Steve Jobs's thoughts on the Internet in 1996 | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs's thoughts on the Internet in 1996

wired.com

93 pointsmcav39 comments

> Jobs's obsession with his old rival took the form of an unusual proposal for all parties to voluntarily keep the Web simple and avoid increasingly popular client-side enhancements like HotJava.

So Jobs didn't like the idea of Flash back in 1996. He didn't just make that up recently as an excuse.

On how the web would evolve, Jobs was profoundly wrong

The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumer.

On how soon the web (and software development) would go from custom development to "lego blocks", Jobs was premature.

The number of applications that need to be written is growing exponentially. Unless we can find a way to write them in a tenth of the time, we're toast. The end result of objects - this repackaging of software - is that we can develop applications with only about 10 to 20 percent of the software development required any other way.

Even today, while frameworks like Django are finally providing the basic building blocks, a lot of web development is still 'custom'.

But in the end, this is one of the most profound interviews I have seen of jobs.

But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.

<snip> I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it's not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be? </snip>

Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. <snip>

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

<snip>

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it.

<snip>

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

On the contrary, his only mistake was that he didn't see that the naive idealistic pseudo-democratization which co-opts the people's creativity to become conduits for advertising is one and the same as corporate capitalism.

Interesting viewpoint.

I think Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the use of Blogs, Twitter and even the epitome-of-corporate-antiprivacy that is Facebook by political movements: all present very strong counterevidence to your claim that the web has not been democratized.

The heart of any information medium has to be commerce, in that there has to be way to economically support the infrastructure costs of the medium but what makes the web more democratic is:

1) The infrastructure costs are very low and falling (The cost of a web server that you can run two hundred blogs off is not more than $200 / year)

2) Quite contrary to what Jobs claimed, everyone on the web is already a publisher.

Wikipedia is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because it's controlled by a very small number of elites with no accountability. This is true of Britannica, but the difference is that Wikipedia editors have perversely managed to co-opt populist democratic rhetoric in order to justify what is effectively an oligarchy. The presence of the edit button on each page functions as an ideological mystification to conceal the where the real power lies. What's happening is that we are provided with the illusion of power, on condition that we never actually use it. As soon as you actually try to become a wikipedia editor, you are immediately confronted with a co-ordinated power bloc that is virtually impossible to penetrate. So far, these elites have been benevolent, but the case of one poweful Wikipedia editor who was a member of a cult and deleted any criticism of the cult leader on his page illustrates that abuse of power is possible.

Another example of this is restaurant reviews. The basic argument is familiar: a single restaurant reviewer in a newspaper is an elite, and this creates the potential for abuse of power. He could demand kickbacks from restaurants to ensure positive reviews or promote his friends' restaurants at the expense of competitors, and so on. Decentralization is proposed as the solution: instead of a single restaurant review, individual patrons review restaurants on a web site and it averages the reviews, and even if a few of them are corrupt, it's much harder to subvert the system. So problem solved, it's a much more trustworthy system. Except for one minor problem: Yelp implements this idea, and restaurant owners have complained that Yelp has abused their power by trying to extort advertising dollars from them by threatening to delete positive reviews and post negative reviews.

The pattern should be clear: moving from a centralized system to a decentralized network doesn't eliminate power, it just moves it to a different place where it can be potentially abused by a different group of elites. That position of power comes from controlling the protocol which aggregates each individual node on the network. The nodes can be decentralized and distributed, but the cost for this is that they must all speak the same language to connect to each other, which is a centralization at a different level.

That's why further decentralization doesn't solve the Yelp problem. We could imagine a federated system of restaurant reviews where individual reviews are stored on servers controlled by individuals, so they can't be deleted. But this just moves the power to a different level - the system for aggregating the peers on the node becomes the position of power, which could potentially be exploited for power and money to an elite. A similar relationship exists between Facebook and Diaspora. This is why Google promotes decentralization, because it is the centralized place you have to pass through in order to get to all that decentralized content, and there's lots of money to be had in owning that position. The handful of multinational corporations that control the internet backbones are also in a similar position of power, control and profit. This is ideal position to hold power, because the average person is completely clueless that these are positions of power. Think of how few people are aware of the importance of network neutrality, for example. Evgeny Morozov makes similar points in his TED talk entitled "How the Net aids dictatorships."

Really, the people promoting decentralization as a moral imperative are the ones who are profiting from it, from VC backed startups who stand to make millions or even billions of dollars to global multinationals who already are. Here again, the idealistic hacker ethos and ruthless corporate capitalism turn out to be one and the same, a nice example of the Hegelian coincidence of opposites.

That's a really superficial critique of Wikipedia, and it doesn't appear to be supported by the facts.

The fact is, if you go use the "edit" button right now and make a good-faith improvement, your edit is overwhelmingly likely to stand.

The "oligarchy" you refer to consists of many hundreds of people, freely nominated from among all the site's users, elected by the votes of every Wikipedia user. If you've made just a few edits, you can OK or neg new members of the "oligarchy".

What you're of course ignoring is the fact that Wikipedia's overwhelming success at their original mission has resulted in a ridiculously valuable position in everyone's search results and a huge influx of random users. I'm not a fan of the bureaucracy at all, but I at least respect the abuse, misuse, and obnoxiousness they're up against.

It's amazing to me that they're as good as they are. They certainly aren't some weird mindfuck or exploitation scheme, as you seem to be implying.

This reminds me of a story in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams illustrating psychological denial. It's about a man who returns a borrowed kettle that had been broken to his neighbor. To explain the damage he says "It's not broken; when I borrowed it, it was already broken; I never borrowed it!" In other words, three mutually incompatible explanations for what happened to try to avoid the facts. Here, you say that Wikipedia is not an oligarchy; and also, it is an oligarchy, but it's justified. The claim against my argument is that it's both too superficial and also an elaborate conspiracy theory, a complicated mindfuck that defies logic. Are these arbitrary outbursts not evidence in themselves of a refusal to consider the facts?

This logic of "Democracy is great! But of course we have to have some standards..." has been used to conceal elite power for centuries. In the US, political participation was originally reserved for white, male property owners, because it was thought that the standard for voting is rationality, which women and lesser races don't have. The elites permit democracy, but they reserve the right to decide what the standards for participation should be. Who decides what "good-faith" means? This isn't conspiracy, it is ideological delusion: elites become corrupt because they're convinced of their own benevolence, that because they stand for Democracy and Decentralization (today's empty signifiers, replacing God, Nation), preserving their elite position is justified. It is definitely not because they cynically manipulate, pulling the strings behind the scenes while laughing at the deluded masses. It's a natural human tendency to see yourself as acting only for the greater good, and to adopt an ideology that explains why what's good for you is good for all.

As I mentioned before, my preferred solution to elite power is not some fantasy of "true democracy", which only ends up concealing real power. Nor do I think that elite control is necessarily a bad thing, only concealing elite power behind mask of democracy. Scientific knowledge is an obvious arena where we are best served by having an elite. But if they abuse their power, we should be ready with the (metaphorical) guillotine. In the case of Facebook, the real response is not a different, more decentralized system, but the guillotine of strong privacy regulations. Or government enforcement of net neutrality, and so on. The libertarian & anti-government leanings of the tech community is more evidence in favor of my argument. Is this not just another way to defend an oligarchy? I think many sincerely believe that this is the best arrangement, but avoiding the facts might cast some doubt on this.

This is one of the more sober commentaries on the internet and power I've read in a long time.

It reads more like a conspiracy theory than anything to me. It is certainly long, which makes it look "sober", but what does that have to do with being accurate?

It annoys me that every 40 year old thinks that the world is getting worse. I used to think it was just the less intelligent people who's minds couldn't keep up with the rate of change. But to hear Jobs say it was disheartening. Death rates from war are the lowest per capita that they have perhaps ever been. People continue to live longer lives. I think that the world allows more upward mobility now than perhaps any time I can think of. Billions of people in India and China are moving towards first world status. Unreadable amounts of information is available at a moments notice. People at the poverty line have things that the richest map 100 years ago couldn't even dream of. When was this heyday where every person was an educated scholar and only the intelligent became leaders. Every complaint like this I hear, I can find 10 examples from history where things were worse. I just don't get it. Maybe I'll understand when I'm 40. I hope I can keep my optimism.

The 20th century is considered the most violent century in terms of sheer number. Death rates are a weird thing to think about in per capita terms. If you look at it that way, then an individual life is worth less now than it used to be. Whether your death is a 1 millionth or 1 billionth of the population makes no difference to your family and friends.

There still 90 years left in this century. Judging by previous ones, a lot of awesome and terrible things are going to happen. Technology amplifies man's capacity for creation and destruction. Speaking as a 25 year old, I'm optimistic that life will continue to be an interesting ride.

Death rates due to war absolutely should be thought about per capita, because put another way, it's the chance that you yourself, or those you care about, or those you know will meet a violent end, assuming even distribution.

I would rather live in a society where one thousand out of a one million total population die from war compared to a society where one hundred out a thousand do.

It all depends on the lens that people see through.

In some ways, his thoughts are some of the most profound things I've read. A very clear articulation of the place of creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

and design:

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

The missing part for me is that he doesn't see that they're like yin and yang with each other. Grokking leads to creativity, and creativity leads to grokking. Most people who aren't engineers don't quite understand the profoundness of that feedback loop. I feel like he mostly does -- but there's still this small little missing link. It could even be his Achilles' heel. But yeah, in everything else he is quite clairvoyant.

How do you infer he sees no connection between the two?

He says, 'When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.'

As an engineer, that's not quite how I think (maybe everyone's different though). What I think about is all the time I spent grokking the subject so that I could see and appreciate the simple connections later.

Diversity in one's approach is really important. And that's underrated -- and powerful that he appreciates that. But perhaps equally important is using the actual design that you've developed to help you find the creative connections. There's just so much focused overlap there. So much quiet feedback that can become powerful -- with a few (somewhat metacircular) iterations, etc.

>The implicit message of the Macintosh, as unforgettably expressed in the great "1984" commercial, was Power to the People. Jobs's vision of Web objects serves a different mandate: Give the People What They Want.

This seems to echo a number of the current criticisms of Jobs and the App Store / iPhone OS. Numerous commentators – too many to count – have compared the current approach of Apple to that "garden of pure ideology" that the Big Brother character in the 1984 commercial proclaims. The iPhone OS and App Store seem to take freedom away from developers/tinkerers in order to give ordinary folks the easiest, most hassle free computing experience.

It's interesting to think that the roots of the current crop of Apple offerings may have been planted long ago when Jobs was ousted from his own company by the Pepsi CEO he hired and forced to wander and reinvent himself.

Pretty profound interview. Jobs always seems to put thought into his answers, rather than using "canned speak" which most CEOs resort to. At least his older interviews are like that.

I went looking for a page with a collection of all of his interviews but couldn't find one. I have started a subreddit to collect his interviews. Please submit your favorite ones.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SteveJobs/

Does anyone remember that WebObjects used to cost $50K? It failed because no one could afford it and there was little to no documentation. By the time Apple woke up and reduced the price it was too late. Other web languages were already off and running.

Interesting he was big on school vouchers. I've always thought those were a great idea too and that they'd spark some incredible innovation in education, but I've never really heard many high profile people speak out in favor of them.

Jobs: "But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important."

What would that Jobs think of Apple's new commercials that pitch the iPad as "revolutionary" and "magical"?

Interesting, that was (is?) a Jobs who trusts individuals, but has "a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups." I wonder if this shaped his leadership style (his "control freakishness" as some call it), so that he makes many of the calls and doesn't rely on committees.

Any idea what he means by "web objects"? I read the whole thing but couldn't get a clear idea.

WebObjects is/was NeXT's web application development framework. Think of it as being like the iPhone SDK for the Web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects).

Interestingly, back in the 90s WebObjects was programmed using Objective C. In 2000, Apple (post-NeXT acquisition) overhauled WO to use Java. This was around the same time that the Cocoa/Java bridge was released for building native Cocoa apps in Java.

WebObjects seems to be on life support inside Apple today. They haven't released a new version in about 20 months, and there's not much sign they'll update it any time soon.

He's probably referring to Apple's WebObjects framework for making web applications - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webobjects

I don't think it's widely used at all these days although I believe Apple web apps like the iTunes store and their online store use it.

Why, they're the future of the web, or haven't you heard? ;-)

Was I voted down because y'all lack a sense of humor, or was it because you didn't read the article?

You can't get by on HN with little quips that don't really add to the conversation.

Others have pointed out that WebObjects is an actual Apple framework for making web applications. If I'm not mistaken, Dell used to use it for their online ordering site in the late 1990s. Apple used it also for the first iTunes Store iterations (not sure what they use today). I only have a superficial understanding of WebObjects but it looked a lot like a Rails/Django style framework with Objective-C Script or Java, and about 10 years too soon.

The link is broken on my mobile phone. It sends me to a mobile portal instead of the content.

I suspect that Wired detects that you're on a phone and thus serves you content formatted for a phone. However, many times I have seen sites do what you describe: redirecting you to the mobile version of the homepage rather than of the article you wanted to see in the first place.

This is very lazy (and frustrating) programming.

So, the link is not broken. Wired is broken.

Getting Wired to work properly on your phone is only an easy 500meg download away...

You can try my project that extracts the article text for easy viewing on mobile phones: http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wired.com%2f...

FYI, this is used by http://toadjaw.com/hn

"The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years."

I think one could argue both sides effectively, depending on your definition of 'change the world'. There is still a huge unequal distribution of wealth, war still wages, people go hungry, and education still isn't what it should be. The internet has affected these things in a limited way, but it has not radically altered them. Not that the effect of the web hasn't been massive in other ways, but I think this is the scale he was talking about.

I tend to agree that the recent focus on web technology has retarded the pace of actual innovation in the last decade. The smart people who should be building the jetpacks and curing cancer are making pets.com, or, no offense, founding YC startups to make a webapp to market your new webapp to other people's webapps on the web.

Cf. Warren Ellis: "a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future." http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/...

The section under "Shooting the Web in the foot" might guide some of what's been done with WebKit and HTML5.

Very very good interview.

So, Steve Jobs were, in 1996, 100% certain the Web Objects will be the future of web development. It didn't happen, and he failed.

Do anybody care to think why he failed?

I have a very "simpleton" theory. Just throw it out here:

Steve Jobs can almost make anything work. He's smart, and he has resources. He can make a good washing machine if he want to. But I think that "anything" will have to be something that he can use, touch, play with, i.e. Mp3, phone, laptop ... But Web Object is an enterprise server software. I can't imagine Steve Jobs playing with it. So, he picked something that he cannot love or even touch. Based on the interview, he picked WO because he believe enterprise will need it and it's gonna make a lot of money.

My belief is that an entrepreneur works best when working on a product that he personally use.

While his enterprise software product may have failed, what he seems to mean by "web objects" is web service APIs, which have indeed become vastly more important since this interview took place. In fact, that was probably the most prescient thing he said.

I agree with you. I said he failed but his vision isn't wrong. He is as convinced about his vision as when he saw the GUI. In fact, what he saw in 1996 remains the same - web dev is still in the everything-custom age (stone age). Every new app is a reinvention of lots of wheels already made ...

What I am curious is that why he failed. My hunch is that he just isn't a fit for this project.

It sounds like you and I and Steve Jobs agree on this fundamental thing. Care to get together offline? I live in Sunnyvale Bay Area.

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