Conversation between Steve Jobs and Developers at WWDC 1997 | Hacker News Reader

Conversation between Steve Jobs and Developers at WWDC 1997

almaer.com

89 pointsakshat20 comments

At 50:23 is the first time I've ever seen video of Jobs on the worse side what appears like a genuinely unpleasant, almost confrontational exchange. He keeps his cool though, and manages to sort of shift the contours of the conversation. Really indicative of the time and place--can you imagine him having to answer that sort of question (posed in that sort of tone) today, given Apple's astronomical success?

I can absolutely imagine Jobs answering a question about, for example, the App Store approval process in a similar way. He knows what he is doing, he knows how to be persuasive and how to not come of as an idiot.

Given Apple’s success (also, he’s now the CEO), however, Jobs doesn’t have to answer questions like that. It would be nice if he had to from time to time.

Watch the D conference videos. He deals with some none too pleasant subjects in them.

His clarity of thought is what just astounds me.

16:00 when he is talking about cloud storage is what drove this home for me. Really amazing for me to see him forecasting "The Cloud" and thin clients.

Still waiting for better SSO in OS X though...

I wouldn't call it a forecast. Thin clients have failed several times before.

At 5:55 his "saying no to customers" mantra sounded eerily similar to 37signals http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php

Wow, this was your first comment.

I think that's a basic insight for everyone who wants to create innovative software.

You need to realize that customers don't think in a creative way. They only think of what's easiest to think of for them. But most of the time those ideas are not great, because they tend to complicate things instead of simplify them.

Truly game-changing concepts take their time to ripen.

But maybe that's just me who thinks in this way. I don't know anyone from Silicon Valley, because I live in a completely different country. So I'm clearly not part of the American startup culture.

I like how is go-to metaphor for strategic priorities is "the high-order bit".

At 33:30 into the video, Jobs pushes a powerful insight that many found hard to believe at the time:

"Apple can win without having to have Microsoft lose."

Maybe, even then, he had a foresight into how significant mobile computing would become.

1:03:30 is great: Jobs about mobile devices: "if you do email, you need a keyboard". Guess the iPhone wasn't on his list of future plans yet.

Actually, listening to this conversation it's completely clear that he'd been imagining a device like the iPhone even then. It clearly solves a problem he has. Remember when he introduced the iPhone as "three revolutionary new products"? There were two that people really wanted: A touch screen iPod. A phone. And one that got lukewarm reception because people didn't know what to make of it: An breakthrough internet communicator. The iPhone was always about the third part for Steve, but you need the other two to sell it to the public.

As for your glib comment about a keyboard, I find the iPhone keyboard is wonderful for typing on. Yes, it's software, but it is a keyboard.

The iPhone does have a keyboard in the sense that he meant: he didn't want a "little scribble thing"...which the software keyboard is not.

Specifically, Palm Graffiti.

He was pretty specifically talking about the Newton, which produced either decently captured raster handwriting or questionably recognized plain text. You don't want to be the one telling people to use a device in a way which is best described as questionable. The iPhone produces reasonably keyed plain text, or questionably smudged handwriting. Since adding cellular modems to handheld devices was straightforward engineering at the time, that inversion of input is probably what made the iPhone take another five years of work when they returned to the idea after stabilizing OS X.

You know, I might have to dig out my MessagePad 2000 to check, but I'm not all that certain I get better recognition on my iPhone than I did on that. I frequently have to go back and correct words on the iPhone, too (usually because my 3G iPhone is laggy or I'm using words like "laggy" that aren't in the dictionary.)

great talk from Steve, and awesome that it starts out with some Grateful Dead :)

I don't effin get this. Another blogger popularized this video weeks ago. I even extracted excerpts from that video and did three posts. The original blog was found here as an HN link weeks ago. But NOW it's news?!

What time of the week was it previously posted to HN? Something like this will likely do better on the weekend, when there's less going on in general, and people have more time to watch hour long videos.

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