"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt&characters=Steve%20Jobs&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Rating&detail=medium

by carterac • 16 years ago

262 110 16 years ago

folklore.org

owyn• 16 years ago

That's a great story. I'm not sure how many people can say they got a hard sell like that from both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for one piece of software...

mcantor2• 16 years ago

I feel like there should be an award for that. I feel accomplished when I manage to get car dealerships to compete over me, much less CEOs worth scrillions of dollars.

gaius• 16 years ago

They were only worth quintillions back then, remember

ericb• 16 years ago

I feel like he really dropped the ball on negotiating the sale. It seems like he didn't make any counters, and didn't use their competing interest to reap a higher price.

I was expecting at least a cease and desist or lawsuit would be involved.

jmtame• 16 years ago

rule number one: never negotiate in person (especially if you're inexperienced)

staunch• 16 years ago

Steve Jobs should not follow this rule.

amackera• 16 years ago

How do you do it? Email? Telephone? I'm legitimately interested, my negotiation skills are weak.

statictype3• 16 years ago

What he really wanted was for this to be bundled with the Mac. So that probably clouded his ability to negotiate a better deal. There's no logic in the assertion that because he worked at Apple and had insider knowledge, that Apple should have to pay less for it.

alexyim• 16 years ago

That isn't the assertion though. The assertion is that he shouldn't be able to charge whatever he wants.

10ren6• 16 years ago

Oh man you reckon that's poor negotiation skills, wait til you check out this guy http://www.nucalc.com/Story/

EDIT found a video of Ron telling the story in person http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567...

johnaspden3• 16 years ago

Ron appears to have got what he wanted, starting from a very bad position!

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

"Sadly, Microsoft has effective building security". That says it all, about corporate mentality.

estel• 16 years ago

Just watched that, can't believe I'd never seen it before. Awesome!

powrtoch• 16 years ago

Agreed. "Don't argue" seems like a really powerful negotiation technique if you've got the charisma/intensity to actually pull it off.

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

Probably my favourite 'Folklore' story (though I've by no means read them all) - I especially like the extra $50K kicker when Switcher was sold, something Jobs "swore they would never do".

10ren6• 16 years ago

With inflation, that's only doubled: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100%2C000+1984+%3D

jrockway• 16 years ago

Not a bad deal for sitting in your house for a few months working on something that you enjoy.

brown• 16 years ago

Or a really crappy deal compared to how much value Bill Gates and Steve Jobs got out of it.

rodh257• 16 years ago

"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months."

In my limited experience negotiating on fees for programming or selling software I've heard this line a few times. "You seem like a really good programmer, that program probably would have only taken you say 2 days, times that by an average hourly rate and thats the rate I'm willing to pay for the program and all source code".

Always a sign for me that things aren't going to go well.

anamax• 16 years ago

> In my limited experience negotiating on fees for programming or selling software I've heard this line a few times. "You seem like a really good programmer, that program probably would have only taken you say 2 days, times that by an average hourly rate and thats the rate I'm willing to pay for the program and all source code".

Bzzt - "really good programmers" aren't paid an "average hourly rate" - they're paid an absurdly high hourly rate.

You've got to be willing to walk away, to call their bluff to find another programmer to do what you did for less.

And when they come back, the price is higher because you both know that they don't have as many options as they thought that they had before. (Alternatively, they've admitted that the options that they were using to beat you down don't exist.)

dedward5• 16 years ago

Yeah.... the guy who made that rediculous statement failed miserably.... no idea how to run a software company at all.

I could tell when he came out of this superyacht moored out in the ocean and camped out next to us reading a book in the shade while we were grabbing some sun on a nice little tropical island. (Didn't bother to bother him - as tempting as it was - I figured he should be able to enjoy the peace and quiet and beautify of the place just like everyone else without being hassled)

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

great story. great insight into Jobs and Gates too, giving a glimpse of both in action in the same era, and dealing with the same issue.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

When it got to the part where Andy was talking to Jobs and Jobs was trying to close a deal to buy Switcher, I could almost hear the click of Steve's Reality Distortion Field turning on. Also pictured him doing the hand-waving motion Kenobi did in Star Wars when doing the Jedi mind trick on stormtroopers. "These are not the droids you're looking for. One hundred thousand credits. The Jedi will not be taken advantage of. This little one is not worth your trouble."

mbenjaminsmith• 16 years ago

I always thought the Jobsian reality distortion field was more inspirational. It turns on and engineers start thinking along the lines of, "Yeah, I guess we can pack a mobo into a single square inch."

What he described sounded like vanilla intimidation. I could feel the guy squirming in his seat.

redfloatplane• 16 years ago

Man, for some reason a mobo in a single square inch sounds like a great idea.

Must… resist… RDF…

mikeknoop3• 16 years ago

Did anyone else think the story would end with the key combination being changed to "Ctrl+alt+delete"?

neandorman• 16 years ago

I was thinking command-option-escape (force quit on Mac).

mikeknoop3• 16 years ago

Well, Microsoft was the comapny who he was talking about force-quit shortcut with, so I assumed the former.

statictype3• 16 years ago

When he started on about the key combinations at the end, I was convinced he was about to give us the origin of Ctrl-Alt-Del.

mikeknoop3• 16 years ago

I had the exact same comment (see farther down). I went on a quick hunt and turned up this as the actual origins: http://www.reviewjournal.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_hom...

zimbu668• 16 years ago

A more humorous take on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zADyh0JQh8

quickpost• 16 years ago

I thought it was going to be the origin of Force Quit on a Mac, but perhaps that already existed at the time.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Damn, look at this: "... including a simple UI for selecting applications and 'Switcher Documents' for remembering sets of related applications."

I wish the concept of switcher documents had survived in the greater ecology - that would have been sweet.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

Both Jobs and Gates tried to snare him with the same fallacy. It was easy for him to do because he was very good/had insider knowledge so he shouldn't be paid that much for it. Wrong.

What really mattered was how much it was worth to Microsoft or Apple and especially that it was worth a good bit to both. Picture Scotty asking if that's worth somthin' t'ye or shd'aye just punch up clear?

danilocampos• 16 years ago

It's a tough one, though. It sounds like an important thing to Andy was getting more of his work onto a bunch of Macs, where it could make the most impact. Which meant getting it bundled. Which meant making Steve happy.

Imagine Andy's horror, for example, if Steve had someone else build the Apple-blessed switcher instead and it worked but lacked the elegance and care of the Hertzfeld version.

Steve ended up having something Andy wanted, too. I gotta believe Jobs is a tough enough negotiator under the best of circumstances. Imagine when he's got you by your idealism.

jimbokun• 16 years ago

The only possible leverage he could have had would have been to try to get Gates and Jobs into a bidding war. But that only works if Microsoft sees it as a competitive advantage to have the switcher for their apps but no one else's.

And, like you said, Andy already admitted he wanted it on all Macs, which blew any chance at leverage he had.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

But as Bill Gates once said, he didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

Are you sure you're not quoting a Simpsons episode? If I'm not mistaken, he followed that quote with instructions to his thugs to "buy 'em out, boys.", whereby they proceeded to trash the office of the dot-com in question.

I'm not certain it's historically accurate.

fookyong• 16 years ago

"keyboard! how quaint"

one of my favourite scenes from the movie series :)

Gormo2• 16 years ago

Best response: "I don't sell time, but here's how much I charge for the product."

vinhboy• 16 years ago

Wow, just wow. I am amazed by two things 1) How much a jerk both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are and 2) How young the engineers were that started all this...

shin_lao4• 16 years ago

They're not jerks, they're putting the interest of their companies first.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

They could do so without being jerks though, and yes, I think they both come off as jerks. I can think of several ways in which they could have achieved the same thing without being jerks.

farmerbuzz• 16 years ago

Check out this other story about Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

I understand you probably did not have this story in mind when you made your comment, but he sounds like a jerk to me.

hammmatt3• 16 years ago

It is amazing how many young people can succeed in technical fields at a young age.

Most great physicists make some of their incredible discoveries when they are young.

Mark Zuckerburg was in college when facebook was created. Same with Napster and dozens of others.

Maybe, there is something special about that age. It is when you can actually use the brainpower, business intelligence, ext. If you have the goods, they seem to show around that age.

nck4222• 16 years ago

Yeah that's actually exactly it. People are evolutionarily wired to try to stand out/take risks at that age.

"The tendency [to take risks] probably affects one in five people, mostly young males, and declines with age. It may ensure our survival, even spur our evolution as individuals and as a species. Risk taking probably bestowed a crucial evolutionary advantage."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/risk

andreyf2• 16 years ago

I wonder if he'd gone with the single-heap-for-all-apps idea, whether or not it would have encouraged program interoperability?

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

It probably would have led to programs crashing other programs by heap corruption though. More separation is better.

febeling• 16 years ago

This is what the Switcher looked like: http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stor...

andreyf2• 16 years ago

If this isn't inspiring to "predict the future by inventing it", I don't know what is.

10ren6• 16 years ago

This story inspired me tonight: reading about how he didn't know if it would work or not, and how he fixed bugs as they arose is true hacking style. And it's definitely a way to get things done. So that's what I did tonight, and made a ton of progress; just hounding down and stomping on bugs mercilessly.

Why wasn't I doing that already? I'd been reading too much Dijkstra, that the "competent" programmer can show whether his code will work or not. It's definitely possible to do it that way, but it's (very sadly) too high a standard for me to reach in reasonable time (or maybe at all), for more than toy problems. Dijkstra used this approach to write a multitasking operating system. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

> the guy wrote a multitasking operating system with this approach. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do that.

You'd be surprised at how doable that is if you actually tried. It's the same as every other problem in programming: break it down in to two pieces, figure out which one is the easier, if it is trivial solve it, otherwise recurse.

You'd need an overall sketch of the architecture before you began but once you have that worked out it's 'just programming' to get you to the finish line.

The hardest part to get right is security, especially if you go multi-user, but since you just specify 'multitasking operating system' that one is somewhat limited in scope.

(such thinking probably gave us windows ;) )...

10ren6• 16 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate the support, but my opps, you caught my initial phrasing before I clarified to disambiguate: I didn't mean to write an operating system; but to write one in Dijkstra's way (ie by showing - proving - that it works before you write it). ugghh I shudder just saying it.

davidw2• 16 years ago

... and wait for the computer to reboot every time you screw up ...

It can be a slow process with less 'instant gratification' than web programming.

johnaspden3• 16 years ago

So, there are two ways to do things, an easy way and a hard way. Once you've done it the easy way, it's probably a lot easier to cover up the traces and make it look like you did it the hard way.

And a guy who is famous both for being incredibly clever and for being rather arrogant and insecure told all his competitors that they were incompetent if they didn't do it the hard way.

Programming is a form of mathematics. Maths papers are terse and beautiful and look as though they have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus.

But you don't see the days of hacking through examples and crazy leaps of intuition (that are almost always wrong) in the finished paper, because the mathematician removes them from the story in order to leave an argument that is easy to verify.

I am not saying that Dijkstra couldn't do things the hard way. I would be amazed if his best stuff was done the hard way.

Retric• 16 years ago

I think it really depends on how well you know the underlying system. Once, I was working on a project written in object pascal and I got to the point where opening the debugger was on average the slower approach to solving most problems. However, I am no where near that point when writing .Net code because the language and the platform became to complex for me to really understand.

timwiseman• 16 years ago

Well said!

Lakatos in his "Proofs and Refutations" addresses precisely this topic.

bpyne• 16 years ago

It's not possible to do unless you fully understand the problem you're trying to solve. When you're exploring the problem you need a "scratch area". In modern times, the scratch area is your programming environment rather than paper and chalkboard.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

> ""But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple."

> "What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.

> "There's no way that you could have written that program without confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge whatever you like for it.""

Wow... that makes me think a whole lot less of Steve Jobs.

That information should have been public knowledge anyway, to try to claim a stake in something that someone wrote just because you don't document your stuff is really low.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

It's a common practice that parts of systems that cannot be guaranteed to not change in upcoming releases are undocumented, and rightly so.

jacquesm13• 16 years ago

That's true, but that is not a reason to see that as giving you a stake in someone else's efforts. I think that's a low thing to do.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

Jobs also offered, 2.5 times what Gates did

confuzatron• 16 years ago

Interesting to see the different approaches taken by Gates and Jobs. Gates: flattery, Jobs: implied threats.

shirtless_coder• 16 years ago

Well, 100k is better than 40k

hammmatt3• 16 years ago

It seemed like he had an incredible product he could have sold for more in my opinion.

For contractual projects wouldn't it make sense to know the value of what is going to be produced (more or less) and then negotiate the percentage of it.

Is there anything akin to an agent for a programmer in this situation? In all seriousness, it might not be a bad idea for a business.

Assuming that you can add value to the talent by increasing contractual payoffs, and/or your organization could develop a reputation for excellence and potentially be sought out to find talent for certain jobs.

I'm picturing a mixture of a consultant, and a technical programming.

Any thoughts?

dedward5• 16 years ago

Keep in mind what the market looked like at the time - it was nothing whatsoever like today. The field was so new there were no ground rules. It was the wild west.

Either party could have also paid him nothing, hired someone else to do it, and been done with it.

chopsueyar• 16 years ago

Excellent story. Anyone remember DESQview for DOS?

I really liked how his development cycles are spaced with mini-vacations.

Also, a nice look at the young Gates and Jobs.

...and he's a hardware hacker, too!

Good stuff.

taylorwc• 16 years ago

The conversation with Bill Gates in his office reads like something out of an Ayn Rand novel. This is awesome.

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."

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