I’ve given my fair share of demos as I’m sure many of you have. If you’re anything like me, you were lucky if the worst thing you suffered was butterflies in your stomach. But all that was nothing compared to what Andy Grignon suffered and he wasn’t even giving the demo.
It was January 8, 2007, the day of the MacWorld trade show at which the iPhone was going to be announced. Grignon was the senior engineer in charge of the iPhone’s radios and he was about to watch Steve Jobs give his famous announcement and demo. The problem was, the thing wasn’t ready and didn’t work reliably. At all. Jobs had been practicing for 5 days and not one of his run throughs was without problems.
Follow the above link for the story of that demo and how terrifying it was for everyone involved. Apple had bet the company on the iPhone and Jobs was going to use what amounted to a kludged up prototype for the announcement. Practically every aspect of the phone had problems. For example, the memory management software wasn’t finished so the phone tended to quickly run out of memory and freeze. To deal with that, Jobs had multiple phones on the table and switched off after a few tasks so the phone he was using wouldn’t freeze. The radio crashed so often that they hard coded the signal strength to 5 bars.
Of course, everything worked out in the end but the story of the demo is one that will resonate with every engineer forced to sign off on a project before it was ready and then having to watch someone demonstrate the result. The story ends with Grignon and his fellow engineers sitting in the fifth row watching Jobs give the demo and recounts their state when it was all over. Read the story to find out what it was.