Steve Jobs: The solution to our problems isn't technology, it's people

The agent of change is not technology.

Interview by Daniel Morrow, Smithsonian Institute, April 20, 1995
Translation from English by Francesco Vegni

In 1995, the year before he rejoined Apple and the year of the SEC filing for NeXT, Jobs gave several interviews to explain what NeXT had become and what he intended to do. Three years earlier NeXT Computer had become NeXT Software. A handsome triple saint from the trapeze with no safety net. So there was much need to explain now that we were thinking of listing on Wall Street.

In the meantime he was also in charge of Pixar, in a very delicate moment of the Emervylle company. A moment that marked the delicate transition from a purely technology company to a content production company. The same path that he has successfully completed 15 years after Netflix.

This interview, however, made more of an institutional sense as part of the Smithsonian Institution's "Oral History" project. Having no promotional or immediate goals, Jobs' attitude is very relaxed and even, at times, personal. There are no hyperbole, there is no megaphone, there are no coup de théâtre, there are no titles or covers to conquer. We speak for history, not for the present or for the market. This makes the interview special, because we have a Jobs "without makeup" and without magic tricks.

Of course it's always Steve Jobs and there's no shortage of lunges. There are some for everyone: the government, competitors, collaborators and for Apple itself, which would have called him back within a few months.

The text we publish is not a translation of the extracts published on the Smithsonian Institution Archive of Oral History website. It is the text of the complete transcript of the video taken on that occasion. Transcription and translation are by Francesco Vegni whom we thank for this considerable effort. Even the titles that divide the parts of the interview are not those of the Archive of Oral History, but those chosen by our editorial staff.

25 years have passed since that interview. Sometimes one gets the impression that just 20 days have passed. Such was the strength of Jobs' vision of technology and also of society. That ability to guess the future was one of the few things he shared with great friend/genius rival Bill Gates. Bill had said it in unsuspecting times that there would be a virus pandemic. Just as Jobs described the web as it is today in 1995.

Enjoy reading and be inspired, because there is inspiration to be had!

Identikit

Daniel Morrow (DM): It's April 20, 1995, this is an interview for the Computerworld Smithsonian Award. With us is Steve Jobs. Steve, I'd like to start with some biographical data. Tell us a little about yourself: when you were born, your parents, your family… Share some memories with us.

Steve Jobs (SJ): I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955. I can give you a lot of details about my youth, but I don't know if anyone really cares.

DM: Well, it might be three hundred years from now when the printed material is gone. Tell me something about your parents, your family; What are the first things that come to your mind? In 1955 Eisenhower was still president.

SJ: I don't remember it anymore, but I remember how I grew up in the late fifties and early sixties. It was a very challenging time for the United States. America was in a period of great prosperity following World War II. Everything had gone pretty normal, from the haircut to the culture, and America was ready to expand further in the XNUMXs. This decade however was a time when things started to take new directions. Everything was still immersed in well-being, visibly new. From my recollections of that time, America seemed young and naïve in many respects.

DM: So you were five or six when John Kennedy was assassinated?

SJ: Well, I remember the assassination of John Kennedy. I remember the exact moment I knew he had been shot.

DM: Where were you at that time?

SJ: I was walking across the schoolyard on my way home, it was three in the afternoon, when someone yelled that the president had been shot and killed. I must have been seven or eight, and I understood exactly what that could mean. I also remember well the Cuban Missile Crisis. I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights, because I was afraid of falling asleep and not waking up. And even though I was only seven at the time, it seems to me, I was aware of the aftermath of what was happening. I think everyone was. It was truly a feeling of dread that I will never forget and that probably never left me. I think everyone felt it at the time.

DM: Those older among us, like myself, remember making plans for how we would organize ourselves if the country was devastated. It was a strange period… Among the aspects we are trying to investigate are passion and power. What were the first things you were passionate about, that you were interested in?

The Silicon Valley of Jobs' childhood

SJ: I was really lucky. My father, Paul, was a truly extraordinary man. He never graduated. He was drafted into the transport navy during WWII and flew troops around the world for General Patton. I think he got into trouble and was demoted to private. He was a mechanic by trade. He worked hard. He was kind of a wizard with his hands. He had a work table in his garage. When I was five or six he gave me a small piece and said, "Steve, this is your workbench now." He gave me some small tools and showed me how to use a hammer, a saw and how to build things. It was really good training for me. We spent a lot of time together, he taught me how to build objects, how to take them apart and put them back together.
One of the things he touched upon was electronics. He didn't have extensive knowledge of electronics, but he had dealt with electronics a lot in repairing cars and other things that he fixed. He taught me the rudiments of electronics and I began to get very interested in the subject. I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My father was transferred right to the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers everywhere. At that time, Silicon Valley was made up of orchards — apricot and plum fruit trees — and it was truly a paradise. I remember the crystal clear air and you could see the valley from one end to the other.

DM: This was when you were six, seven, eight years old.

SJ: Yes exactly. It really was the best place in the world to grow up. There was a man who had moved down the street, maybe six or seven houses up the block. He was new to the neighborhood and lived with his wife. It was known that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and also a radio amateur who was really into electronics. What he did to get to know the kids in the neighborhood was truly original. On the driveway he placed a carbon microphone powered by a battery that acted as a speaker. In this way, speaking into the microphone, his voice was heard throughout the neighborhood. Quite an odd thing to do when you move somewhere, but that's what he did when he arrived.

DM: Is fantastic!

SJ: And I, of course, started playing with it. I had been taught that you needed an amplifier connected to a microphone to make your voice heard. My father had taught me that. I proudly walked home to my father and announced that he was wrong and that the neighbor up the block was only amplifying his voice with a drum kit. My father replied that I didn't know what I was talking about and we had a rather heated discussion. So I took it to the site and showed it to him, and he was kind of amazed.
I then met this man, whose name was Larry Lang. He taught me a lot about electronics. He was great! He used to build with Heathkits. Heathkits were truly amazing… they were disassembled components that you bought in an assembly kit. In reality, it cost much more to make them than to buy the finished product, if available. Heathkits had detailed manuals on how to put the pieces together and all the parts had to be arranged a certain way and sorted by colour. You were really building something yourself. I would say that this made me understand a lot of things. First, what's inside a finished product and how it works. Perhaps more importantly, it was the feeling that we could build the things that were around us. They were no longer a mystery. I mean, if you watched a TV it would make you think:
“I've never built one of these contraptions, but I could. There is one in the Heathkit catalog. I have already built two objects from that catalog and therefore I could also build the television”.
It became clear to me that the objects were the result of human creativity, not magical things that simply appeared in their environment so that no one would have the slightest idea what they were made of. This has led to a huge growth in my self-confidence. Through exploration and learning I could understand seemingly very complex things. My childhood was really lucky in that sense… but I had some problems at school.

What was Steve like at school

DM: It seems you were really lucky to have your father as a mentor. I was going to ask you something about school. How was the formal part of your training?

SJ: From the very beginning school was quite hard for me. My mother taught me to read before going to school. So when I started dating her I actually only wanted to do two things: read books, because I love reading books, and go out chasing butterflies. You know, doing the things that five-year-olds like. I met a different kind of authority than I had met before, and I didn't like it…she imprisoned me. They had almost succeeded in quenching my curiosity. When I was in third grade I had a friend, Rick Farentino. The only way to have fun was to make trouble. I remember we always got away with it. There was a big bike rack where everyone parked their bikes — there were maybe a hundred of them — we swapped our lock combinations with each other's, and then swapped each lock for another bike's… They stayed up until at ten in the evening to arrange all the bikes.
We also detonated bombshells in teachers' desks. We got kicked out of school a lot. Then, in fourth grade, I met one of the other "saints" in my life. They were going to put me and Rick Farentino in the same class, then at the last moment the principal said, “Nope, bad idea. Separate them". So a teacher, Mrs. Hill, said, "I'll take one of them." He was teaching the advanced fourth grade class, and thank God I was the one randomly chosen for that class. She kept an eye on me for a couple of weeks and then approached me. She told me:

"Let's do like this. I offer you a deal. I have a math exercise book: you take it home and do the exercises by yourself, without any help, and then you bring it back to me; if 80% correct, I'll give you five bucks and one of these lollipops — he was flashing them in front of me. And I looked at her as if to say: "Has she gone mad, ma'am?"

No one had ever done anything like this and of course I did the exercises as he requested. Basically he had "bribed" me with candy and money to teach me math. The really amazing thing was that in a short time I developed such a respect for her that I had the desire to learn again. She got me some kits for making cameras. So I sandblasted the lens and made a camera. It was pretty awesome. I think, probably, academically, I learned more in that year than in my whole life. However this also created problems for me. When I finished fourth grade, they gave me a test and decided to transfer me directly to high school, but my parents said "no". Thank God, they said "skipping a grade is fine, but not high school."

DM: Why not high school?

SJ: And I've found that skipping a year is, in many ways, really problematic. This was more than enough. He also created some problems.

DM: This seems like a good opportunity to talk about your experience in fourth grade. Do you think it has had a major impact on your interest in education? I mean, if anyone in the computer industry can be associated with the role of computers in education it's you and Apple.

Equal opportunities in training

SJ: That's right. I really believe in equal opportunities. I don't believe in equality of outcome because unfortunately life is not like that. It would be a pretty boring world if it were, but I truly believe in equal opportunity. For me, having equal opportunities, more than anything else, means having a great education. Perhaps it is even more important than family life. But I wouldn't know how to build a great education system. Nobody knows. It pains me because instead we might know how we can go about providing a great education, we really do. We could guarantee it to every child in this country, but we are well below the threshold. I know from my own experience that if I hadn't met two or three people willing to spend extra time with me, I'm sure I would have ended up in jail. I'm 100% sure if it wasn't for Ms. Hill in the fourth grade and a few others, I would have definitely ended up in jail. I felt I had these negative tendencies from being driven by strong energy to do something. It could have been channeled into something positive, something that other people would like, or it could have flowed into the negative that maybe other people wouldn't like so much.
When you're young, a little bit of instinctual path correction allows for proper addressing. I think it takes talented people to do that. I don't know if many of these talents can be attracted by public education; they don't even pay you enough to support a family! I wish the people who teach my kids were good enough to be able to stay at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why would they work in a school for between $35.000 and $40.000 if they can get $100.000 a year instead? Is this an IQ test? I think we should pay them $100.000 a year, but the problem is of course the unions. Unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education, because it killed meritocracy. Everything has turned into bureaucracy. That's exactly what happened. Teachers can't teach, administrators manage the work and no one can be fired. It's terrible.

DM: Some people say that new technologies are a way to overcome this. Are you optimistic about it?

SJ: I don't believe it at all. As you said, I've helped bring more computers into schools than anyone else in the world, and I'm absolutely convinced that it's by no means the most important thing to do. The most important thing is the person. A person who can stimulate, guide and feed the curiosity of the kids. Machines can't do it like people do. The elements of discovery are all around the kids. No need for a computer. Now [picks up an object and drops it on the ground] — why does it fall? You know it? No one in the world knows why it falls. We can describe it quite accurately but nobody knows why. I don't need a computer for a child to be interested in this, to spend a week playing with gravity trying to understand it and find the reasons why it works.

DM: But one person is needed.

SJ: One person is needed. Especially with computers, as they are now. Computers are very reactive but they are not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They're really responsive, sure, but what kids need is something that's much more proactive. They need guidance. They don't need an assistant. I think we have everything to solve this problem; the effort has only been directed in other directions. I strongly believe that what we need to do in education is access to an incentive system. I know the interview wasn't about that, but it's a topic that particularly interests me.

The state of public education in America

DM: Well, that's exactly what we are interested in.

SJ: Well, great.

DM: This question — believe it or not — had to be at the end and we're there now.

SJ: One of the things I think is if right now if you ask who are the users of education it comes out that it's society in general, it's businesses hiring people. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students, but the parents. The problem we have in this country is that clients, i.e. parents, have lost interest in the school. They have stopped, in most cases, paying attention to their children's schools. In fact, it has happened that mothers have also started working and no longer have time for parent-teacher meetings and to take care of their children's school. Thus, schools have become increasingly institutionalized and parents have dedicated less and less time to the education of their children.
This is what happens when a monopoly takes control of an industry. What has happened in our country is that the level of service is getting lower and lower. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when there was only one telephone company in America. Above the Bell logo was written “We don't care. We don't have to”. This is what a monopoly is called: “I don't care!. This is what IBM was in its day. They don't care. Let's take a look at the economic aspect. The most expensive thing people buy in their lifetime is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually. A car costs approximately $20.000. And on average, a car lasts about eight years. Then buy another one. That's two thousand dollars a year over an eight-year period. Well, your child goes to school for approximately eight years, from first grade through eighth grade. How much does the State of California spend on a public school student per year? About $4400. More than double a car. It so happens that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to make a correct choice and there are many options. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan… They advertise like crazy. Not a day ends without seeing five ads for car brands. They are able to sell these machines so efficiently that they can afford to take some of our money to advertise to other people. Everyone gets to know about these machines and the manufacturers keep improving them more and more. There is therefore a lot of competition.

DM: That's a guarantee.

SJ: Yes it's a guarantee, it's true. But in schools, people don't feel that they are spending their own money. They feel like it's free, right? No one does any cost comparisons. To tell the truth, if you want to enroll your child in a private school, you can't think of doing it with the $4400 a year of the public school, you have to come up with another five or six thousand of your own. I strongly believe that if the country gave every parent a $4400 voucher that they could only spend at a fully accredited school, this policy would change a lot. For one thing, schools would start making themselves known like crazy to recruit students. Secondly, I think many new schools would arise. For example, Stanford Business School, which has a public administration program, could create a school administration graduate program. There would be a lot of people, fresh out of business school, who might want to start their own school. There would be twenty-five-year-old college graduates, very idealistic and full of energy who. instead of starting a company in Silicon Valley, they could start a school. I think they would do it much better than many of our public school teachers. The third thing that could be addressed, I think, is the quality of the school. Only in a competitive market would the quality rise again. Sure, some schools would go bankrupt, many public schools would fail. Of this there is no doubt. It would be quite painful at first.

DM: But for a good cause.

SJ: And much less painful, I think, than the system that exists now. The bigger problem, of course, is that these schools would only want the good kids and the bad guys would be left to private school or what's left of a public school system. You'd think, "Well, all the automakers will make BMWs and Mercedes and no one will make a $10.000 car anymore." But the most fiercely competitive market now is the $10.000 car sector. There are all the Japanese companies that are wallowing in it. General Motors spent $5 billion designing the Saturn in order to compete in that market share. Ford just introduced two new cars for that market. And then there's Chrysler with the Neon.

DM: So you spend $32.000 over 8 years on school, you get a $500 car.

Technology is not the solution to our problems

SJ: The competitive marketplace model shows that where there is a need, there are plenty of suppliers willing to tailor their products to fit that need, and plenty of competition forcing them to do better and better. In my twenties I used to think that technology was the solution to many of the world's problems, but unfortunately that's not quite the case. I will make an analogy. A lot of times we think, “Why is there so little TV programming? Why are television programs so degrading, so poor?”. The first thought that crosses your mind is, "Well, there's a conspiracy: The networks are feeding us this swill because it's cheap." It's the networks that control all of this and that are feeding us this stuff to try and annihilate the American audience. But the reality of the facts, if you analyze the matter well, is that the networks absolutely want to give people what they want, only in this way they will watch the programs. If people wanted something different, networks would give them something different. And the bottom line is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that's what people want to see.
Most people in this country want to turn on the television and turn off their brains, and that's what happens. And it's far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much funnier than reality. The problem is that the vast majority of the public are often quite unreasonable. When it comes to technology, I think we can draw a parallel with the school situation. It is much more encouraging to think that technology can solve problems - which are much more of a human, organizational and political nature - but this is not the case. There is a need to solve these things at the root. These are problems that concern people and how much freedom we can give them concerns the competition that will be able to activate the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like kicking out a lot of 46-year-old teachers who have lost their motivation and shouldn't be teaching anymore. I am convinced of this. I just wish the solution was as simple as giving every child a computer, but it's not.

A Serie A team

DM: I am very pleased that we had the opportunity to talk about this topic. But let's talk about something else. One of the things I wanted to ask you about books about your life and career. So much has been written about you. Rather than going through a bunch of those stories, I wanted to ask you which one you think is best and fairest, and if there are any aspects of your career that you think have been overlooked that you wish they weren't.

SJ: I have to tell you honestly that I'm a bit ignorant about it, because I haven't read any of those stories. Once I saw one; I read the first ten pages and saw that they had my age wrong by a year. If they can't get even that right, maybe there's no point in spending time on it. I don't even remember the title of that book. I've always thought that part of my job was to keep the quality level of the people I work with very high. This is what I consider to be one of the few things that I can really contribute individually, which is to try to instill in the organization the principle that you only need to have first-class players. Because in this field, as in many others, the factor of difference between the worst cabbie and best cabbie to cross Manhattan could be two to one. The best will get you there in fifteen minutes, the worst will get you there in half an hour. As for the best cook and the worst, maybe it's three to one. Consider such a parameter. In the field where I am the factor of difference between the best person and the worst person is about a hundred to one, or maybe more. The difference between a good software programmer and a great software programmer is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, a huge range. That's why I've found, not just with software but with everything else, that it really pays to seek out the best people in the world. It's embarrassing when you have some people who aren't the best in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I've found that my job, at times, has been exactly to get rid of some people who weren't good enough and I've always tried to do it in a humane way. Someone has to do it, and it's never fun.

DM: Is this the most difficult and painful part of running a business from your point of view?

SJ: Oh, certainly. It's natural. I was quite harsh at times and many times people didn't want to leave, but I gave them no other choice. If someone wanted to write a book about me, they shouldn't have to seek out my friends, who would never speak ill of me, but should go and interview the few dozen people I've fired in my life who hate my guts. That was the case with that book I skimmed through. I mean, it was sort of “let's throw darts at Steve's face”. That's life. This is the world I chose to live in. If I didn't like him enough I'd run away and I didn't, so I'm willing to put up with it. But of course sometimes I don't find it very truthful.

Apple, an incredible journey

DM: Ok, so this gives me a golden opportunity to ask you to tell us your story. I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask you specifically about your experience at Apple. Looking back on the Apple years, what accomplishments are you most proud of? Are there a couple of Apple stories you like to tell?

SJ: Apple has been a truly incredible journey. I mean, we've done some amazing things. The thing that brought us together at Apple was the ability to do things that would change the world. This was very important. We were all quite young, the average age in the company was between twenty-five and thirty. Hardly anyone had a family to begin with, we all worked like crazy and the greatest joy was that we felt we were shaping collective works of art like XNUMXth century physics did. Something important that would last over time, to which people have contributed. You know, few people can design things like that, but then they could give them to other people, who could, in turn, build for example an automated factory to make other things and give them to more people; the amplification factor is very large.
The Macintosh, for example, was built by a group of less than XNUMX people, yet Apple has sold more than XNUMX million. Of course everyone copied it and now there are hundreds of millions. That's a pretty big amplification factor, a million to one. It's not very often in life that you get the opportunity to magnify your worth a hundred to one, let alone a million to one. This is exactly what we were doing. It was like saying, “Computer use and how it connects to people is really in its infancy. We're in the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a bit."
What is interesting is that if you change the course of a vector, by the time it moves away a few kilometers its course becomes radically different. We were very aware of this fact. From the beginning of Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Our contribution expressed values ​​relating not only to technical excellence and innovation - for which I think they have done our part - but also to innovation of a more humanistic type.
The things I'm most proud of about Apple are those where the technical side and the humanistic side have gone hand in hand, as happened in the publishing world for example. The Macintosh essentially revolutionized publishing and printing. The art of typography combined with technical understanding and excellence to implement it electronically — these two things came together and allowed people to use the computer without having to learn its arcane commands. It was the conjunction of these two things that I am most proud of. It happened with the Apple II and it happened with the Lisa, although there were other problems with the Lisa that resulted in it being a market failure. Then it happened again on a higher level with the Macintosh.

The conjunction between art and technology

DM: You used an interesting word to describe what you were doing. You talked about art, not engineering or science. Tell me about this.

SJ: Oh, certainly. You know, we generally use the word “artist” to refer to visual artists of some sort, but in reality I think there is very little difference between an artist and a scientist or an engineer of the highest level. In my head I never made a distinction between these types of people. For me they have always been people who follow different paths but who are headed towards the same goal, which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them, so that others can benefit from it.

DM: And art lies in the elegance of the solution, like in chess or mathematics?

SJ: No, I think art is about having a vision of what surrounds us. It's usually the ability to connect things together like no one has done before and find a way to bring it to other people, to those who didn't have that idea, so they can benefit from it. I think many of the Macintosh team had this ability and that's exactly what they did. If you analyze the characteristics of those people, you will find that at that particular time, i.e. in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, the best people in the field of computers could have spontaneously been poets, writers, musicians. Almost all were musicians. Many of them were poets. They turned to computers because it was addictive. It was a fresh and new activity. It represented a new means of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and passion that people poured into us are completely indistinguishable from those of a poet or painter. Many people were introspective, introverted, expressing how they felt about other people, or generally about the rest of humanity, through their work, work that would benefit other people. These people have put all their love into these products and have expressed a great deal of their talent. It is hard to explain.

DM: No, it's about passion in the truest sense of the word.

SJ: That's right… and that's becoming less and less true. Unfortunately the computer industry is at a very critical time and these people are leaving the field.

DM: What will they do?

SJ: Well, it's really hard to say. They are not attracted to anything else. They were kicked out of the computer business. They were kicked out because the computer industry is turning into a Microsoft monopoly. Without getting into whether Microsoft got its position legally or not — what does it matter? — as a result, the industry's capacity to innovate is drying up. I think smarter people have already read about this trend and are starting to hang out. And I think some of the smarter young people are wondering if they're ever going to go back. Maybe things will change. It is a rather dark period that we are experiencing or that we are about to experience.

The loss of Apple's uniqueness and the squandering of values

DM: Apple had a reputation for being a game-changing company that set a new path. Looking back from where you are today with NeXT, do you think that as Apple has grown, it could have kept the original approach? Or was it just supposed to become a big computer company like any other?

SJ: This is an interesting question. Apple has grown and maintained that approach. When I left Apple it was a two billion dollar company. We were close to the Fortune 300 position on the Fortune list. We were a billion dollar company when the Mac was introduced; so Apple grew from nothing to two billion dollars while I was there. That's an insane growth rate. It's grown another five times since I left, basically on the wave of the Macintosh. I think what has happened in terms of growth since I left is irrelevant to what it was like when I was still at it. What ruined Apple wasn't growth, what ruined Apple is about values. John Sculley ruined Apple and ruined it by passing on to the top leadership of Apple a set of values ​​that were wrong and ended up corrupting some of the best people, kicking out some who weren't corruptible and bringing in many who were already corrupt, collectively paying them tens of millions of dollars. People who cared more about personal glory and enrichment than what Apple stood for — a company that made great computers for ordinary people to use.
They didn't care about that anymore. They didn't have a clue how to do it and didn't waste time finding out because that wasn't what mattered to them. They only thought about money. They had this wonderful thing like the Macintosh in their hands that was created by really brilliant people. Instead of following the original trajectory, that which was the initial vision - to make the computer a "household appliance" that spreads everywhere - they aimed for profit and, in fact, managed to make huge profits for four years. Apple was one of America's most profitable companies for four years.
What doomed them was the future. What they should have done was to seek reasonable profits and target market share, which was the goal we always tried to pursue. The Macintosh could have gotten a 33 percent market share, maybe even higher, maybe it would have captured the same as Microsoft but we'll never know. Instead it got single-digit market share and is declining. There is no way to make that moment come back. The Macintosh will die in a few years and it's really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue how to create the new Macintosh because no one in any role at Apple was there when the Macintosh was created — or any other Apple product. They have now lived on that one thing for more than a decade. The last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened. So it's quite tragic, but as far as I can detachedly see it, this is what's happening. Unless someone pulls the rabbit out of the hat, companies tend to have long downward trajectories in the computer industry. Apple is sliding down this slope and losing market share every year. Things start to go downhill when you settle below a certain threshold. And when developers no longer write applications for your computer, that's when the downward spiral really begins.

DM: You obviously still have a great emotional attachment to Apple.

SJ: Oh, certainly. I want Apple to live forever, continuing to build great products. Apple was like Sony for a while. It was the place where the most amazing things were done.

The art of Apple

DM: Is there an Apple customer or story to tell that in your mind exemplifies what the company stood for and what its values ​​were at their best? Which customers were using Apple when you were there?

SJ: There were two types of customers. I mean, the clients who, shall we say, had to do with education and then there were those, in a sense, who were less so. As for the latter, Apple was two things. Firstly, it was the first "lifestyle" computer and, secondly, it is difficult to remember how hard it was in the early 1984s, with IBM conquering the PC world, with DOS (a family of operating systems widely used for the IBM compatible computers from the early XNUMXs to the mid XNUMXs, NDT). The IBM pc was much worse than the Apple II. They had tried to copy the Apple II and had done a terrible job. You had to know a lot of things to get it right. Things were going backwards and the Macintosh was… Did you see the XNUMX commercial? I hope you have it in your archives… Macintosh was basically a relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the giant goliath, IBM, and saying:

“Wait a minute, you've gone down the wrong road. This is not the way we want computers to be. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our children to learn. This is wrong and we're going to show you the right way to do it, which is this. It's called Macintosh and it's much better. He will beat you and that's what we will do."

And that's what Apple stood for. This was one of the things. For the other we have to go a little further back in time. One of the things he built into Apple was that schools bought Apple IIs; but there were 10% of schools that had computers in 1979. I can say, once again, that I was lucky to be in Silicon Valley. When I was ten, eleven I saw my first computer. He was at the NASA Research Center in Mountain View. I didn't actually see a computer, but I did see a terminal connected to a computer on the other end of the line. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop at Hewlett-Packard, the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran in BASIC and APL. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, that if there was even one computer in every school, some kids would find it. I thought, someone will find it and change their life.
We have seen at what pace school administrations were deciding to buy a computer for the school. It was really maddening. We realized that a whole generation of kids were finishing school without having their first computer, so we thought kids can't wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. We found that in America there are 100.000 schools, 10.000 high schools and 90.000 elementary and middle schools. We couldn't afford as a company to give it to everyone. But we studied the law, and it turned out that there was already a federal law that said that if you donated scientific equipment or computers to a university for educational or research purposes, you could get an additional tax break. It basically means you don't make any money, you lose some, but not that much. You can lose 10 percent. We thought that if that law was extended to elementary and middle school as well, removing the research requirement to keep only the educational purpose, then we could donate hundreds of thousands of computers, one for every school in America, and it would cost ten million dollars to our company, which was a lot of money for us at the time, but it was less than a hundred million dollars. We decided we were ready to do it.
It was one of the most amazing things I've ever done. We found our local MP, a guy named Pete Stark from the East Bay; Pete sat down with a few of us and we wrote a bill together. We have literally drafted a bill to make the necessary changes. We wrote, "If this law changes we will donate 100.000 computers at a cost of ten million dollars." We called it "Children Can't Wait". Pete Stark introduced it to the House and Senator Danforth introduced it to the Senate. I refused to hire lobbyists and went to Washington myself. I walked up and down the corridors and halls of Congress for two weeks, which was an incredible thing. I've met two-thirds of the House and more than half of the Senate. I sat down and talked to them.
It was really interesting. I found that House members are generally less intelligent than Senate members and are much more concerned with their constituencies — which I initially found quite negative, but later came to understand that it was actually a good thing. Maybe that's what the founding fathers wanted. They didn't have to think too much, they had to represent their constituents. Either way, the bill passed the House with the largest majority in favor of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was—and it happened during Carter's time as a lame duck (the term paralytic Duck “lame duck” in politics indicates the transitional period in which the incumbent president has been defeated and his successor has already been elected. The incumbent president, therefore, exercises only nominal power, being in a transitional phase. In this case the lame duck was Jimmy Carter, who did not get re-election, defeated in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan, NdT) and Bob Dole, who was then Speaker of the House, dropped him. He wasn't going to bring it up again and we were running out of time. We were supposed to restart the process the following year. Then I gave up. I said, "This is nonsense."
However, fortunately, something unexpected happened. California thought it was such a good idea that lawmakers came to us and said:

“You don't have to do anything. We are going to pass a bill that says 'since you operate in the State of California and you pay taxes in California, if there is no federal law you will get the California tax break.' You can do it in California, where there are 10.000 schools."

And so we did. We donated 10.000 computers to the state of California. We had a lot of companies willing to donate software. We trained teachers for free and monitored this over the next few years. It was phenomenal, it was truly phenomenal. One of my biggest experiences but also one of my biggest regrets as I really tried to do this nationally and came so close… I don't even think Bob Dole knew what he was doing but unfortunately he screwed it all up. rolls.

DM: It's a great story.

SJ: This is also part of what Apple was.

DM: Speaking of the business side, I was at the "Washington Post" when the Macintosh was introduced and the "Post" was a laboratory of IBM Big Blue (Big Blue is the informal name of the company, NDT). Nobody seemed interested, then the Macintosh infiltrated. There was almost a guerrilla movement. It all started with advertisers and now the entire newspaper front-end runs on Apple Macintosh computers. Was this type of revolution frequent enough from a commercial point of view?

SJ: We actually had no idea how to sell to American companies, because none of us had come from that experience. I mean, it was like another planet for us. Unfortunately we had to learn. If only I had known what I know today, we would have done much better, but I didn't know those things and I had no one who did. Thus, our attempts to sell to American companies fell through and we ended up selling only to people who bought the product for its value, not the company it came from. I mean, everyone was very attached to Big Blue back then and bought IBM without thinking about it. There was that famous line “you will never get fired for buying IBM”. But fortunately we managed to change this situation. And Apple, as you know, is even today a bigger supplier of personal computers than IBM.

NeXT's mistake

DM: What beautiful stories. Tell me about NeXT… what prompted you to found NeXT and what were the goals you intended to achieve when you started this new company?

SJ: Oh, it's complicated. We basically wanted to keep doing what we were doing at Apple, which is keep innovating. But we didn't understand what was happening and we made a mistake, which was to follow the same formula we used at Apple, i.e. build the entire widget (hardware, software, content). But the market was changing. The industry was changing. The scale was changing. We knew we would be the last company to do it or the first one not to do it again. We were right in the balance. We thought we were the last to do it, but we were wrong. We were the first not to do it anymore. We put a stop to companies that would try to do so. We certainly made our share of mistakes, but in the end I think it could have taken less to realize that the world had changed, and so we became a software company, so off the cuff.

DM: So on the spot? The NeXTCube got great reviews when it came out.

SJ: The car was the best in the world. Believe it or not, they are selling it on the used market, in some cases for more than the official price. They are hard to find even today. We haven't made them for two, two and a half years.

DM: What are the features of the NeXT machine that are still missing in other computers today?

SJ: Well, first of all it was a totally plug and play machine. Except for the Macintosh, it's a hard-to-find feature. It was an extremely powerful machine, far more than the Macintosh. It managed to combine the power of workstations with the ease of use of the Mac well, and it's great. Secondly, the car had a look and finish that was not and is not on the market.

DM: Is fantastic.

SJ: I'm not referring only to aesthetics; I'm also speaking in terms of operation. From simple things to complex things. Simple things like turning it on and off. A trivial thing. As you know one of the most important reasons people lose information on their computers is that they shut them down at the wrong time. And when you're in a multitasking networked system, there could be very serious consequences. So we were the first to come up with such a thing as pressing a button to prompt the computer to shut down. The system figures out what it needs to do to close trades, puts the trades in order, and then gracefully shuts down. Of course the NeXT computer was also the first to have high quality sound, CD quality sound. Many computers now have it, and it's great. It took a long time to make them available. NeXT was ahead of its time.

The lighting of the PARC in 1979

DM: Tell me about NeXT software. What makes it different? What trends does it respond to?

SJ: This is the real gem of the project. I will tell you an interesting story. When I was at Apple, some of my colleagues said to me, "Steve, you really need to go to Xerox PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center) and see what they're doing there." They usually didn't take in many people, but I was able to get in and see their work. I saw their computer, called the Alto, which was a phenomenal computer, and they showed me three things they've been working on since 1976. I saw them in 1979. Things that we took a long time to completely recreate, just with NeXTStep. However, at the time I didn't realize all three of the big innovations they were making at PARC. I only saw one that was so amazing to me that it dazzled me. It blinded me to the other two. It took me years to become aware of the latter, rediscover them and incorporate them back into our model. At PARC they were way ahead. The things they had done weren't exactly perfect, but they contained the germ of the idea of ​​everything that was to come next. And the three things were the graphical interfaces, object oriented software, networking.
Let me explain better. Graphic interface: The Alto had the first graphical interface in the world. It had windows. It had a rudimentary menu system. It had rudimentary control panels and things like that. It didn't work well but basically everything was there. items: they had a language, Smalltalk, which worked well. It really was the first object-oriented programming language. Simula was actually the first, but Smalltalk was the first official object-oriented language. Networking: PARC invented Ethernet, as you know. They had about two hundred Altos connected to a local area network. E-mails and everything else were sent over the network. All of this was in 1979. I was so amazed by the potential of the graphical interface that I didn't stop to fully investigate the other two.

NeXT software, heir to PARC

What is NeXTStep? It's the refinement of PARC's designs, by turning some of those ideas into reality, embodied in the world's first truly commercial object-oriented system. And it really was the most connected system in the world when it came out in 1988 as the operating system of the first NeXTCube. I think the world has made a lot of progress in networking, but it still hasn't gotten over the object hurdle, and that's what happened with NeXTStep. Now they are starting to be used by some very large corporate customers. It is now the most popular object-oriented system in the world, while objects are on the verge of moving into the mainstream. The company reported its first profit in its nine-year history last year, and sold $XNUMX million worth of software. I think we're going to have significant growth this year and it's pretty clear that NeXT can grow to be a few hundred million dollar software company within three to four years and be the largest object-oriented company until Microsoft comes along. on the market at some point, probably, with a nice cobbled together product.

DM: Some say that in the future, object-oriented software will be the only type of software that will be used.

SJ: Of course, that's true. I remember visiting Xerox in 1979. It was one of those apocalyptic moments, an epiphany. I remember seeing the graphical interface and, within ten minutes, realizing that every computer would work that way one day; it was so obvious after seeing it. It did not require a superior intellect. Of course every computer will work this way… It was so clear. The moment you understand the objects, you have exactly the same feeling. All software will be written using object oriented technology. You can argue about how long it will take, who will be the winners and losers, but I don't think a rational person would question its inevitability.

The Internet, the new leap forward

DM: Tell me what you think about the current state and future of the internet and commercial online services and how they are affecting the development of computers.

SJ: The Internet and the World Wide Web, because they have become one, are clearly the most exciting new thing happening in technology. They are thrilling for three or four reasons. Number one, basically computers are turning into a device for communication and ultimately we are developing more and more technologies to make it not only easy to use, but to make communication more fluid. The web is the missing piece of the puzzle that serves to push this vision further and further. It's really thrilling in that sense. Secondly, it is very important because it is going to change many sectors of our economy, making them accessible to very small companies, which can operate on a par with very large ones.
Let me give an example. A small business of three in Phoenix, Arizona may have a web server that looks identical to, if not better than, the one used by IBM or GAP or any other large company. Everyone can access this new distribution channel for free. They don't have to build buildings. They don't have to enlist a thousand distributors and agents to call them with orders etc. In essence, direct distribution from the manufacturer to the customer via the internet, via the web, direct contact, direct transactions and deliveries via UPS or Federal Express — couriers. All of this will cost much less than going through middlemen or building hundreds of stores across the country. It is fundamentally changing the way goods and services are discovered, sold and delivered, not just in this country, but around the world. As we know, electrons travel at the speed of light and therefore tend to bring parts of the world closer together, to put producers and consumers in direct contact. This is really exciting. The leveling of small and large. The leveling of near and far.
The third reason the internet is exciting is that Microsoft doesn't have it and I don't think they will. It's the one thing in the industry that Microsoft will probably never own. I think one of the essential things is that the government continues to look at the Internet as a public good, as a public facility, and to reject all these ridiculous notions of privatization that you hear around. I don't think they will go through, luckily. The Internet costs the US federal government roughly fifty to seventy-five million a year. These are peanuts relative to its value, and even if that cost someday rises to half a billion dollars a year, it would be worth it. That would be an extremely small price to pay to keep it from falling into the hands of any one company and thus the beginning of the destruction and control of innovation that could happen around the Internet. It is the last hope for the computer industry, to see some major innovations happening at a rapid pace. The beautiful thing about it, the novelty, is that the United States is at the forefront of this. This point also affects the entire software industry. It is another example that shows that the United States is at the forefront. These are technologies that should be kept open. They should be kept free.

DM: Sure… what do you think? I mean, the World Wide Web is literally becoming a global phenomenon. Are you optimistic that it can stay free?

SJ: Yes, I'm optimistic, but before saying too quickly that it is global, it must be estimated that over a third of all internet traffic in the world originates from or arrives in California. So I really think it's a typical case where California is again at the forefront of not only technological change, but also cultural change. I really expect the web to become a worldwide phenomenon, fairly distributed on a large scale. But now I think it's an American phenomenon that's gearing up to be global, and it's still very concentrated in certain areas, like California.

Pixar, from technology to content

DM: 85% of all traffic comes from California. But the expansive potential is there and you're quite optimistic. Now tell me about Pixar.

SJ: Pixar is really interesting. I have dealt with some exceptional people. Again a friend told me to drop by these lunatics in San Rafael (California) who worked at Lucasfilm. George Lucas, who produced the trilogy of Star Wars, he was a smart guy, and at some point, after making a lot of money from these movies, he realized that he should create a technology group. There were a lot of problems to solve. I'll cite one for example. When you copy an analog audio recording, such as one cassette onto another, you introduce noise, hiss. If you make a second generation copy, the situation gets worse and so on, exponentially. The same thing can be said of analog optical copies. If you take a piece of film and make an optical copy, you will find noise, in this case optical noise, which is perceived as blurring, along with other types of imperfections due to the reproduction medium.
Here, George to do Star Wars he had to piece together up to thirteen portions of film for each frame. The backgrounds were on a separate film, the live action the same, some special effects shot separately. Every time he had to make a copy to fit these pieces together and then add a third and then a fourth, he introduced noise with each new replica. If you buy a laserdisc of any of the movies from Star Wars, and you stop it on some frames, you see they are really dirty. Incredibly disturbed, really bad quality. George, the perfectionist that he is, figured out how to solve this problem. He said, "I'd like to do it perfectly, I'll do it digitally." No one had ever done this before. He took some really smart people and they figured out how they could do it digitally without introducing noise. They developed software and built dedicated hardware. George at one point realized that this was costing him several million dollars a year and decided he couldn't support it, so I bought this group from George Lucas, registered it as Pixar, and we began to revolutionize high-end computer graphics. high. If you look at the ten most important revolutions in high-end graphics over the past decade, eight of them have come from Pixar. All the software part that was used to do Terminator, for example — to construct the images projected on the screen — or Jurassic Park  with all the dinosaurs, it came from Pixar. Industrial Light & Magic uses Pixar software as the basis for all of its productions.
But Pixar had another vision that went beyond special effects. Pixar's idea was to tell stories. That is, to make real films. Our vision was to make the world's first animated feature film — completely computer-generated: sets, characters, everything. After ten years we have done exactly that. We have developed tools, all proprietary, to do this, to manage the production of an animated film, such as drawing, computer aided drawing. We're finishing up shooting the world's first computer-animated feature film. Pixar wrote, directed and is producing it. The Walt Disney Corporation is distributing it and will be released as a Walt Disney Christmas gift this year. It will be released on November 11, I believe, and its title is Toy Story. It will be heard a lot because I think it will be the most successful film of this year.

DM: Fantastic.

SJ: It's phenomenal. Tom Hanks is the voice of the protagonist. Tim Allen of the other protagonist. Randy Newman is composing the music. It's just phenomenal.

DM: We have a couple more questions and then I'd like to give you the chance to say whatever else you want to say.

SJ: Going back to Pixar for a moment… There is a lot of expectation regarding the convergence between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. They call it “Silywood” I think. Pixar will truly be the world's first digital studio. It really combines art and technology together. Again just great. Pixar has by far the most talent in the world in computer graphics and now also has the greatest talent in art and animation for film. We have the largest group of animators in the world outside of Disney and we think they are the people with the best skills to work side by side with the developers, the best graphic designers in the world. There really isn't anyone else in the world that can do this stuff. It's truly phenomenal. We are probably almost ten years ahead of everyone else.

Start-ups and young people

DM: It's really exciting. The question I wanted to ask you - and you've already partially answered it - concerns start-up companies. I look around, I examine your information materials, and I see that you have alliances everywhere. You are allied with Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Oracle and Digital and all system integrators. Communications companies and information technology companies are merging, becoming one. Do you think it will ever be possible for a start-up to develop into a large company through applications and software? Will there ever be another startup to become a large company?

SJ: I think there will be. Sometimes, out of desperation, one might say no, but I think so. And the reason is not only that technology continues to advance and create opportunities, but the thing that makes it possible is that the human mind develops invariable ways of looking at the world, it always has been and probably always will be. I have always felt death as life's greatest invention. I am sure that life could not have evolved without death. Without death, life didn't work all that well because there was no way to make room for the new. The new one who didn't know what the world was like fifty years ago, didn't even know what the world was like twenty years ago. He saw it as it was at that moment, without any preconceptions, and he dreamed of changing it. If we are not satisfied with what has been achieved in the last thirty years because the current situation has not lived up to the ideals, well, it is possible to take action to change it. Without death there would be very little progress.
One of the things that happens in organizations, as well as in people, is that they establish fixed parameters of relationship with the world and are satisfied when they have achieved them, while the world changes and continues to evolve beyond them. A new potential arises, but these subjects anchored in certain patterns do not see it. This is what gives the biggest advantage to start up companies. The status quo is what most large companies seek. What's more, large companies usually don't have efficient communication pathways from the people closest to the changes, i.e., the bottom of the company, to the top of the company, where the big decisions are made. There may be people at the lower levels of the company who see these changes taking place, but before the input reaches the higher levels, those who can do something about it, sometimes ten years go by. Even if a company does the right thing at the lower levels, the upper levels usually screw it up. I mean, IBM and the personal computer business is a good example of that. I think that until we can solve this tendency of human nature to get used to one's worldview, there will always be room for new businesses, for young people, to innovate. As it should be.

Innovation spaces for young people

DM: And that would have been my final question before giving you the opportunity to go on your own by free association. That is, talk to young people who see you as a role model. Do you think opportunities for innovation are still possible? What are the success factors for young people today? What pitfalls should they avoid?

SJ: I've been asked many times and I have a pretty standard answer… A lot of people come to me and say, “I want to be an entrepreneur”. And I'm like, "Oh great, what's your idea?" And they say, "I don't have one yet." And I say, "I think you should get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because being an entrepreneur is a lot of work." I am convinced that what separates a good entrepreneur from a bad one is sheer perseverance. It's so hard to carry on. You put so much of your life into this endeavor. There are moments so difficult that most people end up giving up. I don't blame them. It's really hard and it consumes your life. If you have a family and you are at the beginning of your business, I don't imagine how it is possible to continue. I'm sure someone has done it, but it's tough. It's basically an eighteen-hour job, seven days a week. So unless you have a great passion for what you do, you won't be able to survive. You will end up giving up. For that you have to have an idea, or a motivation, something you're passionate about, something that's wrong and you want to fix it, otherwise you won't be able to have the perseverance to resist. I think half the battle is that.

The power

DM: Your words make me think of another aspect of the matter. You talk about the passion part. What would you say… well, there's passion, but there's also power. What would you say about the responsibilities of power, once you've achieved a certain degree of success?

SJ: Candies? What is that?

DM: It takes passion to build companies like Apple, IBM or any other major company. But once you've taken the passion to that level and built a company and you're in a position like Bill Gates at Microsoft or anyone else, yourself, what are the responsibilities of those who have achieved success and have power? economic, social, power over people? I mean, you changed the world. Do you have enormous power?

SJ: This question can be taken on many levels. Obviously if you run a business you have responsibilities, but as an individual I don't think you have responsibilities. I don't think people have special responsibilities simply because they have done something that other people like or dislike. I think the work speaks for itself. I think people can choose to do whatever they want, but we'll all be dead soon, that's my point of view. Someone once told me: "Live each day as if it were the last day of your life and that day you will certainly be right". I do it. You never know when you'll be gone, but you will be gone soon. If you leave something behind, it will be your children, some friends, work. This is what I worry about. I don't tend to think about responsibility. Actually, sometimes I like to pretend I have no responsibilities. I try to remember the last day when I had nothing to do and I had nothing to do the next day, and I had no responsibilities. That was decades ago. Therefore, I have to pretend when I want to feel this way. I don't think in those terms. I think you have a responsibility to make really good things and produce them, to get people to use them, and to allow them to build on what you've done and so keep making better and better things.

DM: So the responsibility lies with yourself and your standards.

SJ: Well, in our work, one person alone can't do anything. You have to create a team of people around you, so we have a responsibility for the integrity of that team. Everyone tries to do the best job possible.

Why California?

DM: Any final comments or thoughts for the record or off the record?

SJ: No, nobody actually. Time is an interesting thing when people look back. I think a hundred years from now, when people look back on this period, they will see it as an extraordinary time in history. And above all to this piece of land, whether you like it or not. When you think of the innovations that have sprung from this area, Silicon Valley and the entire San Francisco and Berkeley bay area, the invention of the integrated circuit, the invention of the microprocessor, the invention of memory RAM, the invention of the modern hard disk, the invention of the floppy disk, the invention of the personal computer, the invention of genetic engineering, the invention of object-oriented technology, the invention of graphical user interfaces at PARC , followed by Apple, the invention of networking. It all happened on this strip of land in the bay. It's incredible.

DM: Why do you think it happened right here?

SJ: Uh… for two or three reasons this is a noteworthy place. Actually, you have to go back a bit in history. I mean, this is where the beatnik phenomenon took hold, in San Francisco. It's a pretty cool thing. This is where the hippie movement developed. This is the only place in America where rock & roll really caught on. Right? Most of the bands in this country, Bob Dylan in the sixties, I mean, they all came out of here. I think Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead. They all came out of here, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, everybody. Why? It's kind of weird when you think about it… And then we also had Stanford and Berkeley, two amazing universities that attracted smart people from all over the world, introducing them to this nice, clean, sunny place where there are loads of other smart people and some decent food. There are also loads of drugs and loads of fun things to do. So they stayed. There is so much human capital that has poured in here. Really smart people. People seem brighter here than in the rest of the country. And he seems more open-minded than the rest of the country. I just think it's a very unique place, and it has a tradition to prove it and it tends to attract more and more people. I give a lot of credit to universities, probably most of the credit goes to Stanford and Berkeley, University of California.

DM: Well, you don't know how much we appreciate all of this…

SJ: Sure, I hope it was helpful.

Hope it was helpful?