In iWeek, the week that is supposed to witness the transformation, re-invention and Second Coming of the mobile phone, it's worth asking how on earth does Steve Jobs get his people to come up with these blockbuster products?
Andy Hertzfeld, co-creator of the Mac, sheds some light on this in his book 'How the Mac was made'.
Jobs wanted the Mac to boot faster, and came out with this outrageous bollox delivered to some of the engineering team.
"How many people are going to use the Macintosh?" Jobs asked the engineers, "a million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day. Well, let's say you can shave ten seconds off the boot time. Multiply that by five million users, and that's fifty million seconds every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. Just think about it. If you could make it boot ten seconds faster, you'll save a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
However ludicrous they found Jobs' spiel, the engineers nonetheless managed, over the next couple of months, to shave ten seconds, and more, off the Mac's boot time.
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