YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Forstall

lines on the record: 123
first: 2022-04-28
most recent: 2022-04-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was pretty scary. Steve could be intimidating. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But to get back to this point I mentioned before of the top down and the bottom up, as I mentioned, except for this very brief interlude where I was a manager, throughout my whole Apple career, over 15 years, almost 16 years, I was an individual contributor. And yet I got the opportunity to demo to Steve some of the latest work that I did at various points in my career because he wanted to see from the person who did the work. And because when he would ask questions, well, go and ask the expert, right? Go ask a person who is the DRI, the directly responsible individual, the person who is, at least according to plan.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I mean, you start to have problems like this. And so we just decided that, well, you know, insight like a Steve Way of maybe communicating this was, look, this is the greatest product ever. It's a touch screen iPod, it's the greatest iPod that we've ever shipped. It's got all these great features. It's a phone. You've got web browsing that you can take anywhere with you now. And there's no copy-paste. Well, who cares? We'll get to it, right? I mean, in the meantime, you've got this, you know, the most amazing product that we've ever made. And so that was, and Steve just was in his mind was believed that the things that we did do were good enough to counterbalance for the things that we couldn't do.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it was simply a matter of setting the constraints and keeping them. You know, again, maybe if we had doubled the size of the team, we could have gotten some other things done, but maybe not to the same level of quality. And again, once you start adding people, other things begin to break down, right? You can invite everybody to team meetings. You can't find a conference room big enough, right?”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, two releases before you even copy and paste. That's right. That's right. And so I want to get right into this because look, Apple was famous for having exquisite taste around the design trade-offs. And a feature like copy and phase kind of feels like, wait, you're arguing against copy and paste. Maybe the way Google would have come at this challenge is, all right, let's give people tasks. This one has copy and paste. This one doesn't have copy and paste. Let's AV tested. But Apple made sort of like what I would argue is a pretty courageous call that seems to fly against the user intuition to exclude it.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effort on it. The one thing that I did implement for the first iPhone was the loop. So you press and hold and it would give that little magnifying glass above your finger that would show. And the whole idea of that is that we wanted your finger to be right where. The insertion point, you know, the little cursor would move. And so then we needed to show you. And so this was an idea that I came up with. But then there was no time to capitalize that and expand on that to do cut copy paste. And it even got delayed an extra year. Because in the second year, after we did the initial release of the iPhone, and then we had that six-month delay before we did the first customer shipments, and then that whole next year was taken up by making third-party APIs.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, very, very early. And that it was clear that this was that getting the text entry system working at all was going to be one of the real challenges. I mean, I got used to being in the team meetings where Henri, in team engineering meetings, again, everybody's in the room, so we've got 20 people in the room, and Henri is up at the front of the room, and he's got a keynote slide deck, and he's saying, okay, big challenges, well, keyboard, of course, and then whatever other challenge there may have been, and those challenges came and went, but keyboard was just a constant throughout the whole 18 months development cycle. And so we knew that we wanted cut copy-paste, but we knew that there was simply not going to be time for it. So we didn't spend any real development.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, it was. But one of the other things that we were really expert at to bring back the word that we talked about earlier was focus in that we were very, very good, really very, very early in the development process to say what was in and what was out.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you just, I mean, again, the secrecy, you know, I have to admit that it was just a moment where it's just like, wait, wait a second. Is there something that I don't know? No, it can't be. But yeah, it was, that was just the culture and the times and the way Steve liked to run things.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. It's going to be the phone and it's going to be the touchscreen music player and then the internet communicator and that how, no, this is actually all just one product and we'll call it iPhone. And when he said that, when I knew that I was going to have to go back the next day and add iPhone to the auto correction dictionary.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. So we were all heading toward this announcement for the iPhone in January of 2007. And so if you remember how Steve introduced the product, he said, give his very dramatic introduction, he said that something to the effect of, well, we've got a groundbreaking product and you privilege to be involved in a product like this maybe once in your career, but Steve, he had been involved with the Mac and then the iPod. And he said, we're going to have three new products of this class today. And I'm saying like, wait, there were two other secret projects that I didn't know about. I mean, truly for a moment, I didn't get, and I was like, oh, no, no. No, no, it's just how he's going to tell the story.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that all the, you know, especially a company like Apple is trying to make products for everybody, well, how do you design for everybody? If the design team isn't a microcosm of everybody. And so there are these really profound challenges, right? Back in these times we did the best that we could within the constraints. And we tried to then really tap into the benefits that the smallness and the secrecy gave us as well.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes Yes. You know, the thing is, I think there is a really underestimated power in keeping your team small. The cohesion, the small unit cohesion that you have, where simple things like we're going to have a meeting, who do we invite? Everybody. Right, we're going to have a team meeting. Yeah, right. Where we're going to talk about important milestones. We're going to call everybody out of their office. Henri could say, hey, everybody, come out of your offices, please. Within 30 seconds, everybody was standing there, right? So, you know, you get our advantages to keeping things really, really small. And of course then there is the disadvantage that when you are trying to tackle difficult problems, you may not have all of the talent that you need. You may not have a sufficient amount of diversity.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just more of conceptual help than really anything concrete that I could put into the software. It just turns out really that the problem that I was trying to solve, which is really input correction, that you weren't sure what key you hit, was a class of problem that was different enough that it really required different solutions.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was tough. It required getting approval. It's like, well, I'm going to go and talk to these people, but there was no process really at that point to get them disclosed. I mean, really, at a certain point, Steve was still personally approving every person that was submitted to get disclosed on the project. But I did get permission to talk to them. So as long as I told them I can't tell you why I want to know how, say, the Japanese input method works. The way the Japanese works is that there is this input method, that there is a sophisticated way to take the keys that a user types and turn it into the Japanese language, a text that actually reads as Japanese. And so that Just won't get into the details of that, but it seemed like it was similar in a way, I mean, at least in the thought process.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was both of those. We all wanted to do the best. We all wanted to be the one. I mean, I think we all had a sense of maybe a sense of ego that we wanted to be the one to crack this hard problem that we were given. But it's all very friendly in the end that if your idea wound up winning approving useful, yeah, you got a little bit of sort of geek cred for that on the hallway. Everybody knew who it was that came up with the idea.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just this iterative process. It just takes a long, long time. You start with ideas. Maybe somebody else does a demo that does an idea and you had your idea and you think, oh, maybe if I can combine those two ideas and make a demo that does the best of everything that I see. And it was just this collaborative soup of ideas all swirling around and you just take the, you know, all of us were, there was a sense of friendly competition.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, sorry about that. So eventually, you know, the breakthrough, if you will, that made it possible for software keyboards to really work in a shippable product was a software assistance to the extent that the software may change the letters that you type that it'll change it to what it thinks rather than what you did. And it's actually this phrase is really, really important. I think really, really one of the important organizing concepts for so much that we did to make the touchscreen operating system work is because you didn't get this tactile feedback, because you couldn't feel the edges of either keyboard keys or any button or anything in the user interface is that the software had to be there working behind the scenes to give you what you meant maybe differently than what you did.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot with you and some other people, you know, they had maybe they worked by themselves, some people had a good relationship with one of the HI designers or whatever. So we've just cobbled together our own little teams, our own little efforts, and started making demos. And again, trying to combat this problem of the keys being too small. So one idea that we experimented with was making larger keys with multiple letters on the keys. I started experimenting with software assistants. Maybe there could be a dictionary on the phone that the software could consult to provide suggestions that may be much like we have today that there's this bar on top of the keyboard that is updating as you're typing keys, giving you some notion of what the software thinks you're trying to do.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we did this series of demos. We see, again, going back to the way that it was on that hallway, and it was just one hallway since it was so few people 20-ish people, and we all had our individual offices at the time. This was not open plan office, right? Everybody had their office. Mine, when I was working and thinking, I had my door closed, right? But then, okay, so I would be in my office with my door closed and I would come up with a demo, an idea that could be represented in a demo. Then I opened the door and I go and see who else's door is open and say, here, try this, right? And so we would have this culture where we were all demoing to ourselves all the time. And when we were set off on this thing, you're all keyboard engineers now. We all just went in our own directions. Some of us had already well-established collegial relationships where I would collaborate.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't have the tactile feedback of that Blackberry, right? You could feel the edges of the keys with your fingers. And of course, with the touch screen, it was just this sheet of glass. And so that's the challenge with the keyboard is that you needed enough keys to have a typing experience. But in order to give the number of keys necessary, the keys needed to be smaller than your fingertips. So what do you do? And so it turns out that through investigation and lots of demos and lots of sleepless nights, the way to close that gap was to give software assistance.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. Again, I mean, in some ways it's hard to think back given how history has played out, right? That we have our phones now and maybe you've got, you know, I've got my phone here today and I'm two thumb typing and I'm hardly even looking and whatever That was actually a really interesting threshold, a constraint that we were dealing with when we were designing the user interface is that if the target that you were going for was larger than your finger, you could target because you could maybe move your head a little bit out of the way and you could see what you were going for. If the target was smaller than your fingertip. It's like, did I get it? I don't know. And so we started.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. No. His idea was that we need a keyboard some of the time, but we certainly don't need it all of the time. And so the idea of the keyboard being in software is that it could get out of the way. It could go off the screen, which would then make the rest of that screen real estate available for a customized user interface that was great, that was optimized for either the phone app or if it's the calendar, you can see more of your appointments or see more of a month view for the calendar. So it was absolutely essential that the keyboard could get out of the way when you weren't using it so that the device could be opened up for these other better, richer experiences in the apps that we were going to be shipping.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the keyboard And the idea of an all sort of software based keyboard was one of the design things that came from Steve early. Like it was just like, look, this is non-negotiable. I'm not shipping a physical keyboard.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“18 months, not a lot of time. We still had really nothing to show for this effort to give a solution for our phone which would compete with the BlackBerry, right? Of course, the BlackBerry had this wonderful keyboard, the hardware keyboard, the little plastic keys, click, click, click, click, the little chicklet keys. And again, you said the word crackberry. People love things. The product's a great product, right? But we were going to provide this different vision for what a smartphone would be, is that it was going to be this, that there wasn't going to be enough room for a plastic keyboard with the keys fixed. We were going to give more of the front of the display over to a screen, to software. And so the keyboard had to be in software.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering manager called all of the engineers out of our offices, into the hallway. We had a group meeting. Again, about two dozen people, probably even less than that. I said, okay, you all stop. Stop what you're doing. Stop working on calendar, phone, app, the user interface level software. Everything stop. Starting from now, you're all keyboard engineers.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we had what was really quite unusual, really unique in my experience at Apple, is that this was judged to be that the development of the software keyboard was judged to be a sufficiently high risk and that the risk was not being matched by a commensurate progress. I mean, the whole thing was high risk. We're going to make a whole new touchscreen operating system, right? So the whole thing was high risk. But the thing is that we were making good incremental progress on most of those areas, touchscreen and the UI kit and Safari and messages and calendar and all of these, the phone app. But the touchscreen keyboard was lagging behind all of these other projects. And so one day it really, really, again, unique in my experience, Henri, who was the”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had DRIs, right? And so when I started working, when I was invited to join the Purple Effort because of my experience on the web browser, I started working on making crunching down Safari, optimizing Safari so that it could fit a smartphone operating system in Foreign Factor. But then after a couple of months, we had a bit of an impasse with the software keyboard.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we started then a program manager. So there were maybe like two people in just managing the schedule, tracking risk, looking at the bugs. A couple of QA people joined. But at Apple, certainly from my standpoint, I consider them engineers. The QA engineers. And so, but still, that still is all encompassed in the numbers that I gave you. And in a way, I say there were no product managers. But I would say that we had one product manager. There's two ways that I could say it. We either had one product manager, Steve.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So when I say six or eight people, that was software engineers There was also this other team of designers, which in Apple we called the human interface team, the HI team, human interface. And that was the team of designers they would do graphic design, animation design, but they would also do concepts. Managers. So there was a fellow named Henri who was leading the software engineering team. There was a fellow named Greg Christie who was the day-to-day manager of the HI team. They both reported to Scott Forstahl. Who was the executive who reported to Steve? And that was it. That was the team. Now, eventually we wound up adding over time more people. We probably never had more than 20 software engineers and maybe 10 designers. Those two managers and the executive and Steve, and that was it There were no product managers.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we weren't going to take any of the naturally the mouse tracking or handling or anything of AppKit, which was the user interface level software for the Mac. We were going to make that from scratch for the phone. So what became UIKit for people who know about the technology for what became the iPhone software iOS, that was our job. And so we started with a clean slate. And that slate was pretty well clean when I joined again just about six or eight people on that effort at the time.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tiny little team to do what I like to term the high level software. The plan was that we were going to take as much of the Mac as possible. And bring it over and squeeze it into one of these tiny little smartphone form factor. And so we're going to take the operating system kernel and some of the low level libraries, you know, the networking stack, things like this, the graphics stack. But above the level of core graphics, which was the low level graphics library, above that, it was then I was invited onto the team that was going to invent the touchscreen OS.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Now you're in the larger, deeper, darker infinity. That's right. It is a bottomless well, truly. And so, yeah, so I had to sign this additional NDA. And yeah, it got introduced to this project. It was called Purple. Purple, the codename for iPhone. And it was in development. And my job was to join the software effort, which at that point was maybe six or eight people to do.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the funny thing is that at Apple, I was already under this blanket non-disclosure agreement. I mean, for the whole time that I worked there, I was on any of these document retention orders. I would get these periodic emails from the lawyers saying, do not destroy anything because of the work that I had done was then submitted in patents and perhaps there was going to be patent litigation. So this is just the whole mindset, the whole culture of what app was it. There was secret. We were doing patentable where we were trying to innovate and we were interested in treating that work as really trade secrets, something that was valuable to the company.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was serious. I was serious. But turn it down. Turned down that job because Scott continued to engage with me. And he said, just kind of sit tight, you know, maybe we've got something for you. And a couple days later, it was actually my direct manager at the time said, come here, and he took me into his office. And he said, we want you to work on this new project, sign this paper. And I kind of thought there was just the fairest little hint on the grapevine. So I just reach out. I signed the paper. And he said, yeah, we're making a cell phone. And you're now on the team”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, because I thought that I was resigning. So I need to go get another job. So I actually did full interview cycle, right? I went and did the interview process at Google and they offered me a job. So you were”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to understand what's going on. So I explained to him what I just explained to you about really wanting to still be in closer touch with the technology. And so he said, okay, we'll just go away. He was not pleased with me.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I had almost shame to say, you know, it's like a mini meltdown. I went to Scott Forstone and I said, hey, look, Scott, I don't want to do this. I led you astray, led myself astray. I quit. I offered to resign. And a part of the thing is it was a feeling of responsibility that I had taken on a responsibility that now I did not want to fulfill. And I felt like, well, the only thing for me, there's really just two choices. I could continue on being miserable about it, or I could just go and say, look, I'm done with this. I submit my resignation. And so Scott was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was still certainly at that point in my career, still fascinated by the software itself. That's what was attracted to me about Sync. It seemed like this distributed computing problem, and I was enamored with the technology, and yet client-server and all of this and not really, again, thinking about how the right focus was to build a team, build a team culture, support the people so that they could do the technology. And again, at that point in my career, I wasn't really ready for that. And I found myself within just a couple of months, I was miserable.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Okay, so it's like you have a computer desktop computer in the office, you have a desktop computer at home, or maybe you have a portable and a desktop. And it was to get those systems exchanging some data, your contact, your address book, things like that. And so I thought this was an interesting challenge, and people were going to be getting more devices and things like that. But I found that very soon after I got into the job that I was miserable. That I hadn't really reckoned at that point in my career with what management really is. It's about people.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, we'll get to. But he was the one who was in my management chain who gave me this opportunity. And so I started working on the Sync Services software for the Mac, which at that time was really still the software that would be up in the cloud and would help to Macs sync with each other. I mean, we didn't really have”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, I always try to think about, well, what's next? And I don't really have a big career vision. Especially the tech world, it changes so fast, right? And so it always seems like you come to the end of one thing and then that's the moment to really decide what the next thing should be. And as you say, I mean, engineering management seemed to be like this new domain that I didn't have a lot of experience in. So I thought that this would be an interesting opportunity. And so I pushed for it. I asked for it. And it was actually Scott Forestal, the software executive, really instrumental in coming up with a lot of the interesting user interface work in the iPhone software project later, which”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you ship Safari. Awesome browser, fast, native. You get a lot of people to switch over. And then at that point in your career, after having been this individual contributor that shipped this awesome product, you thought many people in your shoes, time to be an engineering manager. So maybe talk a little bit about that story of sort of how you thought about it and then how you got the job and then what the job was like when you got it as your first engineering manager.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That basket very carefully. You say the word, and it is one of the best words, perhaps the best word to describe Steve's approach, which was focus. Focus on what? Great products. I mean, in those three words, focus great product. You get, you can distill down Steve's approach, his formula to just a couple concepts.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was sort of a focus thing, right? By Steve saying, look, we're not going to have that many SKUs, we're not going to have that many products. Like, then I can put all my eggs in one basket to get in and watch that basket very carefully.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That beginning of Apple expanding out from being, well, Apple computer to being Apple Inc., right? Get into more consumer focused products that weren't really thought of as being computers. But because the point of going through all that is that since there were so few products, Steve could Keep tabs on what the software teams were doing. That there was this big initiative to make a web browser so he could keep tabs on it. He could find the time on his schedule to get updates on how the software was doing. And he did.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, I'm actually going to dispute one of the things that you said, if I may, is that certainly during the Steve Jobs era, and I still think to today here in 2019, Apple didn't ship a whole lot of product. Back then, Steve quite famously when he re-established control over the company, he came up with that product matrix, where we're going to have consumer product, a pro product, a desktop product, and a portable product, right? And so we've got four products, and it's the same operating system, right? Mac OS. And so it's actually very, very few products. Now, interestingly, when I joined Apple in June of 2001, Mac OS X had come out, and so we had that two-part product matrix that we were still working in. And that was still four months before the announcement of the iPod, which was just that.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we would periodically, I remember quite clearly there was a 0.1, there was a zero.2 demo where we needed to demonstrate the strength and the potential of this open source idea of the Conqueror source code that we had chosen and of our porting plan and efforts before they would commit to going through to the project to go from 0.2 to 1.0.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, with that as a brief handed over to the engineering team, it was our job to figure out how to do it. And so then that's where the bottom-up contribution comes from. He didn't say, I want you to make a performance test and I want you to institute this policy where every check-in doesn't allow any speed regressions. No, no, no. We came up with that, providing that bottom-up contribution that helped to realize division. And then one of these other things, and perhaps we'll get into it a little more as we go, because it is such an important part of Apple's culture, is that there would be demos.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the way that Steve organized the company and built the teams, built the culture was an essential part of how we did our work. And the way I like to describe it. Is that Apple was this wonderful combination of top-down leadership and bottom-up contributions? Steve, the top-down part, I think, is almost well known. Steve was very, very clear. He could be almost domineering in pushing his vision forward, right? So when you worked at Apple in software development, you knew what the vision was. That was always very, very clearly communicated. But it still was just a vision. Now, sometimes he would get specific, but most of the time he just would tell us, I want a great browser and it's got to be fast.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of check ins, that's what happened, either the code either stayed the same or it got faster. And over time, because there was this speed priority straight from Steve, we would look for ways to make it faster and eventually Safari, when it was released, it was three times faster than MSIE at loading web pages. And the point is, again, Steve Jobs going out on stage, he has this repetition.”
2022-04-28 · a16z Podcast · Inside Apple Software Design · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source