A Story Involving Steve Jobs

Back in the late 1990s, when Microsoft and Netscape were waging a bloody war for browser supremacy, my then-employer Macromedia had a problem. We wanted everybody to have the Shockwave browser plug-in, so there would be a vast audience for multimedia content created with Macromedia Director. But a lot of end users were resistant to installing browser plug-ins on their own.

This could have been a moot point had Netscape bundled Shockwave with their default installer, but they never agreed to that. So the only remaining avenue for Shockwave ubiquity was to get the plug-in preinstalled with the operating systems.

Microsoft eventually agreed to bundle Shockwave with OEM versions of Windows 95, and Apple signed on as well. But despite this cooperation, there were a few problems. Occasionally one vendor or the other would ship an inline rev of their OS and spit out a new CD-ROM without telling us. This was always galling because Shockwave itself received frequent updates, and from Macromedia's perspective it was always a missed opportunity when a CD went out the door with an old version of Shockwave on it.

In the fall of 1997, Apple notified us that they were getting ready to ship an update to Mac OS 8. Over the next several weeks, our product managers made attempts to get the latest build of Shockwave included on the CD, but Apple basically ignored us until it was too late. By the time they returned our phone calls, they had already finalized their CD. There would be no changes. And the worst thing? They were including Shockwave 5, even though months prior we had shipped version 6.

Apple QA just would not budge. No amount of cajoling, begging, or arm-twisting could get them to crack open the BOM and replace the old Shockwave with the current version. They told us they had declared Gold Master, and they were categorically unwilling to take on the risk of accepting new bits from us.

Then, about a week later, something happened.

As mentioned elsewhere, Steve Jobs arrived at Macromedia for a pow-wow with our executive staff. He and his guys were greeted with a very warm reception at the 3rd floor elevators, and Steve gave a little speech. Then the Apple guys were ushered into a big conference room and everybody went back to their cubicles.

When I arrived at my desk, I was suddenly ordered by my boss to drop everything and perform a sanity test on Shockwave 6 with IE Mac. So I downloaded the plug-in and kicked off the automated test suite. A few minutes later, my boss gets a call from the VP of our division. We tell him everything looked good, which was no surprise. Our team had already done a full test pass of Shockwave 6 against Mac IE. The VP hangs up and returns to the meeting with Steve Jobs.

A couple of hours later, the phone rings. It's somebody at Apple. All of a sudden, after having stonewalled for weeks, they're downright eager to crack open the precious Mac OS 8 Gold Master to drop in Shockwave 6.

Later on, we catch the story from someone who was in the room. Steve Jobs asked what Apple could do for Macromedia, and our VP mentioned that for starters they could bundle Shockwave 6 with their OS 8 CD. Upon hearing this, Jobs reportedly turned to an underling and simply said: "Do it."

Voila!