Steve Job$

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt
In early January 1985, I got a phone call from Guy Kawasaki, one of Apple's third party evangelists, who told me that Apple was interested in buying Switcher, and that he was assigned to make that happen. The first step was arranging a demo for Steve Jobs. I entered Steve's office with a bit of trepidation, because I thought that Switcher was worth at least a quarter of a million dollars to Apple, but I was sure that Steve would never want to pay me that much. But I was also proud of Switcher, and was interested in seeing how Steve would react to it. I booted up my by now standard demo of MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw and the Finder, as well as a little maze generating program written by Steve Capps. I configured Switcher with the scrolling animation initially turned off, so it would have more impact when I showed it later. I demoed cutting and pasting between MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw, in seconds instead of minutes, and then I turned on the scrolling animation, and starting switching rapidly between them, in both directions. "OK, I've seen enough, " Steve interrupted me. "It's great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations." But then he paused, and stared at me for a moment with an incredibly intense gaze, as if he was sizing me up or maybe just trying to scare me. "But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple." "What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled. "There's no way that you could have written that program without confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge whatever you like for it." I started to get angry. "The program is only half finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I won't be motivated to finish it." Steve gave me another intense stare as he paused for a few seconds. Then he stated a single number, without explanation. "One hundred thousand dollars." "I don't know," I told him, "I think it's probably worth a lot more than that." "Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it." I didn't seem to have any alternative but to capitulate to Steve's price setting, since he's difficult to argue with and I really wanted Switcher bundled with the Mac. I eventually negotiated the final agreement with Guy Kawasaki, where, in addition to the $100,000, I managed to get a 10% royalty of the wholesale price if Apple sold Switcher separately, which Steve swore they would never do, but eventually the royalty delivered another $50,000.
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hehe, Steve is no better than Bill.