New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today.
He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy.
Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments.
[1] (full video): https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...
[2] (insult excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". By the time 5 minutes has elapsed, he's mostly avoided the first question and everyone has completely forgotten the second question existed.
Then he says that it's actually not about the tech, it's about the extent to which the tech enables a good end-user experience. The printer anecdote is imperfect, but it is him highlighting a point he referred to many times in his career, which is that tech (and especially tech specs) is just a means to an end and people just by the end. Like how 3.x era Android phones often had more RAM or nominally higher clockspeed but were substantially less responsive to their contemporary iPhone competitors.
I do think he dodges the second question entirely, but the second question is, in so many words, "You suck at your job. Care to comment?" so, like, what is the ideal answer to that? Crucially, he correctly senses that many in the audience empathize with the aggressive tack taken by the questioner and he admits that it's a fair tack and he has no real defence. If someone tells me "you suck at your job", I think I'd be more likely to respond to validate their anger than to actually take it to be a factual claim in need of rebuttal. If anything I'm shocked that Jobs had the empathy to read that correctly.
I don't see it as RDF so much as it is an honest and coherent and adequate but imperfect answer.
I remember when I first made the switch to Mac around 2005 I did notice the experience of copy/paste between applications was inferior, but I didn't miss it that much.
Looking back, I guess that maintaining that level of app integration is a huge amount of work, and there was a huge amount of overhead in managing a doc that in fact is being edited by multiple docs. I don't think I ever thanked anybody for embedding a doc in another doc. I think compared to where we were turn of the century we expect a lot less from copy/paste and I don't think anybody really misses it.
Thinking about it now, from what I recall of Microsoft's "Longhorn", which was to become Vista it was trying to get this level of deep application integration to work was probably what set them behind and caused them to release a crocked OS and really put them on the back foot really until recently. I was just a kid at the time so I apologise to anybody more familiar with the story if I'm getting this all completely wrong.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that Steve was probably right about this in the end, and that developer made a fool of itself.
- Trying to make every component of the OS describable in a manifest, such that you could change/update/remove it on the fly. They seem to have gotten there finally in Windows 10.
- Trying to rewrite all the native code in C#. Some components got there (including mine), but rewriting all of these libraries and applications at once made the OS so slow that we got to a point where it was unusable and had to take a partial reset.
If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion.
Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets.
There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.
It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either.
The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.
There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents.
But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs.
Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.
Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'"
Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.
There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy:
[Edit:] Okay, I see now it's referencing this part that I'd forgotten:
"I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people. They haven’t done anything in 7 years."
When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do something interesting, and an army of really bad people, who think they can social engineer their way into coasting somewhere new that will succeed.
I am certain Jobs had this experience with NeXT.
It's not really a question you should answer IMO. Whether the complainers did significant work or not is independent of what Jobs did. It's just a dumb 'gotcha' question with no gotcha. If the questioner had a legitimate beef with Jobs' productivity he could have been specific. And Jobs was extremely clear in his original answer as to what he was doing - reviewing tech, and 'putting a bullet in the head' to tech that didn't fit the overarching goals of Apple.
What he was trying to convey here was that you can have the best technology in the world, but if there's no purpose for it -- if people don't want it -- you have nothing.
OpenDoc and Newton, one of them a solution in search of a problem, and the other fifteen years ahead of its time, didn't seem like obvious winners to the former NeXT and current Pixar CEO. This shouldn't be a surprise.
In essence is what real marketing is all about. That is not about finding how to sell something that they have but designing a strategy for the company to focus on creating what people need and are willing to pay that makes sense for the company.
That technology is secondary is something that(most) engineers just don't get, because they have never sold anything or created a company in the first place.
By the way he did not say that he was ignorant. He was not ignorant about anything his company did. He is saying that someone could know more about the tech but that what he actually cares about is how this tech is used, that is his job.
Of course the decision maker does not know all the details. He is not God. His job is to focus on the important details for the company to survive and prosper, not trying to look cool.
Yeah, contrast that with Elon twittering about floating floating point [0] and too many zeros in fp32 [1].
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...
He says he's completely ignorant about the technology.
Despite the tech potentially being better and him not
knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the
messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make
some cool-looking demo"
Document-based computing was intriguing, and in some ways it was of course a GUI extension of the Unix philosophy of chaining together multiple tools.
But how well did it ever work? How do you sell that?
Considering how badly companies struggle with GUIs to begin with, wouldn't we have compounded that by passing around these Frankenstein OpenDocs that were mashed together chunks of data that you had to use multiple bits of commercial software to manipulate? What if your fancy OpenDoc has 28 types of documents and the recipient only has 27 of the required viewers/editors installed? What about software version hell? What about document version hell? Maybe open and well-defined interchangeable data formats were the answer, but when has that ever worked out and why would software vendors even want to buy into that?
Ultimately, in some ways it would have been cool to email a Lotus 1-2-3 doc embedded in a Word doc mashed together with an AutoCAD file but what was this solving? It's at best slightly more elegant than just three separate files, and at worse a complete and utter nightmare.
Consensus seems to be that it was truly a solution without a problem, and at any rate not the kind of thing that would turn around a consumer-facing tech company.
before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech".
has completely forgotten the second question existed.
But with that being said, I agree with you that OpenDoc would have been a tough sell in the proprietary software world for the reasons that you gave. There's also the fact that 1997-era Apple was in no position to challenge Microsoft head-on by promoting component software. In order for the Mac to survive, Apple needed the backing of large software developers like Microsoft and Adobe who were willing to continue writing Mac versions of their popular, industry-standard software packages. OpenDoc might have made business sense in the late 1980s or even in the early 1990s as an alternative to the growing Windows ecosystem, but by 1996 it was too late; Microsoft Windows was the clear winner in the marketplace by a long shot, and Apple was spiraling down the drain before Steve Jobs returned. That's why it was a very big deal at MacWorld Boston 1997 when Steve Jobs declared that "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over."
https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...
In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today?
ps: by that I mean, the show goes on but the soil is dry, I don't think the world dreams or needs more digital tech. It's ironically in autopilot.
The next great technology revolution will give people (developers and consumers) the ability to imagine new possibilities. Some would say that requires new hardware embodiments (AR/VR), while others would say it's a merely a psychological change from the folks who build today (FB/Google repenting).
At the more extreme end, Keiichi Matsuda's "Hyperreality"* absolutely is a nightmare. It's not even the intensification of media that I find so abhorrent. It's the coercion and lack of user agency.
I'm not sure AR/VR will make a big diff but time will tell.
- Users prioritizing new features over rock solid performance hurt us badly. Basically, we as customers are our own worst enemy.
- Software done as distributed services when it doesn't need to be. Each tier added to a distributed architecture is a point of failure. And each tier needs to be supported in vendor upgrades and the like for server software, VM software, security patches, etc.
- Reduced emphasis on protocols. When my team started to develop services for the first time we decided to use JSON as the lingua franca for communicating between them. But we didn't think about developing protocols using JSON. Now it's a shit show of different messaging formats in JSON. So we don't have any standard components for parsing and forming messages.
- Here's a particular pain point with me. I'm sick of creating an account for every damned service I use. When I pull up an app to order takeout from a restaurant, I shouldn't need an account. All too often, I'm required to create one. I have accounts all over the web now and I'm sure I don't remember half of them. Of course, having lots of accounts requires lots of passwords to manage. So I have a password manager which works mostly until I'm in a hurry and then it doesn't.
I don't see a way out of our current predicament. But I do hear an undercurrent of "I want to simplify my life" growing. I believe that tech is taking too much cognitive effort from non-tech people.
Anyway, bit of a rant there but it's another symptom of software essentially disrespecting the user/customer and making them "pay" for the choices of product design.
Regarding cognitive effort, I talk about this with people on a pretty much constant basis. My feedback to designers and product people is always about how much cognitive energy I have to consume to interact with this feature/app/etc. We live in a time where our cognitive capacity is constantly sapped by exactly the things we're discussing in this thread. Extraneous notifications, software update reminders, "dark pattern" UX on news websites, animated advertisements, inconsistent/unintuitive design patterns across different software/platforms, low batteries (or other tech problems), etc.
Every bit of effort we can make on the creators' side to make the user's life easier is a 100% worthy undertaking, IMO. Not only is it a good thing to do for our fellow humans, they will recognize the ease of use and be a happy user or customer as a result.
Sure. Developers today would ask him about AppStore policies and things like that. No one would ask technical questions as it wouldn't make sense. And I am quite sure this scene will only ever exist in my imagination. :)
Most people only see App Store fees as a tax -- in some cases it really looks like that, but in the bigger picture, it's a beautiful example of values codified in a business model.
It's super easy to declare whatever executive to be some evil guy because he shot your product down because he killed your framework or whatever.
But sometimes these things are painful, but are done for the 'right' reasons.
Steve was able to communicate those things, I think most folks can't and thus don't.
On a personal level he's also a much more compassionate/empathetic person which I think plays well in the current social climate. I can't imagine Jobs getting away with some of his fabled antics today.
Finally, and probably due to the previous point, Cook is much more adept at playing the geopolitics game with India, China, Trump, etc..
But yes, him fielding random developer questions would be awkward at best. Which is why they shoo him off stage in favor of Craig/Sruji/some mid-level manager to talk tech every chance they get.
I ask that because I don't know. He does seem empathetic in his words. But the actions of Apple (from its production processes and sub-contracted systems to its treatment of developers and even iphone customers) seem as draconian and cut throat as they have ever been.
Cook does not have this reputation. Whether that's a persona or the real deal is impossible for us to say (I've never met him and I'm not at Apple anymore), but I think it's not very useful to think about what he's "really" like. We can only see how he presents himself, and so far his self-portrayal is significantly more positive than Jobs's, regardless of how the company is run at a larger scale.
---
I also think it's impossible to compare Jobs's ethics to Cook's ethics by looking at how Apple as a company operates. The company has grown immensely in the past decade, so I think 2020-Apple can't be compared to 2010-Apple in this way. However, we can maybe look at Apple's increased commitment to certain real-world ethical concerns and stipulate a little bit.
Environmentally, they're 100% powered by renewable energy, and they recently announced they want to be 100% carbon-neutral by 2030. They have also said they want to manufacture new iPhones entirely from old iPhones, which would be great.
They're also a leader in consumer privacy and security, more than any other company of a similar size.
Then there's the manufacturing stuff. They certainly benefit from and make use of unethical manufacturing processes, but they seem to be trying to move away from that (to the extent that a company that requires as much manufacturing as they do can). I believe their chips are manufactured in the US (?), and I think they've started trying to manufacture certain other things in the US (I think the Mac Pro? or is that done with? I haven't checked in on it recently). Of course, they've got plenty of room to grow when it comes to ethical manufacturing, but what I'm highlighting here is that they've made some effort to improve as new issues have come to light, which can't be said of all companies with their manufacturing needs.
All that said, Apple as a company has plenty of room for growth in the ethical sense, but we can at least appreciate that these are issues that they address explicitly compared to the Apple of the past. As far as I'm aware, this has all been done under Cook's leadership, so perhaps it reflects on his personal values to some extent.
The former just doesn't matter that much and the later is just marketing.
What is material is their ability to make great things, delight customers, operate effectively etc..
Organizations are often led by complimentary types, Jobs is a classic Alpha, Cook a classic Beta, they happened to work well together. But Job's assertiveness, far from being a 'negative thing' may have been a quite essential spark in the formation of the company. Just because it doesn't make you 'feel good' doesn't mean it's bad for the creative process or the company. It also may have been irrelevant: it's entirely possible jobs may have been able to be jobs without that.
Apple is an IP company, their commitment to '0 carbon' is not really important compared to a chemical company, an oil refinery, or some entity whereupon operations are material contributors to carbon.
It's a nice thing to do, and it makes for good corporate citizenry, but it's mostly just that.
Bah. Apple makes a product like Airpod which is disposable and impossible to recycle. They design their products to be impossible to repair, and actually sabotage 3rd party repair efforts. Apple does not care about the environment at all. If they did, they would try to keep them out of landfills, make them easy to repair and recycle, and not design them to fail.
However, I believe it was Jobs who was the catalyst for the entire show. He was the spark that the rocket needed.
The company is in an incredible financial position but is still vulnerable to the next big innovation. The next usurper. The next Black Swan.
Jobs would be so antsy to have something new out at this point. And if he had a vision for something- which I think he would have Had- he would have made it happen.
Maybe some next great thing will happen for Apple soon? The device that cannibalizes the iPhone like the iPhone did to iPod.
And you can see them getting a little scared of this coming doom with their commitment to the App store monopolistic practices (whether you believe it's wrong or not, they really can't afford to cave on this front for their long-term sake)
But then I'm not one of those guys always staring at their phone/watch.
What's the opposite of power user? Old guy, I guess.
After Steve passed in '11, it seems his idea pipe got drained. The watch came out in '15, the earbuds in '16 (neither earth shaking) and other than that, it's been small iterations on the same products for 10 years. Where's the new excitement?
I’m almost surprised they are even bothering to continue the line and just don’t shove the dev work out to Microsoft. Especially since they have been de-thanged, Windows is no threat at all to Apple’s market.
In my opinion executive skills are of course needed but so are long term high level vision, with strong opinions like sjobs had - even if that makes them "less liked"
I think Jobs's vision was not static though.
I really dont see any of that. Definitely not to its customers or professional users and developers. If anything I think these compassionate and empathetic note, the so called "enrich" people's live is a recent thing in the past 4-5 years.
And personally I have not problem with that statement, except until you get caught not doing so people will judge you as a hypocrite. And it is exactly the same playbook as Google's do no evil. That is why Steve Jobs never talks much about any of that ( Despite I think he deeply cares about it ) and only talks about building GREAT products for their customers.
Steve cares or doesn't cares. You can tell. And he is being true to himself. Not the same could be said to Cook. I guess that is partly why Tim is an operational person and not a product person.
God I wish this man is still alive, Apple would be so much better now.
Frankly, I think he nails it all in the first couple minutes. He's the chief NAK'er. Being able to say "no" is more important than yes. Yet so many people are afraid of hurting people's feelings or don't have the political will to do it. Although at that point in his career it had already bitten him once at apple.
Also, can you imagine a current apple employee publicly disparaging one of their products like Jobs did the Newton and various other things? Take the watch, he might have loved it, but I can totally hear him complaining about how it was a subpar experience to the iphone, which you have in your pocket, cue the speech recognition bit. Also the thinly veiled bits about if the clone hardware were actually better..
I doubt Steve/Ive would have let the new widget and icon customisation in iOS14 see the light of day, but it is a MASSIVE hit in a younger demographic.
I also enjoy how, in that Q&A session, he lays out a ton of what Apple would actually release in the subsequent decade.
The actual recordings are on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/user-626311220
Please save yourself the pain of visiting this travesty of a website.
I do both and this site looks fine, like any other article online.
Can we also agree that we don't need JS in order to produce a decent experience on the web?
Compared to Google Maps it was the Stone Age. I get it, a lot of sites use an unnecessary amount of JS and bog down the user. But there are very clear benefits to having JS in browsers.
Different tasks should use different methods.
I usually see the headline and go to youtube to find the video.
Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers to this question:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-technical?share=1
And I'm always reminded of this story where he asks about the light well gathering characteristics of CMOS vs CCD:
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technic...
The biographies that are out there are OK as far as they go, but they're ultimately made by people who are in love with the idea of a humanities student getting rich running a tech company and telling those nerds where to go. They don't explore how he was able to recruit and keep people with strong skills, how he could tell them apart from those who just weren't as sharp. They don't explore how involved he was with at the time radical decisions like the macOS Aqua UI, merging BSD/NeXT/MacOS Classic, what exactly shipped in the first iPhone and so on. I've heard he was very involved with all kinds of minor things like the decision to keep using Objective-C well past its sell-by date, but again, such details come out in scraps here and there.
If you look at other tech firms like Yahoo, after being taken over by people without a strong engineering background they went into decline and failed. Merely being "not a nerd" is hardly sufficient. To match what he accomplished requires skill in deal making, recruitment, retention, skills evaluation, technology, marketing, etc. Yet this story remains largely untold.
There's a lot of revisionist history about whether Jobs understood the tech or not. I believe a lot of it comes from the later-day Woz worship that's been spreading since Mr. Jobs' death.
If you go back and read interviews of the era when Jobs was asked technical questions by technical people, he clearly understood far more than we give him credit for today.
He made a lot of bets on the future and what he felt people would want to buy and use. Many worked out and some didn't.
But what are the examples of him allegedly not understanding specific bits of hardware or software technology?
For me, though I certainly didn't agree with all he did, it seemed he had a keen functional understanding of the underlying hardware and software. He couldn't sit down and write some code (which is fine) but he understood the pros and cons and was able to understand and shape where it was headed.
Take the question of how technical he actually
was. The famous books and movies about Jobs
hardly cover this at all. There's not even
any agreement today about it, look at the
contradictory answers to this question:
He couldn't sit down and write code, or debug a PCB. That's fine. I don't need or even want my executives to be the best engineers in the house. I want them to respect and understand engineering and work in tandem with us.
Jobs was exactly the right sort of "technical" for management and the C-level: he was able to understand the pros and cons of technical details and, rather often, make good predictions about where things were going.
(He was also frequently a jerk, if not outright abusive, and I don't condone that -- but that's a separate matter entirely from his technical chops or lack thereof)
I can think of plenty of calls he made that I disagreed with. Some were bad calls, period. Other calls were "correct" for what he was trying to achieve, but I didn't agree with what he was trying to achieve. Other times, he was simply too ambitious, pushing some software vision before hardware had quite caught up.
But I've never seen an example of him simply failing to sufficiently understand the hardware or software.
I'm not surprised. Is there even agreement on the definition of technical? How can we know if anyone is technical, let alone Steve Jobs?
Also, his partner was Woz. One has to be a bit more than "technical" to have it make sense to take a design from Woz.
In general, tech industry leaders should be able to manage context-switching between technical and non-technical decision-making, but very few leaders can excel at it, if their life were to depend on it. This is why we have very few of them like Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk.
A lot of engineers do not consider Steve Jobs to be technical partially because he was admitted to study a non-technical degree (unlike Andy, Jeff or Elon) and partially because of the way he is documented to have ripped off engineers he has worked with. The reasoning is if he was capable of doing the work himself, why hire someone else to do it or at least devalue their work in a way he wouldn't like to be treated?
Also in tech, we generally fall into two buckets: technical and non-technical, but Jobs as a person didn't neatly fit into either bucket as evidenced by this description taken from Wikipedia. It aptly describes Jobs in a way that different writers fail to do:
He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider.
This phenomenon, in IMHO, is why a lot of writers explain his contributions from the perspective they are most familiar with. A non-technical writer trying to extol his virtues as a business leader will generally not be qualified to speak about his technical leadership abilities, causing readers to think his technical skills are average at best (or even non-existent, similar to his contemporaries in business). The converse is true.
And by "experimented," you mean he was employed by Atari as a solder jockey and more. The guy knew tech in ways today's javascript abstractionists could never imagine.
And yet people constantly bash Steve Doesn't do any programming. I am willing to bet he knows a lot more about tech than any of the so called "Software Engineers" today.
[1] Sorry I search for a few minutes and couldn't find anything. I remember it was on HN. But all my search query failed. So if anyone knows please post the link.
[0] https://archive.org/details/interfacing-the-apple-computer
Turns out it was. My bad. Lesson here: Dont Trust your memory :)
You can listen to some of the old Debug podcasts with Nitin Ganatra and Don Melton for some first hand accounts.
I left Apple a year before he came back, I still regret it.
Honestly, what is so admirable about this? There are a lot of people who take visionary stances and ultimately fail - these stories rarely get talked about. I'm sure there are more than a handful of visionary stances that Jobs took that never formed. It's survivorship bias at its finest.
Don't get me wrong, Jobs is/was an impressive person, but he gets a Midas-like reputation that is beyond cult like.
I will say this here, and Im a sample set of 1. I would be 100% more sympathetic to the cause of paying for news if I wasnt part of the shell game that is click through, engagement, page view and ad revenue metrics.
* Looks around. See the entire Gaming market and Apple dongles.
Yeah. spot on.