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

BG投资十问(Baillie Gifford)

  1,公司是否能正面推动经济、社会或者文化发 展? 如果做不到,BG可能就不会再往下看了。比如军火、赌博类公司再便宜,BG不会去看。 2,公司销售额在5年之内能否翻倍? 为什么要讨论销售额?因为BG关注公司成长,销售额是比较简单直观的指标,而利润可有一些方法调节。所以,BG主要先关注销售额,再看现金流。 3,公司5年之后会怎么样? 这是未来5到10年或者5到15年的中间维度,一是看公司的成长空间究竟还有多大,二是考虑5年之后,公司的短期估值会不会下降,会不会变得成熟。 4,公司的竞争优势到底是什么?随着时间会变 强还是变弱? BG认为,如果公司的竞争优势是不断变弱的,将来在更远期挣回现金流的可能性就更低了。 5,公司是否有非常独特的文化?文化是否能够进化? 毕竟要投资这么长时间,对创始人和公司管理文化是非常关注的。特别喜欢创始人领导的公司,而不是说创始人什么都不干,创始人在做房地产,找了一些人在做新公司,要尽量避免这样的公司。 谈到进化在BG看来,大部分公司都会有大公司病,需要看它怎么能维持比较灵活的管理,变大之后还能够保持非常快速的成长,比如亚马逊的day one文化(注:就是始终处在 创业启动状态,充满迷茫和压力,但是充满创造力和颠覆思想 )。 6,公司过去的回报率怎么样? 一方面是考虑到公司的ROE(净资产收益率),二是考虑公司的Margins(利润),看它的过去是不是值得投资,如果每年ROE都不到10个点,可能长期来看也没什么意思。 7,ROE能不能随着时间增长? 有些公司一开始没有盈利,一直在烧钱,5年之后说不定ROE会到20%或者更高,它是一个动态过程。这样的公司BG也会投资,包括一些早期项目,很多公司都是没有盈利的。 8,公司怎么分配资本? 资本现金流无非就是5种方法:再投资、收购、还债、分红、回购股份,要看公司在某个阶段的资本分配是不是最优的。 如果公司明明可以发展更多,结果乱分红了;或者是明明到了特别成熟的时候,还不愿意分红,都是错误的分配资本。 9,公司怎样才能长成5倍? BG关注的是怎样,而不是能不能。这会强迫BG每个人去设想一些未来的可能性,包括公司现在的底层架构能不能够延伸到更多的业务。 比如,早期的亚马逊或者是阿里,连一个概念都没有,BG会考虑这个公司有没有这种机遇,以后去扩展到可触及的市场。 10,市场对公司有哪些误解,哪些事...

产品随想 | 周刊 第127期:晨光只开一刻钟,但比千年松,并无甚不同

Cherry Studio   https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio Cherry Studio is a desktop client that supports for multiple LLM providers. Support deepseek-r1 Aalto Repository beta   https://repo.aalto.fi/ Images, sounds and videos from Aalto University 这个系列,价值极高 Nokia Design Archive   https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/ 芬兰这个国家很了不起 对话影石刘靖康:两代未出现划时代的产品,就会沦为平庸的品牌   https://www.geekpark.net/news/308996 还挺喜欢这个创始人的,有一种海盗的内涵 从哈佛、明星创业者到酷家乐副总裁,苏奇的传奇   https://app.modaiyun.com/mdy/article/3FO4K4W0M259 WHO关于猫狗咬伤、抓伤的处理建议 动物咬伤: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/animal-bites 狂犬病: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies 关于狂犬病的10个事实: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/rabies INDIGO 新年直播(2025)   https://www.youtube.com/live/ZIgPvSDGAfY 对2024年AI发展的回顾部分特别好 Artab   https://github.com/get-artab/artab Get Inspired by the World's Greatest Artworks Every Time You Open a New Tab. Extension Available for Chrome, Edge, and...

产品随想 | 周刊 第126期:Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world

FolderPaint   https://github.com/MichaelTr7/FolderPaint Folder colour changing application for macOS. 乔布斯说:“对于我和苹果公司的许多人来说,索尼的盛田昭夫是最大的灵感来源之一。我希望我们今天的所想所为能让他会心一笑。” 乔布斯甚至从索尼挖走了一位顶级设计师。哈特穆特·艾斯林格被苹果挖走前,已在 100 多种索尼产品的创造中发挥了重要作用。 供职于索尼时,艾斯林格所在的设计工作室与管理办公室和工厂车间享有同等地位。他说,这样有助于促进公司生产和设计团队之间在一定程度上达成团结,这正是乔布斯试图重建的团结。 艾斯林格指出:“乔布斯有能力洞察事物的好坏,却不知道如何实现以及如何通过组织去构建。因此,我们向苹果提出的第一个建议是,赋予设计师一定的话语权。” 斯卡利表示,乔布斯和盛田之间的深厚友谊和相互敬重可以归结为对于设计的共同热忱。 “他们以非常积极的方式产生了共鸣”,斯卡利说,“两位来自不同文化背景的创始人共聚一堂,这是非常难能可贵的。他们讨论设计原则,却从不谈及商业模式。” “Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” City Lights Bookstore   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_Bookstore?useskin=vector 旧金山的城市之光独立书店 Vesuvio Cafe   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesuvio_Cafe?useskin=vector 好奇怪,这家Cafe居然没有太多的介绍 “One of the things that I was fortunate of was to see and understand the context of San Francisco through the eyes of Steve Jobs,” Mr. Ive said. “He kn...

产品随想 | 周刊 第68期:Glory to Z-Library

Products Anna’s Archive   https://annas-archive.org/ Search engine of shadow libraries: books, papers, comics, magazines. Z-Library不会消失,只会激励更多 ReVanced Manager   https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager The official ReVanced Manager based on Flutter. YouTube免广告 Gopeed   https://github.com/monkeyWie/gopeed High speed downloader that supports all platforms. All Platforms,非常霸气,除了iOS,确实都支持了 The Twitter archive   https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser Python code to parse a Twitter archive and output in various ways 逃离Twitter Ideas 吴晓波|“我们这是怎么了?”   https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/680826.html 我辈需保持那股企业家的精气神 Worth Moving to Sweden as Engineers?   https://hongchao.me/living-and-working-in-sweden-as-engineers/ 瑞典工作10年的华人工程师,分享自己的看法 Murray Newton Rothbard 默里·罗思巴德   https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/穆瑞·羅斯巴德 米塞斯学生,也是推崇自由主义、开放社会 个人工具箱(2022 年 11 月 16 日更新)   https://github.com/pseudoyu/yu-tools 我的个人工具箱 (设备, macOS 软件, iOS Apps...) Design 2022台北...

产品随想 | 周刊 第39期:《自由秩序原理》

Products Exodus   https://github.com/Exodus-Privacy/exodus-android-app Exodus is an Android application that let you know what trackers are embedded in apps installed on your smartphone using the εxodus plateform. It let you also know the permissions required by any apps on your smartphone. 检测你Android机子获取权限、嵌入追踪SDK的 simplewall   https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall Simple tool to configure Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) which can configure network activity on your computer. Mem Reduct Lightweight real-time memory management application to monitor and clean system memory on your computer. 内存清理工具,Windows上挺多这类小工具,很有意思 Squad303   https://1920.in/ 提供大家一个方式,告诉俄罗斯人,乌克兰在发生什么 Chameleon   https://github.com/sereneblue/chameleon WebExtension port of Random Agent Spoofer 帮助隐匿浏览器信息 CanvasBlocker   https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker 浏览器指纹识别是丧心病狂 Alpine Linux   https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/Alpine_Linux 以安全为理念的Linux分支 Wirecutter   https://www.nytimes.com...

产品随想 | 张鸣论中国传统政治

原始文章目录 张鸣:皇权不确定性下的统治术——传统中国官场机会主义溯源   https://www.aisixiang.com/data/68897.html 张鸣:从科举制到市场经济转型——官本位的源流及滥觞   https://www.aisixiang.com/data/59273.html 张鸣:权力边界何在,实话空间几许?——论中国政治传统中的权力与真理关系   https://www.aisixiang.com/data/67054.html Insight: 中国自秦汉以来一直是官僚化的帝制结构,虽然皇帝最终要凭借官僚这个中介才能统治国家,但官员的权力来源和合法性依据都是皇权。官僚机器只是帝制的“车轮”。所以,皇帝要怎么样,官员只要迎合,就能获利。只有在皇帝明显违反常识道理、造成重大灾祸之时,官员才可能凭借儒家伦理对皇帝提出批评。理性选择的结果使得官员更多地趋向于顺从皇帝。 ——符合历史以来的感知 中国尽管有两千多年官僚制的传统,但守规矩、遵法制、走程序的现代理性官僚制度却一直都没有建立起来。考试取官的确是理性官僚制的一个重要因素,但中国古代官僚制只是万里长征走完了第一步,然后就再也不走了。隋唐科举制建立的初衷也并非建设官僚体系,而是防止贵族垄断官职,强化君权。科举制度越来越严密,选拔出来的人才也愈发精英化。但是,官僚的行为却没有程式化和规法化。官员的个人行为偏好往往直接影响一地的发展。 ——如何再往前走一步,可以看看新加坡 官员的行为模式往往以皇帝的喜好为风向标。一般来说,皇帝喜欢什么,一个朝代就兴什么。汉初皇帝喜欢黄老,臣子们就清静无为;东汉皇帝喜欢儒生,则臣子们多为经学家;唐初皇帝喜人上书言事,则多诤谏之徒;到晚唐,皇帝喜欢佛教了,则多礼佛之士;清代嘉庆之后,皇帝提倡节俭,带头穿补丁衣服,则满朝文武衣服上都打了补丁,有的补丁比衣服本身还贵。 ——Interesting 皇帝行为的不确定性,势必导致官员行为无法程序化、规范化,而皇帝行为的不确定往往是由统治术决定的,属刻意为之。多数王朝都外儒内法,崇尚权术,甚至迷信权术。秦始皇和丞相李斯之间,有过一个小故事。李斯随从车马过盛,很是招摇,皇帝看了不高兴。随行的宦官就把这事告诉了李斯,李斯于是轻车简从,低调起来。秦始皇马上知道身边有人泄密,又审不出来,于是把当时在身边的人都杀...

信息流的初衷是节省用户时间

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nMZzLkEe7Cfk6Wu5560m9w 讲述信息流前世今生,讽刺的是信息流发展之初是为了让用户在短时间内找到最需要自己关注的内容,现在却成为消磨时间、捕捉用户兴趣的一个作用。

A Tribute to a Great Artist: Steve Jobs

  Steve Jobs, who died October 5 after resigning in August as CEO of Apple, the company he co-founded, had many talents. But what set him apart from other computer wizards was his artistic sense. He continually used the word “taste” in explaining what was ready to be manufactured at Apple, and what wasn’t ready yet—what he had to reject. The Apple computer, the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod are all strikingly beautiful objects; the clarity of their visual design matches the way they function. It’s clear that Steve Jobs was an artist and that his artistry worked at many levels: it was a visual sensitivity that extended outward to a way of thinking about how things worked and how different variables could interact with each other in a pleasing harmony. Where did this ability come from? Jobs gave some credit for his success to a seemingly unlikely source—a course on calligraphy that he took as an undergraduate at Reed College, a course established by a maverick profes...

巴菲特致股东信-1969年

 编者笔记: 巴菲特正式清算合伙人企业。 我把它们视为实业,而非股票,如果长期而言实业的业绩良好,那么股票也会有着同样的表现。 我不想解散一个雇佣了1100人的生意,尤其在管理层已经在努力改善公司相对整体行业的表现,而且也取得了合理结果的时候,同时该业务目前尚不需要额外的资本投入。 但是如果未来我们面临需要投入大量资本,或者该业务遭受相当程度的损失时,我将做出不同的决定。 原文: 1969 年 5 月 29 日 致合伙人: 大概在 18 个月以前,我曾经给你们致信,认为投资环境和我个人情况的变化将导致我对我 们未来业绩预期做出调整。 我当时所讨论的投资环境 ,已经变得更加的恶劣且令人沮丧 。也许我仅仅是缺乏从精神层面 进行调整的能力。(正如一位评论家对超过 40 岁的证券分析师所评价的那样:“他们知道太 多如今已不再适用的东西 。”) 虽然如此,就我看来: (1) 在过去的二十年中,对于数量(定量)分析方法所能把握的机会 之水已经逐渐干涸 ,到今天可以说是已经完全枯竭了 ;( 2 )我们的资金基数已经达到一个亿 , 也就是说不超过三百万的投资量对于我们净资产的影响几乎可以忽略不计 ,实际上我们的投 资标的的市值已经不能低于一亿美元 ;( 3 )大量地对于投资的专注已经导致市场的交易行为 变得极度追求短期的利润,市场的投机性大大增加。 在 1967 年 10 月的信中我亦提到个人境遇的变化是我调整我们未来收益预期的最重要的原 因。我表达了自己不想再在合伙公司上注入我 100% 的精力的愿望。然而在过去的 18 个月 中我完全没有做到这一点。我曾经写到 :“希望随着预期的降低,我的对此投入的个人努力 也可以随之降低 。”然而实际上完全不是这样,我发现只要我一天还在管理合伙企业,我就 完全无法让自己投入到其它与之无关的东西上去。我不想让自己成为一个永远管理着资金 , 追逐着投资收益的疯狂的兔子,而唯一让我放缓脚步的办法,就是将其停止。 所以,在年底之前,我希望所有的有限合伙人都能正式地得知我的退休愿望。 1969 年 10 月 9 日 致合伙人: 以下是接下来我认为对于我的退休将要涉及的事情: ( 1 )向你们介绍一下 Bill...