Winter of 2001. The hardware guy, Tony Fadell had worked on developing a number of devices at General Magic (a company started by some of the original Mac team members) and later at Philips. After Philips, he set out on his own and tried to shop around the idea for a business that would combine a hardware element - an MP3 player - with a major sales element, a Napsterlike music source. He tried it out on several companies, with no success, but it turned out to be just what Apple was looking for.
Steve Jobs, obsessed by the idea of the fastest realization of his new project (further popular as iPod), gave the assignment of overseeing the project to Apple's head hardware honcho, Jon Rubinstein, known as "Ruby"- the smart, hard-driving business manager Steve had brought along with him from NeXT.
This wasn't a project Ruby could afford to botch. He saw that working with Tony made all kinds of sense because the development work that Tony had already done would give the project a jump start. But when Ruby said he wanted to meet with Tony, the Apple folks who had been in touch with him had a hard time tracking him down: Tony was on a ski slope.
Steve organized contact, and Ruby offered Tony position as an Apple employee in a team that grew to be about thirty people strong. But the job came with expectations that would give anyone pause: he would have to design a product distinctive enough and intuitive enough to use that it would meet Steve Jobs's exacting standards. To make the assignment all the tougher, Steve set the hard deadline: the product would have to be ready in time for the Christmas buying season, less than twelve months away.
Of course, trying to live up to Steve Jobs's near impossible and frequently changing expectations had crushed many strong men. But Tony accepted Ruby's offer anyway. For him, this was a dream job doing what he had spent months trying to talk some company into letting him do.
Jeffrey S. Young, William L. Simon, iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, 2005
P.S. Tony Fadell started working for Apple from February 2001 as a contractor designing the iPod and planning Apple's audio product strategy. In April 2001 he was hired by Apple to assemble and run its iPod & Special Projects group, where he has overseen the design and production of the iPod and iSight devices. He was promoted to vice president of iPod engineering in 2004. In October, 2005, Apple announced that Fadell would replace the retiring Jon Rubinstein as Senior Vice President of the iPod Division on March 31, 2006.
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