Andy Grignon was a senior engineer at Apple. “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,” Fred Vogelstein reports for The New York Times. “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,” Vogelstein reports. “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… 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,” Vogelstein reports. “‘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.'”
“It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked,” Vogelstein reports. “Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended (even though Vogelstein, like so many others, attends the Church of Marketshare) – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz,” “Dan K.,” and “Dale S.” for the heads up.]