Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing

In the internal NeXT lexicon, this pattern of initial hiring hailed as the very best, followed by disparagement as hopelessly incompetent, was referred to by the shorthand phrase “The Hero-Shithead Roller Coaster.

He hired a full-time interior designer as one of the first ten employees of NeXT.

In short, Steve Jobs said the country needed more people like Steve Jobs.

The University of California at Berkeley received gratis so much computer equipment that much of it went underutilized; one donated workstation discovered in a faculty member’s office was used exclusively as a space heater because its circuitry generated considerable heat.

in memos as “senior NeXT exposure,” that is, the presence of Jobs himself. The competition also noticed the phenomenon. Field sales representatives for Sun found that their smooth progress in working an account would be thrown in turmoil when Jobs would present himself and sway the customer to consider the NeXT.

There Apple would provide housing, company stores, recreational facilities, complete immersion in Apple culture. His model was Disney World, a state within a state, with its own fire and police departments.90 Appletown was never built

The Jobs-designed factory obliterated the difference in white-collar/blue-collar work environments found everywhere else; NeXT factory employees in Fremont worked amidst luxury equal to what the employees in the Palo Alto office enjoyed.

When software developers approached NeXT about bringing out a NeXT version of existing software that ran on other kinds of computers, Jobs turned them away in almost all cases.