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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.

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《沸腾十五年》

  《沸腾十五年》 讲述中国,1995-2009 1995互联网商业元年 马云中国黄页 杭州电信有着非常好的社会资源和政府资源,马云却一样都没有。 杭州电信利用中国黄页( chinapage.com )已有的名声,做了一个名字很接近的网站,也叫“中国黄页”( chinesepage.com ),借以分割马云版“中国黄页”的市场。 海归、极客、商人成为中国互联网创业者中的三大特色群体(VC是推手) 1996海归归来 为了确保搜狐不被遗忘,张朝阳选择了最便宜也最有效的方法:树立个人品牌。 1997大门洞开 互联网的一年等于其他行业的7年 网易免费电子邮箱系统一出,中关村性急的评论家们甚至给丁磊戴上第三代程序员的帽子,这个代别划分是这样的:基于DOS平台开发的是第一代,基于Windows平台开发的是第二代,基于Internet平台开发的是第三代。 1998极客当道 曾李青是腾讯5个创始人中最好玩、最开放、最具激情和感召力的一个,与温和的马化腾、爱好技术的张志东相比,是另一个类型。 周鸿祎在公开场合经常教育年轻的创业者,应该先用创业的心态去打工,充分积累自己在管理和业务上的能力和资源 1999狂欢开始了 海归、商人、极客、VC推手,这四类人一起齐刷刷地汇聚在1999年,1999年就这样成为中国互联网最黄金、最灿烂、最辉煌、最值得念想的大年份。 2000泡沫四溢 亚马逊的卖点是:‘最近50年的书我们都有’——这是它提供海量品种的意义。(因为国外有很高的信息化程度,以查询库房是否有存书) 雷军在商店买T恤的时候,发现了求同消费现象。“中国经济和美国经济处在不同的发展阶段,美国消费者寻求个性消费,中国现阶段,需求高度趋同,中国需要50年前版书的人极少。” 单品价格压得再便宜,但5元钱的配送费卓越坚决不免,用户冲着几乎免费的产品而来,但想想既然要出5元的配送费,买一样商品是这个钱,10样商品也是,不如多挑几样商品。 雷军发现,互联网比软件要好玩得多,可以不断地改,不断地去修正,用户可以很快地反馈给你,你也可以很快地进步 2001大转折 段永平反问他:“你卖了公司之后干吗?”丁磊说:“我卖了公司有钱后再开一家公司。” 段永平发现,网易股票被低估是因为公司面临一场官司,也可能被摘牌,这里面有些不确定性。段永平就去找一些法律界人士问官司的问题,问类似的官司最可能的结果是什么,得到...

产品随想 | 陪读《芯片战争》:一、二章

作者其它书也值得读读 已出版《食用油营销第1书》《金龙鱼背后的粮油帝国》《鲁花:一粒花生撬动的粮油帝国》《手机战争》等财经书籍。 第一章 从晶体管到芯片 肖克利要创业的消息,就像17世纪的牛顿宣布要建立工场一样引起了轰动。那时候,美国还在草创时期的半导体产业主要集中在东部的波士顿和纽约长岛地区,许多科学家和工程师精英都慕肖克利之名前往美国西海岸,不远千里地聚集在肖克利旗下。可以这么说,肖克利给硅谷带来了最初的火种。 ——我也認可這個說法,不是斯坦福或其他校園,純粹是人才的原因 芯片发明后的六年间,政府对芯片项目的资助高达3200万美元,其中70%来自空军。同期美国半导体产业的研发经费有约85%的比例来自政府,政府的支持成就了美国在半导体领域的技术优势。“华盛顿通过支付技术研发费用和保证最终产品的市场份额,将原子弹最终制造成功的间隔缩短至六年,晶体管缩短至五年,集成电路缩短至三年。”不过,这些半导体企业实力壮大以后,往往不愿再参与美国政府出资的研发项目,因为那意味着专利权归政府所有,而且还得受保密条款的约束。 ——這纔是更合理的產業支持政策 诺伊斯采用激进的价格政策,将主要芯片产品的价格一举降到1美元,不仅是市场上的主流芯片价格的零头,还低于当时芯片的成本。这不是传统意义上的亏本倾销,而是第一个以反摩尔定律为定价依据的案例。反摩尔定律认为,同样的芯片在18个月后价格就会跌一半,所以按照几年后的价格为当前的芯片定价是有一定合理性的。市场被迅速打开,芯片很快在民用市场得到越来越广泛的应用,仙童的营收和利润都迅速上升,还带动了其母公司的股价上涨。摩尔后来评论:“诺伊斯以低价刺激需求,继而扩大产能、降低成本的策略,对于芯片产业的发展而言,其重要性堪比芯片的发明。” ——看到這裏的時候,真是非常震撼,好厲害的定價策略 东通工用磷渗透法研发出了高频的晶体管,于1957年做出世界上第一款袖珍收音机,并在这款产品上启用了索尼商标。盛田昭夫到美国去推销袖珍收音机的时候,德州仪器刚刚轻率地放弃了这个市场。美国人对盛田昭夫说:你们为什么要制造这种小收音机?美国人都想要大收音机。盛田昭夫回答:单单纽约就有20多家广播公司,同时就有20多套节目在播放,每人使用一台小收音机收听自己喜欢的节目,岂不更好?索尼用“一人一台”的宣传成功打破了美国人全家共用一台大型收音机的观念,成为全世界最畅销的收音机...

“真假难辨”的效果图如何打造,以一只笔为例(下)——渲染篇

原文地址 独家教程 | “真假难辨”的效果图如何打造,以一只笔为例(下)——渲染篇 上期独家教程,康石石带大家用Rhino完成了 COPIC MULTILINER 针管笔建模(复习请戳: 独家教程 | “真假难辨”的效果图如何打造,以一只笔为例(上)——建模篇 ),下面我们把它丢进Keyshot渲染器里,看看究竟Keyshot究竟能不能打造真实照片一般的既视感。 Keyshot虽为各家晚辈,但近年来突飞猛进。有的同学说Keyshot渲染效果不如V-Ray,但我们可以看下本期独家教程内容再作判断。 基础材质赋予 首先我们打开 Keyshot 基本导入参数 导入后 由于我们事先在Rhino中,对各个部件分过色,所以我们可以直接,尽情 把左边各种需要的材质球直接拖到需要的部件上 。 初步赋予材质后效果 特写效果 环境光赋予 Keyshot预设的材质显然不能够完全适合所需情况,且物体上的光线并不是很正确。因此同学们需要 将环境光换成更加接近真实摄影棚的灯光场景 。 选用 3 Panels Tilted 2k 作为的基本环境光,将环境光拖入环境里之后,效果如下: 模型各部材质赋予 由于光影的变化,整个模型已更加真实。 接下来 各部的材质还需根据实际的视觉情况 手工调整 。 以下是这次模型各部材质的参数:   笔身主要的金属材质 黑色塑料件部分以及笔头的黑色 笔夹与笔头所使用的金属材质 Tip:金属材质是将Keyshot预设的钢材质的粗糙度调整为0.01而成。 握柄处的塑料材质 Tip:因为塑料的视觉特点,此处特地选用了 半透明属性的材质 做调整,除了表面颜色的参数之外,剩余的三个颜色区域均使用了 R255,G255,B255的纯白 。 笔身标签渲染 在给各部赋予了材质之后,产品很重要的一个环节就是印刷于产品之上的各种商标与说明,在Keyshot中,这些效果可以很轻松的通过标签功能来实现。 首先对实物上的印刷效果进行观察, 可以看出实物上的印刷效果其实是比较立体的 。 Tip: 细节,往往是产品品质的一种体现。 在效果图的渲染中,也应该...

产品随想 | 周刊 第117期:He saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

He disliked biography attempts. “I regard my scientific papers as my essential biography,’’ Land said. “I pour my whole life into the scientific project I’m investigating. I leave behind the things I’ve done in the past to do the work in the present.’’ “The purpose of inventing instant photography was essentially aesthetic,’’ Land said in 1947, announcing the process’s invention. “We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.” — Edwin Land, Statement to Polaroid Corporation employees (25 June 1958) The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter ask...

Scott Forstall: "Great leaders exude a positive attitude of possibility and don’t shy from working harder than their employees and taking risks."​

  Scott Forstall led the team at Apple that developed the iPhone – and is equally successful in vastly different realms, including co-producing multiple Tony Award winning Broadway shows. What has always impressed me most, though, is the time he devotes to mentoring a diverse set of entrepreneurial founders. We’ve had the pleasure of knowing each other for several years, thanks to mutual friend Ali Partovi ’s incredible Neo community , a mentor community, accelerator and VC through which we support junior engineers to become senior leaders. Ali was an early backer of Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber and Facebook, so I knew I was in good hands! At our recent Neo reunion I was able to catch-up with Scott for a wide-ranging conversation on the landscapes of opportunity in technology and what we’re anticipating next. He kindly agreed to go o...

产品随想 | 周刊 第116期:Great things in business are never done by one person.

Cromite   https://github.com/uazo/cromite Cromite a Bromite fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser! awesome-shizuku   https://github.com/timschneeb/awesome-shizuku Curated list of awesome Android apps making use of Shizuku KernelSU   https://github.com/tiann/KernelSU A Kernel based root solution for Android Love, Hate or Fear It, ​​TikTok Has Changed America   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/business/media/tiktok-ban-american-culture.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mE0.DpEZ.VWmNssw5B6_c "My model for business is The Beatles.There were four guys who kept each others, kind of, negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that's how I see business. You know, great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. "Our motivation is simple--we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we wa...

Steve Jobs on the iTunes Music Store: The Unpublished Interview

A candid talk with Apple's CEO on a landmark day in its history. By Laura Locke  |  Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 1:15 am Steve Jobs announces the iTunes Music Store. On April 28th, 2003, moments before I was about to interview Steve Jobs at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, I was jittery. Anticipation? Nerves? Excitement? You bet. All of those visceral emotions were firing. Knowing Jobs’ storied reputation as an irascible and exacting Silicon Valley CEO had me on edge. But I had prepared a tight set of questions. Secretly, I was hoping he might enjoy the line of inquiry. In turn, I would have a lively and candid report for my editors at TIME. What I didn’t know was that the interview was taking place on what would turn out to be one of the most important days in Apple’s history: The launch of the iTunes Music Store. Once again, Ste...

巴菲特致股东信-1971年

 编者笔记: 保险业务因为高毛利,开始有了更多竞争(资本逐利性) 确保当保险灾难来临时,有能力调集足够的资金来解决 巴菲特几乎从不进行恶意收购,收购的主要目的是:长期持有企业以获得经营利润并利用自由现金流再投资 原文: https://xueqiu.com/6217262310/131103035  To the Stockholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: It is a pleasure to report that operating earnings in 1971, excluding capital gains, amounted to more than 14% of beginning shareholders' equity. This result--considerably above the average of American industry--was achieved in the face of inadequate earnings in our textile operation, making clear the benefits of redeployment of capital inaugurated five years ago. It will continue to be the objective of management to improve return on total capitalization (long term debt plus equity), as well as the return on equity capital. However, it should be realized that merely maintaining the present relatively high rate of return may well prove more difficult than was improvement from the very low levels of return which prevailed throughout most of the 1960's. ...

产品随想 | 周刊 第50期:2010年kkndme:写在房价暴涨前

Products Digital Clock 4   https://sourceforge.net/projects/digitalclock4/ 开源的桌面时钟工具,开源,Linux, Mac, Windows FlipIt   https://github.com/phaselden/FlipIt Flip Clock screensaver 开源的翻页时钟 Windows 11 Fixer   https://github.com/99natmar99/Windows-11-Fixer Windows 11 Fixer is a program designed to make customizing your Windows 11 as easy as possible. 在一个集中的位置,能直接Win11相关的设置 即食历史   https://cuphistory.net/ 非常简短的历史科普,Base香港,很多内容有广东话 kkndme聊房   https://github.com/momo0853/kkndme kkndme聊房,数据整理自天涯。提供HTML、PDF和Markdown三种形式。 v86   https://github.com/copy/v86 x86 virtualization in your browser, recompiling x86 to wasm on the fly 浏览器中模拟x86 GitHub City   https://github.com/honzaap/GithubCity Create a 3D city from your GitHub contributions 让过往成城 Layoffs.fyi   Tracker   https://layoffs.fyi/ Tracking all tech startup layoffs since COVID-19. 用技术,监测疫情依赖的美国科技公司裁员 Trianglify   https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify Algorithmically generated triangle art Low Poly生成工具...

Hacking Team武器库

之前百度盘上公开了部分Hacking Team工具,自己一直没有看懂,今天在泉哥博客上看到他对于武器库的几篇文章,mark一下