[mikelevins]

"the magic is gone"

I first went to work at Apple in January of 1988, at the end of the era that Woz described as making whatever they felt like and throwing it over the fence to ravening crowds who were throwing bales of money over the other direction.

Some time in the first few weeks I was there, my department head convened a staff meeting to explain that they were going to try a new concept that Apple had never tried before. "It's called a 'budget'," she said. "We try to guess ahead of time what our plans are going to actually cost."

At some point someone asked if that meant that regular meetings would no longer be catered. The answer was, "of course not. We have to have some way to get people to show up."