This room was just one more room like so many others in the building, a bit small for one. old meeting room Yes thin inaccessible – didn’t even have a window. Housekeeping did not have access to it. “There is no need to clean up here, there is only waste that we have to store somewhere and that we will no longer use” someone from Apple commented on the more than likely gesture of indifference from the person in charge of facilities of the Cupertino company.
People from key projects are disappearing, and it had only happened once at Apple: with the launch of the Macintosh.
Inside it smelled like coffee, pizza, and there were more people than any HR department would have considered reasonable… if they had known. Some company employees were perplexed – even for Apple – by the unusual disappearance of key personnel from certain projects. This was not a normal reallocation of resources. Scott Forstall himself was appearing more and more often at the project table and literally “ripping off” certain profiles of what they were doing. It didn’t matter what it was. To the astonishment of the project managers who did not have a clear answer as to the destination of these people. “I’ve only seen this situation once at this company, and that was when we released the Macintosh in 1984.”commented on some business stories. They were not lacking in reason.
The Project Purple 2 room, with a prototype of the original iPhone. Very few knew it existed.
The first rule of the Fight Club also applied in Project Purple 2: no one could speak of its existence.
Inside that room were all these people. Many of them had to say they were working on projects that didn’t exist, and had to cancel vacations, honeymoons and sleep. At the door he hanged himself A poster for the popular film El Club de la Lucha: “The first rule of the fight club is that we do not talk about the fight club”, A declaration of intentions. On the table, a purple stuffed animal in the shape of a kangaroo. This color would become the name of the project to avoid any connection with what they reported: Project Violet 2.
This “2” made sense to the world. It’s because of the first day that Steve Jobs saw a prototype of what was to be the original project, a three-layer multi-touch screen with inertial motion for a different project.
“This technology is incredible! But we’re not going to use it for the first time on a tablet.
We’re going to create a phone. “
Reinventing the phone, everyone
Ever since the iPod launched in 2001, Apple knew it had to do something with phones. At that time, everyone who owned an iPod also carried cell phones – some, the first smartphones that allowed us to connect to a primitive web and very simple games based on Java technology. As a business, they also had to deal with another scenario: at one point, smartphones had sufficient capacity to play MP3s and your customers have decided to eliminate iPods from their pockets.
The stage was not easy, but there was also no clear winner, beyond the Nokia and the BlackBerry which dominated the market but did not change the concept. “We have to transport the content that we can have on an iPod, on a smartphone”, commented Phil schiller to their teams. The first attempt was not a homemade product: they spoke to Motorola, which was suing to glide
it did not work : Eddy Cue, Vice President of iTunesHe only managed to put in this soulless Motorola the color covers of his albums, a dual stereo speaker and a microphone for the hands-free. Far from the next-gen experience they wanted to achieve. Light years from what Steve Jobs imagined, asking for a project that presented a challenge for the company and which decide on your future like the Macintosh did. A new 1984, a smartphone for “the rest of us”. Maybe that’s why he saw the perfect opportunity in Project Purple which was going to be an iPad, and it ended up being Project Purple 2 … “We created the smartphone we wanted to buy” Scott Forstall said years after the release of the original iPhone.
Introduce iPhone, whatever the cost
Greg christie, head of the original iPhone team, would have liked to suggest to Jobs to announce the launch of the new product a few months later. After all, no one expected such a thing. But he also knew it was impossible: six days before January 9, 2007 the presentation was already written and had been rehearsed over and over. However, the iPhone had never performed well in any of them. And there was no material time to do anything.
Steve Jobs had to present the original iPhone in a certain order so that it wouldn’t crash … The first time everything worked was on keynote day
The device it was not over yet, the operating system crashed at times and despite having three backup iPhones I had prepared for the presentation, no one was betting it would work. However, the team was able to detect the order in which the iPhone “could” operate without hanging up: teaching the music app and then the mail app wasn’t the same, rather than the other way around. This determined the final order of the presentation, and so Steve Jobs introduced some features earlier than others. It wasn’t a whim: if it had been otherwise, the phone would have hung up. Any of the three he had on stage.
Jobs also didn’t want the internet connection to go down, so he ordered AT-T to install a mobile antenna outside the building. A few days before, he had the idea of call a Starbucks live in the middle of a speech demonstrate the technical capabilities of the product and failure at this stage would have been catastrophic. In addition, he asked the development team that the coverage bars are always displayed full, since the subsystem of the internal antennas was not yet completely closed.
Today, exactly 15 years after this moment, we remember how Jobs and Apple changed the world with a phone that ushered in everything that came after: app stores, social media, and even the reviews Macs would earn – with accomplishments as incredible as the design. of the company’s own processors started with the iPhone 4: the Apple Silicon and its first representative as the M1.
In my opinion, one of the best moments in the business, and one that I remember most about Jobs, was the thirteen seconds before the announcement of the original iPhone. Those thirteen seconds Jobs knew he was going to change the world again, and seemed to taste it very carefully. The moment that was reserved for him before announcing it to the world.
Boy you did it.
Thanks Steeve.
