas with concepts that would ultimately take shape in the form of the World Wide Web. Alan Kay would later say that John Sculley had asked him to come up with a “modern Dynabook,” which he found humorous, since at the time his original Dynabook still didn’t exist. He said that in response to Sculley’s request, he had pulled together a variety of ideas from his original Dynabook research and the artificial intelligence community, as well as from MIT Media Laboratory director Nicholas Negroponte, an advocate of speech interfaces.5 Negroponte had created the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1967, in part inspired by the ideas of Ivan Sutherland, whose “Sketchpad” Ph.D. thesis was a seminal work in both computer graphics and interface design.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Steve Jobs was no longer at Apple, having quit six years earlier, and was now trying very hard to make his new company, NeXT, a success. His other company, Pixar, was also struggling although, four years later, it released its first film, Toy Story, which became a blockbuster. Apple was being run by John Sculley, a former PepsiCo executive whom Steve Jobs had lured to the company with the immortal line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”31 Sculley’s reputation is mixed these days, but at the time, he hadn’t yet put a wrong foot forward. Apple was huge, and the computer industry was exploding. The desktop publishing revolution was putting Macs in businesses all over the world.

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Windows 1995 was still a few years in the future; no one could yet know that Microsoft’s operating system would entirely reshape the PC industry—and almost put Apple out of business. Flush with cash, Apple was expanding its product lines. Sculley was investing Apple’s horde of $2.1 billion in cash in R&D to speed up development of new products. He got a lot of attention for talking up a new line of innovative hyper-portable computers he called “personal digital assistants,” a term he coined at a major speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.32 Although it would be a couple of years before Sculley’s PDA would actually hit the market as the Newton MessagePad, the IDg was hard at work on it. Brunner’s design team was busy not only with the MessagePad but also a new line of PowerBooks.

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A money loser from the start, Amelio’s administration had tried to spin off the Newton into its own division but the then-CEO had changed his mind at the last minute. As an adviser, Jobs had tried to persuade Amelio to shut down the Newton. It had never really worked right, and it had a stylus, which Jobs hated. Despite a small and dedicated following, it hadn’t taken off with a mass audience. Plus, Jobs saw it as John Sculley’s baby. Though it was the only really innovative thing Sculley achieved under his tenure, Jobs had many reasons to end the Newton’s brief life. Most executives would have thought twice about killing a well-loved product, and Newton lovers flooded Infinite Loop’s parking lots with placards and loudspeakers. (“I give a fig for the Newton,” one sign read.)

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Apple had also considered candidates from minicomputer manufacturers such as DEC, HP, and Data General, but the fit had never been right. The company broadened its search beyond electronics and computing, and now it seemed that Apple had found its new president: John Sculley, the head of PepsiCo. With high hopes and no small measure of relief, Markkula left Apple’s presidency in April. His replacement, John Sculley, had been lured to the position, in part, after Jobs asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Sculley knew little about computers. But in the mid-1980s, Apple was one of several technology firms that thought it wise to hire leaders with general, but not technical, business experience.

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When Newsweek assigned a reporter without computer experience to learn to use a personal computer, she spent a total of seventy hours with three different machines (including an Apple II and an Apple III), only to conclude, “I remained wholly incapable of utilizing them to suit the needs I would have bought them for.”5 Apple needed to figure out how to sell to the general public—by 1983, IBM had 26 percent of the personal computing market, while Apple had only 24 percent6—and Sculley seemed to be someone who might know how. Markkula remained a director of Apple after Sculley’s hiring. Meanwhile, Sculley and Jobs entered a reporting relationship nearly identical to the one that Markkula and Mike Scott had concocted at Apple’s launch. As president, Sculley reported to Jobs, the board chair. But Jobs, as head of the Macintosh group, also reported to Sculley. The unconventional structure had worked well enough for Markkula and Scott, but it would prove problematic for Jobs and Sculley. One month after Markkula stepped down, in May 1983, six-year-old Apple, trading at a record high, became the then youngest company ever to enter the Fortune 500, just as Markkula had predicted.7 The magnitude of Markkula’s influence on Apple is not widely recognized today, and he has generally liked it that way.

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He also played an integral role in helping the Semiconductor Industry Association make its successful case in Congress for the importance of high-technology industries. Apple remained particularly important to McKenna. In the mid-1980s, he was the only non-Apple employee to attend executive staff meetings. In that role, he served as a confidant to both John Sculley and Steve Jobs as they battled for control of the company in 1985. Tensions rising, Sculley told the executive staff, “I never had a problem with leadership; I was president of everything since my first grade class, yet I know you question my leadership.”13 He called McKenna into his office and asked, “What will Steve do? Will he leave? Will he blow his brains out?

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Schmidt served for ten years, from 2001 to 2011, whereupon a presumably grown-up Page retook control. Ridley Scott directed Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, The Martian, and “1984”—the commercial that launched the Macintosh computer. John Sculley was the Pepsi executive whom Jobs famously recruited to be the CEO of Apple in 1983 by asking him, “Do you really want to sell sugar water, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Two years later Sculley ousted Jobs from the company that he had founded. Tiffany Shlain threw the best annual party of the dot-com era: the Webbies. Today Shlain is a full-time experimental filmmaker, working to bring her craft into the twenty-first century with a concept she calls “cloud filmmaking.”

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We said, “That is great.” Lee Clow: Getting the spot approved wasn’t that hard. I guess the biggest hurdle was that it required a pretty big budget. They had never spent one million dollars on a commercial before. But Steve loved it and John Sculley had just joined from Pepsi. Dan Kottke: John Sculley was the celebrity CEO that Jobs had hired. He was like this glitzy marketing guy. Lee Clow: John Sculley wanted to show off and prove that he was really smart, so he said, “Well, I love it too, because we used to do spots like that at Pepsi.” He really never did but that’s what he always said. Steve in his classic way basically said, “Go make it great.”

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So what to do about it? John Sculley: In 1985 Steve introduced the Macintosh Office, which was a laser printer—the LaserWriter with PostScript fonts from Adobe—and a Macintosh. One problem: The product just didn’t work. It wasn’t until at least a year later that the microprocessors were powerful enough that you could actually do the kind of things we were actually promoting back in 1985. So people weren’t buying it. Steve got depressed. And then he turned on me. Andy Hertzfeld: It got to the point where Steve was openly sabotaging Sculley. Something had to be done. Sculley and the board didn’t fire him, but they removed his responsibility from running the Mac.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Jobs recruited a new president from the outside, Pepsi executive John Sculley. The hire brought consumer marketing expertise to the operation and would perhaps, as Time characterized it, “induce a streak of humility in an organization where confidence bordered on arrogance.” Sculley brought other non-technical East Coast types along with him, including a bearishly friendly former college football coach named Bill Campbell, who’d most recently worked at Kodak. Microcomputer purists looked at the suits and ties on the new arrivals with bafflement. What could sugar-water and camera salesmen do for a company that was supposed to change the world?

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By the end of September, the stock price had tumbled from a 1983 high of $62 per share to less than $17. In the mind of the board and John Sculley, the main source of all of Apple’s woes was the mercurial, messianic, and megalomaniacal Steve Jobs. In one of the most celebrated firings in American business history, Sculley took away Jobs’s operational authority and moved him into the ceremonial—and powerless—role of chairman. Four months later, Jobs sold all his Apple stock (except one, deeply symbolic share) and quit. For a breathlessly watching business press, the showdown between Jobs and Sculley had reverberations far beyond Cupertino. The suit-and-tied Organization Man from the East had beat out the long-haired entrepreneurial visionary from the Golden State.

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What’s more, he now was being asked by Gore himself to beef up the campaign’s broad-brush technology policy. Barram, in turn, invited John Sculley, Mitch Kapor, and others to chime in. Kapor took politicians’ bold promises with a grain of salt, but he sensed that this was just the kind of thing that could shake the political and business worlds out of their Internet slumber. “It’s psychological,” he told a reporter. “If people believe there is genuine national leadership, they will be prepared to move.”27 By September, a Silicon Valley that was usually quiet about its politics loudly declared its loyalty. Young, Sculley, and thirty other tech executives gave a public endorsement of the Democratic ticket.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

This fear of regret, when prompted correctly, can penetrate through the behavioral inertia of Status Quo Sloth and trigger the Desired Action. When Steve Jobs wanted to recruit Pepsi executive John Sculley into Apple as the new CEO, he famously said, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Boom! That was a powerful FOMO Punch that prompted Sculley to think he would miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime if he “wasted” the rest of his career at Pepsi. He later remembers, “I just gulped because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.”13 (Ironically, Sculley’s lasting legacy would likely be known as the guy who fired Steve Jobs and ran Apple into the ground - just for Steve Jobs to return and resurrect).

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Some brands decide to double down on Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity by making everything about the sweepstakes unpredictable. Coca-Cola is one of those brands that has been at the forefront of developing creative and innovative product promotions. You can often see that Coca-Cola commercials attempt to turn simple acts of drinking carbonated sugar water into a Core Drive 1: Epic meaning and Calling experience through using magical kingdoms, promoting happiness, and friendly polar bears. The company launched an especially appealing sweepstakes contest for teenagers in Hong Kong. Users are offered a free app called “Chok.” During each evening, a television commercial will run, asking fans to open the app and shake their phones to catch virtual bottle caps and earn mobile games, discounts, and sweepstakes entries11.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“incompletely delivered”: Ibid., p. 8. Michael Toy’s blog entry from June 26, 2003, is at http://blogs.osafoundation.org/blogotomy/2003_ 06.htm. “A baseball manager recognizes”: Brooks, p. 155. CHAPTER 2 THE SOUL OF AGENDA “sell sugar water”: Steve Jobs’s pitch to John Sculley has become the stuff of legend. The transcript from the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, in which Sculley himself reports it, is a relatively primary source: http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.htm. Kapor’s estimated $100 million: Business Week, May 30, 1988, p. 92. “It’s important to understand”: David Gans’s interview with Kapor is at http://www.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry _Barlow/HTML/barlow_and_kapor_in_wired_ interview.htm.

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It wasn’t clear how much Gore actually knew about Chandler and OSAF, but guessing that their goal was “changing the world” was a pretty good bet. In Silicon Valley that phrase had been a rallying cry at least since Steve Jobs’s legendary pitch to Pepsi CEO John Sculley twenty years before, asking the exec whether he preferred to “sell sugar water” the rest of his life or come build computers and change the world. To a jaded ear it might sound impossibly naive, but the people working on Chandler—like, in my experience, software developers everywhere—were motivated by the hope that their work might make a difference in people’s lives.

Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

They were five to ten years younger than the hippies, but they came out of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, and embraced many of the ideas of personal liberation and iconoclasm championed by their slightly older brothers and sisters. The PC was to many of them a talisman of a new kind of war of liberation: when he hired him from Pepsi, Steve Jobs challenged John Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugared water to adolescents, or do you want to change the world?" Personal computers and the PC industry were created by young iconoclasts who had seen the LSD revolution fizzle, the political revolution fail. Computers for the people was the latest battle in the same campaign. The Whole Earth organization, the same Point foundation that owned half the WELL, had honored the PC zealots, including the outlaws among them, with the early Hackers' conferences.

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By the time they started inviting CMC evangelists from around the world, COARA had become more than a successful experiment--it was a testbed for the idea of citizens' movements and regional governments working cooperatively to create virtual communities. In 1992, Governor Hiramatsu addressed a small invitational forum of technology developers, including Apple Computer's John Sculley, and top managers from NEC and other Japanese companies: I see the toyonokuni network as being an "information road." Just as the automobile society wasn't built on the development of motor I think the true information society will require this kind of social infrastructure as an essential building block.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

CHAPTER 16.0 Fulfilling the Mission, One Customer at a Time Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a purpose. HELEN KELLER Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously asked the then-Pepsi executive John Sculley in the mid-eighties, “Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change the world?” Apple Computer is undoubtedly changing the world, but Comcate? The journey toward changing the world starts with a single person. . . . >> In late 2005 I received a phone call from Jack in Burgon Hills. If you recall, Jack was the resistant employee who didn’t want to change his ways while I oversaw one of the first eFeedbackManager implementations.