The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983: Foreshadowing Wireless Networking & iPad
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That's the reason of why, when they speak, sometimes the things they tell may seem to be a little bit odd at the time, but eventually that things became real.
There are a few examples of this in the interview made by AllThingsD to Gates and Jobs together in 2007. [1] At 35:30 Gates said that he was sure the tablet market was about to explode (while jobs was looking at him with a funny poker face), and later, he basically described Kinnect, a few years before Project Natal was made public.
If Google haven't revealed Glass or their autonomous cars, and Larry or Sergey came out speaking about driver-less cars, and wearable devices, some would think that they are dreaming, but the truth is that they are describing their vision, and they are working to make it real.
It's like what jobs said at min 43, when asked about 5 years from 2007 (yeah, right now!). And he said: "I don't know, " [...] "but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there".
They are not wizards, they happen to know what currently exists, and what's being developed. So, instead of making weird assumptions (like: "ok, assuming that we will develop a material 1000 times stronger, 100 times lighter and 10 times cheaper, we'll have X in ten years"), they rationalize about what's the logical evolution of the technology, based on what they know.
[1] http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB... , Min 28 and forward.
I don't find it is so important that people like Jobs, Gates, Brin, etc. have sometimes correctly predicted the future. What is important is that they executed, and turned these predictions to reality. Even more. They turned these predictions to everyday reality for most people, instead of a select few.
It annoys me when these people are compared to people who just throw a million ideas around and then, when one of these ideas becomes reality, they claim that they are so good at predicting the future.
Kay popularized that quote, but didn't invent it. It goes back to a 1963 book called Inventing the Future by physicist Dennis Gabor: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/
Rather I think what happens is that some technology matures, and then some people that are familiar with that technology are able to recognize that it can be made into a real product that has market potential.
These people don't need market research, because from their standpoint, with their knowledge, it's "obvious". Eg. if you knew about the internet and email in the 80s, it would be obvious that it would replace telex at some point, even though you might be off with the timing of that transition.
Gates on the other hand was a big believer in market research and focus groups. I think that's why he was so into pen computing. He was unable to get past the windowing, desktop, pointing device paradigm.
Around that time I worked on a project for a company that made machines to stick labels on product packets. Those machines were electromechanical and worked but were quite inflexible. I was asked to prototype a computer control of one of the machines and wrote the code by hand and demonstrated that not only was computer control cheaper and smaller it was way more flexible. For example, the electromechanical machines were unable to detect when there was a missing sticker on the roll of stickers to be applied to the products. It was trivial with computer control (and an IR detector) to add that functionality.
The machine was a 6502-based box whose interface was a hex keypad and a 6 digit seven segment display. You typed your program in in hex and ran out, but it and enough I/O channels to run the machine.
Here is is... The KIM-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1
Meanwhile, and also in 1983, Steve Roberts was traveling across the US with his computer-on-a-bike and checking his email across CompuServ using satellite links, so actually doing it: http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html
Winnebiko 2 added packet radio for email in 1986-88, but I don't think the satellite links came until Behemoth which was in the 1990s.
Neat presentation he did describing it at Xerox PARC in 1989. http://youtu.be/tDaz8vaKzdQ
Presumably some browser/window size configurations wouldn't have a chunk of article text blocked by an obnoxious window demanding I shill this article on a bunch of websites I never visit, so I figure it's bad website design rather than an intentional retro throwback to 1998-style popup-heavy browsing, but still - if you made that site, and you're reading this, make it not happen anymore.
For others, in Firefox, under OSX:
Tools -> Web Developer -> Inspect
Then hold down option, select the box, then click on the downarrow "delete node" and the box will disappear.
I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert not a visionary.
all you need to make an mp3 player successful is marketing.
all you need to make a smartphone successful is marketing.
all you need to make notebooks successful is marketing.
fire all the designers, engineers, coders, all the fucking nerds and replace them with marketing people! brilliant. this is exactly how you become one of the most valuable companies on this planet.
quick, call HP, Dell and Nokia to tell them about this grandiose insight!
Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT industry with many rising competitors. That is it.
That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.
Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.
They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing everyone on the way down.
My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products and ripped off other people's work persistently.
The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.
I'm fed up with reading all the tripe about him.
The hype and popularity exists because Apple has produced very compelling products. The iPod and the iPhone were both leaps and bounds ahead of the competition at their launch. It's also clear that Jobs was the driving force behind their vision.
You say that "even [you]" waited on Apple announcements because "they usually stepped up the game" which translates into the fact that Apple made better/interesting/more innovative products. Note you didn't say "even I waited on Apple news announcements because their marketing was so amazing."
You say that Lumias are treading on their "innovation" territory. Not their marketing territory, their innovation territory.
If it was all marketing, they would still be winning by your argument. Has their marketing dramatically changed in the past few years?
The only rational way to reconcile this is by you saying "oh, by marketing, I mean the whole product package, user interface, software, and hardware design". In which case, you just are simply defining marketing wrong.
The differentiator was the marketing hype.
They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on them. That is still marketing.
Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.
Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.
Marketing here is purely spin.
What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer.
On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.
The iPhone was way ahead of Nokia Symbian phones in power of its web browser, display, touch sensitivity etc.
Sure, Apple's marketing is better than that of their competitors. But good marketing and good products aren't mutually exclusive.
That said, since the original iPhone, the updates have gotten increasingly incremental, and the competitors have closed the gap.
The problem here is that you appear to have no idea what the word "better" means to a consumer, as opposed to a hacker.
And that's why you can't understand Apple's success and write it off to "marketing".
Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser (with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch browser, you'd know there is no comparison.
I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor (unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.
Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But, in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia phones, and apparently, so did the market.
The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).
Apple however made it successful through marketing.
And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)
If they "stepped up the game" then surely there is (or was) something more happening than simply "hype"?
Who knows what will happen next - maybe others have or soon will catch up and Apple will crash and burn. We'll see. Still, to dismiss a pretty remarkable run over the last decade as "just marketing" is really to miss a lot, not to mention implicitly reducing everyone else in the industry to idiots who for some bizarre reason couldn't hire a good ad agency.
Unfortunately they have nothing to throw out now - it's all minor improvements on something they've already sold.
None of their most "innovative products" are remarkable - it's all hype.
In the end, I want what's best for us all. Healthy competition.
Apple's legal team haven't ever been nice guys, since way before the iPhone (maybe even before Jobs' return, I don't know).
This is a false dichotomy, Apple is not suddenly forcing its engineers to study law.
For example, with the iPhone 5, they doubled CPU performance in a year - better than Moore's Law. It's not a new vision, but it is an engineering accomplishment.
Yes, marketing is their greatest strength, but "marketing" includes more than advertising, more than design, it's also knowing what will be wanted, and making it happen. Jobs actually cited Sony as a great inspiration - and perhaps we forget now, but they did create the first commercially successful transistor radio and the walkman (also Trinitron TV and the first playstation, and a bunch of other stuff in their heyday). I would say these are close parallels to Sony with the iPod, and arguably the iPhone and iPad.
My point is that Apple doesn't do invention of new technology, but commercialization of technology. A great example is the mouse: PARC invented it, Apple commercialized it. I think it's a cool and impressive thing to commercialize technology, but it's no more than that (unless Apples starts doing fundamental research like PARC, Bell Labs and IBM used to do).
Yes, they built a mouse and shipped it as part of an integrated product, but it had been invented by others more than a decade earlier. It had even shipped in a product well before they did it. PARC is actually in pretty much the same position there that you're putting Apple - they took an existing idea and made it a bit more commercial than it had been. Englebart's mouse was unreliable and uncommerical; PARC's mouse was more practical to make, more reliable, but way too expensive; Apple's mouse was finally reliable and cheap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29#Early_mic...
Interesting that Engelbart patented the mouse. http://www.google.com/patents/US3541541?printsec=abstract#v=...
PS: the "tape" is awesome, thanks.
> I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert not a visionary.
Yes, in hindsight it's all so logical. Anybody could have done it, Apple was simply the first to redefine the MP3 market, the digital music distribution market, the phone market, the mobile app market, the laptop market, the tablet market, all by chance. And marketing of course. Marketing and chance, there ain't nothing more to it. Just like founding NeXT, only to buy it 10 years later to create a whole new operating system and foundation of frameworks to program it, agile enough to run on hardware ranging from smartphones to workstations, it was all Jobs' marketing genius. The same marketing genius that founded Pixar, and had Intel scrambling to pay the traditional PC manufacturers to produce the PC equivalents of MacBook Airs.
Really, Steve Jobs and Apple are all.marketing, no doubt about it... :-/
and later went to work for apple were jobs was able to copy more of his ideas.
So yeah what a prediction say in 1983 what Alan Kay invented in 1968.
Im not bitter it just bothersme the fanboyism that is so prevalent in Sillicon Valley...if we want to improve our craft we need to know it's history.
But 5 minutes in, I realize this speech is actually filled with content, and good content at that.
long live tim cook
And Steve also said that video on iPods was a stupid idea.... a year before he introduced a video iPod (so Apple must've been working on it even as he made that statement)
Jobsy supposedly passed on much advice to Tim Cook - on where to go with the next few models. Jobsy may not have been against 4G LTE and a 4 inch screen - he may have recommended Tim to go down that path.
Is it because most people these days use macbooks for development?