Fortune Magazine's Steve Job Interview

A few interesting iPhone tidbits from Fortune Magazine's interview of Steve Jobs:

"We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'

And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we'd made and ideas we'd had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, 'All this work you've [done] for the last year, we're going to have to throw it away and start over, and we're going to have to work twice as hard now because we don't have enough time.' And you know what everybody said? 'Sign us up.'"

They might have said, "Sign us up," but they were probably thinking something else. Like, "You son of a ..."

Job's "do it over until it's right" approach is something only companies as rich in cash as Apple is can afford to do, especially on a project as big as the iPhone. Yet I am glad, as are Apple shareholders, that Jobs took the time to get it right before releasing it. They could have released a different phone and still made tons of cash in the meantime because it was an Apple product. That's one stone in the good karma pile for Apple, at least in my book.

"It was a great challenge. Let's make a great phone that we fall in love with. And we've got the technology. We've got the miniaturization from the iPod. We've got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say, 'We're going to do it. Let's try.' The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let's give them a shot. And they did."

What I find curious is that when they were thinking about putting OS X onto a phone, where did the touchscreen part of it come into play? Did the touchscreen phone idea come first, and touchscreen OS X would need to be created from scratch? Or was the software and hardware already sitting around in some form, and just needed to be molded into the iPhone?

The article is a good read, despite Fortune Magazine spreading it across 15 web pages. I copy & pasted it into a text document first.