Steve Jobs in 1991

yeah interesting you mentioned dell where i'm we're interviewing michael tomorrow one of my associates is down in austin and i mean did you see the timing into r d yeah driving up his car so he's going to be yeah they're going to be nipping at his his heels all right so tell me when you're ready and i can finish yeah we're ready the whole premise for apple's existence is to come up with better products highly differentiated better products that then the third-party software developers can develop new and exciting and different applications on that they can't develop on other types of personal computers and if apple gives that away by giving away their future system software then i'm not sure that that the market needs apple so my whole question in this is what is apple's differentiation if this is successful and if it's not successful what is apple's innovation which is going to propel it through the 90s like macintosh did through the 80s i'm not i'm not sure i'm sure that they're a bunch of bright people there and i'm sure they have some some good ideas they stopped sending me their management reports a while ago so well we've already covered uh some of the things that that we can do with pcs today that that we didn't do but if we're to look ahead what do you think that we're going to be doing with personal computers and i mean from that you know your your machines here are somewhere between a workstation and a personal computer what do you think that we'll be able to do with with this field called personal computing where you are in control that we that we can't do today um well what's happening right now with our industry is it's bifurcating all current generation personal computers all ibm pcs uh all most of the current macintoshes are all gonna go portable they're all gonna be smaller all portable within two three years everything will be portable and yet customers are also demanding at the same time more power and more power falls into three or four areas people want large color screens that they can put photographs on ask anyone in in the upper part of desktop publishing as an example people want motion video people want to be networked with very high speed networking at least ethernet speeds and people want to be sending all of this rich media around the network unfortunately this second class of product cannot be made portable so what i see is i see our industry bifurcating where the current generation of products are going to be portable and the next generation of products these very powerful highly network color machines are going to be desktop machines and that's where i think we're going now what is going to be the new breakthrough that causes the next spurt of growth in our industry just like spreadsheets did in the early 80s desktop publishing did in the late 80s and again i come back to interpersonal computing i think personal computing which we we mastered in the 80s its mission was to improve individual productivity and at best creativity and with over 50 million personal computers shipped in the 80s it worked the next thing for the 90s though needs to be more improving individual productivity isn't enough anymore the real competitive advantage in the 90s is going to come from improving improving group productivity and collaboration improving group productivity and that is going to be achieved through interpersonal computing using the same desktop tool that revolutionized analysis and planning with spreadsheets that revolutionize publishing with desktop publishing using those same tools to revolutionize human to human communication collaboration and group productivity and i think that is going to be the third revolution of the desktop computer in the first half of the 90s you a fan of lotus notes um i think we're about three or four years ahead of that kind of thing with next now that's why a lot of people are buying our stuff we have something that's pretty remarkable yeah so um lotus notes is okay but it starts off with a pc so you have a lot of inherent limitations did you have any idea early on say early 70s even late even early the late 70s early 80s that the pc was going to have such a dramatic impact on the entire structure of the computer industry sure again what's hard to remember is that by 1979 when we were at apple we were already shipping more unit more computers measured in units than ibm was remember ibm was only shipping big mainframes and a few attempts at minicomputers we were already shipping more computers in unit volume in 1979 than ibm was so the thought occurred to us certainly by then that this was going to have a staggering effect uh because of the unit volume if we're to come back to you in five years for the 15th anniversary of the pc how many like what among the companies that are out there now do you think may well go away and and which amongst them that are uh you know somewhere in the in the the also rand pack do you think maybe running up front well besides next let me correct uh uh i think a mistaken impression that that that you articulated um i don't think this is the 10th anniversary of the pc i think it's the 15th anniversary of the pc or maybe the 14th because the first modern pc as we know it appeared in 1977 and it was the apple ii and the apple ii sold five or six million units until it was retired and ibm entered the pc business with their products which turned out to have a very large effect but nonetheless there was you know the course had already been plotted in 1981 so um i think it's the 10th anniversary of ibm's entrance into the pc market five years from now uh let me answer a broader question than that and i'll come back to that one okay at the risk of wasting some of your video tape that's all right the tape is cheap um there is a constant tension in our industry between standards and innovation uh and i think it's a healthy tension standards are very good because they give everybody a baseline they give everybody a low-cost economic vehicle but left to themselves people that usually are the standard bearers don't have any incentive to move forward and ultimately customers lose and that's the role of the companies that innovate companies that innovate use as many of the standards as they can but then leap up from them and try to to provide new opportunities through through innovation with certain amount of risk associated because they're not part of the standard and some of them succeed very wildly macintosh as an example was a real step it was a real revolution versus just an evolution as where most of things in the pc world have been evolutionary 286 the 386 the 486. excuse me sometimes and it's this tension between the evolution and the revolution that i think keeps our industry moving forward we've seen seven years after macintosh finally the ibm world is getting some of the graphical user interface that was available in 1984 with the macintosh so this this evolution revolution tension i think is extremely important to keep on going in the future and the the revolutionaries that manage to establish a critical mass get up to a certain size before the evolutionary people catch up they survive and prosper those that don't get absorbed into the evolutionary path and with that perspective when i look at what is happening now unfortunately i see a lot more a lot more status quo in the next five years than i see real evolution i don't see much coming from things like the apple ibm relationship i see more of the same coming from apple over the next five years i see more of the same coming from ibm in small evolutionary steps 286s to 386s to 486s to 586s but nothing really different spreadsheets will run a little faster but nothing really different uh i see you know system 7 system 8 system 9 coming from apple but fundamentally nothing really different and i wish i saw more but i think it's going to be up to to some of the other companies like next and others to provide that that revolution in the next five years which you know five six seven years from now the standard bearers can uh can catch up to just like we saw the pc world catch up to to macintosh seven years later let me ask you something that may not mean i could say that more articulately if you want to well no i think that that could work really well one of the the questions i have i saw um the xerox star system over a decade ago i guess it was you know with with document context architecture why hasn't the personal computer developed along those lines until really the the go operating system where you can you know touch and essentially be doing the spreadsheet in one document touch and then you're doing graphics in the same document without having to open new applications and so on i mean i know that the power wasn't there initially but now it is well i guess i take exception to a lot of your contentions the star didn't actually do that uh quite the star actually opens separate applications the the industry's wrestling right now with compound document architecture and go made a sort of very simple attempt at it but unfortunately one that i think will not be robust enough for for real life use and it's a very difficult problem it's actually more of a user interface problem i think than anything else it's very difficult because as an example when you use a spreadsheet there's a lot of paraphernalia that goes with the spreadsheet maybe a little bar so you can type in things and a few buttons and when you use a drawing program maybe there's a palette of things that sometimes is even glued right onto the document so how do you handle the context switches from a user interface point of view when you move around through these various sort of objects in your document nobody's yet figured that out the tech the underpinning technology is very easy to hack up now and give a demo of but to really do it right you'll see some things next year so i think and and star also didn't really solve the the general problem remember that all the applications on star were written by xerox oh i know i mean so i didn't want to get into the question of you know what they did wrong in that the point i'm trying to make is it's very easy to do something when you write all the applications because then every application can know about every other one and in general a company turns out five or six applications and they all know about each other and you can give a great demo with these apps but the real key is to come up with an underlying structure that'll let third parties who never talk to each other have these capabilities within their apps and no one's yet done that no one has yet done that well and i think you'll you'll see some of that next year how much one of the pieces that we're doing is is going to be about as much as we ever get into things like personalities so let me just ask you looking back from from the day that you guys came up with the notion for apple one how much has your life changed and how has it changed well for me that's a really big subject because my whole adult life has been spent building personal computers we started apple when i was you know 20 years old and i'm now uh an old man of the industry at 36. so i've been doing this for about 16 years and and it's been my whole adult life so the the history of my my vocation and my uh avocations and you know my growing up are all the same uh and it's very hard to separate one from the other all right you see what i'm getting i see what you're getting yes is there anything that we haven't touched on in the course of running through all this stuff that you'd like to get to either in terms of the narrow issues or the broad brush strokes um well i think there's two two interesting issues that you could touch upon one is of course the you know the the american versus japanese issue um and uh the second is that our industry some people think our industry is very mature and they think there's going to be you know rapid consolidation and very few companies left over and it's pretty much very predictable from here on out which is a that point of view i do not share at all i think we're about one inch down a road that's many miles long and that every time there's major technological innovation there's a tremendous opportunity for new players for a reorganization of the industry to occur and um i think that that there is certainly as much opportunity for innovation in the next five years as any five-year period i've ever seen in our industry i think there's just as much opportunity for new companies to come along for new approaches to be taken and uh and for customers to get much better computers five years from now than they have today so i'm pretty optimistic and i think we all need to remember that we're just in the infancy of this revolution and it will continue to occur throughout our lifetimes and i i hope and i i i work with a group of people that all work very hard to make sure that the rate of innovation doesn't slow down and that that most of that innovation continues to come out of the united states of america all right you have a take on the u.s japanese well yeah i do um as we as we look at the types of of computers we're building today and projected in the next few years a a disturbing fact is that even though most of the computers are assembled here in the united states a significantly large number of the dollars that one pays for the components of those computers to build those computers flows overseas the most expensive part of many computers is the display whether it be a color cathode ray tube or whether it be a flat panel display and almost all of those dollars flow to japan one of the the second most expensive component in most computers is the dynamic memory and again most of those dollars flow to japan the third most expensive component is the hard disk drives and most of those dollars flow to u.s companies even though the disk drives are mostly built in singapore and one of the things i think we need to keep our eye on the ball of is to manage those most expensive components back to america and i think that that's going to take some real effort especially in the display in the dram area it's going to take some effort because those are capital intensive products the factories to build the displays or dram are now costing a half a billion dollars to a billion dollars a piece and the engineering required is also something that one doesn't build up overnight but it's i think essential that we don't we don't continue to be hollowed out as an industry where even though the assembly of the final products the printing of the manuals the bow on the shipping carton gets tied here in the u.s most of the dollars don't get sent across the shores you're in a very fortunate position because you're you are privately held and you you don't have to worry about the quarter to quarter problems that some of your publicly traded brethren right have to worry about how much of what you're talking about is is a result not so much of the advances being made by the japanese but by the impediments that exist in the american capital structure in terms of investment disincentives for for long-term uh capital uh holdings in terms of of the quarterly outlook of the wall street analyst and so on um well i don't really buy that argument and let me give you some reasons why if i'm going to build a factory and it's going to cost a hundred million dollars that factory doesn't get written off the minute i build it that factory is an asset on my books just like cash in the bank is it gets depreciated over many many many years so that decision to build that factory doesn't really affect my earnings statement it affects my balance sheet because i take 100 million of cash and put it into a 100 million dollar factory but it doesn't affect my earnings and shouldn't affect what wall street views are my prospects or or my results uh and i think that the real problem is not been with wall street it's been with the management of our industry it's been with people not being willing to take responsibility for the underlying component technologies and thinking that we could give that responsibility to others and uh and survive in in just a successful of a fashion which is not true industry after industry has shown us that that's not true so we have to have more accountability for our raw technologies and not just assume that we can be the final packager at the end because ultimately the providers of those components don't need the final packager at the end ultimately they can go directly to the consumer and they have relationships with the consumer already as sony does and and others in japan i mean so sony the builder of the next apple portable next mac portable ask john scully i'm going to so um i i don't really think saying it's wall street is too easy we've got we've got apple we've got ibm and many other computer companies with with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in the bank in cash the cash the raising the capital is not the problem and wall street is not the problem the problem is that in many cases the management of our companies is not from an engineering or manufacturing background anymore and may not appreciate uh the dependence we have on these underlying technologies is where if you go to japan the people running these companies are engineers or for they're from the manufacturing backgrounds and they they very much appreciate is that why us memories failed i don't know i don't know anything about us memories that was the the yeah all right i think that pretty much covers thanks

Channel: btm0815ma

Views: 51,502

Rating: 4.975976 out of 5

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Id: x_t-iKeWdRI

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mushu_Pork]

This video is amazing, it's filled with such great industry wisdom. To see his insight articulated is wonderful.

He was right about the social connection, however it developed with ego instead of collaboration... stupid Facebook, ugh.

[u/coldbrewdonkey]

It’s really enriching listening to him speak in 1991 and you’re in 2021

Thirty years ago this man is talking about people want to send colorful things to each other and is setting the stage for the apple iPhone

The man’s a visionary and I can’t state that enough

[u/TheJadedSF]

Man strong throwback thursday on r/apple today

[u/YousernameOne]

I paused this video for a moment so I could click on the Home app and turn off my noisy fan across the room. If only 1991 Steve knew what lied ahead on this long road of technology that he describes...

[u/[deleted]]

i literally thought the thumbnail was ashton kutcher. definitely a no-brainer casting decision for that movie lol

[u/TheSquirrelWithin]

This interviewer is such a bore. Steve Jobs is also bored, but answers the questions gracefully. Kinda expected him to blow up on the interviewer.

Steve Jobs was a brilliant jerk.