The Shape of Days

Hertzfeld sets the tone for the book with his very first anecdote, a two-page introduction to Burrell Smith, Apple hardware engineer and a major character in the Macintosh story. Hertzfeld’s obvious affection and respect for Smith shows through in his prose: “The first time we went to lunch, I found out that Burrell’s creativity extended beyond his engineering work. He would often try to convince our waitress to concoct variations of the standard fare on the menu, thinking of something different every time. For example, after he successfully persuaded a waitress to divide his pizza toppings into thirds, he asked her to do fifths the next time. Or he ordered mixed sodas, as if they were cocktails, in ever varying proportions, like three quarters Coke and one quarter Sprite. The waitress often balked, but Burrell was sometimes charming enough to convince her to comply.”

That’s the kind of book Revolution is. It’s more memoir than memorandum. And those of us who lived through the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s will be immediately struck by how familiar Hertzfeld’s story seems: bright, creative people working unimaginably long hours for practically no money but lots of stock options; the camaraderie shared by a small group who considered themselves outsiders within their own company; the inevitable personality conflicts that emerged when sound business sense and the innovative spirit found themselves at cross-purposes. Only the hairstyles in the book’s hundreds of photographs and the dates provided in small print at the beginning of each section reveal that the events described took place more than 20 years ago.

One anecdote, in particular, resonated with me on a very personal level. The passage, titled “Too Big for my Britches,” involves a personality conflict between Hertzfeld and Macintosh engineering manager Bob Belleville.

Bob unfurled his mirthless grin. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think your technical work has been perfectly adequate during the review period, and I don’t have a single criticism of it. That’s not your problem area.” He paused for a moment, to take a deep breath, and then continued. “The problem is with your attitude, and your relationship with management. You are consistently insubordinate, and you don’t have any respect for lines of authority. I think you are undermining everybody else on the software team. You are too big for your britches.”

At this point, I broke down into tears. The Macintosh was at the center of my life, but I couldn’t work for somebody who was saying this, no matter how much the project mattered to me. It was suddenly clear that I was going to have to quit.

Revolution in the Valley is honest in a way that business books rarely are, and that technology books never are. Hertzfeld isn’t afraid to describe the low points in uncomfortably raw terms; he refers to several developments, in addition to his confrontation with Bob Belleville, that left him and the other members of the Mac team in tears. In particular, he’s not afraid to end the book where he must: not at the high point of the Mac’s introduction in 1984, but later, after the design team had broken up, and a management shake-up at Apple had changed the company’s culture forever.

But the book’s melancholy ending is tempered by recent events. There is, of course, an as-yet-unwritten sequel to the book, one that begins in 1997 with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple Computer and the company’s re-emergence as a leader in technological innovation. But that isn’t Andy Hertzfeld’s story to tell. Somebody else will have to write that book.