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Apple's 1978 office floor plan

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Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#21

Post by bluekeybox »

jstevens85 wrote: post #17
jaysonelliot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also say, conversely, that Jobs placed himself next to Markkula instead of Woz, finding it more important to sit next to the VP of marketing than the chief engineer. I'm not making any judgements on the way they organized the physical space in the office. It clearly worked, after all, Apple in 1978 was on the precipice of an unprecedented success. I'm just interested in the way that the physical location of…

According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management.

One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#22

Post by far33d »

Yopie wrote: post #20

It's interesting to see the toilet is in the center of the building. When Jobs took over Pixar the new campus development was planning to build three separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. But Jobs insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the centre — because that’s where everyone meets and talks.

It works too. The atrium is a very common chance meeting place, and that's nearly 100% due to the coffee, conf. rooms, and bathrooms being centrally situated.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#23

Post by bluekeybox »

philwelch wrote: post #19
Swizec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have something to do with the fact that marketing people are on the phone a lot and engineers have to focus a lot. Wherever I've worked the engineering team always locked the CEO away from themselves because he's a huge distraction.

Typically, the CEO is "locked away" in a spacious corner office and the engineers have to make do with cubes.

If the CEO never had to meet people from outside the company, I'm sure his office would be less spacious.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#24

Post by mapgrep »

bluekeybox wrote: post #21
jstevens85 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management. One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.

This is correct. In fact, the book said this was what finally got Woz to quit HP and go full time at Apple: One of his friends told him he could start a company without going into management, which he hadn't realized. Jobs had convinced all these friends and family to lobby him, but none of it worked until he was told he could stay an engineer.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#25

Post by philwelch »

bluekeybox wrote: post #23
philwelch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically, the CEO is "locked away" in a spacious corner office and the engineers have to make do with cubes.

If the CEO never had to meet people from outside the company, I'm sure his office would be less spacious.

And if engineers never had to concentrate and focus to get their work done, I'm sure their workspaces would be open to auditory and visual distraction. Don't think for a minute that the typical business allocates these resources based on practicality rather than status.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#26

Post by bluekeybox »

philwelch wrote: post #25
bluekeybox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the CEO never had to meet people from outside the company, I'm sure his office would be less spacious.

And if engineers never had to concentrate and focus to get their work done, I'm sure their workspaces would be open to auditory and visual distraction. Don't think for a minute that the typical business allocates these resources based on practicality rather than status.

Businesses exist to make money, not to serve as a bed for some perverse status assertions. Not saying that the latter ones never happen; just pointing out the basic facts.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#27

Post by philwelch »

bluekeybox wrote: post #26
philwelch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if engineers never had to concentrate and focus to get their work done, I'm sure their workspaces would be open to auditory and visual distraction. Don't think for a minute that the typical business allocates these resources based on practicality rather than status.

Businesses exist to make money, not to serve as a bed for some perverse status assertions. Not saying that the latter ones never happen; just pointing out the basic facts.

Most human social behavior is "a bed for perverse status assertions", business included.

The CEO's I worked for, incidentally, tended to spend at least half their time flying around the country, leaving the spacious corner office empty more often than not. Is that really the most pragmatic solution? No, just an artifact for signaling "I am the boss". It's not like it's something people stop to think about when designing office space. And when it is, it says something interesting about a company.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#28

Post by defen »

bluekeybox wrote: post #21
jstevens85 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management. One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.

On the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have turned out if they hadn't met each other.

It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs - he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten relic sitting in his garage. Less likely but still possible is that someone else would have helped him commercialize it, but there never would have been a Macintosh as we know it and the company would have ended up like Commodore, Tandy, and Atari.

With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#29

Post by Empact »

far33d wrote: post #22
Yopie wrote: post #20

It's interesting to see the toilet is in the center of the building. When Jobs took over Pixar the new campus development was planning to build three separate buildings: for creatives, for producers and for business people. But Jobs insisted that they be brought under one roof, with toilets at the centre — because that’s where everyone meets and talks.

It works too. The atrium is a very common chance meeting place, and that's nearly 100% due to the coffee, conf. rooms, and bathrooms being centrally situated.

This is a also applicable to residential architecture - I lived in several large student houses in Austin, and the houses whose floorplans required new arrivals to pass through common spaces (living room, kitchen) on the way to their private rooms invariably had closer and more general ties than those that did not.

Re: Apple's 1978 office floor plan

#30

Post by erikpukinskis »

defen wrote: post #28
bluekeybox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the same book, Wozniak specifically insisted at some point that he would prefer to be treated as an engineer and not be involved with high-level management. One could also say it would be interesting how things might have turned out if Wozniak was more ambitious.

On the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have turned out if they hadn't met each other. It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs - he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten rel…

Here's a random theory:

They would've met each other a little later, and done the same thing. Jobs and Wozniak orbited each other a few times before they really connected professionally. If you change one little thing so they wouldn'tve met each other, they would've met each other some other way.

And if you change enough things so that they NEVER would've met each other, you'dve changed enough things that they wouldn't really be Steve Jobs and Woz anymore.

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