People talk about CEOs with "vision", and usually it's a substitute for a more concrete explanation of what the value-add of non-technical upper management is.
Reading this exchange is fascinating. Jobs doesn't spell out the future - he doesn't know it either - but he has an unwavering faith that computers will be central to it, and can even quite effectively explain how and why. The interviewer seems in retrospect hopelessly naive, but he no doubt represented the mainstream opinion of the time. For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it (remember, most people betting their careers on computers would have been able to find work even if they had never left the science lab or big corporations - Jobs was speculating on a completely different future) shows, I think, that he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given.
"Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."
>For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it ... he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given
I'm sure Jobs was brilliant, but this kind of praise still reminds of this Enrico Fermi's story [1]:
During the "Manhattan project" (the making of nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a "great" general. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how
many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that if the chance of winning one battle is 1/2 then the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/2^5 = 1/32 = 3%. "So you are right, General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius."
I'd probably use the term quaint over naive, in 1985, only the most hardcore of households had an Apple IIe, IIc, IBM PC, etc. And no cell phones, so it really was so early on. Consumer tech hadn't really come into its own yet. It pre-dated CD (for music), and the Sony Walkman with cassettes and an Atari/Intellivision game console were about the extent most people had with computers. I'm not even sure if there was traditional tech journalism at the time? I mean, my family had some Apple-centric magazine that came every now an then....
I love the analogy between early command-line computer interfaces and the telegraph, versus graphical computer interfaces and the telephone.
It's also funny to that when he elaborates on this by saying we prefer not to describe where something is but just point to it, he did so with his finger. Of course in context he meant on a computer it's better to point with a mouse than enter commands, but it so nicely foreshadows his intuitive embrace of touch interfaces decades later.
> It's also funny to that when he elaborates on this by saying we prefer not to describe where something is but just point to it, he did so with his finger
"One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.
'The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward,' he scoffed. 'Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface.'
Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.
'I don't understand you!' said the programmer.
Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.
'What are you trying to tell me?' asked the programmer.
Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.
'Why can't you make yourself clear?' demanded the programmer.
Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.
As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.
At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment."
Yes, his vision was permanently very clear. In this 1985 interview he already had:
"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."
I don't agree with the analogy. Telephones derive their power from the use of language just like command-line interfaces. Point and click interfaces will never surpass the power of language because it is language that makes us human.
"Jobs: That’s inevitably what happens. That’s why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete." (He was speaking about the computer hardware).
20 years later "2005 Stanford Commencement Address":
"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. (...)
Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
There is also a coda: in 2010, at D8 conference (Jobs died 2011), Jobs got a question:
"Q: A few years ago you gave a preparation speech at Stanford (...) Now few years later and a couple of years wiser would you add anything to that speech?"
"Jobs: Oh, I have no idea. Probably I would have just turned out the volume on it because the last few years have reminded me that life is fragile."
> The famous story about the boxes is when Woz called the Vatican and told them he was Henry Kissinger. They had someone going to wake the Pope up in the middle of the night before they figured out it wasn’t really Kissinger.
Elon Musk. How many companies has he created or is running? Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX (a rocket company? that takes guts), Tesla (a new car company to compete against GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW etc? that's nuts!), SolarCity, The Boring Company. And now he is promising self-driving cars by next year. (That's nuts!)
"Jobs: When I went to school, it was right after the Sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. Now students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. They certainly are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of their time as they study their business majors. The idealistic wind of the Sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever."
This was pretty striking for me, the goal of becoming rich, or being 'a millionaire' has been pounded into me from a young age to the point where I have difficulty picturing myself obtaining any kind of happiness without some level of financial success. Hopefully the current generations can find fulfillment in different areas. Tying happiness to money is kind of a cruel road to send entire generations down.
Playboy: That’s what critics charge you with: hooking the enthusiasts with premium prices, then turning around and lowering your prices to catch the rest of the market.
"As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can produce, the lower the price will get"
"As soon as we can lower prices, we do. It’s true that our computers are less expensive today than they were a few years ago, or even last year. But that’s also true of the IBM PC. Our goal is to get computers out to tens of millions of people, and the cheaper we can make them, the easier it’s going to be to do that. I’d love it if Macintosh cost $1000."
RIP, Steve. I have ached since he died not only for the loss of what he was, but also for the loss of what could have been. Whatever your view of Apple now, I feel strongly that it is a fraction of what it would have been if Steve had been able to continue on for another 10 years.
Tech revolutions are often ushered in by people in their early 20s one pop economist noted. That is when they have some education, lots of energy and few family responsibilities. The PC revolution was by people born in the mid 1950s, dot.com by mid 1970s, mobile by early 1990s ...
When I grew up, I had the feeling computers weren't much of a thing in private.
Sure, I had a C64 when I got 8 years old and my first PC with 11, but until I got my PC I knew basically nobody in any age group that had a computer.
To me, the dream Jobs had, that anyone had a computer, became reality end of the 90 and beginning of the 00.
Which is kinda funny. The time everyone really had a computer at home probably didn't even last more than 10 years when it was superseeded by smartphones.
Life is very crazy in retrospect...
I remember talking to some friends at school when I was 16. They told me I should become an administrator and not a developer, because everything we need is already developed. They had games, videos, mp3s what more was there?
"Sure, I had a C64 when I got 8 years old and my first PC with 11, but until I got my PC I knew basically nobody in any age group that had a computer."
Wild. Where did you grow up?
I ask because I was born in 1970, and by the time I got a computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer 2; 16K of RAM, baby!) in about 1982, I was far from the first kid I knew to have one (though I definitely was on the leading edge). I wrote all my high school papers on it, and by the time I graduated in 1988 I'd say at least half the papers being turned in had those tell-tale rough edges from tractor-feed paper run through dot-matrix printers. By then, several friends had moved up from CoCo/C64/Apple II style machines to PCs (or, in one case, an early Mac).
My family was firmly middle/upper-middle class, but we were in a very poor state (Mississippi).
Now, most of these were household computers, shared by everyone in the house, but still: the upshot was "lots of PC penetration in homes in south Mississippi by 1988."
> Which is kinda funny. The time everyone really had a computer at home probably didn't even last more than 10 years when it was superseeded by smartphones.
To be fair, smart phones are computers. They're just a different form factor.
>> When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Ironically, the first US IKEA store opened in June that same year.
I really enjoyed description of an environment where Jobs grew up. Now kids see electronics only as a screen of smartphone or tablet. No space for technical creativity unless your parents are doing something in this domain. Selling printed circuit board in European Union is a great adventure taking care of CE and WEEE even for experienced adult.
It is kind of annoying that there's a two tier market: as a consumer, you can buy all sorts of extremely cheap nifty boards to connect to the Arduino, by having them posted from China to circumvent all the rules. But you can't circumvent the rules yourself.
(Well, you can, the enforcement is pretty adhoc, but there is still a nonzero chance of getting spotted and fined and they can actually collect against you in the EU)
Do they really? I'm not sure I agree, these days we have things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi which have been a huge success, and I'd argue they attract a much wider range of children than middle-class white boys who just happened to grow up near innovation centres.
What's really cute is how Jobs expresses contempt for money, for being a millionaire, praising the Sixties idealism (needless to say, the very spirit of the beginning of internet) at the same time he builds up the most closed, proprietary-obsessed company possible.
In the interview at the end Jobs says he loves Sushi. What's the deal here? I thought he only ate fruit or at least certainly not meat/fish. Can someone explain?
Eating sushi wasn't something normal people in the US did in 1985. It was a bit of a class marker that he was sophisticated and did crazy things.
I realize that sushi is pretty commonplace now but in 1985, for white Americans it was probably the craziest thing you could think of doing. It really freaked people out. Raw fish?
[+] [-] tompccs|6 years ago|reply
Reading this exchange is fascinating. Jobs doesn't spell out the future - he doesn't know it either - but he has an unwavering faith that computers will be central to it, and can even quite effectively explain how and why. The interviewer seems in retrospect hopelessly naive, but he no doubt represented the mainstream opinion of the time. For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it (remember, most people betting their careers on computers would have been able to find work even if they had never left the science lab or big corporations - Jobs was speculating on a completely different future) shows, I think, that he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given.
[+] [-] lisper|6 years ago|reply
Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.
[+] [-] namirez|6 years ago|reply
I'm sure Jobs was brilliant, but this kind of praise still reminds of this Enrico Fermi's story [1]:
During the "Manhattan project" (the making of nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a "great" general. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that if the chance of winning one battle is 1/2 then the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/2^5 = 1/32 = 3%. "So you are right, General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius."
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0607109.pdf
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taude|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonh|6 years ago|reply
It's also funny to that when he elaborates on this by saying we prefer not to describe where something is but just point to it, he did so with his finger. Of course in context he meant on a computer it's better to point with a mouse than enter commands, but it so nicely foreshadows his intuitive embrace of touch interfaces decades later.
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
"One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.
'The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward,' he scoffed. 'Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface.'
Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.
'I don't understand you!' said the programmer.
Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.
'What are you trying to tell me?' asked the programmer.
Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.
'Why can't you make yourself clear?' demanded the programmer.
Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.
As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.
At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment."
[+] [-] acqq|6 years ago|reply
"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."
[+] [-] globular-toast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|6 years ago|reply
"Jobs: That’s inevitably what happens. That’s why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete." (He was speaking about the computer hardware).
20 years later "2005 Stanford Commencement Address":
https://singjupost.com/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement...
"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. (...) Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
There is also a coda: in 2010, at D8 conference (Jobs died 2011), Jobs got a question:
"Q: A few years ago you gave a preparation speech at Stanford (...) Now few years later and a couple of years wiser would you add anything to that speech?"
"Jobs: Oh, I have no idea. Probably I would have just turned out the volume on it because the last few years have reminded me that life is fragile."
(Or was it "turn up"? Do we hear what we want to hear there? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4400 )
[+] [-] torstenvl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantondwa|6 years ago|reply
These were really different times.
[+] [-] dwoozle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victor106|6 years ago|reply
Who are some visionaries/ industry leaders that have this kind Realistic future insight that are worth paying attention to?
[+] [-] petilon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yajirobe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmcer|6 years ago|reply
This was pretty striking for me, the goal of becoming rich, or being 'a millionaire' has been pounded into me from a young age to the point where I have difficulty picturing myself obtaining any kind of happiness without some level of financial success. Hopefully the current generations can find fulfillment in different areas. Tying happiness to money is kind of a cruel road to send entire generations down.
[+] [-] pentae|6 years ago|reply
Seems like old tricks are the best tricks, eh?
[+] [-] kstenerud|6 years ago|reply
"As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can produce, the lower the price will get"
"As soon as we can lower prices, we do. It’s true that our computers are less expensive today than they were a few years ago, or even last year. But that’s also true of the IBM PC. Our goal is to get computers out to tens of millions of people, and the cheaper we can make them, the easier it’s going to be to do that. I’d love it if Macintosh cost $1000."
[+] [-] ekianjo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archeantus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casefields|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|6 years ago|reply
When I grew up, I had the feeling computers weren't much of a thing in private.
Sure, I had a C64 when I got 8 years old and my first PC with 11, but until I got my PC I knew basically nobody in any age group that had a computer.
To me, the dream Jobs had, that anyone had a computer, became reality end of the 90 and beginning of the 00.
Which is kinda funny. The time everyone really had a computer at home probably didn't even last more than 10 years when it was superseeded by smartphones.
Life is very crazy in retrospect...
I remember talking to some friends at school when I was 16. They told me I should become an administrator and not a developer, because everything we need is already developed. They had games, videos, mp3s what more was there?
[+] [-] ubermonkey|6 years ago|reply
Wild. Where did you grow up?
I ask because I was born in 1970, and by the time I got a computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer 2; 16K of RAM, baby!) in about 1982, I was far from the first kid I knew to have one (though I definitely was on the leading edge). I wrote all my high school papers on it, and by the time I graduated in 1988 I'd say at least half the papers being turned in had those tell-tale rough edges from tractor-feed paper run through dot-matrix printers. By then, several friends had moved up from CoCo/C64/Apple II style machines to PCs (or, in one case, an early Mac).
My family was firmly middle/upper-middle class, but we were in a very poor state (Mississippi).
Now, most of these were household computers, shared by everyone in the house, but still: the upshot was "lots of PC penetration in homes in south Mississippi by 1988."
[+] [-] wtetzner|6 years ago|reply
To be fair, smart phones are computers. They're just a different form factor.
[+] [-] ponyous|6 years ago|reply
Oh my. That's funny.
[+] [-] ekianjo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisieb|6 years ago|reply
Ironically, the first US IKEA store opened in June that same year.
[+] [-] lnsru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
(Well, you can, the enforcement is pretty adhoc, but there is still a nonzero chance of getting spotted and fined and they can actually collect against you in the EU)
[+] [-] fiala__|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] francescopnpn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guyzero|6 years ago|reply
I realize that sushi is pretty commonplace now but in 1985, for white Americans it was probably the craziest thing you could think of doing. It really freaked people out. Raw fish?
[+] [-] geden|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortilla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasKrokodil|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] faissaloo|6 years ago|reply