It’s 1996. Steve Jobs was still at NeXT with the merger with Apple still a few months away.
I was a Systems Engineer for NeXT, working alongside a Sales Executive, and our little team covered customers in a part of the East Region.

We brought a customer out to Redwood City for a meeting. They asked Steve what he thought of their industry. And he sure told them.

we’re selling WebObjects to big companies

NeXT was mostly selling WebObjects in those days, which was a tool that you’d run on a server to help you build web apps five to ten times faster, as we all liked to say.

Seriously, WebObjects was a great product, that cost $50,000 per server at one point, and I remember being in the room post-Apple-merger when Steve announced that the price was dropping to $699 (and eventually to $0.) Our NeXT sales guys, whose recent careers had been built on selling one or two copies of the $50,000 version a month, were not exactly enthusiastic about this change.

(We Systems Engineers, on the other hand, thought this was a great chance to get WebObjects in front of more people.)

customer visits to HQ are usually great

So anyways, we used to bring customers out to the NeXT headquarters in Redwood City for a day of meetings with sales, support, and engineering leaders, and at the end, Steve would drop by for a little informal Q&A.

(I’m going to refer to him as SJ which is what a lot of us called him, because it might otherwise be confusing on this blog to be talking about Steve from NeXT.)

He was not quite the business legend at that point—NeXT had great technology that was not exactly selling like hotcakes—but he was still pretty famous, and someone that most customers enjoyed meeting, even briefly.

We invited the senior IT folks from a major retail chain (that has since merged a couple of times with other companies, and it’s not important who it was) out for one of these day-long meetings. My partner and I had been working closely with them for over a year on a project to modernize their point-of-sale checkout system to do dynamic personalized coupons, or something.

It’s been a while. I forget exactly what technical things we talked about. But I definitely remember the end of the meeting.

SJ arrives at the meeting. We brace ourselves.

End of the day, engineering meetings finished, everything’s gone well, sales team cautiously optimistic, Steve Jobs comes in. Pretty casual. Just wanted to say “hi”, and what questions do you have for me?

My partner and I glance at each other from the back of the room. We’ve been working on this customer for a long time. This part of the meeting has not been scripted carefully. Cross your fingers.

“why isn’t NeXT successful in retail?”, the customer asks

“Sure, I have a question”, says one of the retail company’s IT leaders.

“We’ve noticed that NeXT has been pretty successful in some vertical markets, like finance, and health care, and telecommunications for instance” (note: this is true) “but you haven’t been very successful with retail. Why is that?”

Um, did we remember to tell SJ that this was a customer from the retail industry? What’s he going to say?

“Well”, SJ begins … “I think it’s because people in retail are too stupid to see the value of our technology.”

omg WHAT?

As my partner and I start to think about how we are going to apologize to the customer at dinner later, SJ continues.

SJ analyzes the retail landscape

“Who’s your CIO?”, he asks.

Well, they respond, it’s some guy who (fortunately) wasn’t at the meeting.

“How much money does he make?”, SJ continues.

Um, I dunno, maybe $150K? the customer guesses.

“There’s the problem!” SJ announces. “All the smart CIOs are on Wall Street, and they’re all making a million bucks a year, and THEY are the ones who are adopting our technology.”

meeting over

SJ excuses himself and departs.

Well that could have gone better, we thought. Just as we start to think up what kind of grovelling could possibly save this customer relationship, one of the customers says:

“You know what, he was exactly right. Retail is a stubborn business, resistant to change. We want to be the exception."

And everything was fine. SJ had hit the nail on the head, even if the sales team in the back didn’t realize it.