跳至主要内容

Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview

 

The story of Apple CEO Steve Jobs is one of the most familiar in American business — shaggy Bob-Dylan-loving kid starts a computer company in a Silicon Valley garage and changes the world. But like any compelling story, it has its dark moments. Before the iPad or the iPhone, Jobs, then the head of the short-lived NeXT Computer, sat down with Rolling Stone‘s Jeff Goodell. It was 1994, Jobs had long ago been booted from Apple, the internet was still the province of geeks and academics, and the personal computer revolution looked like it might be over. But even at one of the low points in his career, Jobs still had confidence in the limitless potential of personal computing. Read on to get Jobs’ prescient take on PDAs and object-oriented software, as well as his relationship with Bill Gates and why he wanted the internet in his den, but not living room. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 on October 5th, 2011.

 

Like other Phenomena of the ’80s, Steve Jobs was supposed to be long gone by now. After the spectacular rise of Apple, which went from a garage start-up to a $1.4 billion company in just eight years, the Entrepreneur of the Decade (as one magazine anointed him in 1989) tried to do it all again with a new company called NeXT. He was going to build the next generation of the personal computer, a machine so beautiful, so powerful, so insanely great, it would put Apple to shame. It didn’t happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NeXT closed down its hardware division last year and laid off more than 200 employees. It seemed only a matter of time until the whole thing collapsed and Jobs disappeared into hyperspace.

But it turns out that Jobs isn’t as far gone as some techno-pundits thought. There are big changes coming in software development — and Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial revolution had on manufactured goods. “In my 20 years in this industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as this,” says Jobs, with characteristic understatement. “You can build software literally five to 10 times faster, and that software is much more reliable, much easier to maintain and much more powerful.”

This article appeared in the June 16, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new revolution to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs — Mr. Revolution himself — is bound to raise some eyebrows. “Steve is a little like the boy who cried wolf,” says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a PC industry newsweekly. “He has cried revolution one too many times. People still listen to him, but now they’re more skeptical.” And even if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly sees himself as.

Whatever role Jobs ends up playing, there is no question evolutionary forces will soon reshape the software industry. Since the Macintosh changed the world 10 years ago with its brilliant point-and-click interface, all the big leaps in computer evolution have been on the hardware side. Machines have gotten smaller, faster and cheaper. Software, by contrast, has gotten bigger, more complicated and much more expensive to produce. Writing a new spreadsheet or word-processing program these days is a tedious process, like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented programming will change that. To put it simply, it will allow gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of starting from the ground up every time, layering in one line of code after another, programmers will be able to use preassembled chunks to build 80 percent of a program, thus saving an enormous amount of time and money. Because these objects will work with a wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also eliminate many of the compatibility problems that plague traditional software.

For now, the beneficiary of all this is corporate America, which needs powerful custom software to help manage huge databases on its networks. Because of the massive hardware requirements for object-oriented software, it will be years before it becomes practical for small businesses and individual users (decent performance out of NeXT’s software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24 megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive). Still, in the long run, object-oriented software will vastly simplify the task of writing programs, eventually making it accessible even to folks without degrees from MIT.

No one disputes the fact that NeXT has a leg up on this new technology. Unlike most of its competitors, whose object-oriented software is still in the prototype stage, NEXTSTEP (NeXT’s operating system software) has been out in the real world for several years. It’s been road-tested, revised, refined, and it is, by all accounts, a solid piece of work. Converts include McCaw Cellular, Swiss Bank and Chrysler Financial. But as the overwhelming success of Microsoft has shown, the company with the best product doesn’t always win. For NeXT to succeed, it will have to go up against two powerhouses: Taligent, the new partnership of Apple and IBM, and Bill Gates and his $4 billion-a-year Microsoft steamroller. “Right now, it’s a horse race between those three companies,” says Esther Dyson, a Silicon Valley marketing guru. A recent $10 million deal with Sun Microsystems — the workstation company that was once NeXT’s arch rival — has breathed new life into NeXT, but it is only one step in a very long journey. Still, few dare count NeXT out.

Today, Jobs, 39, seems eager to distance himself from his reputation as the Wunderkind of the ’80s. He wears small, round John Lennon-style glasses now, and his boyish face is hidden behind a shaggy, Left Bank-poet beard. During our interview at the NeXT offices in Redwood City, Calif., just 20 miles north of his old Apple fiefdom, he took particular joy in bashing his old rival Bill Gates but avoided discussing other heavyweights by name. Trademark Jobsian phrases like “insanely great” or “the next big thing” were nowhere to be found. Friends say the Sturm und Drang of the past few years has humbled Jobs ever so slightly; he is a devoted family man now, and on weekends, he can often be seen Rollerblading with his wife and two kids through the streets of Palo Alto.

“Remember, this is a guy who never believed any of the rules applied to him,” one colleague says. “Now, I think he’s finally realized that he’s mortal, just like the rest of us.”

It’s been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what’s most surprising to you?
People say sometimes, “You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.” I don’t feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-’70s. And here we are, just about the mid-’90s, and it’s kind of commonplace now. But it’s about a 10-to-20-year lag. That’s a long time.

The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry. It hasn’t happened that often.

The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to be the fueling agent for these changes. It’s simply because they have a lot of money. They’re willing to pay money for things that will save them money or give them new capabilities. And that’s a hard one sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in this business aren’t doing it because they want to help corporate America.

A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff, like Apple’s Newton. I’m not real optimistic about it, and I’ll tell you why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother’s going to have one, and you’re going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don’t think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals.

And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product.

To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.


 

Is that the period you’re emerging from now?
I hope so. I’ve been there before, and I’ve recently been there again.

As you know, most of what I’ve done in my career has been software. The Apple II wasn’t much software, but the Mac was just software in a cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn’t run on any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software. And what we’ve done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson. When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk. So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else they won’t take it

What we learned was that the reward can’t be one and a half times better or twice as good. That’s not enough. The reward has to be like three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the mainstream.

The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter of fact, I think that the leap that we’ve made is at least five years ahead of anybody.

Let’s talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near future will be able to do everything that traditional desktop computers can do. Is the PC revolution over?
No. Well, I don’t know exactly what you mean by your question, but I think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the Mac was — well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft. Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet — basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn’t change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It’s amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself.

So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that’s great. The question is, what’s next? And what’s going to keep driving this PC revolution?

If you look at the goal of the ’80s, it was really individual productivity. And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the ’90s — well, if you look at the personal computer, it’s going from being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It’s going from individual productivity to organizational productivity and also operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for mainframe and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market And people don’t buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate the heart of their company. And they don’t buy these applications shrink-wrapped. You can’t go buy an application to run your hospital, to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network. They don’t exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much that they’re really custom apps by the time you get through with them.

These custom applications really used to just be in the back office — in accounting, manufacturing. But as business is getting much more sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel and a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn’t implement the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without the custom app, it doesn’t have the new product or service. I’ll give you an example. MCI’s Friends and Family is the most successful business promotion done in the last decade — measured in dollars and cents. AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them billions of dollars. Why didn’t they? They’re obviously smart guys. They didn’t because they couldn’t create a custom app to run a new billing system.

So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?
I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by much more advanced software, and it’s going to be driven by custom software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped software on the PCs, and that’s why PCs haven’t really touched the heart of the business. And now they want to bring them into the heart of the business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps alongside their shrink-wrapped apps because that’s how the enterprise is going to get their competitive advantage in things.

For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now. They’re giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer just runs these custom apps, they’re networked back to a server in Seattle, and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your phone works on the entire McCaw network.

In addition to that, the applications business right now — if you look at even the shrink-wrap business — is contracting dramatically. It now takes 100 to 200 people one to two years just to do a major revision to a word processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really creative people who like to work in small teams of three, four, five people, they’ve all been squeezed out of that business. As you may know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn’t have any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft’s advantage. You can’t have small teams of programmers writing word processors and spreadsheets — it might upset their competitive advantage. And they can afford to have 200 people working on a project, no problem.

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.

That may be so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think of the man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses — not to corporate America.
Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.

What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both.

What’s going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better. They’re not sitting around thinking that they have a giant problem that needs to be solved — whereas corporations are. The PC market has done less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need, and they know it. We don’t have to spend money educating them about the problem — they know they have a problem. There’s a giant vacuum sucking us in there, and there’s a lot of money in there to fuel the development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from that

I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit’s been written about — it was a very important visit. I remember being shown their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete, some of it wasn’t even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And within 10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might be, but I don’t think rational people could argue that every computer would work this way someday.

I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it. You can argue about how many years it’s going to take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry, but I don’t think a rational person can argue that all software will not be built this way.


 

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?
Objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here.

Here’s an example: If I’m your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.”

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact that Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software industry with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers should work?
I don’t really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do you feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we had … well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It’s not my goal anyway.

The thing I don’t think is good is that I don’t believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying — and indeed, in the beginning, that’s just what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate — look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can’t say the same thing about Microsoft.

And I become very concerned, because I see Microsoft competing very fiercely and putting a lot of companies out of business — some deservedly so and others not deservedly so. And I see a lot of innovation leaving this industry. What I believe very strongly is that the industry absolutely needs an alternative to Microsoft. And it needs an alternative to Microsoft in the applications area — which I hope will be Lotus. And we also need an alternative to Microsoft in the systems-software area. And the only hope we have for that, in my opinion, is NeXT.

Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented operating system —
They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too. I’m sure they’re working on it

Microsoft’s greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is Windows. Windows is so nonobject-oriented that it’s going to be impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without throwing Windows away, and they can’t do that for years. So they’re going to try to patch things on top, and it’s not going to work.

You’ve called Microsoft the IBM of the ’90s. What exactly do you mean by that?
They’re the mainstream. And a lot of people who don’t want to think about it too much are just going to buy their product. They have a market dominance now that is so great that it’s actually hurting the industry. I don’t like to get into discussions about whether they accomplished that fairly or not That’s for others to decide. I just observe it and say it’s not healthy for the country.

What do you think of the federal antitrust investigation?
I don’t have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by breaking some of the rules. I’m not qualified to say. But I don’t think it matters. I don’t think that’s the real issue. The real issue is, America is leading the world in software technology right now, and that is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of. I personally believe that it would be in the best interest of the country to break Microsoft up into three companies — a systems-software company, an applications-software company and a consumer-software company.

Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple days, when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is Microsoft. And instead of Apple that will save us, it’s NeXT. Do you see parallels here, too?
Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That’s not important. What’s important is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and what Microsoft is doing today…. I think we came closer than we think to losing some of our computer industry in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the healthiest thing that’s happened in this industry in the last 10 years.

What’s your personal relationship with Bill Gates like?
I think Bill Gates is a good guy. We’re not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month.

A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden boys of the computer revolution —
I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill very much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the companies we built were very different from each other.

A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft has on the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope for is that it will be a niche product.
Apple’s a niche product, the Mac was a niche product And yet look at what it did. Apple’s, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion when I left They’re doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent market share of the system-software business? I’d be happy now. I’d be very happy. Then I’d go work like crazy to get 20.

You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you founded now, what do you think?
I don’t want to talk about Apple.


What about the PowerPC?
It works fine. It’s a Pentium. The PowerPC and the Pentium are equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you measure them. They’re the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That’s good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be? No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000 architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least equal, but it’s not a compelling advantage.

 

You can’t open the paper these days without reading about the Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?
The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I’m not very excited about that. I’m not excited about home shopping. I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.

Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all over each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think will be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?
I’ve talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business, and believe me, they have no idea what they’re doing here. And the people who are talking the loudest know the least

Who are you referring to –John Malone?
I don’t want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is going to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They don’t understand that that’s a little computer that they’re going to have in the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they’re going to have to come up with some very sophisticated software.

Let’s talk more about the Internet. Every month, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?
I don’t think it’s too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

I’m interested in bearing your ideas.
I don’t think of the world that way. I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

Nevertheless, you’ve often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

It’s been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
The world’s clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We’ve given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.

The second thing that we’ve done is the communications side of it. By creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice. We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies together and start to act as if they were a virtual organization.

So I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. And I don’t think it’s anywhere near over.

When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?
I don’t know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment — however you define it. But these are private things. I don’t want to talk about this kind of stuff.

Why?
I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it’s very important to keep a private life.

Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon Valley?
I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me. Because otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot writes about you — you just can’t take it too personally. But then that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.

I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day, and they mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a few months ago. You didn’t want to participate in that. Has it been a burden, the pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some people have compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work, and it’s all downhill from there.
I’m very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I’m going to be on. Guess I’m going to have to start eating a lot of pie. [Laughs.] I don’t know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You’ll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you’ll smell that romance in the air. And you’ll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.

But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with.

But I also think that what we’re now may turn out in the end to be more profound. Because the Macintosh was the agent of change to bring computers to the rest of us with its graphical-user interface. That was very important. But now the industry is up against a really big closed door. Objects are going to unlock that door. On the other side is a world so rich from this well of software that will spring up that the true promise of many of the things we started, even with the Apple II, will finally start to be realized.

After that … who knows? Maybe there’s another locked door behind this door, too; I don’t know. But someone else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one.

Popular posts from 产品随想的博客

申请日本研究生---转载

原文地址: 申请日本研究生 首先有必须向大家解释一下日语中这个“研究生”的概念以及日本的大学院的基本设置。  日语中“研究生”用英文来说是research student,在日本的大学是非正规生,也就是说没有学位也不可以修得学分,一般情况下只能在研究生阶段结束以后得到一份“研究生修了证明书”,这个回国是没有用处的。  最初研究生的设立,并不是为了大学院备考者。但是现在外国留学生都利用这个课程来作为进入大学院正规课程的一个途径。说直接一点,就是为了拿到签证,来日本考大学院的一个途径。  研究生又分为两种,一为学部研究生,申请的资格为大学本科毕业及其预定毕业者,或者是满16年学习经历的都有资格申请。第二种为大学院研究生一般是硕士毕业以及其预定毕业者有资格申请。  简单的说,可以把中日的高中到博士的就学阶段和名称对比如下:  日本:高校 学部 学部研究生 修士 大学院研究生 博士  中国:高中 本科 硕士预科 硕士 博士预科 博士  |--------- | ----------|  |  统称大学院  研究生的申请基本上为书类选考,也就是只要提交必要的材料和得到指教教官的许可就可以申请。也有个别好的大学需要书面考试,但为数不多。  研究生的申请可以是国内出愿(人在日本),也可以是海外出愿(人在中国)。  日本大学院的基本设置。  一般是##大学大学院###研究科的机构下,分博士前期(相当于国内的硕士)和博士后期(博士),有些大学的有些专业没有博士后期,一般就叫做修士课程。  研究生下又有具体专攻的划分。  申请研究生第一步  是和你想去大学的导师联系,希望他能够当你的指导教官(当然事先搜集有关大学,导师的资料是必备的,要确定这个大学一定招研究生.相关信息。  可以利用小春留学论坛学校版提供的以下信息搜索引擎  也可以利用日文门户网站yahoo等来搜索。)  联系导师的合理时间,一般在你希望入学时间(一般一年有两次,4月和10月,)的6-12个月前.具体时间各个学校,各个专业不同不同。  至少6个月前是一定要联系拉,否则会来不及.  国内本科大4在校生,建议在进入大4后就着手准备联系导师事项.  联系导师的方法,材料及注意事项  1。可以通过电子邮件,书信,传真,电话各种工具。最方便,最便宜的方式推荐用电子邮件。有些导师是不公开电子邮件的,那就只能利用其他工具拉。 

乔布斯自己的话

我對建立一家屹立不搖的公司有著不滅的熱情。我希望激發公司裡的人做出偉大的產品,其他都是其次的。能獲利當然很好,因為這樣你才有更多的本錢去做很棒的產品。然而,最重要的动机還是產品,而不是獲利。史考利就是把優先順序搞錯了, 把赚钱當成首要目標。雖然製造產品和追求獲利只有些微的不同,但這目標的確關係到一切,包括你要雇用什麼樣的人,晉升哪些人,在開會的時候要討論什麼。 有些人會說:「給消費者想要的東西。」但這不是我的做法。我們必須在消費者知道自已想要什麼東西之前,就幫他們想好了。記得福特曾說:「如果我問顧客他們要什麼,他們必然會回答我:跑得更快的馬!」除非你拿出東西給顾客看,不然他們不知道自己要什麼。這就是為什麼我從不仰賴市場調查。我們的任務是預知,就像看一本書,儘管書頁上還是一片空白,我們已可讀出上面寫的東西。 寶麗來的蘭德曾提到人文與科學的交會。我喜歡這樣的交會,這就是最神奇的地方。目前創新的人很多,我的職涯最突出的並非創新。蘋果能打動很多人的心,是因為我們的創新還有很深的人文淵源。我認為,偉大的工程師和偉大的藝術家很類似。他們都有表達自己的深切欲望。其實,為第一代麥金塔打拚的精英當中,有些也會寫詩或作曲。在1970 年代,人們用電腦表達他們的創造力。像達文西和米開朗基羅這樣偉大的藝術家,本身也是科學家。米開朗基羅不只是會雕刻,也知道如何開採石材。 蘋果能做的,就是幫消費者整合。因為一般人都很忙,一星期七天,一天二十四小時,完全抽不出時間想這些。如果你對製造偉大的產品充滿热情,你就會想整合,把你的硬體、軟體和內容變成一個整體。如果你想開關新的疆土,你得自己來。如果你要使你的產品開放,和其他軟、硬體相容,就不得不放棄你的一些遠見或夢想。 過去的矽谷,在不同的時間點都曾出現過獨領風騷的大公司。最早是惠普,他們曾稱霸一段很長的時問,接著進入半導體時代,快捷和英特爾是其中的佼佼者。之後蘋果也曾光芒耀眼,然後又黯淡下來。到了今天,我想最强的就是蘋果,而 Google 緊跟在後。我認為蘋果禁得起時間考騐。蘋果這幾年的表現非常亮眼,日後仍會是電腦科技的先鋒。 向微軟丢石頭很簡單。微軟顯然不再像過去那樣意興風發,不再舉足輕重,但我還是認為他們過去的成就很了不起,那真是不容易。他們是經營獲利的高手,對產品發展則沒那麼有野心。蓋兹自認為是產品的推手,懂產品的人。其實,他不是,他是個生意人。

Good for the Soul, Steven Levy, 2006, Newsweek

Interview During the iPod's development process did you get a sense of how big it would become? The way you can tell that you're onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can't wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one. Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right? We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless. What was the design lesson of the iPod? Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they're really complicated surfaces. We tried mak

产品随想 | 周刊 第122期:务必要疯狂地怀抱雄心,且还要疯狂地真诚

你可能是个大器晚成的人——那些早年失败却在晚年成功的人具备的特质。   https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6gBPM5u1y2QNJsdnfd_O1Q 好喜欢这句话:人的一生可以在很多方面帮助你,但有两样东西是别人无法给予你的:好奇心和动力。这两样东西必须由自己来提供。 The House of Arnault,His company, LVMH, bought up many of the world’s major luxury brands. And he’s not finished shopping.   https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-lvmh-bernard-arnault/ 介绍奢侈品巨头 大模型的扑克牌:独家内幕故事   https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/YfFN7yjbyyPIy3MC89HdXA Club Deal. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI's Future   https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/06/04/inside-silicon-valley-influence-battle-for-ai-future/ AI计算机的样子,会是怎么样? Tinokwan Lighting Consultants   https://www.instagram.com/tinokwanlighting/ 估计也是世界顶级的灯光设计公司 “He saw beauty in both art and engineering,” Jobs said, “and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius.” 乔布斯评价达芬奇 中华珍宝馆   https://g2.ltfc.net/home 文化传承还是得靠民间这些喜爱之人 Morphic   https://github.com/miurla/morphic An AI-powered search engine with a generative UI 试用了下,体验非常不错 「务必要疯狂地

内网域名访问内网服务器

部门ftp服务器和远程服务器内网域名无法访问问题困扰我好久,钻研了几天,终于明白了一些,和大家做一个分享, 原帖子在这里 ,表示感谢

产品随想 | 周刊 第51期:Never let a good crisis go to waste

Products Paperless-ngx   https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx A community-supported supercharged version of paperless: scan, index and archive all your physical documents 自架设服务,文档聚合 Tube Archivist on YouTube   https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist Your self hosted YouTube media server 自托管YouTube流媒体播放 Emby Server Emby Server is a personal media server with apps on just about every device. 自己掌控流媒体 Pointless   https://github.com/kkoomen/pointless An endless drawing canvas desktop app made with Tauri (Rust) and React 无限画布白板工具,Tauri构建,跨多端 PWA LIST   https://www.pwalist.app/ 一些好玩的PWA应用,有些还不错 Pomofocus 番茄钟 Song Search “Find me a song by lyrics.”   https://songsear.ch/ Nanopi Openwrt   https://github.com/klever1988/nanopi-openwrt Openwrt for Nanopi R1S R2S R4S R5S 香橙派 R1 Plus 固件编译 纯净版与大杂烩 Project ImmortalWrt   https://github.com/immortalwrt/immortalwrt An opensource OpenWrt variant for mainland China users. China用户专用......心情复杂 YAOF   https://github.com/QiuSimons/YAOF Yet Ano

产品随想 | 周刊 第56期:西方出版商应该拒绝思想审查

Products IKEA's latest AR app can erase your furniture to showcase its own   https://www.engadget.com/ikea-ar-app-lets-you-preview-its-furniture-in-your-own-house-130004284.html LiDAR的实际应用 JustLive-Android   https://github.com/guyijie1211/JustLive-Android 一个集成国内多个直播平台内容的App,非常好用 2022口腔护理评测合集,护齿攻略不容错过   https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ktyG9K_dwbcha4F0qm3Elw 有调出品 NAS媒体库资源归集整理工具 NAS Tools   https://github.com/jxxghp/nas-tools NAS媒体库资源归集、整理自动化工具 Citizenship Consciousness & Privacy British publishers censor books for western readers to appease China   https://www.ft.com/content/63cbf209-656f-4f99-9ee3-722755c228ed?shareType=nongift 西方出版商应该拒绝这样的思想审查 Boris Nemtsov Tailed by FSB Squad Prior to 2015 Murder   https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/03/28/boris-nemtsov-tailed-by-fsb-squad-prior-to-2015-murder/ 克格勃特工 Design My NYC Apartment Tour: $1,875/Month in Manhattan   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ABFuMGkp9k 曼哈顿1800刀月租的房子,还是很棒的呀 The Hardest Trip - Mandelbrot Fractal Zoom   https://www.you

Class 3

一. shell脚本 基本语法  #!/bin/bash    声明解释该脚本的程序,使用后可使用bash内建的指令 #!被称为魔数    魔数后应指定运行该脚本所需程序的完整路径 特点 shell脚本解释器

产品随想 | 陪读《爱因斯坦传》:11-18章

  第十一章 爱因斯坦的宇宙,1916—1919 施瓦茨希尔德先是计算了一个非旋转的球形恒星外部的时空曲率。几周以后,他又寄给爱因斯坦一篇论文,讨论了这样一颗恒星内部的时空曲率是什么样子。 无论是哪种情况,似乎都可能有某种不同寻常的事情发生,事实上是必然会发生。如果一颗恒星(或任何物体)的所有质量都被压缩到一个足够小的空间(即后来所谓的施瓦茨希尔德半径〉中,那么所有计算似乎都失效了。时空将无限地自行弯曲下去。对我们的太阳而言,如果它的所有质量都被压缩到不足两英里的半径内,这种情况就会发生。而地球则需要压缩到大约1/3 英寸。 这就意味着,在这种情况下,施瓦茨希尔德半径之内没有任何东西能够逃脱引力的牵引,甚至连光或其他形式的辐射也不行。时间也将延缓到停滞。换句话说,在外面的观察者看来,施瓦茨希尔德半径附近的旅行者似乎被冻结了,从而驻足不前。 ──后来的黑洞 在整个宇宙中,现已发现许多黑洞。我们银河系中心就有一个,质量比太阳大几百万倍。“黑洞并不稀少,它们并不是我们宇宙的一种偶然点缀,”戴森说,“只有在这里,爱因斯坦的广义相对论才能大显身手,光芒四射。也仅仅在这里,空间和时间才丧失了自己的特性,共同融入一种由爱因斯坦的方程精确描绘的卷曲的四维结构。” 现在想象这样一种情形:如果这些平直居民的二维仍然在一个表面上,但这一表面(以一种在他们看来相当微妙的方式〉发生了轻微弯曲,或者说,如果他们仍然局限于二维,但其平直表面就像是--个球面,情况会怎样?正如爱因斯坦所说:“现在让我们考患一种二维存在,但这次是在球面上而不是在平面上。”这些平直居民射出的箭看上去仍然沿直线运动,但最终却会折返,就像沿地球表面航行的水手最终会从反方向归来一样。 平直居民所处的二维空间的弯曲使其表面是有限的,但却没有任何边界。无论他们沿着什么方向旅行,都不会到达宇宙的尽头或边缘,但最终会回到同一位置。正如爱因斯坦所说:“这种思考的迷人之处在于认识到:这些生物的宇宙是有限的,但却没有边界。〞如果这些平直居民的表面类似于一个膨胀的气球,那么他们的整个宇宙将会不断膨胀,但仍然没有边界。 在这样一个弯曲的宇宙中,沿任何方向发出的光将沿肴表面上的一条直线运动,但仍然会折回自身。“构想这样一种有限无界的空间,是迄今为止关于宇宙本性的最伟大的思想之一,”物理学家玻恩这样说。 的确如此,但这个弯曲的宇宙之外是什么呢?曲

有关DNS

Windows下DNS命令 查看本机DNS缓存:ipconfig /displaydns 清除本机DNS缓存:ipconfig /flushdns 查看本机DNS地址:nslookup 查看本机网络设置:ipconfig /all