The final push to finish the software: Real Artists Ship… You’d better get back to work!

A little tale about shipping product at Apple from January 1984 and getting ‘something’ out the door on time.

Article Extract: Finally, the deadline for finishing the software was less than a week away, and it seemed obvious that there were still too many bugs for us to ship it. Late on Friday evening, we convinced ourselves that we needed an extra week or two to fix the remaining problems. Steve Jobs was on the East Coast, along with Bob Belleville and Mike Murray, doing press for the introduction, so we arranged for a conference call early Sunday morning to tell him about the slip… “No way, there’s no way we’re slipping!”, Steve responded. The room let out a collective gasp. “You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. Just make it as good as you can. You better get back to work!”

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s