Rolling Stone meets Steve Jobs: "I don't want to talk about Apple" (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Rolling Stone meets Steve Jobs: "I don't want to talk about Apple" (1994)

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60 pointsjlees18 comments

If you think about it he is responsible for the first gen modern PC interface and it looks like he's going to be responsible for the second gen with the iPad on the horizon.

HyperCard is also considered by some to have been a precursor to the web..

I can't think of one other figure in the last 25 years that has shaped the industry this much in terms of innovation.

Tim Berners-Lee

Definitely up there. No doubt.

Interesting side note: This NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server. from Wikipedia.

Very interesting, particularly the parts where the goals he describes wander off from where Apple is today. For instance...

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.

...whereas these days "home shopping" for media is obviously a huge source of revenue for Apple.

It's interesting that in 1994, Steve Jobs considered it a foregone conclusion that video rental stores would get killed by the internet. He says it so blithely that it seems like it was conventional wisdom.

The interesting part is that a) Netflix wasn't founded until three years later, and b) it's only now that we're starting to get good products for renting movies via the internet.

I think everyone "knew" video delivery would go online back then. But what's the saying? Everyone overestimates how much will happen in 5 years, and underestimates how much will happen in 15.

He doesn't say that he knows that the video rental stores are going out of business. He says about 'digital convergence in the set-top box', that "All that's going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie." It's not hard to see that hooking the Internet up to a television saves will allow you to have video delivered to your television over the Internet. You'll notice that he's poo-pooing the digital set-top box in that quote, not praising it.

And yet we have AppleTV. :)

I think it was mostly posturing.

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. (...) 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.

That object oriented programming thingy looks really cool! I've heard someone is writing a C with classes to do that. Once this is released, I'm confident bugs will be gone forever.

Q: "You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by that?" A: "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. "

I wonder if that makes Apple the Microsoft of the 2010's.

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.

and later:

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.

How much of this has actually been realized? Certainly OO programming is the dominant model, but a lot of popular languages were created around the same time as this interview, and languages tend to reflect "best practices" from whenever they were first designed. Is OO popular just because it's popular, or because it's genuinely the superior approach?

And, as a bonus question, how much does that still hold now that concurrency is a major concern?

Who would've thought of multi-core CPU's at that time?

I'm not saying they were dumb for thinking OOP was a great leap forward at the time, I'm just wondering how correct they were in retrospect. OOP is ubiquitous enough that it's hard to find a baseline for comparison.

I really like how we understand where his mindset was at that time. Toy Story wasn't released until 1995, so overall he was literally at a crossroads in his life, with a glorious past and a somewhat unknown future.

"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"

Wow, thats interesting, I had no idea.

He has been so spot on right about so many things it's amazing!

Stating this stuff in 1994, in the peak of cyber-hype, was not terribly prescient.

Steward Brand travelling to Xerox PARC in 1973, seeing what all those crazy ARPANET guys were up to, and stating "So much for record stores as we know them" -- that was prescient.

His last remark is certainly poignant: "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."

Yeah, Steve. Someone else is going to have to figure out how to jailbr- er, "unlock" it.

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