Steve Jobs Insult Response - Highest Quality

yes mr. jobs you're a bright and influential man here it comes it's sad and clear that on several counts you've discussed you don't know what you're talking about I would like for example for you to express in clear terms how say Java in any of its incarnations addresses the ideas embodied in open doc and when you're finished with that perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years you know you can please some of the people some of the time but one of the hardest things when you're trying to affect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas I'm sure that there are some things opendoc does probably even more than I'm not familiar with that nothing else out there does and I'm sure that you can make some demos maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things the hardest thing is what how does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision that's gonna allow you to sell eight billion dollars 10 billion dollars a product a year and one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology you can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're gonna try to sell it and I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room and I've got the scar tissue to prove it and I know that it's the case and as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer where can we take the customer not not starting with let's sit down with the engineers and and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that and I think that's the right path to take I remember with the laser writer we built the world's first small laser printers you know and there was awesome technology in that box we have the first canon laser printing cheap laser printing engine in the world in the United States here at Apple we had a very wonderful printer controller that we design we have Adobe's PostScript software in there we had Apple talk in there just awesome technology in the box and I remember seeing the first printout come out of it and just picking it up and looking at it thing you know we can sell this because you don't have to know anything about what's in that box all we have to do is hold that something goes do you want this and if you can remember back to 1984 before laser printers it was pretty startling to see that people went wow yes and that's that's where Apple's got to get back to and you know I'm sorry that open Docs a casualty along the way and I readily admit there are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about so I apologize for that too but there's a whole lot of people working super super hard right now at Apple you know avi John Marino Fred I mean the whole team is working burning the midnight oil trying to and and people you know hundreds of people below them to execute on some of these things and they're they're doing their best and I think that what we need to do and some mistakes will be made by the way some mistakes will be made along the way that's good because at least some decisions are being made along the way and we'll find the mistakes we'll fix them and I think what we need to do is support that team going through this very important stage as they work their butts off they're all getting calls being offered three times as much money to go do this throughout the valleys hot none of them are leaving and I think we need to support them and see them through this and write some damn good applications to support Apple out in the market that's my own point of view mistakes we made some people will be pissed off some people will not know what they're talking about but it's I think it is so much better than where things were not very long ago and I think we're gonna get there

Channel: Jonathan Field

Views: 3,032,638

Rating: 4.9129019 out of 5

Keywords: steve jobs, insult, heckler, heckled, high quality, clear audio, tough question

Id: oeqPrUmVz-o

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Revolutionary-Duck-7]

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it." I want to scream this at my boss.

[u/IMovedYourCheese]

Guy was salty that Apple decided to kill OpenDoc in favor of better integration with platforms like Java.

[u/galo]

This video lacks context - I believe this is at a developer conference just after Steve arrived. If you watch the whole thing at the beginning he explains some of the decisions/cuts he made, at some point Steve said Opendoc is not needed anymore because they now have java.That is where the question comes from, as they are different things.

It's right at the beginning when Steve starts talking, I guess he is talking about applets maybe, I'm not familiar with how Java solves the same problem as well - hence the original question. https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o

[u/thavelick]

Okay. So back in the day Microsoft had a technology called OLE that allowed programmers to programmers to make it so you could put certain things like spreadsheets, images, videos, little programs etc inside a word document. The thing was that it was proprietary meaning that it was closed source and hard to understand. So if I was a programmer trying to make my software's files embeddable in word documents I'd need Microsoft's permission.

OpenDoc, as I understand, was an open, aka not proprietary standard to do the same thing with apple products of the day. So if I was spreadsheet maker and I wanted my spreadsheets in appleworks or something I would probably have a much easier time with doing that with opendoc than I would trying to do the same with OLE.

Unfortunately apple killed their support for open doc before it really got going at all.

Java is another technology that allowed folks to write software that runs on any type of computer. Quite a common thing today but a bit of an amazing thing in the 90s. Apple apparently threw some support behind it.

The guy in the audience seems to have thought that OpenDoc was awesome and that Java was the dumbest idea ever and was whining about it.

You might be thinking: "that can't be right, Java and OpenDoc don't even do the same thing!" And you'd be right. The guy is just mad because apple ditched a tech he liked around the same time that they picked up a tech he didn't. That's why Steve's response talks about technology in general because the meat of the guy's criticism doesn't even really make sense.

Side note: this is my impression of the situation form skimming a few Wikipedia articles and having experience as a software engineer. I may be inaccurate in the details in places but my intention was to paint the broad strokes.

[u/dirkjames]

I don’t really understand the question.

OpenDoc and Java are not in the same solution space. Why would you ask a CEO to compare an object oriented programming language and virtual machine runtime to a document linking framework?

Furthermore, why would you ask a CEO who wasn’t even at Apple when Apple made that decision?

I guess that’s why he asked Jobs what he’s been doing for the past seven years (not running Apple), but the whole question seems like an attack and a need to get answers during a keynote QA? Even the audience oooohed.

Maybe the guy loved OpenDoc and was attacking Jobs for moving other parts of Apple software away from things like OpenDoc to things like Java, but come on. Maybe he misses the era of Apple making duds during the mid 90s to the point where they nearly went bankrupt because it had a nice development environment and that’s all he cares about.

[u/Habitabatibal]

Anyone know what the guy who asked the question is up to today?

[u/Noobasdfjkl]

What a response by Steve. That dude kinda shit on him, and he came back with a totally reasonable and measured response.

[u/hagenbuch]

„What do you mean, in clear terms?“

[u/OwwMyFuckingAss]

Posted this to ELI5 originally but their automod directed me here.