A Steve Jobs' Moment That Mattered Macworld, August 1997

[Applause] w [Applause] [Applause] [Music] thank you very much for that warm welcome now I guess I'm going to have to give a speech the uh I came today to give you a status report on what's going on and to try to fill you in on some of the steps we're taking to get apple healthy again um as you know uh I'm the chairman and CEO of a company called Pixar and thank you and uh I like a lot of other people have are pulling together to help Apple uh get healthy again and I am uh extraordinarily confident that that is going to happen now when I uh started to get involved a lot of people gave me advice and some of the advice that was the most popular was uh uh Apple has become irrelevant um there was a great one that was Apple can't execute anything uh and another one was um the Apple culture is is anarchy you can't no one could manage it you've read all these things in the press and after four weeks um here's what I found quite the opposite of these things actually uh Apple's not relevant as relevant as it used to be everywhere but in some incredibly important market segments it's extraordinarily relevant and I want to share some of that with you today uh Apple is executing wonderfully on many of the wrong things the ability the organization to execute is really high though I mean I've met some extraordinary people at Apple there's a lot of great people at Apple they're doing some of the wrong things because the plan has been wrong and lastly um what I found is rather than Anarchy I found people that can't wait to fall into line behind a good strategy there just hasn't been [Applause] one so what are some beginning steps that we're going to take one of the first ones has to be to start at the top Apple's done a lot of of change at the bottom and I think this change needs to start at the top um with the board of directors focus on focus on relevance Apple needs to find where it is still incredibly relevant and focus on those areas it needs to figure out what its core assets are and invest more in them Apple has neglected its core assets for a while it has to forge some meaningful Partnerships not just Partnerships and press releases and it needs to Define some new product paradigms and we've got some great ideas I'm not going to be talking about products today though I just want to let you know that that we have some wonderful ideas that you'll be hearing about between now and the end of the year now I put I put together a little video uh if you'd like I'll show it to you that just uh I asked the we asked the board members a few questions and you can just maybe get a little get a little familiar with them would you like to see it let's go ahead and roll that you know the old board has been um associated with the past and the past has been failure a new board brings hope the new group of people on on the apple board are all computer insiders we've all been in the computer industry everyone knows that the computer industry changes at the speed of light now we have people who clearly can help us articulate and understand where the niches are where Apple can compete and successfully win so a lot of times we try to focus on ourselves we engineer ourselves internally and we forgot sometimes who pays the bills it's the customer out there pays the bills you know one of the things that that bothered me years ago was when when they raised prices I thought that that was the the um uh it it it made me think that Apple didn't understand the outside world I think Apple needs to worry less about competing with Microsoft and worry more about doing things that are different it's back to Innovation it's back to creativity it's back to Vision no one's really going to believe Apple can be successful until we get the revenues and the cost back in line and that means we got to start growing the revenues again companies have to look at everything they're doing and determine you know what are core competencies what are the core parts of the business in a sense apple is TR trying to do too many different things we need to focus on a handful of things and do them really really well you know Apple's the only Lifestyle brand in the computer industry it's the only company that people feel passionate about you know my company Oracle it's a huge company IBM is a huge company Microsoft's a huge company but no one has incredible emotions associated with our companies only apple is really a Lifestyle brand and companies can spend billions of dollars to build a brand I don't think we've been doing a good enough job uh taking care of you have you called the I mean I've called the support lines myself I've gotten very acquainted with the hold signal and uh so I think we're going to see some changes there soon and I apologize for for [Applause] anything but what I want to do right now is get a little more analytical and I want to say sort of from a an more analytical standpoint what are Apple's core assets and there's two of them that I've been able to uncover the first one is the brand itself and the second is the Mac OS now the brand if you asked you know what are the five greatest brands in the world if you asked you went out and you asked professionals this question you know I think Nike would be on everybody's list Coca-Cola would be on everybody's list Disney would be on everybody's list and apple would be on everybody's list we have we have one of the world's greatest Brands and we haven't paid much attention to it in the last several years and I think you're going to see that start to change and now I want to focus on the Mac OS the Mac OS is an incredibly core asset to Apple and we've been walking all over it I mean most most people think that we're about to abandon the Mac OS most people think that you know Macintosh os8 which we just released was code name tempo as you know right so we just released Tempo most people think our next release next year which is code name Allegro will come out but then our next release will be requium and it's crazy it's absolutely crazy the Mac OS is still the best thing in the world it is still the best thing in the world there are over 20 million active users the number is a little closer to 25 million there are thousands of devel developers and there's a billion and A5 software industry built around this thing this is one of the core assets of the company and we are going to invest a lot more in it because we think it is an incredible asset and it has yet to really be fully exploited apple is about the Mac OS we're going to be doing other things things because we're creative people but at the core apple is about the Mac OS and all of the the fears that I've heard of people that we're abandoning it are absolutely not true morning some of the most exciting work that I've done in my career has been the work that I've done uh with Steve on the Macintosh uh whether it's the first introduction uh or doing products like mac exal uh these have been major milestones and it's very exciting to renew our commitment uh to the Macintosh we have over 8 million customers uh using Microsoft software on the Macintosh um we make it very easy for people to use Macintosh uh to take their uh their documents and work with all kinds of machines uh we're very excited about the new release we're building this is called Mac office 98 uh we do expect to get it out by the end of this year and we've got some uh some real exciting features uh it's a product that's going to require no setup it's going to be an easy transition from people in the past uh and I think it's going to really uh set a new Benchmark for doing a good job with performance and exploiting unique Mac features uh in many ways it's more advanced than what we've done on the Windows platform we're also excited about uh Internet Explorer and we've got a a very dedicated team that's down in California that works on that Pro product uh and the code is really specially developed for the Macintosh it's not just a port of what we've done in the windows environment and so we're pleased to be uh supporting Apple uh we think Apple makes a a huge contribution to the computer industry um we think it's going to be a lot of fun helping out and uh we look forward to the feedback from all of you as we move forward doing uh more Macintosh software thanks [Applause] thank you Bill you know where we are right now is we're shepherding some of the greatest Assets in the computer industry and if we want to move forward and see apple healthy and prospering again we have to let go of a few things here we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose okay we have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job and if others and if if others are going to help us that's great cuz we need all the help we can get and if if we screw up and we don't do a good job it's not somebody else's fault it's our fault so I think that's a very important perspective I think if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude we'd like their software so the era the era of of setting this up as a as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned this is about getting Apple healthy and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry to get healthy and prosper [Applause] again lastly I want to just talk a little about about Apple and the brand and uh and what it means I think to a lot of us you know I think you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer uh when we shipped uh the Apple 2 you had to think different about computers mean computers were these things you saw in movies they occupied giant rooms uh they weren't these things you had on your desktop you had to think differently because there wasn't any software at the beginning you had to think differently when a first computer arrived at a school where there had never been one before and it was an Apple 2 I think you had to think really differently when you bought a Mac it was a totally different computer worked in a totally different way used a totally different part of your brain and it opened up a computer world for a lot of people who thought differently you were buying a computer with an installed base of one you had to think differently to do that and I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer uh and I think the people that do buy them do think differently and they are creative Spirits in this world they are the people that are not just out to get a job done they're out to change the world and they're out to change the world using whatever great tools they can get and we make tools for those kinds of people so hopefully what you've seen here today are some beginning steps that give you some confidence that we too are going to think differently and serve the people that have been buying our products since the beginning because a lot of times people think they're crazy but in that craziness we see genius and those are the people we're making tools for thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Forbes Tech

Views: 117,946

Keywords: forbes, apple, steve jobs, macworld, mac, macintosh, microsoft, bill gates, announcement, macworld 97, 1997

Id: EauGoACmp7E

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2012