The Big Apple
Apple is one of the most successful computer companies in history and currently offers the industry’s hottest hardware. But how did it get here?
By Danny Bradbury
August 1, 2009
August 1, 2009
Ron Avitsur was so irritated when Apple decided to can his project that he continued working on it anyway, inside the company. He was a contractor writing the code for a graphing calculator for a computer Apple was building in 1993. The company cancelled the computer project but he had put so much of his life into his small software component that he was loath to stop working on it.
“I had been paid to do a job,” Avitsur said, “and I really wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.” He hid in a deserted office and recoded the calculator for the company’s forthcoming PowerPC computer, roping in sympathetic engineers to help with the covert project.
Eventually, after working 16-hour days for weeks in secret, he befriended the manager in charge of the “Gold disc”—the software that ships to the factory to be copied to new machines. And his graphing calculator actually made it onto the PowerPC.
Why did an unpaid engineer work under the company’s nose, narrowly avoiding ejection from the building, to finish a piece of software that management didn’t want? The truth is Apple inspires that kind of enthusiasm in its workers and its customers.
But Apple also has a history of corporate schizophrenia. Many of its finest products have been created by dedicated engineers (most of them on payroll) working in secretive teams, often without the knowledge of senior management, and with minimal support.
This belief in an underdog product was what gave birth to the Mac. Steve Jobs, having been ostracised from his original project, the Lisa, took over the Mac project. It was his vision and tough management style that bought the computer to market and effectively killed the Lisa. Jobs’ laser-like focus has always been a part of the firm’s DNA.
That focus is driven by a cult-like vision. “It’s more than developing good products. It’s about changing the world,” said Cordell Ratzlaff, who now works at Cisco, but who spent five years at Apple designing the user interface for OS 8 through to OS X. “Apple has found a way to be successful while also being true to that core mission.”
Jobs wanted to reinvent what had been a stuffy business-oriented product as something that non-computer experts could use easily. He revolutionized design in the company’s battle against IBM, and positioned the Mac as the underdog—both within the industry, and within his own company. He fought to build an irreverence into Apple products that make them quirky and appealing to non-business types. In doing so, Apple carved out its core base in the consumer market, leaving PC vendors to colonize the business space and then attempt to venture into the consumer segment as time went on.
Charges of arrogance
It’s difficult to argue with Apple’s success, but its unerring vision has been interpreted both as genius and as hubris, even by some of the firm’s own seminal figures.
“It was absolutely overwhelming,” said Bruce Tognazzini, who is now a principal with design company Nielsen Norman Group, but was employee number 66 at Apple and founded the company’s Human Computer Interface group. “It’s arrogance, and I think it’s isolation.” He cites factors like the shortcut keys on the Apple operating system being different to the Windows shortcut keys. “They have not made it easy for the millions of people who live in both worlds, having a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home. They have always lived on their own little island.”
Although the company has since made it possible to reconfigure the keys, it’s a good example of the dark side of a world-changing vision: the company’s religious fervour came with a sense of Manifest Destiny.
Jobs was, by most accounts, a terrible manager. ”We had a meeting with Steve Jobs and said to him ‘Nothing is good to you. We need to understand what you think is good.’ He looked at our portfolio and said ‘I don’t get it,’” said Clement Mok, a former creative director at Apple, who was brought in to help brand the Mac. “We said ‘OK, we’re trying to read your mind, Steve. Give us a clue.’ And he said: ‘You know what’s good? The Beatles.’ That’s the only design clue we were ever given.”
Dark days
Jobs left the company in 1985 when John Sculley, who Jobs had recruited from Pepsi, fired him. The move was made, at least in part, to rid Apple of Jobs’ tempestuous management style. He went off to found the unremarkable NeXT Computer, which eventually contributed some elements to OS X, and then Pixar, the runaway-success digital animation company.
The ensuing years were dark days for Apple. “It was as if the second wave of employees that came in began to believe their own hype,” said Andrew Hargadon, who worked as a product designer at Apple during its worst years in the early ’90s. “While Jobs was all about building a beautiful computer, the rest of the company, especially under Sculley, was encouraged to use those high margins as evidence that they were brilliant and could reinvent any aspect of the computer industry they chose to.”
Mok has a slightly different view. “Sculley pulled Apple out of a hole when Steve left,” he said. The Mac, which was originally ailing due to a mixture of poor hardware specification and a lack of software support, found a new focus under Sculley as a desktop publishing tool.
Nevertheless, he admits Sculley then got in over his head. He rolled out the Newton, a handheld device that was years ahead of its time, and the product line ballooned into a confusing array of machines. Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio arrived in rapid CEO succession. “Spindler was a great operating officer who should never have been CEO. And then Amelio never had a chance. He had to come in and cut costs and save the life of the company,” Hargadon said. Corporate axeman isn’t a role in which one can innovate.
Re-enter Jobs
This set the scene for Jobs’ cathartic return. The prodigal son took the helm, first temporarily in 1997 and then as permanent CEO. He filleted the bloated product base down to a few key products and then returned to his fetish for product design, re-establishing the Mac’s romance with the consumer market.
Jobs may be surrounded by what friends and critics alike call the “reality distortion field,” but there is no denying his success at building the company, and then rebuilding it after it faltered. The firm lost US$1.045 billion in 1997, the year he returned as interim CEO. Last year, it turned a US$4.8 billion profit.
Jobs achieved this—along with a rise in the Mac’s market share to almost 10 per cent—while sticking to a perennial strategy with the Mac. He still refuses to open up the hardware franchise to third parties, as IBM did with the PC. Instead, the firm has relentlessly quelled any attempt to reproduce the Macintosh platform.
In the early days, this self-reliance was followed with an almost religious fervour, Hargadon said. “They did the disk drives, the monitors, the printers. They did some amazing things, none of which were strategically important to Apple’s product position.”
But some aspects of this insular behaviour gave the company distinct advantages. For example, by owning the entire hardware platform, it could control the overall configuration. Mistakes still happened (thousands of early units of the Apple III shipped with faulty hardware, for example) but by and large it was able to avoid the problems that beset Microsoft’s more democratic model. That company still struggles with reliability problems caused mainly by badly written device drivers on third-party hardware, for example.
Music money machine
And, of course, there is the music. From a standing start in 2001, the company’s iPod and iTunes business now almost equals revenue from Mac hardware. (The removal of the word “Computer” from the company name was no coincidence.) It was able to achieve this music play by owning the entire ecosystem, from the online store through to the desktop and the player hardware.
While ownership of the ecosystem enabled Apple to craft a seamless experience for the end user, Microsoft was struggling again with third-party incompatibilities. Things got so bad that it was forced to market its “PlaysForSure” Kitemark as a guarantee that third-party players were compatible with its own music file formats.
But Hargadon said there is also a good legal reason for Apple to vertically integrate everything in the music delivery business: the studios. In the midst of concerns over electronic copying, the company had to convince a traditionally conservative and highly nervous industry to put its products online.
“There was a good strong value for Apple developing a proprietary format and digital rights management system that protected that player, because they were the ones that needed to be on board,” he said.
The Mobile Me fiasco
Mobile Me is a good example of how Apple’s standard hub-and-spoke strategy can backfire. When Apple revamped the Mac system into the new service, designed to be a single cloud-based synchronization point for all of a user’s data, it unquestionably fudged the job. Data was not synchronised properly. People lost their e-mails. Online luminaries such as Robert Scoble advised others not to use the product. Those problems may have been ironed out now, but as the company scales up its efforts and is forced to play in an increasingly online world, it will continually face such challenges if it tries to do everything itself. It has to choose between its original model and a new one in which it plays nicely with the rest of the industry.
The old hub-and-spoke model is losing its lustre, Hargadon said. “What we need now is more of a star network.” Apple needs to relinquish ownership of some parts of the ecosystem to others, who can then provide best-of-breed components to give end users a better experience. We are starting to see this with the integration of Google features into the iPhone and iPod Touch, and now into the firm’s iPhoto product. The company has also opened up integration between iPhoto and third-party online services such as Flickr and Facebook.
Shiny new Apple
Still, Apple is a master at reinventing itself. Leaving the massive growth of its music business aside, OS X is a good example. Whereas Microsoft decided to keep backwards-compatibility with its previous Windows incarnations when developing Vista, Apple binned OS 9 and rebuilt the operating system from the ground up, on a mixture of open-source and proprietary products. The results—from the bad publicity and customer lawsuits that surround Microsoft Vista—speak for themselves.
This future focus is perhaps why Apple wouldn’t speak to us for this article. Its stoic PR person, used to turning down such requests, sighed at us and said the company focuses only on whatever products are on the shelves now. Everything else, including past successes and future strategies, is irrelevant in public discussion.
“The one thing it learned the most was to forget its past,” Hargadon said. This may be what will keep the company going through the current troubled financial times, as its products sell at a premium, not necessarily a good place to be in the worst financial crisis in 30 years.
The company’s recent announcements—new versions of iLife and iWork, a notebook with an integrated battery and a slightly improved iPhone—were underwhelming, but commentators such as Mok speculate about a future netbook that could rival Amazon’s Kindle. Whatever the firm does, its success will rely on its shark-like characteristic: never slow down, never sleep, never stop swimming forward.
SIDEBAR
Jan 84: Mac launched
Apr 84: Apple IIc launched
Sept 85: Jobs resigned
Aug 87: Hypercard unveiled
Jan 88: 1st $bn quarter
Mar 88: Sued Microsoft & HP over Windows interface
Sept 88: Mac Portable launched
Oct 88: Xerox sued Apple over windowing interface
Jan 90: Xerox lawsuit dismissed
Oct 90: Mac Classic, IISI, LC launched
May 91: System 7 launched
Oct 91: Signed technology partnership with IBM & Motorola for PowerPC chip. Classic II, Quadra 700 and 900, and Powerbooks launched
Sept 92: Performa mass-market consumer range launched
Nov 92: Quicktime introduced
June 93: Michael Spidler named CEO
Aug 93: Newton Messagepad PDA shipped
Nov 93: Apple II discontinued
Mar 94: First Power Macs based on PowerPC architecture released
May 95: Power Computing released Mac clone under licence
Dec 96: NeXT Computer, the company Jobs founded when leaving Apple, bought for $430m
July 97: OS 8 released
Sept 97: Jobs named interim CEO after CEO Gil Amelio resigned in July. Licencing deals for Apple Mac clones cancelled
May 98: iMac and PowerBook G3 announced
Jul 99: iBook launched
Jul 00: G4 Cube released
Mar 01: OS X shipped
May 01: Retail stores opened
Oct 01: iPod launched
Apr 03: iTunes store launched
Jun 05: Switched to Intel chips for Macs
Oct 05: iTunes video store launched
Jan 07: iPhone announced
Sep 08: App store downloads for iPhone & Touch topped 100m worldwide
Jan 09: Last year at MacWorld show; Jobs began six-month sabbatical
By Bruce Tognazzini
Steve Jobs spent 12 years in the wilderness after being fired from Apple. Now, 12 years after his return, what was supposed to be a simple sabbatical has turned into downtime for a liver transplant. The 53-year-old cancer survivor has battled constant industry speculation about his health, spurred by his increasingly gaunt appearance over the past couple of years. Finally, just a week after dispelling concerns in a public letter citing a simple hormone disorder, he admitted that his health issues were “more complex than I had originally thought.” Jobs, who returned to the company in June, has the ability to influence the company’s value with his health news. Although the transplant announcement (which came two months after the fact) didn’t hurt stock prices, Apple’s stock plunged seven per cent in January on the news that he was taking time off, which shows how much the market pins the company’s success to his individual talents.
Given Jobs’ strong role in the company, could Apple survive without him? Critics might look at the company’s previous performance after he was fired in 1985. “I’m confident that he’s not a one-man band there anymore,” said Bruce Tognazzini, who is now a principal with design company Nielsen Norman Group, but was employee number 66 at Apple. The last time he left, there was a power struggle with Sculley, and Jobs’ personality had not permeated the company. When he was working on the Mac he was only working with seven or eight other people, the designer recalls. Now, his personality is stamped all over the company. “It’s a different man, and a different time, and now Apple is his. People think like him, and people who don’t think like him leave.”
Andrew Hargadon, who worked as a product designer at Apple in the early ’90s, believes that the most likely candidates for replacement—senior executives Tim Cook and Phil Schiller—have been well groomed. But he worries that the company would suffer if it lost the CEO’s vision. Boards generally need two key roles: an operational expert, who can keep the machine running, and a visionary, who can move the company forward.
“Jobs has put together a tremendous management team,” Hargadon said. “The only thing that will be missing is the person who said ‘No, that’s not good enough’, or ‘No, that’s not the direction we need.’”
“I had been paid to do a job,” Avitsur said, “and I really wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.” He hid in a deserted office and recoded the calculator for the company’s forthcoming PowerPC computer, roping in sympathetic engineers to help with the covert project.
Eventually, after working 16-hour days for weeks in secret, he befriended the manager in charge of the “Gold disc”—the software that ships to the factory to be copied to new machines. And his graphing calculator actually made it onto the PowerPC.
Why did an unpaid engineer work under the company’s nose, narrowly avoiding ejection from the building, to finish a piece of software that management didn’t want? The truth is Apple inspires that kind of enthusiasm in its workers and its customers.
But Apple also has a history of corporate schizophrenia. Many of its finest products have been created by dedicated engineers (most of them on payroll) working in secretive teams, often without the knowledge of senior management, and with minimal support.
This belief in an underdog product was what gave birth to the Mac. Steve Jobs, having been ostracised from his original project, the Lisa, took over the Mac project. It was his vision and tough management style that bought the computer to market and effectively killed the Lisa. Jobs’ laser-like focus has always been a part of the firm’s DNA.
That focus is driven by a cult-like vision. “It’s more than developing good products. It’s about changing the world,” said Cordell Ratzlaff, who now works at Cisco, but who spent five years at Apple designing the user interface for OS 8 through to OS X. “Apple has found a way to be successful while also being true to that core mission.”
Jobs wanted to reinvent what had been a stuffy business-oriented product as something that non-computer experts could use easily. He revolutionized design in the company’s battle against IBM, and positioned the Mac as the underdog—both within the industry, and within his own company. He fought to build an irreverence into Apple products that make them quirky and appealing to non-business types. In doing so, Apple carved out its core base in the consumer market, leaving PC vendors to colonize the business space and then attempt to venture into the consumer segment as time went on.
Charges of arrogance
It’s difficult to argue with Apple’s success, but its unerring vision has been interpreted both as genius and as hubris, even by some of the firm’s own seminal figures.
“It was absolutely overwhelming,” said Bruce Tognazzini, who is now a principal with design company Nielsen Norman Group, but was employee number 66 at Apple and founded the company’s Human Computer Interface group. “It’s arrogance, and I think it’s isolation.” He cites factors like the shortcut keys on the Apple operating system being different to the Windows shortcut keys. “They have not made it easy for the millions of people who live in both worlds, having a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home. They have always lived on their own little island.”
Although the company has since made it possible to reconfigure the keys, it’s a good example of the dark side of a world-changing vision: the company’s religious fervour came with a sense of Manifest Destiny.
Jobs was, by most accounts, a terrible manager. ”We had a meeting with Steve Jobs and said to him ‘Nothing is good to you. We need to understand what you think is good.’ He looked at our portfolio and said ‘I don’t get it,’” said Clement Mok, a former creative director at Apple, who was brought in to help brand the Mac. “We said ‘OK, we’re trying to read your mind, Steve. Give us a clue.’ And he said: ‘You know what’s good? The Beatles.’ That’s the only design clue we were ever given.”
Dark days
Jobs left the company in 1985 when John Sculley, who Jobs had recruited from Pepsi, fired him. The move was made, at least in part, to rid Apple of Jobs’ tempestuous management style. He went off to found the unremarkable NeXT Computer, which eventually contributed some elements to OS X, and then Pixar, the runaway-success digital animation company.
The ensuing years were dark days for Apple. “It was as if the second wave of employees that came in began to believe their own hype,” said Andrew Hargadon, who worked as a product designer at Apple during its worst years in the early ’90s. “While Jobs was all about building a beautiful computer, the rest of the company, especially under Sculley, was encouraged to use those high margins as evidence that they were brilliant and could reinvent any aspect of the computer industry they chose to.”
Mok has a slightly different view. “Sculley pulled Apple out of a hole when Steve left,” he said. The Mac, which was originally ailing due to a mixture of poor hardware specification and a lack of software support, found a new focus under Sculley as a desktop publishing tool.
Nevertheless, he admits Sculley then got in over his head. He rolled out the Newton, a handheld device that was years ahead of its time, and the product line ballooned into a confusing array of machines. Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio arrived in rapid CEO succession. “Spindler was a great operating officer who should never have been CEO. And then Amelio never had a chance. He had to come in and cut costs and save the life of the company,” Hargadon said. Corporate axeman isn’t a role in which one can innovate.
Re-enter Jobs
This set the scene for Jobs’ cathartic return. The prodigal son took the helm, first temporarily in 1997 and then as permanent CEO. He filleted the bloated product base down to a few key products and then returned to his fetish for product design, re-establishing the Mac’s romance with the consumer market.
Jobs may be surrounded by what friends and critics alike call the “reality distortion field,” but there is no denying his success at building the company, and then rebuilding it after it faltered. The firm lost US$1.045 billion in 1997, the year he returned as interim CEO. Last year, it turned a US$4.8 billion profit.
Jobs achieved this—along with a rise in the Mac’s market share to almost 10 per cent—while sticking to a perennial strategy with the Mac. He still refuses to open up the hardware franchise to third parties, as IBM did with the PC. Instead, the firm has relentlessly quelled any attempt to reproduce the Macintosh platform.
In the early days, this self-reliance was followed with an almost religious fervour, Hargadon said. “They did the disk drives, the monitors, the printers. They did some amazing things, none of which were strategically important to Apple’s product position.”
But some aspects of this insular behaviour gave the company distinct advantages. For example, by owning the entire hardware platform, it could control the overall configuration. Mistakes still happened (thousands of early units of the Apple III shipped with faulty hardware, for example) but by and large it was able to avoid the problems that beset Microsoft’s more democratic model. That company still struggles with reliability problems caused mainly by badly written device drivers on third-party hardware, for example.
Music money machine
And, of course, there is the music. From a standing start in 2001, the company’s iPod and iTunes business now almost equals revenue from Mac hardware. (The removal of the word “Computer” from the company name was no coincidence.) It was able to achieve this music play by owning the entire ecosystem, from the online store through to the desktop and the player hardware.
While ownership of the ecosystem enabled Apple to craft a seamless experience for the end user, Microsoft was struggling again with third-party incompatibilities. Things got so bad that it was forced to market its “PlaysForSure” Kitemark as a guarantee that third-party players were compatible with its own music file formats.
But Hargadon said there is also a good legal reason for Apple to vertically integrate everything in the music delivery business: the studios. In the midst of concerns over electronic copying, the company had to convince a traditionally conservative and highly nervous industry to put its products online.
“There was a good strong value for Apple developing a proprietary format and digital rights management system that protected that player, because they were the ones that needed to be on board,” he said.
The Mobile Me fiasco Mobile Me is a good example of how Apple’s standard hub-and-spoke strategy can backfire. When Apple revamped the Mac system into the new service, designed to be a single cloud-based synchronization point for all of a user’s data, it unquestionably fudged the job. Data was not synchronised properly. People lost their e-mails. Online luminaries such as Robert Scoble advised others not to use the product. Those problems may have been ironed out now, but as the company scales up its efforts and is forced to play in an increasingly online world, it will continually face such challenges if it tries to do everything itself. It has to choose between its original model and a new one in which it plays nicely with the rest of the industry.
The old hub-and-spoke model is losing its lustre, Hargadon said. “What we need now is more of a star network.” Apple needs to relinquish ownership of some parts of the ecosystem to others, who can then provide best-of-breed components to give end users a better experience. We are starting to see this with the integration of Google features into the iPhone and iPod Touch, and now into the firm’s iPhoto product. The company has also opened up integration between iPhoto and third-party online services such as Flickr and Facebook.
Shiny new Apple
Still, Apple is a master at reinventing itself. Leaving the massive growth of its music business aside, OS X is a good example. Whereas Microsoft decided to keep backwards-compatibility with its previous Windows incarnations when developing Vista, Apple binned OS 9 and rebuilt the operating system from the ground up, on a mixture of open-source and proprietary products. The results—from the bad publicity and customer lawsuits that surround Microsoft Vista—speak for themselves.
This future focus is perhaps why Apple wouldn’t speak to us for this article. Its stoic PR person, used to turning down such requests, sighed at us and said the company focuses only on whatever products are on the shelves now. Everything else, including past successes and future strategies, is irrelevant in public discussion.
“The one thing it learned the most was to forget its past,” Hargadon said. This may be what will keep the company going through the current troubled financial times, as its products sell at a premium, not necessarily a good place to be in the worst financial crisis in 30 years.
The company’s recent announcements—new versions of iLife and iWork, a notebook with an integrated battery and a slightly improved iPhone—were underwhelming, but commentators such as Mok speculate about a future netbook that could rival Amazon’s Kindle. Whatever the firm does, its success will rely on its shark-like characteristic: never slow down, never sleep, never stop swimming forward.
SIDEBAR
Jan 84: Mac launched
Apr 84: Apple IIc launched
Sept 85: Jobs resigned
Aug 87: Hypercard unveiled
Jan 88: 1st $bn quarter
Mar 88: Sued Microsoft & HP over Windows interface
Sept 88: Mac Portable launched
Oct 88: Xerox sued Apple over windowing interface
Jan 90: Xerox lawsuit dismissed
Oct 90: Mac Classic, IISI, LC launched
May 91: System 7 launched
Oct 91: Signed technology partnership with IBM & Motorola for PowerPC chip. Classic II, Quadra 700 and 900, and Powerbooks launched
Sept 92: Performa mass-market consumer range launched
Nov 92: Quicktime introduced
June 93: Michael Spidler named CEO
Aug 93: Newton Messagepad PDA shipped
Nov 93: Apple II discontinued
Mar 94: First Power Macs based on PowerPC architecture released
May 95: Power Computing released Mac clone under licence
Dec 96: NeXT Computer, the company Jobs founded when leaving Apple, bought for $430m
July 97: OS 8 released
Sept 97: Jobs named interim CEO after CEO Gil Amelio resigned in July. Licencing deals for Apple Mac clones cancelled
May 98: iMac and PowerBook G3 announced
Jul 99: iBook launched
Jul 00: G4 Cube released
Mar 01: OS X shipped
May 01: Retail stores opened
Oct 01: iPod launched
Apr 03: iTunes store launched
Jun 05: Switched to Intel chips for Macs
Oct 05: iTunes video store launched
Jan 07: iPhone announced
Sep 08: App store downloads for iPhone & Touch topped 100m worldwide
Jan 09: Last year at MacWorld show; Jobs began six-month sabbatical
A Jobsless Apple?
“People think like him, and people who don’t think like him leave.”By Bruce Tognazzini
Steve Jobs spent 12 years in the wilderness after being fired from Apple. Now, 12 years after his return, what was supposed to be a simple sabbatical has turned into downtime for a liver transplant. The 53-year-old cancer survivor has battled constant industry speculation about his health, spurred by his increasingly gaunt appearance over the past couple of years. Finally, just a week after dispelling concerns in a public letter citing a simple hormone disorder, he admitted that his health issues were “more complex than I had originally thought.” Jobs, who returned to the company in June, has the ability to influence the company’s value with his health news. Although the transplant announcement (which came two months after the fact) didn’t hurt stock prices, Apple’s stock plunged seven per cent in January on the news that he was taking time off, which shows how much the market pins the company’s success to his individual talents.
Given Jobs’ strong role in the company, could Apple survive without him? Critics might look at the company’s previous performance after he was fired in 1985. “I’m confident that he’s not a one-man band there anymore,” said Bruce Tognazzini, who is now a principal with design company Nielsen Norman Group, but was employee number 66 at Apple. The last time he left, there was a power struggle with Sculley, and Jobs’ personality had not permeated the company. When he was working on the Mac he was only working with seven or eight other people, the designer recalls. Now, his personality is stamped all over the company. “It’s a different man, and a different time, and now Apple is his. People think like him, and people who don’t think like him leave.”
Andrew Hargadon, who worked as a product designer at Apple in the early ’90s, believes that the most likely candidates for replacement—senior executives Tim Cook and Phil Schiller—have been well groomed. But he worries that the company would suffer if it lost the CEO’s vision. Boards generally need two key roles: an operational expert, who can keep the machine running, and a visionary, who can move the company forward.
“Jobs has put together a tremendous management team,” Hargadon said. “The only thing that will be missing is the person who said ‘No, that’s not good enough’, or ‘No, that’s not the direction we need.’”
