1980s — Education, McKinsey, and Apple

Macintosh IIfx

McKinsey & Company (Aug 1984–May 1986)

First job out of Michigan: business analyst at McKinsey & Company in New York. He was one of the first non-Ivy League, non-econ hires — literally "an experiment." McKinsey thought: "Let's get one of these computer engineers from the Midwest and see if computer people would be helpful in doing business analysis."

Everyone else was "Ivy League econ and philosophy majors." The few computer people McKinsey already had were doing "sequel programming" — IT work, setting up databases. Ted was the first placed on actual studies and cases. "I like to think I broke the mold." After Ted, McKinsey started actively recruiting engineers and computer engineers, and looking outside the Ivy League.

Two years at McKinsey confirmed the tech + business combination. "Just being analytical was helpful for working on these cases."

Barnett Consulting (June 1986–August 1987)

After McKinsey, Ted did independent consulting in New York. A bridge period of solo consulting work between the corporate world and business school.

Harvard Business School (Sept 1987–May 1989)

MBA at Harvard. The engineering-to-consulting-to-MBA pipeline was a classic high-achiever path, but Barnett would use it differently — building companies rather than managing them.

Summer Internship at Apple (1988)

Between HBS years, Ted got a summer job at Apple in K-12 education sales, building HyperCard stacks for sales reps so they could demo products to schools. He lived near Stanford with friends: "What's the catch? It's nice and warm out here and everyone's talking about computers." The summer cemented his decision to come to California.

At the time, ~80 out of 800 HBS classmates eventually came to California, but "we felt like pioneers — there was no rush to come out here yet." Most MBAs were still doing investment banking and consulting. The choice was basically Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle.

Bill Gates Calls

In a remarkable bit of history: Bill Gates personally called Ted at his HBS dorm room to recruit him for Windows. Microsoft had Gates call a few HBS students that year to talk them into changing their minds.

Ted had seen a demo of Windows — "it was like made out of characters, like equal signs for the horizontal lines. It was a hideous-looking thing." His response: "No way I would work on Windows." He thought they'd never catch Apple.

"If they had actually booted up Windows 386 and showed me how nice it could look, I might have thought differently."

Apple Computer (Aug 1989–Aug 1992)

Joined the product management group on the Mac team in September 1989. This was the John Sculley era — post-Jobs, pre-comeback.

The Vibe Inside Apple

Still exciting, lots of momentum from the Macintosh era
"A little heartbreaking" — the Mac was clearly the better product, but Microsoft dominated. Apple was a tiny percentage of desktops. "It shook my faith — if you build a better product, it doesn't mean people will beat a path to your door"
Felt like the underdog — "we felt like the 1984 commercial was still happening"
Sculley was trusted at the troops level as a competent business leader. Obsessive about margins — "you feel like you were BMW or something"
Not radically innovating — "living off something we'd already created" but with room to grow (color, high-end, low-end)

Products Ted Worked On

Mac IIfx — Super high-end Mac, 40MHz, SRP of $9,000 (plus monitor). "It felt miraculous — it could run QuickTime and you actually saw movies on your screen in a tiny postage-stamp window"
Mac LC (Low-Cost Mac) — Part of the low-cost Mac initiative
Mac LCII — Ted worked on this directly
Mac Classic — The three low-end Macs together

The Low-Cost Mac Initiative

The low-cost Mac project was engineer-driven, not top-down. People like Paul Baker spearheaded it in a quasi-skunk-works fashion. As Ted understood the history, they built the thing and showed it to Sculley, who then adopted it as strategy — "it's not like from the top we were told 'figure out how to make cheaper Macs.'" Apple's engineers cared about customers and had their own mission regardless of management direction.

Newton

The Newton was starting in skunk works while Ted was at Apple. He had several friends on the Newton project, including two who later joined him at When.com.

Amy

Around 1990, Ted's relationship with Amy began. Amy was also in tech — Bell Labs (1983), Stanford (1986), Apple (1987), General Magic (1993). Two tech careers running in parallel through Silicon Valley. They would later have three children together: Olivia (1996), Willa (1999), and Ryan (2001).

Context: The Industry

Apple II launched in 1976 — Ted grew up with the birth of personal computing
The IBM PC (1981) arrived as Ted started at Michigan
The Mac launched in 1984 while he was at McKinsey
By the time he joined Apple in '89, the GUI revolution was well underway
Pen computing was the next-big-thing magnet — "whenever there is some new exciting platform, it ends up recruiting a lot of really good people"