An Interview with John Markoff
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Koman: I wonder if it was somewhat generational. I mean, for all of his vision he came from the generation of monolithic machines and the sort of engineer-as-priest, and ultimately he couldn't give control of the project up to the group, he couldn't trust that he had a group of great engineers who would take it forward...
Markoff: I think you're right. I think you're very right. That was one of the things he agonized over, that people were stealing his vision. He was very upset that he lost control. And in his dealings with Xerox, if he had been more flexible, I think that Xerox would have done more with NLS.
Koman: Is that sort of a larger lesson about control versus unleashing things ... so today we have this world where everyone wants to build a platform that lots and lots of third parties are going to build on top of?
Markoff: I find it takes a personality like Jobs. Steve Jobs to me is the archetype of a successful leader, who can take a technology, package it, and bring it to market effectively. That's a rare quality, even in Silicon Valley. And you know he's a little tyrant. I wouldn't call him a sociopath but, you know, Jobs has got some very rough edges, and yet he's got this genius ability to package technology and bring it to market. That's a different thing from Engelbart. I don't think he was equipped to make that transition.
Koman: So he wasn't equipped to be a Jobs but he also wasn't equipped to be a Torvalds.
Markoff: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean he's closer to Torvalds than Jobs but he really felt he needed control and his ideas just got away from him. It's one of these great tragedies.
Koman: And it also comes out that in the dark years, est, and a lot of those '60s and '70s things .. I mean this sort of maps to the era itself, where things start to get manipulative and dark.
Markoff: Yeah, I agree.
Koman: ... and that seems like what was happening inside the Augment group. He created these PODs, which were basically encounter groups where people were supposed to talk about the internal problems and those tended to be bitch sessions. So going down the est route tended to make things worse also.
Markoff: What I think he was looking for was some set of organization techniques that would allow him to create a more powerful and tightly coupled team. And it didn't work out that way. The things he experimented with actually sort of ripped the team apart. I think other people may have found better ways to build teams since then but that was early, and he was thinking about these things very early on.
Koman: So Engelbart is relatively well known, the other two guys you point to at the conclusion are not: Fred Moore and Myron Stolaroff. Moore is not well-known either as an activist or a technologist. How did you identify him as a crux figure?
Markoff: Well I focused on him because because he was the cofounder of the Homebrew Computer Club and the Homebrew Computer Club had this remarkable impact in that it lit the spark for the most powerful industry in the world. You know, two dozen companies came directly out of the Homebrew Computer Club. To me the rich irony was the spark that lit the club was not entrepreneurial. It was Fred wanting to have his own personal computer because he was a community organizer and he realized that if he had a database he would be more effective.
So that little bit of history has been lost. At the same time, too, the other sort of archetypical thing about the Homebrew Computer Club that sort of underscores my larger point is the relationship between Wozniak and Jobs. Wozniak was a hobbyist who only wanted to build his computer to show off to his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club that he was a great hacker, and Jobs was the one who thought there was a market for these things.
My argument is that those two things go together. You really need the passion for technology, exhibited by Wozniak, and you need whatever quality it is that Steve Jobs has.
