The past days one of the engineers who participated in the development of the first iPhone provided interesting details about the whole process, and today a former employee of Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), gives us some additional information. Andy Grignon is his name, being him an engineer who developed the software based on which the GSM part of the terminal works. According to him, Steve Jobs he chose for this project only engineers who had no experience in the development of mobile phones, the idea being to have people who have no preconceptions about how a smartphone should be developed.
We had the opportunity to hire people from Palm, from Nokia, to help us build this thing. [But] Steve said, 'No, no, we don't need to do that. He wasn't just being an asshole, although he did have that tendency. What he was actually doing was, under the auspices of keeping the program secure and secret, he didn't want anyone outside of Apple knowing what we were up to, but he had something in his head, and it manifested itself later on. He didn't want the project tainted by what we thought of as a phone at the time.
Although then Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), they could have hired engineers Nokia or Palm, Steve Jobs he categorically refused to use any employees other than those inside Apple to ensure that the entire project remained secret. To keep everything secret and to ensure that he would bring his product to the market, Steve Jobs managed to motivate his employees in such a way that they worked with the conviction that he was going to bring a revolutionary product to the market, the former engineer claiming that leaving that team, he didn't join any team at least as motivated.
I actually don't think that anybody except for Apple was capable of building the iPhone, because not only did you have a guy like Steve running the ship, but you had a bunch of mini-Steves underneath him running their respective ships. It was just a whole cluster of assholes. I was one of them! But we were motivated in a way that I've never seen a team motivated before.
The entire iPhone development project required the application of drastic measures for Apple, Steve Jobs managing all the details of the project and taking part in a multitude of meetings where decisions were made regarding the development of the terminal, the final result being a device that would revolutionize the mobile terminal industry.
