PDC 1996 Keynote with Bob Muglia and Steve Jobs [video]

Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.

I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses.

What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.

The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem.

I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc

Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.

They are the figureheads of their respective companies. And just as the engineer builds the product, their job is to sell it. You'd be lucky to work for a company with people at the top as persuasive as Jobs or Musk.

In terms of "performance needed for many users", Facebook doesn't use PHP (a "scripted language") for everything. etc.

I don’t think php ever compiled to C, based on a quick scan of the Wikipedia page. I thought it compiled to perl at one point but that doesn’t seem to be true either.

Consider the iPhone and the then Android phones (which appeared later anyway).

Consider the iPad and the vastly worst first competing tablets (back in 2010 or so), which in addition cost $100-$200 more than the iPad.

Consider Apple Watch today and what's available from the competition (at the same category, which includes e.g. the Samsung watches and so, I know there are e.g. Garmin watches that last 2 weeks, but they have different target group and functionality).

Consider the AirPods as well.

(And, again, for all of those, I'm talking at launch and for the first 1-2 years. For some of those we have decent competition now).

Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all good things.

Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors', because they want to show it as in a completely different class.

Another example was when he switched screens and the car website appeared instead of the flights website, the audience laughed and he said something like “we recommend them driving instead of taking a plane”.

I was experimenting with IDC for a client project at the time but quickly switched to ASP as soon as the beta became available.

Its price tag probably prevented the average startup from using it. It’s hard to use expensive software before you have funding.