21 ms·
Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing
- owyn 16y agoPretty cool. Originally published in Feb 1996 for those who are curious (like I was).
- cubicle67 16y agoI got to the bit where he said he was 40, then googled his birthdate (1955) to arrive at 1995
- Clarity1992 16y agoThanks, I realised it was old, but didn't bothering figuring out the date. Personally I would like it if people put the publication year in the title when posting articles such as this.
- zalew 16y agoOfftopic: Please, stop this linking to print version nonsense. Discussion about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966724 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966724 Original: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html Issue 4.02 | Feb 1996
- jmtame 16y agothe original story was split out into 8 pages and is bombarded with ads, i guess i can see why the print version was linked instead
- wyclif 16y agoI agree. There is no reason to spread a simple interview over 8 pages so that Wired can get additional ad impressions, and I upvoted the parent because I hate that crap.
- tzs 16y agoThe regular version is much more readable, since it sets the column size reasonably. The print version fits to the window size. Furthermore, for those who prefer the print version, it is a single click away from the regular version. On the other hand, there is no link on the print version to go to the regular version. This alone is sufficient to make the regular version the correct version to link to.
- zalew 16y agoYeah, and this particular '96 html is so bad that the print version is all bold and unreadable after using Readability while the original looks quite good (only the first page is bold) btw I guess I got downvoted for encouraging linking to the original, who'd know.
- _delirium 16y ago> The regular version is much more readable, since it sets the column size reasonably. Perhaps if you're really good at ignoring peripheral distractions, but for me, I'd rather have the column be too wide than the column be narrow and a flashing GIF in the margin!
- barrkel 16y agoUse Readability.
- srgseg 16y agoTo be fair - the only way to have known that this was published Feb 1996 would have been to have had the regular link.
- nailer 16y agoYes, the site and magazine use ads for funding. What's your point?
- meadhikari 16y agoWhy are you so Interested in we all going through the 8 pages of advertisement.
- ugh 16y agoWhy was this comment downvoted? Besides linking to it being on shaky moral ground, the print version misses in this case a very critical piece of information, the date this story was published. There is also no way of going from the print version to the normal version, the reverse, however, is easily possible. It’s just not nice to link to the print version.
- kragen 16y agoIt didn't occur to me that some HN readers might not know that Wired 4.02 was published in about 1996, but you could be right. Linking, however, is not on shaky moral ground. If Wired didn't want the print version to be linked to, they wouldn't put it on the web.
- sayemm 16y agoThanks for including the original Wired link there. And my apologies guys, I usually include the date of the article on the title if it's something old and link to the original publication on my HN submissions. I came across the link on Quora out of all places, skimmed it very quickly on a late-Friday night, and submitted it w/ no thought to seeing it get upvoted several times. Regardless, I'm glad we're getting a good discussion here on the interview; glad you guys find it interesting.
- ivanzhao 16y agoHow funny the Web and Steve's "objects" has become one thing eventually (mashups/infrastructure-SAS/APIs)
- Fjslfj 16y agoJobs was entirely wrong about the web, and continues to be. WebObject's big-company focus ($50,000 for a license) is precisely why it is now dead. Meanwhile Personal HomePage script (now known as PHP) powers the world's largest website -- the little guy's tools won.
- lr 16y agoWebObjects, dead? Can you please define "dead"? WebObjects powers the iTunes store. I think it is doing just fine generating billions of dollars/year for Apple.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jfb 16y agoI question the asserted numbers. It is a dead technology.
- rimantas 16y agoSo it's the dead technology that powrers #1 music seller in US?
- cubicle67 16y agoI think he means dead as a commercial product, not dead as in no longer used
- vetinari 16y agoYes. There are thousands people in the world speaking Latin, but it is still dead language.
- jfb 16y agoI think I can safely say that I know more about the usage of WebObjects within Apple than (probably) every other poster here, and my knowledge in this area leads to me to one inescapable conclusion: it's a dead technology. HINT: My last job was writing WebObjects software for the aforementioned music store.
- taphangum 16y agoThis was particularly interesting: "Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."
- sudont 16y agoThose diverse experiences are exactly the purpose of a “liberal arts education,” something that’s derided here as bad job training. A degree in Shakespeare won’t help with cache invalidation, but it’ll sure spice up the naming.
- mullr 16y agoHa! One out of two isn't bad.
- tel 16y agoI think of the underlying faults with that point of view on liberal arts education, one stands above all others. As holder of an engineering bachelors, I'll anecdotally attest to the widely known problem that Undergraduate engineering degrees actively discourage building communication skills. This above all else is the heart of that linear thinking problem. Many graduating engineers in the US are communication challenged. They can't perform a principled arguments, write evocatively, perform convincing. They lack the skills to perform critical analysis of other communication, any sort of eye for subtlety, and flat out lack the appreciation of good writing. It's often explained away as if there is this single choice people make when they're young that they'll either be good at math/science or literature/history. Once you've made that choice, you're stuck socially, psychologically, practically. But that's okay, goes the argument, specialization is necessary and everybody is one-sided, really. So despite wide knowledge of this problem, schools combat it by deliberately watered-down english classes designed to not damage engineering GPAs. My alma mater required two english classes, both of which I got near perfect grades in by skipping class and writing half-minded, fantastical leaps of literary analysis on books I'd skimmed. I got perfect scores and remarks like "This is the best paper I've ever read". Literally. It also required a single semester "technical communication" course where we were introduced to business letter etiquette and the definition of genre. As a firm believer that writing something down is the fastest, most powerful method to clarifying your thoughts, I find it despicable that engineering colleges don't provide these challenges. I find it corrosive that the dominant societal perspective is that it's ok if you can't write because you're an engineer. I think this directly leads to the sort of creativity rot I saw, all the time, in classmates. My experiences may be anecdotal and localized to my college, which is one of the top engineering colleges in the US. I hope it is, and that this disgust is misdirected, but really I think it's larger than that. --- tl;dr? I'm completely convinced that a dreadful number of engineers are missing something central to anyone who wants to deal in complex ideas entirely because it's considered a liberal arts speciality. They're weak at techniques to critically and clearly articulate or analyze ideas aloud or in writing, the art and science of human communication. (I'll also note that so far a huge part of the advice of how to survive graduate school is learning to write. People tell me it with the look in their eyes that says they've seen so many people fail miserably because of this sudden, new expectation. I'm know my writing needs a lot of improvement, but I know that of many of the people in my graduating class, many would require a near complete literary reversal before they could actually publish.) </rant> (Edit: made it more clear that I'm not arguing with what sudont said. Written communication is hard.)
- grammr 16y ago"Jobs's fundamental insight - that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks - was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances." It's interesting that common sense becomes "prophecy" when you're Steve Jobs.
- blader 16y agoIt's more that prophecies tend to become common sense 25 years in the future (Jobs first spoke of this in the early 80s).
- ecuzzillo 16y agoAlso, more humorously, "said this" becomes "spoke of this" when you're talking about Steve.
- grammr 16y agoI'd like to say that it still wasn't all that prophetic back then, but I was only a wee lad and don't seem remember much of the early 80's...
- nikster 16y agoI'd argue that saying something today that will be common sense 25 years in the future is the very definition of prophetic. None of this was common sense back then, that's for sure. I got my first email account in 1995.
- _delirium 16y agoI'm not sure it was so common as to be common sense, but it was a reasonably common prediction among tech people. The slogan "the network is the computer" was coined at Sun in 1984!
- WalterBright 16y agoIt was common sense in 1977, when the people I worked with were connecting their computers together.
- jfb 16y agoWeb Objects: yesterday's technology, tomorrow!
- maguay 16y agoJobs: "The desktop computer industry is dead." And here we are, nearly 15 years later, with this statement seeming truer than ever, in part thanks to Jobs' iOS devices.
- maguay 16y agoIn case I was mistaken, I meant that as both a compliment to Jobs and as a reminder of how incredibly hard it is to know when something's truly dead or non-relevant.
- crander 16y agoI view it as a compliment to Jobs as a visionary. From a business perspective, the desktop industry was still to peak and then shifted to a luggable version of the same ecosystem with laptops.
- adammichaelc 16y agoThough Web Objects didn't take off, I think the idea behind them did. We just call it SaaS. In SaaS products, instead of building the same core ingredient over and over again for multiple companies, it is built once and then made available via the web to anybody who wants to use it. That's what ViaWeb was, it's what WePay is, it's what Salesforce is -- it's what the web has become. You need software to do something, you Google it, you find a web-app and you start using it. Done. Web Objects, Web Apps, tomato, tomatoe.
- danilocampos 16y agoAlways thought he was seeing OOP in general, which, of course, took off in a huge way, even if Web Objects didn't. (NeXTStep was hugely OOP, as were OS X and iOS later, of course.)
- Estragon 16y agoOOP was pretty big by the time of the interview, so what he says doesn't make sense, if he's talking about OOP in general.
- encoderer 16y agoNah, he was definitely talking about OOP I feel. I mean, specifically, he was pimping his product that he was launching, NeXT WebObjects which was just an application server for OO apps. In 1996 most software was being developed in, hmm, C, C++, and Visual Basic 5. Java was just launching. Most web stuff was Perl or old fashioned C. VBScript (Classic ASP) was being developed.
- stcredzero 16y agoOne of the things that happened after Steve's infamous Xerox PARC visit, was that he saw Smalltalk, thought it was massively cool and declared that to be the way everyone should program. When he went on to found NeXT, they were pushing Objective-C, which is Smalltalk style message passing layered on top of C. (Trying to get the best of both worlds, though the combination is a bit awkward to me.)
- bsergean 16y agoI'm horrified about the part on education, but it's probably because I'm not too close to the libertarians ideas.
- nikster 16y agoI love Jobs' endorsement of Miele washing machines. Where I grew up in Austria all everyone had was Miele. They were ridiculously expensive. Their slogan was "reliability for many years" which was an understatement as they actually ran for 20 or 30 years no problem. Also him discussing the new washing machine with his family for 2 weeks! Fascinating. I don't think many Billionaires would do that.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 16y agoMy Miele never worked right, the plumber couldn't fix it. Finally I had it ripped out and replaced with a Maytag.
- LaPingvino 16y agoJust had called the Miele service themselves: they offer a 10 years guarantee plan.
- anamax 16y ago> Their slogan was "reliability for many years" which was an understatement as they actually ran for 20 or 30 years no problem. You say that like it's something odd or distinctive. My family has gotten that kind of lifetime out of bargain-price "American" washing machines. The only exceptions have involved operator error and "but I want a new one NOW,I've waited long enough for it to die".
- 0x0 16y agoIs this quote a case of iPad foreshadowing? :) "On the client side, there's the browser software. In the sense of making money, it doesn't look like anybody is going to win on the browser software side, because it's going to be free. And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware."
- hedgehog 16y agoI think these old articles provide valuable perspective. There's an interesting book from 1998 analyzing Apple's fall up to that point: http://amazon.com/dp/0887309658 http://amazon.com/dp/0887309658 I'm partway through and so far it's good. The detailed analysis untainted by the company's current success is quite interesting. At that point Jobs had come back to be involved in the company but not yet officially taken over as CEO (publicly he said he wasn't up for it).
- rasur 16y agoFrom the mouth of Steve: "And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place." Riiight, Steve. "App-Store" as Democracy.
- jason_tko 16y agoIt's still a 'democracy' in the way you're describing it. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet.
- rasur 16y agoI do!
- dirtyaura 16y agoOn the other hand, AppStore has brilliantly fulfilled another vision mentioned in the article: removing a lot of middlemen and thus making hierarchies flatter. If you worked either in the mobile business or game business, AppStore is indie paradise compared to times before it.
- cubicle67 16y agoI was most taken by his ideas on education. The voucher system will never happen, of course, which is a shame. I also love the idea of small school springing up all over the place (I'm not a huge fan of the current education system, and I'd love to see it disrupted) as for trying to teach computing in schools, well that's long been rant material of mine (ask anyone who's been unfortunate enough to mention to me how pleased they are that their school's spending money on a room full of new computers), so don't get me started...
- spydum 16y agoInterestingly enough, many states attempted voucher programs, not to the extent Jobs suggested though. It did spur school upstarts. I know Florida had a Pre-K voucher program, and as a result, Pre-K schools popped up all around. This was sometime in 2006-2008. I'm not sure if they discontinued the program or not, but education levels were on par with public schools, with a per-child cost of about half.
- arturadib 16y agoHe was right about the "idea" of objects on the web, that is, stuff that can be simply plugged and reused here and there. We call those APIs today.
- stcredzero 16y agoPrediction: Apple is going to move away from the notion of Hard Disks for their consumer-oriented mobile devices. The Flash chips in SSDs are already somewhat like dynamic RAM, though not quite as fast and with some extra requirements and limitations. One could easily give the illusion of a laptop with 256 Gigabytes of orthogonally persistent RAM by using 8 Gigs or so of dynamic RAM as a cache into Flash RAM. No need for any notion of a separate persistent store like a Hard Drive. No need to even boot up! Laptops would only have "hibernate" and "sleep". (You'd need ECC, wear leveling, and ways of transparently "retiring" sections of Flash RAM that go bad.) Go one step further, and use the cloud as a backing store with an always-on mobile broadband connection. The 256 Gigabytes of Flash RAM would act as a local cache to cloud storage.
- guywithabike 16y agoIt's not a "prediction" if they've already started doing it, dude(tte). Prediction: Apple will do away with optical drives. Prediction: Apple will bring iOS features into MacOS X. Prediction: Apple will make their laptops smaller and slimmer. Prediction: Apple will do away with floppy drives.
- stcredzero 16y agoWhat do you mean "already started doing it?" Please point out the OS X or iOS device whose kernel has no notion of a "Hard Disk" or something like it. With what I'm talking about, the kernel would see nothing but RAM. As far as I can see, they just started doing away with the case of the hard drive mechanism in their laptops. As far as even their iOS devices go, they still have a notion of a separate persistent store with high latency characteristics completely separate from a non-persistent RAM. What I'm talking about doing is making dynamic RAM, Flash RAM, and the cloud all just a part of the memory hierarchy with orthogonal persistence. This is going to entail a lot of engineering which isn't yet in evidence in any of their current products. Such devices would never have to boot-up! I'm not sure such devices would be capable of being booted up. They'd also need more sophisticated error correction than current devices have. (Current devices can just correct the rare memory corruption event by being rebooted.)
- cmurphycode 16y agoFascinating. I find it particularly interesting that Jobs, since moving back to Apple, has done nothing interesting with the Web, but so much with the desktop and hardware. Sure, iTunes delivers music over the Internet, but it is not a web application. On the other hand, he did create the iPad: "And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware."