Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Perlman 183
Phil said, “Well, we do have a build that’s compiling now”—it took a long
time to compile all the source and then we had to release and test it—”and it’s
going to be done in about 2 and 1/2 hours.” I said, “How do we know it’s going
to work?” He said, “Well, it probably won’t.” So I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “All the recent builds we’ve done had major bugs and serious crashes.
We did do a lot of fixes here, though.” And so I’m thinking, “Holy cow. This is
our big chance, and we’re in a really bad stage of development.” But we had no
choice, so I said, “OK, let’s roll the new build out when the CTO comes and see
what happens.”
The guy arrived about 15 minutes before the compile was done, and so we
kind of wined and dined him. We brought in a vegetable tray and had some
drinks there and were talking with him and tried to be polite. He said, “I really
don’t have a lot of time. I need to see your WebTV prototype now.” So then I
look over to the prototype area, and Phil had just walked in with a WebTV prototype,
“Here it is. The new build is loaded into this box.”
So for better or worse, it was ready to go, and we sit Sony’s CTO down on
the couch. I remember saying to Phil and Bruce, “What happened when you
tested it?” And they said, “What do you mean? This is the test.” So I thought,
“Great. We’re doomed.”
We turned the thing on, and I don’t know how, but it was perfect. It ran perfectly.
It just happened to be a good build. It was pure chance, but it went
through all the paces. We could go to websites and we typed in URLs and went
to all the different things, and there it was: WebTV did what it was supposed to
do. You could see the Web on TV.
We talked about the image processing and flicker elimination and showed
him the hardware and everything, and he looked very impressed. In fact,
shortly thereafter, we got a call to come to Tokyo to present to Idei-san himself
and his staff. In the end, he brought in engineering teams from all over the
company simply to see the image processing we were doing to make such a
sharp image on a TV, because they had never seen that before at Sony, even that
one element of technology.
The one website that the CTO went to that didn’t work when he was in Palo
Alto was a Japanese website, because we didn’t support the Japanese characters.
We had one engineer, Mark Krueger, who we had worked with at Apple,
working from Japan. He married a Japanese woman, so he lived there, and he
had an ISDN line to a house in the middle of a rice paddy, literally. He was
picking up a little bit of Japanese. When we went to Japan, we got to the Tokyo
Hyatt, and I remember Bruce had a development system there—we had
hauled these big computers with us. Mark had a development system at his
place in the rice paddy. And the night before our demo with Sony, they went
and did another build. They didn’t tell me about this, but Bruce stayed up all
night working with Mark, and he integrated Japanese language support into the
code. So, literally, we arrived in Japan with an English-only browser, but by the
next morning we had it running English and Japanese.
Livingston: You didn’t know they did this?