Joanna Hoffman

Joanna Karine Hoffman (born July 27, 1953) is an American marketing executive. She was one of the original members of both the Macintosh team at Apple Computer, and the NeXT team.

Early life and education
Hoffman was born in Poland, the daughter of film director and his Armenian former wife Marlena Nazarian. She lived with her mother in the until age 10, when she went to live with her father in,. In 1967, her mother married an American and moved to. Hoffman joined them in the United States in 1968. Hoffman quickly became fluent in English and excelled in school.

She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics, a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science from the, and pursued a doctorate (which she did not complete) in archaeology at the at the. In 1979, she was scheduled to travel to for an archaeology dig. She stopped in Poland to visit her grandmother and received word from Iran that she would have to return to the United States because of the.

Career
Hoffman was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California. While there, she had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin. The discussion focused on "what computers should look like and how they should improve people's lives." Raskin was so impressed with Hoffman that he asked her to interview for a position at Apple Computer. She began on the Macintosh project in October 1980 as part of Raskin's initial team of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, and Brian Howard. At the time she began, the Mac was "still a research project" Her position "constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project." She also wrote the "first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines." Hoffman would eventually run the International Marketing Team which brought the Mac to and. She later followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, as one of its original members.

Hoffman had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with Jobs. In both 1981 and 1982, she won a satirical award at Apple given to "the person who did the best job of standing up to Jobs”. (Jobs was aware of the award and liked it.)

During the early 1990s, Hoffman was vice president of Marketing at General Magic, retiring in 1995 to spend more time with her family. On occasion she has given public lectures discussing her early life at Apple and working with Steve Jobs.

In 2020, she was hired by the Spanish artificial intelligence company as a consultant and the right-hand of its founder and CEO.

Personal life
Hoffman is married to Alain Rossmann, a native of France, who also worked on the Mac team at Apple, with whom she has two sons. Her children attended the in Palo Alto, where she served on the school board.

Portrayal in media
Abigail McConnell portrayed Hoffman in the 2013 film Jobs. British actress portrayed Hoffman in the 2015 film Steve Jobs. Winslet won the, the , and was nominated for the for her performance.

On the nature of the relationship between Hoffman and Jobs, Winslet described her as Jobs' "work wife", and that "she was an extraordinary, feisty Eastern European person who was pretty much the only person who could actually knock sense into Steve".

Articles

 * How Xerox PARC Helped Produce the Macintosh Business Plan by Adam Rosen at Cult of Mac (2014-01-20)