Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 28: Steve Jobs & Sean Parent

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

In this episode, Conor and Bryce talk to Sean Parent about some of his Steve Jobs stories.About the Guest:Sean Parent is a principal scientist and software architect for Adobe Photoshop. Sean has been at Adobe since 1993 when he joined as a senior engineer working on Photoshop and later managed Adobe’s Software Technology Lab. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple’s successful transition to PowerPC.Date Recorded: 2021-05-19Date Released: 2021-06-04Apple Rhapsody OSNeXT IncAdobeSteve JobsJohn WarnockMacOSXGreg Gilley Adobe Demo at WWDC 1998MetrowerksIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Yeah, and that was Steve's MO. Steve would tend to arrive to meetings a little early. His question was, you know, why are you here? Why are you here now? So, and if you didn't give an acceptable answer, he was like, recorded on May 19th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we wrap up our three-part interview with Sean Parent, where he tells us some of his awesome Steve Jobs stories. Fast forward until after I left Apple. So, you know, I left Apple after five years and went to Adobe to work on Photoshop. And so I joined Adobe end of 93

to work on Photoshop. And a couple of years after that, Steve Jobs came back to Apple. So I always say I worked at Apple between jobs because I joined Apple right after Steve left and I left Apple right before Steve came back. So I worked at Apple between jobs. So Steve came back and Apple proposed this operating system called Rhapsody, which was basically Next Step. And they said they were canceling traditional macOS and they were going to move to Rhapsody, which was Next Step, which had came out of Next Computing, which is a company that Stephen formed. And at the time, Apple had about 2% market share and was falling. And so the idea of supporting a new and different, radically different platform on what amounted

to a failing company was not particularly of interest to Adobe. And so both Adobe and Microsoft had basically said, well, you know, that's very nice, but we decline. We won't be supporting your new operating system. And before I had left Apple, I had worked at Apple on the transition from 68K processors to PowerPC processors. So, you know, I kind of knew, you know, at the very low level, kind of how the operating system worked and how it was brought up and, you know, enough that I could bring up, you know, with high amount of compatibility, you know, a 68k box running in a PowerPC box. And so I wrote this

about a page and a half proposal that was known as the Cyan proposal. It was Cyan because Apple always color-coded their OSs, and Cyan was an unused color, and Cyan is kind of a blend between blue and green, tending towards yellow a little bit. And Rhapsody, I think, was going to be yellow. And traditional Mac OS was blue. And so I wrote this Cyan proposal. And basically, it was a proposal for how you could have Mac compatibility

inside of this Rhapsody environment. And this was while you were at Apple or while you were at Adobe? Well, it was at Adobe. I wrote this proposal up. And floated it up the management chain, and it went to John Warnock, who at the time was our CEO. And we had lots of conversations, and John was like, yeah, okay, if Apple did this, then we would support their new operating system. And so then we ended up in discussions with Apple about, okay, you want us to support your new operating system?

Then build this bridge, and we'll support your new operating system. And Craig Gilley was my boss at the time, and he kind of took point on most of these negotiations and so at one of the meetings with Apple this was fairly senior like director of engineering at Apple at the time Greg had you know, if you don't do this, why would we support your operating system? And the director of engineering from Apple said, well, you know, if you don't do this, I'm just gonna build my own Photoshop and put you guys out of business, was his basic response. To which Greg responded, if you really think that you could do that, I suggest you do,

because you'll make way more money than what you're doing right now. And that turned into kind of a heated argument between the two of them. At the time, I actually thought it was going to come to to physical blows like they were like chest to chest um um is this at adobe or like is this meeting taking place at adobe was taking place at adobe and so they were literally like chest to chest you know pointing so after this meeting the person from Apple wrote an email that went to Warnock that was that he could no longer negotiate

with Adobe because Greg was a hothead. So if Adobe wanted to continue negotiations, it would have to be with somebody else. So I got tagged and was like, okay, so Sean, you get to continue the negotiations around this. And so we set up another meeting.

This one was at Apple. And the meeting was supposed to basically go in two parts where Adobe presented the business reality of why we wouldn't support Rhapsody as it was, you know, the cost to us of moving our products to a new platform, the opportunity costs involved, the technical challenges and basically lay out the case for why we weren't going to do it. And you know, in less, Apple kind of met us halfway. And on the flip side, Apple was going to present their analysis of the Cyan proposal. It was myself and Ross Bott.

Ross Bott was an executive at Adobe, and he was handling kind of the number side, the marketing side of it, and I was handling the technical side of it. And so we go to this meeting, and we do our presentation on the technical aspects and the numbers aspects. And then it's like, okay, Apple, it's your turn to give your presentation. And this same individual who had been in an argument with Greg says,

well, we looked at this proposal that Sean wrote and it can't be built. And like, that was it. they had like no slides no presentation no numbers no anything and I got mad and I'm like I'm like that's bs uh he was like nope I've had like all the you know best senior engineers we have here look at this they say nope it can't be built i'm like like you're full of blank you know if you just if you want to hire me back let me put my own team together i'll build it and uh so it went it went really well then the the meeting. So, yeah, so the meeting went really, really well. So I get back to the office, and I don't even think the day was over.

I get an email from John Warnock, and it's a forward of an email from this director of engineering Apple that says you know that the whole problem with dealing with Adobe was you know was was me as a as an ex Apple employee with an X to grind, and that I didn't know what I was talking about, and I was impossible to work with. And so this is just a forwarded email just slamming me personally with a note from John at the top that says, I want to see you in my office now. That was the extent of the note.

So, you know, I went through my office thinking, okay, well, if I'm getting escorted out of the building, what do I want to take home today? And I called John's assistant and said, you know, John sent me this note. He wants to speak with me now. And she said, yeah, he's waiting for you. Come on up.

So, you know, go up to the 18th floor of the tower. It's's what you would expect you know a ceo's office to be like right and um i i get there and uh john's like oh sean come on in come on in like have a seat i'm like oh i'm like shaking and sweating, right? I think this is the end of my career. And he goes, just sit there. Just listen. I just wanted you to be here for this. And he picks up the phone to his assistant, and he tells her, can you get Steve on the line? And she says, yes. So there's a pause, and the phone rings again, and he tells her can you get steve on the line and she says yes so there's a pause and phone rings again and he picks it up he's like steve i'm putting you on speakerphone

puts it on speakerphone and it's steve jobs from apple and uh he goes he goes hey steve it's john they go through a couple pleasantries he goes yep I'm calling you today about this Rhapsody thing I just want to tell you we're not doing it and we're not discussing it anymore and he hangs up the phone and he turns to me and he says he says you know he said for them

to come back and say that they can't work with you when we had already told them no and you're the only person who me and he says he says you know he said for them to come back and say that they can't work with you when we had already told them no and you're the only person who was trying to salvage the situation he said is is just ridiculous he said so so we're done and and you know i would leave the story there but for your listeners the time passes probably about a year and a half from from this point in time and i'm sitting in my office you know at adobe working away on on photoshop and my phone rings and i pick it up i said hello and they're like hello is this sean parent i'm like yeah this is sean parent and it's like this is steve jobs i'm like

yeah they're like they're like no this is steve. I'm like, yeah. They're like, no, this is Steve Jobs. I'm like, okay, well, hi, Steve. What can I do for you? And he said, I'm calling to personally invite you over to Apple. I've got a presentation I want to give to some of the Adobe folks. So I'm calling each of you individually and inviting you personally to come over. So it gives me the time,

and it was myself and Greg and Mark Hamburg, who was a technical lead on Photoshop at the time, a couple of other people from some of the non-Photoshop product teams also. And we go over to this meeting at Apple, and Steve comes into the room, and he said, this is what I'm going to present at WWDC, which is Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, in about two weeks and he goes through a set of slides for Mac OS X. And he said so we're going to be announcing Mac OS X at WWDC and here's the slide

deck and he goes I want Adobe's commitment here and now that you guys will support OS X and I said nothing like okay and so we said you know we had a conversation and we had enough people in the room we said we can commit to this and he said okay I want to show Photoshop running on OS X in two weeks and so we said we'll do our best and yeah a bunch of us got very little sleep for two weeks and and you can look it up online. You can probably hunt it down and find a link in the show notes. But Greg Gilley presented Photoshop running on OSX at WWDC two weeks later. And it's a horrible presentation because Greg was completely

sleep deprived. And he starts rambling about how he was, you know, writing code during the family barbecue the night before the WWDC. And so it kind of goes into this long ramble about his family barbecue. So, you know, Photoshop is all crazy, and I'm dealing with all the fires that are coming up and dealing with that. And then my brother comes in town, and so I've got him and his family, and so we, you know, are trying to run around with them. And so I've got him and his family. And so we are trying to run around with them. And so actually, on this past Friday, I actually went down to Monterey Bay Aquarium

and left the machine with a couple of engineers on the Photoshop team who finally got to the point where the disks were going to manufacturing. So they had a few minutes of time. And they fixed a couple of things which had been nagging me. And then so Saturday, we had a barbecue minutes of time and they fixed a couple of things which had been nagging me and then so saturday we had a barbecue in my backyard and i was i was in there i was fixing trying to get the last couple of things fixing trying to get them worked and i burned the steaks

um so my wife gave me grief for that but um and let's see and then of course sunday was mother's day and didn't didn't didn't you say that when steve present like unveiled this at wd wwdc didn't he say something like they said which you found amusing because a year earlier yes it was yes he did use exactly those words they you know whoever they were and and it was. Yes, he did use exactly those words. They, you know, whoever they were. And it was it was somewhat annoying. Yeah, there was there's there's so many interesting side stories in this in this time frame, because the Cyan proposal went a little further after Apple turned it down, which was one of the people who I'd worked with at Apple.

He had actually started as mine and Scott Boyd's intern at Apple, Eric Trout. He wrote the dynamic recompiling emulator for 68K to PowerPC that Apple was using. And I knew Greg Gallinos, who had created a company called MetroWorks, and they kind of had Apple's development tools, but development tools for the Apple platform, CodeWarrior tools, which were very popular at the time. But something else that MetroWorks had was a library that emulated some of the Macintosh on PCs.

Now I'm drawing a blank as to what the name of the library was, so long as you kind of recompiled. And Eric then had worked at Connectix, and they did something called Speed Doubler, which was a way to speed up the emulated portions of PowerPC systems at the time. At this company, Connectix. He later went on to Microsoft and worked on the Hypervisor, and he's now retired. Eric and I kind of got together and kicked this around and said, you know, we know enough people that we could build a Mac-compatible

system. If Apple's going to kill the Mac, we could put together a consortium of companies basically to build Mac compatibles. And, you know, Macs at the time had opened themselves up for cloning. So there were these hardware manufacturers that had geared up to build Mac clones. And then when Steve Jobs came back in, he kind of shut down all the clones. And so companies like IBM had been geared up to build PowerPC Max and then had to shut it all down. And we knew folks at Bee, which was a company that built an operating system that ran on PowerPCs. And so we kind of hatched this idea of, well, we could take Bee OS and we could take the MetroWorks library and we could take the technology that Eric had been working on and we could put together all of

these pieces and we could build Mac compatible power PCs. And we know all the hardware manufacturers who were going to build Mac clones and perhaps they would be interested in building Mac clones without Apple. And we scheduled a meeting. It was going to be just a handful of basically engineer types to talk about the technical feasibility over at B headquarters. This had kind of leaked beyond the engineers who were talking about it to executives. And so I walked into this room, and know, Jean-Louis Gosset,

who had been at Apple and had then started the B Corporation and senior executives from IBM and these other companies. And we sat for an hour and discussed the technical feasibility. And what it basically came down to is, could we get the software manufacturers, the big software manufacturers, to commit to support this platform, right? If we were going to build a consortium of companies, could we get the software to back it up?

And that led me back to John Warnock's office to say, hey, would you support this Mac clone? And John came back and said, no, I wouldn't. He said, for two reasons. One is, it's a high-risk thing. He said, I think, he said, in his opinion, he said he thinks that the hardware manufacturers are actually playing you. He said they have a bunch of sunk costs into building Mac clones that they're looking to recoup. And they want to do one generation and burn off their hardware.

And then they'll be done with this. So he said from a business standpoint, he said, I think, you know, you're getting used. So tread carefully. And he said the other thing that he had learned, he said, I think, you know, you're getting used. So tread carefully. And he said, the other thing that he had learned, he said, was to never take Steve on head to head. He said, it's one thing to tell Steve, you know, I'm doing this or I'm not doing this. It's another thing to actually go and try to compete with the man. And he said, he's, you know, he has a long relationship with Steve, which, you know, the whole laser writer thing and Adobe got started largely out of Steve's support from Apple. And so he said, I'm not going to go compete against Steve head to head.

And so I'm out. And kind of without Adobe's commitment, we couldn't get Microsoft's commitment. And the whole strategy just kind of without Adobe's commitment, we couldn't get Microsoft's commitment and the whole strategy just kind of unraveled. But, you know. Where were you working at the time? I was at Adobe. You were still on Adobe Gatch, yeah. Yeah, so I was at Adobe from 93 until 2009.

And then I went to Google for a little over a year and then back to Adobe and I've been at Adobe since it must have been pretty like there's not a lot of people that can uh stand up to Steve Jobs and it sounds like John Warnack was one of them yeah yeah you know there there are you know a few other stories you know I was in a few meetings during that time period with Steve. And John was one of the few people who would stand up to Steve. And there seemed to be a huge amount of respect there. You know, John, I actually saw John tell Steve, Steve, have a seat. And Steve kind of, you know, shut up and sat down.

If I recall correctly, the background of that story was, wasn't it that Steve had come into the meeting and started asking each person in the meeting who they were and why they were there, and then telling them whether or not to remain in the meeting? Yeah. Yeah. And that was Steve's MO. Steve would tend to arrive to meetings a little early. And even, you know, this was a meeting at Adobe, so this was not a meeting that he had. And he would walk into the meeting and people who were already there and then people who came into the room, his question was, you know, why are you here? And person might give, you know, well, I'm the so-and-so. People answer that question with their title, right?

I'm the lead on blank product. He'd be like, that wasn't the question. Why are you here now? And if you didn't give an acceptable answer, he was like, you don't need to be here. Get out. Such a nice guy. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, kind of everything you see in the movies about him is, you know, has some amount of accuracy. You know, he's an incredibly smart guy, had an incredible aura around him, if you will, the kind of reality distortion field that he's famous for, could convince you of almost anything. And in many ways that served him very well, right? He was a very good motivator, and would push people outside of their limits. And a lot of times, you know, it was just by telling people, you know, no, that's not, that's not right. I don't know what's right. That's not it. Do better. Right? And just

pushing people to go back and do better and try again and to try to impress the man. And so I wouldn't say he was an individual who I'd ever want as a friend, but as somebody running the company, he was very effective. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. There's nothing I love more than Sean war stories from that particular period of time. I think the first time, it was the first time we met Sean. And so for those that aren't familiar with Silicon Valley, Adobe's headquarters are in San Jose, which is sort of at the bottom of Silicon Valley. And I think Apple's offices, either the new one or the old one have always been in Cupertino. So is that where those meetings were taking place going back and forth between Cupertino and San Jose? Yeah, yeah, it would have been that time it was, you know,

the infinite loop building, right, which was in Cupertino um but yeah the first time i met uh sean we had lunch in the cafeteria of the adobe headquarters and i was i think i we had lunch for like i don't know two hours or two and a half hours it was very kind of you to spend that much time with me and i heard all these stories and when you were telling me the one uh where you go up to john warnock's the ceo's office like i thought for sure you were going to get fired because the way it goes is like you're sent in there as like the second negotiator and been told, all right, so, you know, it didn't go well the first time. You know, let's try and be friends. We want to be we want to have Apple. And then you come out of it just as much of, you know, having gotten an argument.

And then the punchline of that, of the CEO getting Steve Jobs on the phone and saying, no, thanks. Because it's a good, you sort of, in the midst of hearing the story, you forget that you essentially had written a proposal, like, for Apple. It wasn't really for Adobe. It was, your proposal was like, hey, Apple wasn't really for Adobe. It was you, your proposal was like, Hey, Apple's asking us for this. And we're saying no. Um, and you went out of your way to write a proposal for Apple that said, Hey, if you do this, we can work together. It wasn't for Adobe, uh, per se, it was for the partnership between the companies. And you, you lose sight of that because the story is so amazing and then at the end of it you sort of realize oh yeah sean was the only one that was like nobody else like

you know for for all we know uh you know your your direct reports or people you were reporting to were saying okay you can spend a little bit of time but like we got other stuff to do so um you know don't waste two weeks writing up this proposal or whatever. Yeah, it's crazy. It's an amazing story. And I've heard, you know, I've heard conflicting stories from inside of Apple. You know, what was referred to as Blue Box, which was kind of cyan, was built, my understanding is, largely by the Quickdraw team, which Quickdraw also had like a compatibility layer that they had built for Windows boxes. And so I've heard that, you know, the Cyan proposal had nothing to do with OSX and it was developed completely independently.

And then I've heard like, no, it had everything to do with it. And, you know, it wouldn't have been developed if it hadn't been for the Cyan proposal. You know, I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't think it was a unique idea. And I think anybody who I had worked with at Apple, because we had been working on how do we support the evolution of the Mac onto new operating systems. Anybody who I had worked with who was still there would have come to the same conclusion. But I also think that having Adobe say no in less was a huge motivating factor. have where, you know, it's not uncommon for somebody's initial reaction to a thing to be, it can't be done, or this is a bad idea, or we shouldn't do this. And I think really the,

the, the key thing is not an initial reaction. The key thing, like when presented with a new idea that maybe challenges your, your perceptions, the key thing is when you go and think about it and you realize, Hey, maybe, maybe, maybe this was actually right. Maybe my gut reaction was just me being defensive. What do you do next? Because you can either double down or you can say, oh yeah, you know what? I'm going to change my position. And one of the things I've noticed about people that I consider very intelligent and who it seems being very successful is they are, when they recognize that they were wrong, they have no shame and no remorse about switching their position to what they now believe to be the reality of the world. And so like, you know, obviously Apple, Apple doesn't come off well in that engagement, but at least they eventually recognized that they needed to do the thing.

Yes. And yeah. And, you know, I think that that's very true. I'm notorious in meetings for arguing all sides of a problem. You know, I will argue against myself in a meeting and people are like, wait, you just said this other thing. And I'm like, well, now I'm taking the other position, right? So let's figure this out. And I'll frequently tell people when they say, you know, you can't do that. I'm like, do you know I can't do that? You know, do you know that that can't be done? Or do you just not know how to do it?

Those are two different things. And, you know, if you know that can't be done, put together the rational argument, right? Connect the dots and basically, you know, prove it, prove that can't be done. So I think, uh, yes, yes. People are, are, are, are, are too dismissive. And a lot of times in my career, you know, if I've had a significant impact just because I've been like, no, you know, I can see that this is doable, and it's not a huge amount of work, and it can be scoped,

and there's a path that can get us from A to B, and it just comes out of sitting down and trying to look at, you know, okay, you know, people say it would be great if we could do blank, but everybody says we can't do blank. And I'm like, do we? Does, you know, is that really we can't do blank? Or is that just a bunch of people saying we don't know how to do blank? And so let's go go actually dig in and take a look at that problem. My, my youngest of three sisters, Piper, she works in finance. And she has this quote, I think it's a Ray Dalio. But it could be from some other famous hedge fund person that says, like genius or brilliance is the ability to

hold like multiple points of view in your head at the same time and like compare and contrast them. Because a lot of times in meetings, you see, you know, people go head to head. But like, real brilliance is like the ability to, you know, do what you were doing is, you know, take one side of an argument and then take the other side of the argument. Because at the end of the day, you shouldn't just be stuck to a decision, because that's the one that you chose, you should be looking at all angles, which is it's a hard thing to do. Yeah, I think it's important also to kind of seek out people who view the world differently than you do in tech. An individual who at Adobe, Mark Hamburg, he was lead on Photoshop when I joined the Photoshop team and then he and I worked later on a product called Revel. So we've

worked together off and on for, gosh, it's getting close to 30 years now. He's an absolutely brilliant individual, but he always manages to come at a problem from the opposite direction that I come at it from, you whatever the two of us are proposing as solutions, you would think that one of the two has to be wrong. And I have a huge amount of respect for Mark, technically, and his brain just works very differently than mine does. He solves problems in a very different way than i solve problems and what i usually find is is we're notorious for having these long drawn out very vocal arguments but yeah we're good friends we'll go out and get a beer afterwards the when we have these arguments it's like we both end up learning something right right and and usually we end up on a better solution than if either of us were trying to tackle the same problem alone and so he's somebody whose input i will i will seek out even though for whatever it is when i'm like oh i'm thinking about doing this and here's

how i do it his initial response is going to be it's going to be you're wrong that's like a stupid way to do it right right right and i just know and expect that and it's like okay so so but he's going to propose something that's completely different which at first glance i will say well that looks ridiculous um but if i take the time to understand what he's saying it's like no that's not ridiculous there's some some amount of brilliance in there and if i if i understand where he's coming from i'll end up in a better place and so so i think in tech we tend to people tend to grav gravitate towards people who affirm their own you know their own belief systems and they form these little clusters and they kind of push out outside influences. And it's like, no, you want, you, you know, it's like you don't want to be the smartest person in the room

and you don't want to work in an environment that's homogenous, you know, that everybody's viewing things the same way. And that's why we should all learn APL. Perfect way to close it out. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.