Ben Williamson

And one thing that people don't necessarily understand is his ability to know exactly what you needed to achieve your very best and his ability to intuit whether or not you were capable of it and you just needed a kick in the ass or you were capable of it and you just needed some help.

approaching the problem from a different perspective whatever it was he you know I kind of observed him his impact really more than working directly with him but just his ability to make sure that the best people were in the right room headed in the right direction and also knowing that

And helping you believe that you could do 20 times more than you thought you were capable of and showing you that it could be done.

If you look at a lot of the products that are early on in Apple's history, it was only a couple of people working on it.

If you look at the original iTunes application, that was two guys.

And when you think about two people creating an entire application, it just boggles the mind.

It's completely different in the way Apple was run back then.

It was completely different than anything else out there that a typical software project would have 40 or 50 people on it, four or five project managers, lots of different releases and milestones.

And at Apple, it was just a couple of guys grinding really hard, making it happen in isolation and secrecy until the covers came off and the curtain lifted and

The entire world was waiting to rush into the vacuum and see what they traded next.

Well, he would say, you're going to get it released by June 1st.

You're no longer going to be here.

People didn't say no to Steve often.

There was one product I worked on that was a black project.

I'm not going to say exactly what it was, but something changed.

Frequently, people would work on projects for a really long time.

And Steve didn't mention it on stage at the keynote.

There was one project that was an airport base station that was updated.

I don't remember what Macworld it was at, but it actually was updated.

It was really released.