IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 43

the iPod, which revolutionized the music
industry, pushed Apple into the Fortune
200, launched a thousand business‑school
case histories, and will be described in
books (or whatever succeeds them) a cen‑
tury from now.

t

hese days, Rubinstein lives in
a San Francisco high‑rise with his
wife of six years and two dogs.
(The cat died.) He takes the train to
Sunnyvale, where, as executive chair‑
man of the struggling smart‑phone
maker Palm, he's tackling another
turnaround. If all goes well, he'll soon
be competing more or less head‑to‑
head with his former mentor-Jobs.
But not everything has changed.
Rubinstein still pads around the
house barefoot, buys his jeans
at budget retailer Mervyns, and
gripes about the cost of running
shoes. His income, place of resi‑
dence, and age suggest he should be
driving a Porsche Carrera or maybe
a Mercedes SL 550. But he doesn't
even own a car. "I do drink better
wine these days," he says.
At Palm, Rubinstein is essen‑
tially expected to do what Steve
Jobs did for Apple. That is, take a
once‑high‑f lying company head‑
ing for oblivion and, through prod‑
uct innovations, make it a player
again. Palm helped create the
smart‑phone market with the Treo,
then lost ground to the BlackBerry
and, more recently, the iPhone.
Rubinstein's job is to get Palm back
into the race. "Palm can be saved," says
Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner's
San Jose, Calif., office. "They had a great
product, though they stuck with it too
long. Their name is known."
But, says Dulaney, the next product
is critical: "If they don't come up with a
good piece of hardware next, they'll be
crippled." The rumor mill says that prod‑
uct will be a Web‑surfing phone that will
blow the iPhone out of the water and that
it'll be coming in the first half of 2009.

r

ubinstein says he's always been
"a product guy." It's just that the
hardware keeps getting smaller. First,
in the early 1980s, after he gradu‑
ated with a master's in engineering from
Cornell, he worked on test methods for
computer production at Hewlett‑Packard.
Then he helped design subsystems for the
HP 9836 workstation. In 1986, start‑up
Ardent Computer, headed by industry leg‑
50

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * SEptEmbEr 2008

end Gordon Bell, hired Rubinstein to help
design a new kind of compact, graphics‑
oriented supercomputer.
Then, in 1990, Steve Jobs came calling.
He wanted Rubinstein to help develop
reduced‑instruction‑set computing work‑
stations at NeXT Computer, the quirky but
influential start‑up Jobs launched during
his years of exile from Apple. Alas, NeXT

$11 billion the previous year. Its Power
Macintosh computers were running tired
six‑year‑old System 7, and it had only
3 percent of the personal computer mar‑
ket, down from over 9 percent in 1993.
Rubinstein and the rest of Jobs's execu‑
tive team revamped the company's culture,
product line, and engineering teams. By
mid‑1999 the company's computer busi‑
ness was becoming healthy again,
although its market share, still
hovering around 3 percent, was
hardly more than a footnote in the
PC marketplace.

a

nd then came iTunes. In
late 2000, Apple was caught
short when Hewlett‑Packard
introduced computers with
built‑in CD burners. Apple needed
to add burners to its line quickly
and also develop software to sup‑
port them. It bought the rights to
an MP3 player called SoundJam
and brought one of its developers,
Jeff Robbin, who had worked for
Apple in the 1990s, back to the com‑
pany to work on the project that
would be iTunes. The main thing
he needed to add was the ability to
seamlessly burn CDs from within
the program.
That first generation of iTunes
mostly stored music in a library
a nd bu r ned CD s f rom t hat
library. But it also had to sup‑
port at least some of the digital
music players then on the market.
So as part of the iTunes
ran out of money before it could ship the man in
project, Apple engineers
the plaid
anything Rubinstein worked on.
bought various digital
With Jobs's blessing, Rubinstein flannel shirt:
music players, includ‑
few people who
took some of the technology he had see this casually
i ng Creat ive's Nomad,
been developing and started a com‑ dressed engineer
Diamond Multimedia's Rio,
pany called Firepower Systems realize that he
and Philips's Nike.
to build PowerPC‑based personal managed the birth
"They were horrible,"
of the ipod.
computers. However, when IBM photo: mark richards
Rubinstein recalls. "The
killed its own PowerPC line and
small solid‑state ones could
stopped investing in the market,
hold, like, six songs. The
Firepower's business was pretty much hard‑drive ones were really big and ugly
destroyed. Still, he made a tidy profit six and took all day long to download music.
months later when he sold Firepower to It was just an awful experience.
Motorola. Weary of the high‑tech merry‑
"We started kicking around the idea
go‑round, at age 40 he began what he of doing our own music player. Steve told
intended to be an extended vacation.
me, 'Look into it.' We all wanted one that
But in January 1997 Jobs called again. was better than what was out there, but
He was selling NeXT to Apple and wanted we were really busy."
Rubinstein as senior vice president of
Rubinstein formed a small team to
hardware engineering. How could he investigate. They looked at technologies
say no to the great persuader? Apple and tossed around ideas, but they just
was at a low point, with annual sales of couldn't identify a "home run product," as
US $9.8 billion, down from more than Rubinstein puts it.
Continued on page 52
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008
