Fake it till you make it
Imagine striding onto the podium at the launching ceremony of your innovation. A device that will change the way that humans interact with machines. A device that will completely change the way that we, as humans, receive and process data. The device that will move forward to become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, and will be known throughout as iPhone.
Now imagine initiating the launch ceremony of a device that will go on to become one of the most successful business ventures in today's world & doing that while having a prototype that could barely function without crashing every 10 minutes and with no backup plan to save the company from going bankrupt.
This was the backstory behind the iPhone launch back in January 2007.From the time when Apple introduced the iPod back in 2001, the executives had been thinking of launching a device that would provide it’s users all the facilities in one single device, but every time it was examined in detail it was considered a suicide mission. It wasn’t until 2006 when Apple signed the deal with Cingular (later becoming AT&T) that they seriously considered the idea.
But the struggles they went through inorder to make a functional prototype left the team soo burned up that a few of them quit just after the first phone hit the shelves. In the words of Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project,
“I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”
There were a million things that could go wrong and a hundred of them actually went wrong, the to-do list was never ending but Steve Jobs was unrelenting and pushed his team to achieve results that were thought to be impossible. For instance, No one had ever put a multi touch screen in a mainstream consumer product before, either. Apart from that, Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But that meant Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and the software would have to be a tenth its usual size.
The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation, and if it hadn’t taken off, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by the failure and burned out would have left the company entirely.
Jobs was a brilliant leader and was well known as a taskmaster, seeming to know just how hard he could push his staff so that it delivered the impossible.
But this time, it seemed he had pushed his team too far or had set a goal that might just be too far to be accomplished.
Days before the launch, the prototype had yet to be perfected both physically and software wise. Only about a hundred iPhones existed, each with a different defect and almost all of them with a software that was full of bugs. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. The team had to spend hours perfecting a set of steps that, when performed in the same order would give the illusion that the phone was working perfectly fine. But even when following those predefined steps, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. The biggest problem that the team faced was the memory problem, the iPhone ran out of memory and had to be restarted after performing a couple of tasks. Every time it crashed or froze up, Jobs would look directly at the person responsible for that portion and would very directly state “If we fail, it will be because of you.”
On the day of the launch, the team had prepared not one but 6 different prototypes working as backup for when one froze onstage even as the team frantically worked till the last minute to hack it into working without any glitches. When Jobs started his presentation, every member of the team was nervously biting their teeth in anticipation of the biggest catastrophe of all time, but as he executed all the steps one by one, the nervousness gave way to disbelief, then elation, relief and finally drunkenness as the team drank themselves as each segment of the demo worked like a miracle.
Looking back, we can see just how far Apple has progressed. To the audience, the presentation was a success and they could not see any of the product-demo glitches, it was as though it had almost never happened. But for those in the background, the whole experience was one big roller-coaster ride through hell. But the reason why Apple is one of the most successful business ventures to date is credited mainly to the unreasonable demands — and unusual power — of an inimitable man.
