Interviewer:
what is it about this machine? Why is this machine so interesting? Why has it been so influential?
Jobs:
Ah ahm, I'll give you my point of
view on it. I remember reading a magazine article a long time ago ah
when I was ah twelve years ago maybe, in I think it was Scientific American.
I'm not sure. And the article ahm proposed to measure the efficiency of
locomotion for ah lots of species on planet earth to see which species
was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B. Ah and they
measured the kilocalories that each one expended.
So ah they ranked them all and I remember that ahm...ah
the Condor, Condor was the most efficient at
[CLEARS THROAT]
getting from point A to point B. And humankind, the crown of
creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of
the way down the list. So ah that didn't look so great. But ah, let me
do this over again.
I remember ah reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American
where they measured the efficiency of locomotion of all these species
on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point
A to point B? And the Condor came in at the top of the list ah
surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way
down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of
creation.
And ah but somebody there had the imagination to test the
efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew
away the Condor all the way off the top of the list. And it made a
really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that
we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have
to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a
bicycle of the mind. Ah something that takes us far beyond our inherent
abilities. And ah I think we're just at the early stages of this tool.
Very early stages. And we've come only a very short distance. And it's
still in its formation, but already we've seen enormous changes. I think
that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years.
Interviewer:
In program six we're going to look
at some of the past predictions of why people have been so wrong about
the future. And one of the notions is that today's vision of a
standalone computer is just as limited as those past visions of it being
only a number cruncher.
What's the difference philosophically between a network machine and a standalone machine?
Jobs:
Let me answer that question a slightly different way.
There have been, if you look at why the majority
of people have bought these things so far, ah there have been two real
explosions that have propelled the industry forward. The first one ah
really happened in 1977. And it was the spreadsheets. I remember when ah Dan Fylstra who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet, walked not my office at Apple
one day and pulled out this disk from his vest pocket and said, "I...I
have this incredible new program. I call it a visual calculator." And it
became Visicalc. And that's what really drove, propelled the Apple to...to the success it achieved more than any other single event.
And...and with ah the invention of Lotus 123, and I think it was 1982, that's what really propelled the IBM PC
to the level of success that it achieved. So that was the first
explosion was the spreadsheet. Ahm the second major explosion has driven
our, the desktop industry has been desktop publishing.
Jobs:
The...the second really bit explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing. Happened in 1985
with the Macintosh and the laser writer printer. And at that point
people could start to do on their desktops things that only typesetters
and printers could do prior to that. And that's been a very big
revolution in publishing. And those are really, those two explosions
have been the only two real major revolutions which have caused a lot of
people to buy these things and use them. Ah the third one is starting
to happen now. And the third one is let's do for human to human
communication what spreadsheets did for financial planning and what
public, desktop publishing did for publishing. Let's revolutionize it
using these desktop devices. And we're already starting to see the signs
of that.
As an example in an organization, we're starting to see
that as business conditions change faster and faster with each year, ah
we cannot change our management hierarchical organization very fast
relative to the changing business conditions. We can't have somebody
working for a new boss every week. We also can't change our geographic
organization very fast. As a matter of fact even slower than the
management one. We can't be moving people around the country every week.
But we can change an electronic organization like that. And what's
starting to happen is as we start to link these computers together with
sophisticated networks and great user interfaces, we're starting to be
able to create clusters of people working on a common task in a s... you
know literally in fifteen minutes worth of setup. And these fifteen
people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are
geographically. And no matter who they work for hierarchically. And
these organizations can live for as long as they're needed and then
vanish. And we're finding we can reorganize our companies electronically
ah very rapidly. And that's the only type of organization that can
begin to keep pace with the changing business conditions.
And I believe that this collaborative model has
existed in higher education for a long time. But we're starting to see
it applied into the commercial world as well. And this is going to be
the third major revolution that these desktop computers provide is
revolutionizing human to human communication in group work. We call it
interpersonal computing. In the 1985 we did personal computing. Ah and now we're going to extend that as we network these things to interpersonal computing.
Interviewer:
What was the image of the computer in the mid 196Os or whenever you first saw one? And where are we now?
Jobs:
I ahm, I first saw my first computer
when I was twelve. [MUMBLES] I saw my first computer when I was twelve.
And it was at NASA. We had a local NASA
center nearby. And it was a terminal, which was connected to a big
computer somewhere and I got a timesharing account on it. And I was
fascinated by this thing. And I saw my second computer a few years later
which was really the first desktop computer ever made. It was made by Hewlett Packard.
It was called the 9100-A. And it ran a language called Basic. And it
was very large. It had a very small cathode ray tube on it for display.
And I got a chance to play with one of those maybe in 1968 or 9. And ah
spent every spare moment I had trying to write programs I was so
fascinated by this. Ah and so I was probably fairly lucky. And then my
introduction to computers very rapidly moved from a terminal to within
maybe twelve months or so, actually seeing one of the first, probably
the first desktop computer ever...ever really produced. And ah so my
point of view never really changed from being able to get my arms around
it even though my arms didn't quite fit around that first one.
Interviewer:
What was the role, how have personal
computers changed the landscape of computers? I mean back then it was
centralized power, it was in a mainframe. Now we have three times as
much power at the fringe than we have in the center, five times as much
power. How did the PC change the world?
Jobs:
Well, though the analogy is nowhere
perfect and certainly ah one needs to factor out the environmental
concerns of the analogy as well. Ah there is a lot to be said for
comparing it to going from trains, from passenger trains to automobiles.
And ah the advent of the automobile gave us a personal freedom of
transportation. In the same way the advent of the computer gave us the
ability to start to use computers without having to convince other
people that we needed to use computers. And the biggest effect of the
personal computer revolution has been to ahm allow millions and millions
of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever
would have in the old paradigm. And to allow them to ah participate in
ah the making of choices and controlling their own destiny using these
tools.
But it has created ah, it has created problems.
And the largest problems are that ah now that we have all these very
powerful tools, we're still islands and we're still not really
connecting these people using these powerful tools together. And that's
really been the challenge of the last few years and the next several
years is how to connect these things back together so that we can, can
rebuild a fabric of these things rather than just individual points of
light if you will. And ahm get the benefit of both, the passenger train
and the automobile.
Interviewer:
What's the vision behind the next machine?
Jobs:
Everything that ah, that we've done
in our [PAUSES] Everything I've done with computers in my life has been
along pretty much a single vector. Ah and next is just one more point on
that same vector. Ah in this case what we...we observed was that the
computing power we could give to an individual was an order magnitude
more than the PCs were given. In the sense that people want to do many
things at once and you really need true multi tasking. We really did
want to ahm start to network these things together in very sophisticated
networks.
So the technology to build that became available. And most
important we saw a way to build a software system that was about ten
times as powerful than any PC. And where new software could be created
in a fourth of the time. So we spent four years with ah fifty to a
hundred of the best software people we could find building this new
software system. And it's turned out beautifully. Ah what happens in our
industry...
Interviewer:
what's the vision behind NEXT?
Jobs:
Ahm it's not so much different than everything I've ever done in my life with computers starting with the Apple II and the Macintosh, and now NEXT
which is if you ah believe that these are the most incredible tools
we've ever built which I do, then the more powerful tool we can give to
people, the more they can do with it. And in this case ah we...we found a
way to do two or three things that were real breakthroughs.
Number one was to put a much more powerful
computer in front of people for about the same price as a PC. The second
was to integrate that networking into the computer so we can begin to
make this next revolution within a personal computing. And the PCs so
far have not been able to do that very well. And the third thing, and
maybe the most important was to create a whole new software architecture
from the ground up that lets us build these new types of applications
and let's them, let us, let's us build them in 25 percent of the time
that it normally takes to do on a PC. So ah we spent ahm four years with
50 to a hundred of the best software people that I know creating a
whole new software platform from the ground up. And the way our industry
works is that you create this platform software first and then you go
out and you get people to write new applications on top of it. Well
the...the height that these new applications can soar is...is enabled or
limited by the platform software.
And there's only been three systems that have ever been
successful in the whole history of desktop computing and that was the Apple IIs platform software of which there wasn't too much. The IBM PC and Macintosh.
So we're attempting to create the fourth platform software standard and
hopefully we'll succeed because it will allow these applications to be
written which far far exceed in capacity what can be done in today's
machines.
Interviewer:
What happens when you have a network
that allows the relative minorities in a whole different area come
together. How does that change the democracy?
Jobs:
I don't know.
Interviewer:
Okay.
Jobs:
But...but what I have seen is I've
seen interpersonal computing happening at our own company. Or maybe the
best way to put it is ahm, I remember when the first spreadsheet came
out. I saw it fly through Apple as well as other companies. And when we
ah, when we invented desktop publishing of course it influenced Apple
first.
And I've seen the same thing happen with interpersonal computing here at NEXT. We decided to put a NEXT
machine on every employee's desktop about 18 months ago and connect
them with the very highspeed networking that's built in. And I've seen
the revolution here with my own eyes. And it's it's actually larger than
the first two. Let me give you some examples. Ah if we want to ah, if
we're going to be doing a special project let's say with a company, and
we. and let's say the company is called ahm, what's your...
Interviewer:
WGBH.
Jobs:
WGBH. we're going to be doing a special project with WGBH. And what we'll do is we'll create a ah special mailbox, WGBH
and we'll put twenty people on it that are going to be helping on this
project. Now these twenty people will be from all over our company. From
marketing, from sales, from engineering, some from manufacturing. Maybe
some from our Boston
office so they can be close by. And ah if one sends a message to this
mailbox, [SNAPS FINGER] they'll all get it like that, instantly.
And if ah one sends a reply they'll copy the whole mailbox
so the rest of the team members get to read ah the intellectual content
going back and forth. And everyone on this, in this mailbox will
probably get around 30 mail messages a day. And they'll spend about
twenty minutes, thirty minutes reading these and answering these per
day. And it will be like a beehive. Now this project is very important
for our company and I want to make sure it's getting off right. So I'll
put my own name on this mailbox and l'll see these thirty mail messages
fly by. All of the disagreements and the arguments and the thoughts and
the decisions. And I can just let it fly by and read it. I can do some
background coaching with a few people if I think they're a little off
track. I can get right on the network and kibbutz if I'd like.
And after a month or so when I know that it's
going well I can take my name off. And so not only is this a way to
organize violating all management and geographic boundaries, it's also a
way to manage. Where one can see. Again the thoughts, disagreements and
decisions of a company fly by a manager in a way that they never could
before. And ah we have seen it reduce the number of meetings we have at
least by fifty percent. we've seen it get far more managers and
individual contributors involved in decisions than there ever were
before. We think the quality of the decisions is a lot higher. And we've
seen a window for management to look into the process of this organism
we call our company in a way that has never before been possible.
Interviewer:
There was an article written by a guy by the name of . . .
Interviewer:
As we become part of this
electronically community ahm that's going to provide us wonderful new
capabilities and ah communications abilities. But we still always want
to be able to disconnect that network spigot, take it off, and take our
standalone computer somewhere, let's say home. Now what's going to
happen rapidly as with radio links and with fiber optics to the home,
you're going to be able to hook your computer up to your network at
home. Ah but there's always going to be that cabin in the middle of
nowhere that I want to go for a two week vacation where I want my
computer. And if it doesn't work in a completely standalone way, I'm I'm
going to be no happy.
So we have to provide a fluid way for these
things to kind of dock into the mother load network, but also undock and
allow me as an individual to carry my computer up into Yosemite
backpacking. And where there's no radio links and no fiber optic links
and still be able to use it and then come back and dock back into the
network and find out what happened when I left and share some of my
thoughts maybe with some other folks. So we're working on that. That's
our goal for the next five years is that seamless transition between a
standalone computer and the computer as part of this network community.
Interviewer:
It also keeps away the welling aspects of always being hooked into the network.
Jobs:
That's right. I actually think what
an interesting paradox is the network which is ultimately going to
define and create the home computer market. Not keeping our recipes on
these things or something like we thought in 1975. Ah being a part of
that network and not being able to stay away from it while you're home
will drive people to get computers in every house just like we have a
telephone.
Interviewer:
But computers then then won't be just computers. They'll be radios, and stereos, and TVs.
Jobs:
No I think, I think they'll be just
computers. Just like your phone isn't your television set. Just like
your toaster isn't your radio. I think they'll be computers and they'll
have many of the capabilities of these other devices. Ahm multimedia,
the ability to integrate sound and video in with the computer is
absolutely coming. But a lot of people have mistaken it as the end
rather than the means.
Ah we see multi media as more of a means. In
other words, people aren't going to buy a computer for multi media.
They're going to buy it for training. Or they're going to buy it for
interpersonal communication. And in that communication, in addition to a
text, they're going to want voice. They're going to want, potentially I
might want to send you a videoclip. But the real market is to help us
communicate better, or to help us train somebody. And ah we need to not
lose sight of that.
Interviewer:
I want to get your thoughts on the
user interface stuff. And I'd like to look at the transition ah Xerox to
Apple. when did you hear, what was the image of Xerox PARC and what was it like when you first went in there?
Jobs:
Ahm well Xerox PARC was a...a research lab set up by Xerox
when they were making a lot of profits in copier days. And ah they were
doing some computer science research which was basically an extension
of some stuff started by a guy named Doug Engelbart when he was at SRI.
Doug had invented the mouse, and invented the BIP map display. And some Xerox folks that...that Xerox ah I believe hired away from Doug or split off from Doug somehow and got to Xerox, were continuing along in this vain. And I first went over there in 1979
and I saw what they were doing with ah the larger screens, ah
proportionately spaced texts ah and the mouse. And it was just instantly
obvious to anyone that this was the way things should be. Ahm and so I
remember coming back to Apple thinking our...our future has just changed. This is where we have to go.
The problem was that Xerox had never made a commercial computer. This group of people at Xerox
was...was ah was more concerned with...with ah looking out fifteen
years than they were looking out fifteen months trying to make a product
that somebody could use. So there were a lot of issues that they hadn't
solved like menus, other things like that. And at Apple
what we had to do was to do two things. One was complete the research
which really was only about fifty percent complete. And the second was
to find a way to implement it at a low enough cost where people would
buy it. And that was really our challenge.
Interviewer:
What did you succeed in doing with the MAC?
Jobs:
Well the Macintosh
as you remember when it came out, we called it the computer for the
rest of us. And what that meant was ah that while experts could use some
of the computers that were already out, most people didn't want, again
the computer was not an end in itself. It was a means to an end. And so
most people didn't want to learn how to use the computer. They just
wanted to use it. And the Macintosh
was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a
computer without having to learn how to use one, spend six months.
Now it turned out that the...the paradox was
that to make a computer easier to use you needed a more powerful
computer in the first place because you were going to burn a lot of the
cycles on making it easy to use. And so this computer that was easy to
use was actually more powerful and could do more things than the less
easy to use computer. And it took people a few years to figure that out
about the Macintosh. But I think ah, I think people did.
Interviewer:
Actually there's a funny joke that we were clowning around one day. And one of our group is an IBM
person. And so he was saying, some little girls walks up and sees a
prompt and goes to her daddy and says "it's broken". Where's my desktop?
Where's...where's my metaphor. And we've gotten, we've...we've adopted
this new metaphor. How has that changed the look of computers?
Jobs:
Well I think, I think the Macintosh
was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict
vision between sort of science and art. Or in other words, that
mathematics is really a liberal art if you look at it from a slightly
different point of view. And why can't we interject typography in the
computers? Why can't we have computers ah...ah talking to us in English
language? And ahm looking back, five years later, this seems like a
trivial observation. But at the time it was cataclysmic in its
consequences. And the battles that were fought to push this point of
view out the door were very large.
Interviewer:
The balance between thinking and doing. I mean one of the things in the semiconductors was you had risktakers. Bob Noyce
learns to hang- glide at age 40. These people like laying their butts
on the line. How important was that in the early days? I mean we're
going back to '75. Well again
after seeing... my entire life has been spent only in one industry
which is this one. And but I've been in it now for about fifteen years
and I've seen a lot of people make a lot of things. I've seen a lot of
people fail a lot of things.
And my...my point of view on this, or my
observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that
really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker
and doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you
know did Leonardo
have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the
future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it,
of course not. Leonardo
was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a
fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments. Ah knew about human
anatomy. And combing all of those skills together, the art and the
science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the
exceptional result.
And there is no difference in our industry. The
people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers
and the doers. And when you, when you ah, a lot of people of course,
it's very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more
concrete. But somebody, it's very easy to say oh I thought of this three
years ago. But ah usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that
the people that really did it were also the people that really did it
were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual
problems as well.
Interviewer:
What's it going to take to make
computers accessible to the rest of the public. And I don't know what
the statistics are but 20 million people on computers or .... What's it
going to take to get it to a hundred million?
Jobs:
Well probably death is the best
invention of life. Ah because it means there's a constant turnover. And
so if you want to make a change in our society, the best place to do it
is in the educational system. So that you're ah, there are, there are
now generations of people that have come out of school who computers are
second nature to them. And the people in our society that...that ah at
this point still have, have not embraced these things. Or getting older.
Has that cycle, that wheel of birth and death turns, ah just like
driving. People that don't drive are very rare. Another generation or
two, people don't use computers are, will be pretty rare.
Interviewer:
Going back...
Jobs:
It's a harsh way of saying it but...
Interviewer:
It's very true. I mean there is a
line that says those people that don't adopt it will die off. Focusing
now on the third program where we've gone from semiconductors and the
vision is that IBM is this big machine, UNIVAC,
big large machine. And we take the line through an integrated circuit
microprocessor. And I actually got some great stuff from Ted Hoff
about, you know, it's a lightbulb. It burns out, you replace it. Then
we lead up into the beginnings of the personal computer. So what were
you doing at the time and how did that get started?
Jobs:
Actually you know, it wasn't Intel
that first figured out that the microprocessor was a computer. They
designed these things to be used in calculators. And they thought, the
reason that the microprocessor came about was they thought if they could
design a slightly programmable one, the next customer that walked in
the door that wanted a slightly different calculator they could just
spend a few months rather than a few years designing a new piece of
silicone. But I think the thought of making a computer never really
occurred to them. And it was the hobbyists that thought about making a
computer out of these things. It was the computer hobbyists community
that first did that.
Ah and I don't think Intel quite understood
that for a few years. But again the first thing that happened was these
people came together and formed a club, the home ____ computer club at
Stanford was the first one in the country. And ah it was a beehive of
all of these people who were interested in these small little computers.
People that might have been ham radio operators, people that might have
you know worked with large computers ah were all gathered together to
share, discuss their ah, their latest little projects. It was very
exciting. And there was not a month that would not go by where some
breakthrough didn't happen. And then the first magazine came along which
was Byte magazine to communicate on a national scale with all these
hobbyists. So that it was a very, very exciting dynamic time.
Interviewer:
what did you think when you saw the Apple I?
Jobs:
What did I think when I saw the Apple?
Interviewer:
Yeah when you first saw that Woz was building that board.
Jobs:
Well it didn't quite work that way actually. what happened was that Woz
and I ah had known each other since I was about 12 or l3 years old. And
we built, ah our first project together was we built these little blue
boxes to ah make free telephone calls. And ah we had the best blue box
in the world. It was this all digital blue box. I don't think it works
anymore. But ah we had, we had a fun time doing that. So when it came to
building a computer together ah Woz focused mostly, Woz
was the brilliant hardware engineer and focused on the core design of
the computer. And ah I was worrying about which parts we ought to use
and how we were going to build these things and how it sort of, and
somebody that wasn't a Wise was going to manage to buy all the extra
parts you still needed to buy and plug this thing together because you
still needed to buy your own keyboard, your own display, and your own
power supply. And ah so you needed to be pretty much of a hardware
hobbyist.
Now we made the, a very important decision was
to not offer our computers a kit. Even though you needed to buy these
extra parts. The main computer board itself came fully assembled. We
were the first company in the world to do that. Everybody else was
offering their little computers a kit. And what that meant was was there
was maybe an order of magnitude of more people who could actually buy
our computer and use it then if they had to build it themselves.
And the Apple II
was actually the first computer to come fully assembled where you
didn't have to do anything. And the reason there was it was our
observation that for every hardware hobbyist, someone who could either
build the kit themselves or at least find these five or ten extra parts
they needed, there were a thousand potential software hobbyists. And if
they didn't have to do anything with the hardware except use it, make...
that meant write their own programs.
Still there was a much larger group of people
that could take advantage of this. So we wanted to reach them. That was
the real breakthrough of the Apple II.
Interviewer:
Contrast if you will the Atlantic City fair over the West Coast computer firm.
Jobs:
Ahm well the....the Atlantic City ah computer show was the first...
[PAUSES] [
Interviewer:
Look at the light bulb.
Jobs:
[SNEEZES]
The ahm, the first an face to face gathering of personal
computer hobbyists from all around the country was the show put on in Atlantic City in 1976.
And it was in the basement of some dingy hotel. And it just happened to
be about 300 degrees outside. So the basement, it was like a steambath.
And it was impossible to be down there for longer than a half an hour
without being completely drenched. And nevertheless there were a few
hundred hobbyists completely drenched walking around for hours. And we
had a little tiny booth there.
There was a table tablecloth over a hotel table. And there were, Woz
and I and a friend or two of our went there and we had our few Apple ls
there and a little poster we made. And that was really our first ah,
the first computer show in the, the ah world. A year later, I think ah
maybe even nine months later, there was the first West coast computer
fair which was a much more professional operation by, in comparison with
Atlantic City. But still very every hobby oriented compared with what
goes on today. And that was in San Francisco
and there were maybe a hundred ah companies showing their wares. And it
was attended by maybe a thousand people which was a lot for our
industry at that time.
Interviewer:
13,000.
Jobs:
l3,000, wow, really. 13,000 people. That's a lot.
Interviewer:
Jim Warren told me that.
Jobs:
That's a lot. I...I'd be surprised at that. But maybe.
Interviewer:
Call it half that. 6,000.
Jobs:
Jobs:
Well we found Regis by ahm, I used
to like Intel's advertising. So I called him up one day and I said who
does your advertising? And he said Regis McKenna. And I said what's Regis McKenna?
He said no it's a person. He gave me his phone number and I called
Regis up. He told us to go away about four or five times, but eventually
he ah agreed to help us out.
And then Mike Markkula I found ah from ah a venture capitalist actually. Ah told me that I should go talk to Mike Markkula. Now we...we hooked up with Mike just around the time we introduced the Apple II. Maybe a month before. But the Apple II was pretty much designed and ready to go. And then Mike came on board and ah things really started to take off.
Interviewer:
How important was the disk drive in the development of Apple?
Jobs:
Disk drive was crucial. Ah one of the things that people forget when they think about...about Apple and the Apple II
in particular was that we were the first company to come out with a
reliable, inexpensive floppy disk drive. And we had a low cost floppy
disk drive that really worked about two to three years before any of our
competitors. And that was an incredibly important reason why the Apple
II was successful. A matter of fact, ah there were a few others.
The Apple II
could hold up to 48 kilobytes of memory which today doesn't seem like
much, but at that time was maybe three times as much as its competitors.
And that's why Visicalc was written for the Apple II. It was the only computer that could hold it. And so if Visicalc
had been written for some other computer you'd be interviewing somebody
else right now. And it was because of that design decision and other
design decisions like it that the Apple II really beat its competition.
Interviewer:
How did the Apple II change the world of computing?
Jobs:
Well the Apple II
was the world's first successful personal computer. And really defined
the personal computer as we know it today. So ah I think it changed the
world a lot from that point of view.
Interviewer:
One of the theses is that um ....
well let me turn this question around. How important is market research?
How much did you rely on it in the early days?
Jobs:
Well you know I think in the early
days it was very easy because you would go to a home group computer club
meeting and there was your whole market and so you could find out what
they thought. Now if you show them your product and see what they
thought and you could because products were much simpler then and within
a few months you could change it all around and come back and show the
new one.
But as the market got more sophisticated it was
less easy to do that. And the problem is is that market research can
tell you tell you what your customer think of something you show them.
Or it can tell you what your customers think of something you show them.
Or it can tell you what your customers think of something you show
them. Or it can tell you what your customers want as an incremental
improvement on what you have but very rarely can your customers predict
something that they don't even quite know they want yet.
As an example no market research could have led to the development of the Macintosh
or the personal computer in the first place. So there are these sort of
non incremental jumps that need to take place where it's very difficult
for market research to really contribute much in the early phases of
thinking about how to you know what those should be.
However once you have made that jump possibly
before the products on the market or even after is a great time to go
check your instincts with the marketplace and and verify that you're on
the right track. And usually when you show people something they'll
they'll say oh my God this is fantastic. Or give you some feedback along
those lines.
Interviewer:
How has the personal computer
changed society? I mean how have we fundamentally changed the way we do
do our do our daily business our our daily lives? How's it affected
that?
Jobs:
I'm not the right person to ask.
Interviewer:
when you were getting started out I
read somewhere that you had no intention of building a company you were
just out to do something for yourselves.
Jobs:
Well at the time when we started Apple um _____ was working for Hewlett Packard I was working for Atari actually for ______ ______ designing video games and ah we we went through Atari and showed them our early protoypes and we went to HP
and we encouraged each company to hire the other one and let us do this
for them. And we got we got turned down in both places.
Probably for good reasons but ah we started a company because it was the only alternative left. Not cause we wanted to.
Interviewer:
when did you ever think that it was
going to really this was really going to happen. That this was going to
go from just an interesting idea that ah....
Jobs:
Oh it didn't take very long. It it
happened for me when I saw people that could never possibly design a
computer. Could never possibly build a hardware kit. Could never
possibly assemble their own keyboards and monitors. Could never even
write their own software using these things, then you knew something
very big was going to happen.
When we got into that stage where we were high
enough on the food chain if you will that ah a lot of people could use
these things and they were really liking it.
Interviewer:
What's the the goal of the the the next factory? why why is it so automated? Why is that necessary?
Jobs:
Um one could go on for a long time
about how the US has forgotten about manufacturing which has certainly
been true but we're starting to wake up. And ah what we're finding is is
that ah time to market is very important and quality is very important
and the way we can make tremendous increase in quality and and
reductions in market is through automation. So the automation isn't
there to lower the cost although it does do that it's really there to
increase the quality and decrease the time it takes us to get a new
product as an example to market which is very important in a technology
based market place.
So um we happen to be the lowest cost producer
in the world already next of our class of products. we also happen to be
one of the highest quality producers of our type of product in the
world. And we think for a company to survive much less prosper in the
nineties that these are going to be very very important things to be
world class at. we're not competing at the home group computer society
anymore we're competing with Europe ink and Japan ink and IBM ink ah and
ah in order to do that we really have to be world class manufacturers.
Interviewer:
What if computer networks offered education?
Jobs:
Well ah education been on computer networks for longer then almost anyone else. The Department of Defense has an office called DARPA and they funded a thing called ah ARPANET
many many years ago to try to build a command and control network for
military ah ah purposes. And they did a very brilliant thing. After they
got a prototype working they gave it to the university community in
America and said bang on this for awhile and see if it works and help us
make it better. And after a few years of the university community doing
that they created a separate version for military purposes but they
left the ah educational version going.
And that is tied together the research community
of the United States now for about a decade. And it's vital to the
functioning of higher education in this country. So higher education has
actually led the way. That's why we started off focusing exclusively on
higher education because where else could you find five thousand people
on a network but university as an example.So higher education has been
five years ahead of business in using computers in some of these
powerful new ways which we're going to see now ripple into business in
the first half of the nineties. It's pretty exciting.
Interviewer:
How about lower education? How about school? How about lower ....
Jobs:
Um sharing valuable resources. So far ah computer use in K-12 has been primarily Apple IIs.
And ah I wish ah I wish that they'd be upgrading the MacIntosh's faster
then they have been but I think ah I think that slowly happening and IBM
is is getting in there as well. The primary purpose of computing in
K-12 has been just computer literacy and um there's been a bottle neck
because there hasn't been enough sophisticated course wear written and
that's a problem for our society in general amongst all the other
problems with our K- 12 education system. One could talk about that for a
few days easily.
Interviewer:
Easily.
Interviewer:
Going back to the Mac and meeting
the deadline for the Mac how crazy did it get? I mean you had already
said that you were going to have this big scratch at the Super Bowl.
Jobs:
Um actually we wanted to get the Mac
out a year before we did so we had internal deadlines ah that we were
not able to meet but by the time we set ah by the time we bought the
spots for the Super Bowl
and things like that it was basically in the bag. It's not that we
didn't work twenty four hours a day for the last six months to get it
out but um we were on the ______ run at that time.
Interviewer:
I love this this I don't want to
call ______ this thing that you did was just have everybody sign the
_______ that was great. Why did you do that?
Jobs:
Um because the people that worked on
it consider themselves and I certainly consider them artist. These are
the people that under under different circumstances would be painters
and poets but because of that time that we live in this new medium has
appeared ah in which to express oneself to one's fellow species and
that's a medium of computing and um so a lot of people that would have
been artists and scientists have gone into this field ah to express
their their feeling and um so it it seemed like a the right thing to do.
Interviewer:
what was it like when you announced at the shareholders meeting?
Jobs:
Oh wow it was well I got the first
few rows had all the people that worked on the Mac. About a hundred
people. A hundred fifty people that really made it happen were all
seated in the first few rows and when it was introduced after we went
through it all and had the computer speak to people itself and things
like that ah the whole auditorium of that twenty five hundred people
gave it a standing ovation and ah ah the whole first few rows of Mac
folks were all just crying.
All of us were just .... I was biting my tongue
very hard because I had a little bit more to do. But ah it was a very
very emotional moment because it was no longer ours. From that day
forward it was no longer ours. We couldn't change it. If we had a good
idea the following day it was to late. It belonged to the world at that
point and time.
Interviewer:
So what did you accomplish? what did you set out to do and what did you do?
Jobs:
Well I think maybe it's something
different along the lines then what you want to ..... . You know the
semi-conductor people didn't know what they had in the micro-processor
for two to three years. It was the computer hobbies that really got the
idea to make this into a computer rather then a calculator.
Interviewer:
Would you like to build a company or change the world?
Jobs:
Ah when we started Apple we were out to build computers for our friends. That was all No idea of a company.
Interviewer:
How important is a user interface in the design of a computer?
Jobs:
Well the whole idea of the MacIntosh
was a computer for people who want to use a computer rather then learn
how to use a computer.
So....One way we've been playing
with it is it's not how it does it but what it does. In other words I
don't care how it does it anymore I just want it to do what I want it to
do.
Interviewer:
Where are we in the evolution of the user interface? And where are we going?
Jobs:
The whole discussion about user
interface is just strange to me because to me it's just sort of a
natural thing that had to happen and did happen and it's happened. It's
kind of like automatic transmissions. Um not quite the same as that
but...
Interviewer:
Um okay networking. Why is networking important? Why is it the future?
Jobs:
Well in the nineties we're going
revolutionize human to human communication using these desktop computers
in the same way that spreadsheets revolutionize financial modeling and
the desk top publishing revolution as publishing.