Bits Blog: A Gift From Steve Jobs Returns Home

And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” Grignon says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

The preparations were top-secret. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage, it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards 24 hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple hired — from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound — sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor for Wired. His book “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution” will be published in November.

Editor: Dean Robinson

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Bits Blog: GIF Creator, Steve Wilhite, Receives Lifetime Achievement Webby Award

Among the thousands of file formats that exist in modern computing, the GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, has attained celebrity status in a sea of lesser-known BMPs, RIPs, FIGs and MIFFs. It was honored as a “word of the year” in 2012, and Tuesday night, its inventor, Steve Wilhite, will be accepting a lifetime achievement award at The Webby Awards.

Now, almost any fragment of digital culture can be spun up into a grainy, gratifying animation. GIFs provide a platform for nearly everything, it seems — from rapid-fire political commentary to digital art to small moments of celebrity intrigue.

Has any file format received more attention, more accolades (or had more fun) than the GIF?

Invented in 1987, today the GIF has become the aesthetic calling card of modern Internet culture. Even Yahoo released one to announce the company’s acquisition of Tumblr this week, seen below.

“It’s been an incredibly enduring piece of technology,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards. “Even as bandwidth has expanded,” he said, “it has been very exciting to see how much cultural cachet the format has gotten.”

But back in 1987, such things could not be imagined. Dial-up speeds were achingly slow. Image downloads were made even worse by interoperability problems. An article that year in the magazine, “Online Today” described the problem:

“Horror stories about incompatible microcomputers may be humorous when everyone is in a good mood, but they are certainly the nemesis of any serious computer user. The frustration is no laughing matter when a person wants to transfer some data or a graphics image, and the system doesn’t cooperate.”

Mr. Wilhite, then working at CompuServe (the nation’s first major online service) knew the company wanted to display things like color weather maps. Because he had an interest in compression technologies, Mr. Wilhite thought he could help.

Steve Wilhite was featured in an October 1987 issue of the CompuServe magazine, “Online Today” for inventing the GIF.

“I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he said in an e-mail. (He primarily uses e-mail to communicate now, after suffering a stroke in 2000.) The first image he created was a picture of an airplane.

The prototype took about a month and the format was released in June 1987.

“I remember when other people saw the GIF,” he said. Colleagues abandoned work on on other black and white formats, he said, as graphics experts began to spread the GIF online. A triumph of speed and compression, the GIF was able to move as fast as Internet culture itself, and has today become the ultimate meme-maker.

In the last decade, the animated GIF has reigned supreme, and while Mr. Wilhite has never himself made an animated GIF, he said the classic, “dancing baby” from 1996 remains a favorite.

Since retiring in 2001, Mr. Wilhite has led a quieter existence than his creation. He goes on RV trips. He built a house in the country with a lot of lawn to mow. He dabbles in color photography and Java programming. He uses e-mail and Facebook to keep up with family.

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

The webcast of Mr. Wilhite’s Webby Award acceptance speech will be on YouTube on Wednesday.

Steve Jobs’s Widow Sets Philanthropy Goals

Marlene Castro knew the tall blonde woman only as Laurene, her mentor. They met every few weeks in a rough Silicon Valley neighborhood the year that Ms. Castro was applying to college, and they e-mailed often, bonding over conversations about Ms. Castro’s difficult childhood. Without Laurene’s help, Ms. Castro said, she might not have become the first person in her family to graduate from college.

It was only later, when she was a freshman at University of California, Berkeley, that Ms. Castro read a news article and realized that Laurene was Silicon Valley royalty, the wife of Apple’s co-founder, Steven P. Jobs.

“I just became 10 times more appreciative of her humility and how humble she was in working with us in East Palo Alto,” Ms. Castro said.

The story, friends and colleagues say, is classic Laurene Powell Jobs. Famous because of her last name and fortune, she has always been private and publicity-averse. Her philanthropic work, especially on education causes like College Track, the college prep organization she helped found and through which she was Ms. Castro’s mentor, has been her priority and focus.

Now, less than two years after Mr. Jobs’s death, Ms. Powell Jobs is becoming somewhat less private. She has tiptoed into the public sphere, pushing her agenda in education as well as global conservation, nutrition and immigration policy. Just last month, for example, she sat down for a rare television interview, discussing the immigration bill before Congress. She has also taken on new issues, like gun control.

“She’s been mourning for a year and was grieving for five years before that,” said Larry Brilliant, president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund who is an old friend of Mr. Jobs. “Her life was about her family and Steve, but she is now emerging as a potent force on the world stage, and this is only the beginning.”

But she is doing it her way.

“It’s not about getting any public recognition for her giving, it’s to help touch and transform individual lives,” said Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a philanthropist and lecturer on philanthropy at Stanford who has been close friends with Ms. Powell Jobs for two decades. She is also the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer in Silicon Valley and the wife of Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist.

“If you total up in your mind all of the philanthropic investments that Laurene has made that the public knows about,” she said, “that is probably a fraction of 1 percent of what she actually does, and that’s the most I can say.”

While some people said Ms. Powell Jobs should have started a foundation in Mr. Jobs’s name after his death, she did not, nor has she increased her public giving.

Instead, she has redoubled her commitment to Emerson Collective, the organization she formed about a decade ago to make grants and investments in education initiatives and, more recently, other areas.

“In the broadest sense, we want to use our knowledge and our network and our relationships to try to affect the greatest amount of good,” Ms. Powell Jobs said in one of a series of interviews with The New York Times.

Still, the fortune she inherited, making her the world’s ninth wealthiest woman, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, has catapulted her into the upper echelon of global philanthropists. And that has led to certain expectations.

Ms. Powell Jobs has a net worth estimated at $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, most of it in shares of the Walt Disney Company. Mr. Jobs helped found the animation studio Pixar, which Disney acquired in 2006 and paid for in stock. With 131 million shares, worth about $8.7 billion, the Laurene Powell Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest shareholder with a 7.3 percent stake in the company, and she has benefited from the stock having more than doubled since her husband died in October 2011.

Mr. Jobs also owned 5.5 million shares of Apple at the time of his death, and it is unclear whether she has sold her position.

“She knows that she is in an unusual position and has the standing to have a major impact on the world stage,” said Peter Seligmann, chief executive of Conservation International, on whose board Ms. Powell Jobs sits. “It will be fascinating to watch the choices that she makes.”

Like many technology titans, her husband was criticized for not giving away as much money as he could. Mr. Jobs did not give publicly during his life — though there have been rumors of at least one major anonymous gift, to a hospital.

Corner Office: Steve Case on Risk-Taking, or Lack Thereof, in Business

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. The earliest ones probably related to just understanding that everybody is wired a little bit differently. Just because you think a certain way or are inclined to react a certain way doesn’t mean everybody thinks and reacts the same way. I think people just naturally presume that they look at a problem in a certain way and frame the issue in a certain way and that everybody else would look at it the same way.

I learned in my 20s that there are a lot of different ways to look at things, a lot of different filters that people put on, partly based on how they analyze the circumstance but also based on their own history and perspectives and biases and instincts and so forth. You have to be open-minded about that and listen to what’s being said — but also to what’s not said sometimes. Those discussions can lead you to different places.

Q. Other big leadership lessons?

A. The core one is a Thomas Edison quote that summarizes my perspective on things, which is, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” I do believe in vision. I do believe in big ideas. I do believe in tackling problems that are complex and fighting battles that are worth fighting, and also trying to, in my case, create companies or back companies. That can change the world. The vision thing is really important — but the execution thing is really important, too. Having a good idea is not enough. You’ve got to figure out some way to balance that and complement that with great execution, which ultimately is people and priorities and things like that. You have to strike the right balance. If you have those together, I think anything is possible. If you don’t have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you’re not going to be successful.

Q. What about mentors?

A. One of the co-founders of AOL, Jim Kimsey, said something when I was about 26. My view, in the early part of my career, was that appearances mattered, that looking like you’re working hard mattered. I remember Jim saying once — and partly I think it relates to some of his training in the military — that really the art is trying to set the priorities and assemble a team so you wake up in the morning and actually have nothing to do. It’s impossible to achieve, but it’s a good goal to have the right priorities and the right team in place so they can execute against those priorities. It’s almost the opposite of how I was approaching it. 

The objective should not be looking busy, but actually creating a process that allows great things to happen in a way that you can be less involved. So it was sort of a process of letting go, which is hard for entrepreneurs. But at some point you’ve got to let go and you’ve got to step back. Ultimately, that is about trusting the people you’ve got — but also trusting yourself, that you’ve set the right context in terms of the vision, the priorities, the team.

Q. With the benefit of time and hindsight, thoughts on the AOL-Time Warner merger?

A. They were both terrific companies. I think everybody saw it as a big idea to bring them together and help Time Warner move into the digital age and help AOL move into the broadband age. Well, it didn’t happen. The reason it didn’t happen is because the execution wasn’t up to the vision — going back to the Thomas Edison thing — and the primary reason was there were not the relationships and trust with people.

Ultimately, it came down to poor execution of what I thought was a good idea, and that was largely attributable to people and relationships and resentments and pride and egos. There were some substantive strategic debates, but it was mostly about people and trust and relationships. I’ve seen where it works well. It can really accelerate and animate a company to do things that nobody thought was possible. When it’s not working, you can’t get much done.

Q. On reflection, what should you have done differently?

A. It goes back to the people side. Both of the answers are probably somewhat impractical, but I think it would have resulted in a better company. One would be that if we’d brought these companies together — and I say this somewhat in jest, but it makes a point — we should have fired the top 50 executives, myself included, and hired 50 new executives who brought new perspectives and could look at this through the focus on the future, not in the rearview mirror. It would have done better. There is a reason why that happens whenever a new president is elected. They bring in an entirely new team to get behind their vision and execute that vision. If it were the same 50 people from the prior administration being asked to implement new policies for the new president, it would not work.

Media Decoder Blog: Steve Jobs's High School Girlfriend to Publish Memoir

Chrisann Brennan was one of Steve Jobs’s first serious loves, his high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Lisa. Now Ms. Brennan will tell the story of her relationship with Mr. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died in 2011, in a new memoir to be published next year. St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, said on Thursday it had acquired the rights to an untitled memoir by Ms. Brennan, who is now a painter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

After meeting him at Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., Ms. Brennan later lived with Mr. Jobs in a cabin, meditated with him and attended lectures. “At 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet,” Ms. Brennan wrote in an article in Rolling Stone after his death. While in her early 20s, she became pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, who is known as Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Mr. Jobs initially denied paternity of his daughter but later developed a closer relationship with her.

St. Martin’s said Ms. Brennan’s memoir would cover a range of subjects, including her relationship with Jobs, the founding of Apple and “Jobs’s enormous appeal, energy and drive as well as his developing ambition and ruthlessness in business and personal dealings.”

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