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Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

253 points by o0-0o 12y ago

ddebernardy 12y ago
Quite prescient: > 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.
- increment_i 12y ago
  Even though it sounded hyperbolic at the time, I doubt even Jobs himself realized this was actually an understatement.
- joshvm 12y ago
  He even alludes to smartphones: > Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    That's so generic it could simply refer to laptops and not smartphones or tablets. Btw I don't know why people think Smartphones are so innovative, they simply are evolved versions of PDAs that we started to have already in the 90s. The "future" was already out there for a long time, it just took many steps to reach an optimal form.
  - TorKlingberg 12y ago
    I think "telephone" here referred mainly to landlines. Mobile phones were rare in 1985, and completely analog.
- tomasien 12y ago
  Just realized I double posted this - awesome quote for 1985
- tdicola 12y ago
  Is it really that prescient? By 1985 there were lots of BBSes you could dial into and connect with people from across the nation. In fact what would become America Online was just starting out as a BBS. The internet was available at most colleges, and tools like email and usenet were in full use. I think his statement is like someone right now saying electric cars will be a huge thing in the future.
  - ihnorton 12y ago
    On the other hand, how long did it take Microsoft to figure that out - remember the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack? edit: note, Windows 95 originally didn't have a TCP/IP stack! The point is, plenty of smart people missed this boat for years, and I don't think it was at all obvious in 1985 that getting on a network would be the driving use case for widespread computer adoption by "non-techie" people.
    - jchimney 12y ago
      trumpet winsock and hours of troubleshooting different configs :) irq settings etc
    - tonyedgecombe 12y ago
      It did have a tcp/ip stack but it wasn't installed by default, it was one of the optional extras. What it didn't have was a web browser, you needed the plus pack for that.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > On the other hand, how long did it take Microsoft to figure that out - remember the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack? Having a good TCP/IP stack core isn't about figuring out that plugging into a national computer network is one of the key values of a computer, its about knowing which national network will be the key one (and, more specifically, which technology stack that one will be built on.) The web -- the bit that made the Internet win that battle as the consumer-facing network that would matter -- was fairly new when Windows 95 was released and hadn't even been invented when work on Windows 95 began. At that time, dialup, largely-text mode offerings that didn't rely on a TCP/IP stack not only dominated local BBS's (some of which were part of national interBBS networks), but also represented some of the biggest (inter)national consumer-facing services to which computer users were likely to connect (like CompuServe, which had already secured leadership in that space when Jobs gave his 1985 interview.) > The point is, plenty of smart people missed this boat for years, and I don't think it was at all obvious in 1985 that getting on a network would be the driving use case for widespread computer adoption by "non-techie" people. It was widely accepted. Its true that in 1985 it wasn't at all obvious that the Internet or any specifically TCP/IP-based network would be the specific network, the recognition that connecting to a large-scale network was a compelling feature and likely to become the most compelling feature was widespread in 1985.
ulyssesgrant 12y ago
Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect: "Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. 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."
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion - even if it is the landing page approach. I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?
  - cromulent 12y ago
    Different stages in the market maturity. If you are inside the PC revolution and you have a chance to define where it is going, then who knows better than you?
  - hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
    > So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac? Okay, it may help indicate there is an opportunity, but this is the easy part, anyone can do that. It does nothing to indicate how to fulfill that opportunity, it's not the client's job to give a blueprint, and that's the hard part. Imagine starting a restaurant business by asking people on the street what they like or what they think you should have on the menu... let's just say it's not going to star on Michelin. > I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach? There's a quote often attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I can think of plenty of prior successes that I doubt having started with a survey.
jordhy 12y ago
In this interview, Jobs' obssesion with fighting IBM is quite present. A decade later, the obsession was to defeat Microsoft, or at least to gain substantial market share from them. It's quite funny that Apple became the most valuable company in the planet when they let go of this obsession and instead focused on beating the old Apple.
- utopkara 12y ago
  It is a great observation. I wonder if it is true though. We have seen Apple obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were rising this time.
  - mehrdada 12y ago
    > We have seen Apple obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were rising this time How so? I'm actually surprised how little they seem to have reacted to the competitive pressure of Android than pursuing their agenda at their own pace.
    - jordhy 12y ago
      Remember the phrase "I'll go thermonuclear on Google" by S. Jobs.
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asimov42 12y ago
Loved the simple, straightforward language used at the time. Currently even mainstream news sites are are just dripping with way too many marketing terms that don't really mean anything anymore.
- Rambunctious 12y ago
  Liked how the interviewer was posing tough questions around the failures of previous product launches and around any resentment towards folks who had deemed him incapable of running the Lisa division. Didn't seem like the interviewer was sitting inside the distortion field. Having said that, I must also say that Jobs fielded the questions rather well.
joshmlewis 12y ago
> Playboy: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith? I'm sure a lot of people were and still are asking that about Tesla. His response is basically he doesn't know how the future will respond to the computer but he knows it will definitely change the world and before long it won't be an act of faith.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Only the Tesla won't change the world. It's just an electric car.
  - boomlinde 12y ago
    The Macintosh was just a computer.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      A computer is a general purpose machine, with capabilities for business, clerical work, arts (graphics, multimedia etc), entertainment (games, web tv, media distrubution) and of course communications. A car, by now, is just a car. It's 2014, they are a known quantity, and the big change they were to bring, they have brought already. Plus the key in the era of Mac and IBM PC was that the personal computer was just beginning and exploding from only nerds and large enterprises to billions of people. The personal computer was something genuinely new and disruptive for all kinds of markets, business processes and personal life. An electric car is just an incremental innovation on the car everybody already has. Now, if it was a flying car, or a self driving car, that would have been more impressive in its possibility for change, but still nothing like a computer in the pre-mass computer era.
      - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
        Their cars definitely won't change the world. The one area they're working on that might change the world is battery technology.
urs2102 12y ago
> Jobs: I think that the scale of the business has gotten large enough so that it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch anything new. Playboy: No more billion-dollar companies hatched in garages? Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. It’s the only way we can compete with them. If we go fast enough, they can’t keep up. I'm not sure I agree, but what kind of hardware company do you guys think could ever reach a near Apple level? I feel that perhaps something in robotics, but was curious what you all thought...
- hobolord 12y ago
  perhaps something to do with energy
- morbius 12y ago
  CoreOS was hatched in a garage. But I don't see them getting Apple-level anytime soon.
  - urs2102 12y ago
    Why do you think CoreOS? A lot of the suggestions above make sense - I was just curious what your thoughts were on CoreOS?
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    They were building physical computers manually, not forking an established OS.
- ivanca 12y ago
  Tesla. But yeah, your definition of "Hardware" may vary.
  - npinguy 12y ago
    Tesla was launched with the investment and vision of a man who's already made billions in the industry, not some teenagers with an idea and a garage.
edlebert 12y ago
All these things show that it really is coming down to just Apple and IBM. If for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.
treblig 12y ago
Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985: "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."
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  Pff that will never take off http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
  - mpweiher 12y ago
    Wonderful link! "...no online database will replace your daily newspaper..." "Newsweek now back in print!"
  - deleted 12y ago
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- dsrguru 12y ago
  You beat me to posting this. He was as right as Asimov in 1964 about landing unmanned rovers on Mars by 2014 but still no people, and he was as right as Paul Graham was in 2001 about software moving to the server and clients moving to pocket computers that might be called cell phones by historical accident [1]. Predictions might be fun to boast about in hindsight or to demonstrate through entrepreneurship, but reading documented quotes that were just this spot on is really cool. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html "With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones."
ekianjo 12y ago
> Jobs: my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening. I'm very glad that IBM and its compatible equivalents won the market, we would certainly be in much Darker Ages should Apple have won the desktop war, with their close-minded view on the world and its strict control on contents, peripherals and whatever gravitates around the Brand.
- mpweiher 12y ago
  Hmm...the prediction came through fairly precisely.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    The PC has been a haven for innovation on the desktop, in case you failed to notice. Hardware wise the PC surpassed the Macs in power and price in no time. Precisely because it was an open platform.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Not quite. IBM paved the way for Compaq, which in turn led to an explosion of computer brands all around the same Industry Standard Architecture. Apple first bet on the 68K line, then moved to IBM (the Power series CPU), then finally joined that 'closed' culture with the advent of the second generation iMac. Each of those machines was as closed as they could make them without welding them shut (and your present day iMac is no exception to this, it doesn't have to be designed in such a way that it is hard to open).
- pedalpete 12y ago
  I think the "Dark Ages" of the desktop was inconsequential due to adoption of the internet.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    All platforms were not necessarily equal when the Internet/WWW came around. The browsers eventually came to be multi-platform and support standards but it took a very long time to move away from platform specific software. Look at the legacy created by IE, for example.
enraged_camel 12y ago
>>[The telegraph] was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. It occurs to me that programming languages are like the telegraph: you can do amazing things with them, but at the end of the day they require someone to learn a "whole sequence of strange incantations," and the majority of people will never learn how to use them. I wonder who will invent the "telephone" for computers -- which would, in this case, allow ordinary people to create software with languages they already know how to use (speak). I know it sounds far-fetched given how computers work, but I'm sure the telephone also sounded far-fetched to telegraph operators at the time.
- judk 12y ago
  Cordata / Google Now / Siri People just gesture at the terminal, and the software interprets it.
  - EarthLaunch 12y ago
    > "For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. [...] Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again." -Hitchhiker's Guide (1979?)
flyrain 12y ago
He is right. The IT revolution has dwarf the petrochemical revolution.
ekianjo 12y ago
> Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. Always like to see how pretentious Jobs has always been, thinking he was the only source of innovation in the whole world. He has been proven wrong many times.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  But the strategy was right, the image of Apple as innovator still stands strong in consumers' minds, despite obvious incorrectness.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    Perception bias. The strategy has failed for 20 years before it took hold on the mobile computer market (Smartphones / Tablets). So when do you decide that a strategy was right? Only when the tides turn around, ignoring the rest of time when the water was low?
    - bennyg 12y ago
      Brand == Perception. You can't argue that their brand is based off the perception of grand innovation. Take a look at every Apple keynote ever.
jobebob 12y ago
> "The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer." Looks like the iPhone was in his mind for a long time.
- mpweiher 12y ago
  That's mostly just Alan Kay's Dynabook from 1968 IIRC. And the networking and laser printers etc. were the "Interim Dynabooks" aka Altos + networked laser printers (Ethernet) he saw at PARC.
cnp 12y ago
Wow: quite easily one of the Great Interviews of our time, hands down.
TaoloModisi 12y ago
Jobs: I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [laughs] Playboy: You can laugh about it? Jobs: I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. I believe that Jobs laughed because- the value of starting or investing in a business is in making meaning first; by making meaning you are looking to change the world. Starting or investing in a business on the sole purpose of making money, means that if you don't make money, you’ll quickly lose interest and on top of that you’ll be left with a meaningless company that doesn’t change the world.
CmonDev 12y ago
"If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives." - was certainly reconsidered :). But funnily Gates fulfilled it.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Gates became the liberal do-gooder that Jobs initially sold himself as with his Eastern philosophy and anti-materialist pretensions. Jobs died cursing Google while building a super-yacht he never got to use. Incredible how things ended up. No one saw this coming, I think.
mironathetin 12y ago
Playboy interviews used to be great! There was no limit in length or content. The interviewer was allowed to ask whatever he wanted. If you get a Playboy from the 60s or the 70s, the interviews fill 20 pages and more. No pics, only text. Unimaginable nowadays in a printed product. I bought some old Playboys because of this (Castro, Connery, Dylan etc.) There are also books with the interviews only [the directors (Clint Eastwood, Billy Wilder, Orson Wells etc.), larger than life etc.]. Great reads.
- zeroxfe 12y ago
  > I bought some old Playboys because of this (Castro, Connery, Dylan etc.) me too
- wonderyak 12y ago
  'I only read it for the interviews/articles' used to be a legitimate reason and not a joke for covering up buying a magazine with boobs in it.
  - mironathetin 12y ago
    I was waiting for this comment :o). Indeed, the interviews were designed to give more credibility to the Playboy and give a wider range of men an excuse to buy them. This worked out perfectly, if you ask me. But, the interviews developed into much more than just an excuse. They are a genuine piece of great journalism. Even though they are surrounded with boobs - which isn't totally uncomfortable for the reader, too - is it?
- thinkling 12y ago
  50 of them got released as Kindle Singles a few years ago. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/06/news/la-jc-the-reading-life-return-of-the-playboy-interview-20120906 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/06/news/la-jc-the-readi...
pp19dd 12y ago
Oddly prophetic note on Radio Shack, which is recently sending signals about its impending bankruptcy. Jobs: "Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat." - "...their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment." And the nail in the coffin: "I don’t anticipate that they’re going to recover and again become a major player."
- tim333 12y ago
  It's quite impressive that Radio Shack have kept going as long as they have. Here's the Onion's take http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack-still-in-b,2190/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-ho...
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    In the context of 1985, Radio Shack was a different story. In most towns, it was the closest thing people had to a computer store. There was no Best Buy, there was no way to order $3 cables from Monoprice via China. When you needed an RS-232 cable or a box of floppy discs, sometimes Radio Shack was all you had.
    - georgegeorges 12y ago
      not only was RadioShack the only computer store in town, but they also helped open up the IBM platform by selling the Tandy computer (produced by their parent company, Tandy). Prior to that they created and sold the TRS-80. It's easy to toss rocks at them today. But it's hard to understate their importance to the early PC industry. Ultimately Jobs was right. This sort of hobbyist market wasn't going to last (and RadioShack has completely missed the boat on the 3d printing and "maker" movements). We don't have smartphones with BASIC installed. Computer makers don't even care about that aspect of their devices (that is, that they are programmable). Things have changed quite dramatically.
pptr1 12y ago
I can't think of someone else right now who could come up with such an easy way to understand computers. "Playboy: Maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is. How do they work? Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]"
- robg 12y ago
  It's a great answer but, a minor quibble, we have thousands of hours studying physics and the laws of motion before we ever drive a car. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics
  - eruditely 12y ago
    No this is not the same thing.
  - Diamons 12y ago
    You completely missed his point
mentos 12y ago
"...That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently." Apropo today given Notch's announcement.
graeme 12y ago
Interesting comment about the petrochemical revolution here: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront. --------- What I think is interesting is that the computer revolution is, and will continue to be, dependent on the petrochemical revolution. We are in the process of finding out whether we can replace petrochemicals with renewables. If we can't, or only partially can, computing gets more expensive. This goes contrary to our expectations of more and cheaper computer, indefinitely.
himanshuy 12y ago
I envy Steve Jobs the way he articulates technical terms in simple words.

253 points by o0-0o 12y ago

Quite prescient: > 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.

increment_i 12y ago
Even though it sounded hyperbolic at the time, I doubt even Jobs himself realized this was actually an understatement.
joshvm 12y ago
He even alludes to smartphones: > Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  That's so generic it could simply refer to laptops and not smartphones or tablets. Btw I don't know why people think Smartphones are so innovative, they simply are evolved versions of PDAs that we started to have already in the 90s. The "future" was already out there for a long time, it just took many steps to reach an optimal form.
- TorKlingberg 12y ago
  I think "telephone" here referred mainly to landlines. Mobile phones were rare in 1985, and completely analog.
tomasien 12y ago
Just realized I double posted this - awesome quote for 1985
tdicola 12y ago
Is it really that prescient? By 1985 there were lots of BBSes you could dial into and connect with people from across the nation. In fact what would become America Online was just starting out as a BBS. The internet was available at most colleges, and tools like email and usenet were in full use. I think his statement is like someone right now saying electric cars will be a huge thing in the future.
- ihnorton 12y ago
  On the other hand, how long did it take Microsoft to figure that out - remember the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack? edit: note, Windows 95 originally didn't have a TCP/IP stack! The point is, plenty of smart people missed this boat for years, and I don't think it was at all obvious in 1985 that getting on a network would be the driving use case for widespread computer adoption by "non-techie" people.
  - jchimney 12y ago
    trumpet winsock and hours of troubleshooting different configs :) irq settings etc
  - tonyedgecombe 12y ago
    It did have a tcp/ip stack but it wasn't installed by default, it was one of the optional extras. What it didn't have was a web browser, you needed the plus pack for that.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > On the other hand, how long did it take Microsoft to figure that out - remember the Windows 95 TCP/IP stack? Having a good TCP/IP stack core isn't about figuring out that plugging into a national computer network is one of the key values of a computer, its about knowing which national network will be the key one (and, more specifically, which technology stack that one will be built on.) The web -- the bit that made the Internet win that battle as the consumer-facing network that would matter -- was fairly new when Windows 95 was released and hadn't even been invented when work on Windows 95 began. At that time, dialup, largely-text mode offerings that didn't rely on a TCP/IP stack not only dominated local BBS's (some of which were part of national interBBS networks), but also represented some of the biggest (inter)national consumer-facing services to which computer users were likely to connect (like CompuServe, which had already secured leadership in that space when Jobs gave his 1985 interview.) > The point is, plenty of smart people missed this boat for years, and I don't think it was at all obvious in 1985 that getting on a network would be the driving use case for widespread computer adoption by "non-techie" people. It was widely accepted. Its true that in 1985 it wasn't at all obvious that the Internet or any specifically TCP/IP-based network would be the specific network, the recognition that connecting to a large-scale network was a compelling feature and likely to become the most compelling feature was widespread in 1985.

ulyssesgrant 12y ago

Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect: "Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. 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."

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion - even if it is the landing page approach. I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach?
- cromulent 12y ago
  Different stages in the market maturity. If you are inside the PC revolution and you have a chance to define where it is going, then who knows better than you?
- hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
  > So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they have done market research and done even better? How exactly can one do market research and arrive at something like the Mac? Okay, it may help indicate there is an opportunity, but this is the easy part, anyone can do that. It does nothing to indicate how to fulfill that opportunity, it's not the client's job to give a blueprint, and that's the hard part. Imagine starting a restaurant business by asking people on the street what they like or what they think you should have on the menu... let's just say it's not going to star on Michelin. > I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person have gone along with the "no market research" approach? There's a quote often attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I can think of plenty of prior successes that I doubt having started with a survey.

jordhy 12y ago

In this interview, Jobs' obssesion with fighting IBM is quite present. A decade later, the obsession was to defeat Microsoft, or at least to gain substantial market share from them. It's quite funny that Apple became the most valuable company in the planet when they let go of this obsession and instead focused on beating the old Apple.

utopkara 12y ago
It is a great observation. I wonder if it is true though. We have seen Apple obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were rising this time.
- mehrdada 12y ago
  > We have seen Apple obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were rising this time How so? I'm actually surprised how little they seem to have reacted to the competitive pressure of Android than pursuing their agenda at their own pace.
  - jordhy 12y ago
    Remember the phrase "I'll go thermonuclear on Google" by S. Jobs.

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asimov42 12y ago

Loved the simple, straightforward language used at the time. Currently even mainstream news sites are are just dripping with way too many marketing terms that don't really mean anything anymore.

Rambunctious 12y ago
Liked how the interviewer was posing tough questions around the failures of previous product launches and around any resentment towards folks who had deemed him incapable of running the Lisa division. Didn't seem like the interviewer was sitting inside the distortion field. Having said that, I must also say that Jobs fielded the questions rather well.

joshmlewis 12y ago

> Playboy: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith? I'm sure a lot of people were and still are asking that about Tesla. His response is basically he doesn't know how the future will respond to the computer but he knows it will definitely change the world and before long it won't be an act of faith.

coldtea 12y ago
Only the Tesla won't change the world. It's just an electric car.
- boomlinde 12y ago
  The Macintosh was just a computer.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    A computer is a general purpose machine, with capabilities for business, clerical work, arts (graphics, multimedia etc), entertainment (games, web tv, media distrubution) and of course communications. A car, by now, is just a car. It's 2014, they are a known quantity, and the big change they were to bring, they have brought already. Plus the key in the era of Mac and IBM PC was that the personal computer was just beginning and exploding from only nerds and large enterprises to billions of people. The personal computer was something genuinely new and disruptive for all kinds of markets, business processes and personal life. An electric car is just an incremental innovation on the car everybody already has. Now, if it was a flying car, or a self driving car, that would have been more impressive in its possibility for change, but still nothing like a computer in the pre-mass computer era.
    - TheCoelacanth 12y ago
      Their cars definitely won't change the world. The one area they're working on that might change the world is battery technology.

urs2102 12y ago

> Jobs: I think that the scale of the business has gotten large enough so that it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch anything new. Playboy: No more billion-dollar companies hatched in garages? Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. It’s the only way we can compete with them. If we go fast enough, they can’t keep up. I'm not sure I agree, but what kind of hardware company do you guys think could ever reach a near Apple level? I feel that perhaps something in robotics, but was curious what you all thought...

hobolord 12y ago
perhaps something to do with energy
morbius 12y ago
CoreOS was hatched in a garage. But I don't see them getting Apple-level anytime soon.
- urs2102 12y ago
  Why do you think CoreOS? A lot of the suggestions above make sense - I was just curious what your thoughts were on CoreOS?
- CmonDev 12y ago
  They were building physical computers manually, not forking an established OS.
ivanca 12y ago
Tesla. But yeah, your definition of "Hardware" may vary.
- npinguy 12y ago
  Tesla was launched with the investment and vision of a man who's already made billions in the industry, not some teenagers with an idea and a garage.

edlebert 12y ago

All these things show that it really is coming down to just Apple and IBM. If for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

treblig 12y ago

Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985: "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."

adamnemecek 12y ago
Pff that will never take off http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
- mpweiher 12y ago
  Wonderful link! "...no online database will replace your daily newspaper..." "Newsweek now back in print!"
- deleted 12y ago
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dsrguru 12y ago
You beat me to posting this. He was as right as Asimov in 1964 about landing unmanned rovers on Mars by 2014 but still no people, and he was as right as Paul Graham was in 2001 about software moving to the server and clients moving to pocket computers that might be called cell phones by historical accident [1]. Predictions might be fun to boast about in hindsight or to demonstrate through entrepreneurship, but reading documented quotes that were just this spot on is really cool. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html "With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones."

ekianjo 12y ago

> Jobs: my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening. I'm very glad that IBM and its compatible equivalents won the market, we would certainly be in much Darker Ages should Apple have won the desktop war, with their close-minded view on the world and its strict control on contents, peripherals and whatever gravitates around the Brand.

mpweiher 12y ago
Hmm...the prediction came through fairly precisely.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  The PC has been a haven for innovation on the desktop, in case you failed to notice. Hardware wise the PC surpassed the Macs in power and price in no time. Precisely because it was an open platform.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Not quite. IBM paved the way for Compaq, which in turn led to an explosion of computer brands all around the same Industry Standard Architecture. Apple first bet on the 68K line, then moved to IBM (the Power series CPU), then finally joined that 'closed' culture with the advent of the second generation iMac. Each of those machines was as closed as they could make them without welding them shut (and your present day iMac is no exception to this, it doesn't have to be designed in such a way that it is hard to open).
pedalpete 12y ago
I think the "Dark Ages" of the desktop was inconsequential due to adoption of the internet.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  All platforms were not necessarily equal when the Internet/WWW came around. The browsers eventually came to be multi-platform and support standards but it took a very long time to move away from platform specific software. Look at the legacy created by IE, for example.

enraged_camel 12y ago

>>[The telegraph] was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. It occurs to me that programming languages are like the telegraph: you can do amazing things with them, but at the end of the day they require someone to learn a "whole sequence of strange incantations," and the majority of people will never learn how to use them. I wonder who will invent the "telephone" for computers -- which would, in this case, allow ordinary people to create software with languages they already know how to use (speak). I know it sounds far-fetched given how computers work, but I'm sure the telephone also sounded far-fetched to telegraph operators at the time.

judk 12y ago
Cordata / Google Now / Siri People just gesture at the terminal, and the software interprets it.
- EarthLaunch 12y ago
  > "For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. [...] Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again." -Hitchhiker's Guide (1979?)

flyrain 12y ago

He is right. The IT revolution has dwarf the petrochemical revolution.

ekianjo 12y ago

> Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. Always like to see how pretentious Jobs has always been, thinking he was the only source of innovation in the whole world. He has been proven wrong many times.

CmonDev 12y ago
But the strategy was right, the image of Apple as innovator still stands strong in consumers' minds, despite obvious incorrectness.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Perception bias. The strategy has failed for 20 years before it took hold on the mobile computer market (Smartphones / Tablets). So when do you decide that a strategy was right? Only when the tides turn around, ignoring the rest of time when the water was low?
  - bennyg 12y ago
    Brand == Perception. You can't argue that their brand is based off the perception of grand innovation. Take a look at every Apple keynote ever.

jobebob 12y ago

> "The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer." Looks like the iPhone was in his mind for a long time.

mpweiher 12y ago
That's mostly just Alan Kay's Dynabook from 1968 IIRC. And the networking and laser printers etc. were the "Interim Dynabooks" aka Altos + networked laser printers (Ethernet) he saw at PARC.

cnp 12y ago

Wow: quite easily one of the Great Interviews of our time, hands down.

TaoloModisi 12y ago

Jobs: I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [laughs] Playboy: You can laugh about it? Jobs: I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. I believe that Jobs laughed because- the value of starting or investing in a business is in making meaning first; by making meaning you are looking to change the world. Starting or investing in a business on the sole purpose of making money, means that if you don't make money, you’ll quickly lose interest and on top of that you’ll be left with a meaningless company that doesn’t change the world.

CmonDev 12y ago

"If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives." - was certainly reconsidered :). But funnily Gates fulfilled it.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Gates became the liberal do-gooder that Jobs initially sold himself as with his Eastern philosophy and anti-materialist pretensions. Jobs died cursing Google while building a super-yacht he never got to use. Incredible how things ended up. No one saw this coming, I think.

mironathetin 12y ago

Playboy interviews used to be great! There was no limit in length or content. The interviewer was allowed to ask whatever he wanted. If you get a Playboy from the 60s or the 70s, the interviews fill 20 pages and more. No pics, only text. Unimaginable nowadays in a printed product. I bought some old Playboys because of this (Castro, Connery, Dylan etc.) There are also books with the interviews only [the directors (Clint Eastwood, Billy Wilder, Orson Wells etc.), larger than life etc.]. Great reads.

zeroxfe 12y ago
> I bought some old Playboys because of this (Castro, Connery, Dylan etc.) me too
wonderyak 12y ago
'I only read it for the interviews/articles' used to be a legitimate reason and not a joke for covering up buying a magazine with boobs in it.
- mironathetin 12y ago
  I was waiting for this comment :o). Indeed, the interviews were designed to give more credibility to the Playboy and give a wider range of men an excuse to buy them. This worked out perfectly, if you ask me. But, the interviews developed into much more than just an excuse. They are a genuine piece of great journalism. Even though they are surrounded with boobs - which isn't totally uncomfortable for the reader, too - is it?
thinkling 12y ago
50 of them got released as Kindle Singles a few years ago. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/06/news/la-jc-the-reading-life-return-of-the-playboy-interview-20120906 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/06/news/la-jc-the-readi...

pp19dd 12y ago

Oddly prophetic note on Radio Shack, which is recently sending signals about its impending bankruptcy. Jobs: "Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat." - "...their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment." And the nail in the coffin: "I don’t anticipate that they’re going to recover and again become a major player."

tim333 12y ago
It's quite impressive that Radio Shack have kept going as long as they have. Here's the Onion's take http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack-still-in-b,2190/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-ho...
- joezydeco 12y ago
  In the context of 1985, Radio Shack was a different story. In most towns, it was the closest thing people had to a computer store. There was no Best Buy, there was no way to order $3 cables from Monoprice via China. When you needed an RS-232 cable or a box of floppy discs, sometimes Radio Shack was all you had.
  - georgegeorges 12y ago
    not only was RadioShack the only computer store in town, but they also helped open up the IBM platform by selling the Tandy computer (produced by their parent company, Tandy). Prior to that they created and sold the TRS-80. It's easy to toss rocks at them today. But it's hard to understate their importance to the early PC industry. Ultimately Jobs was right. This sort of hobbyist market wasn't going to last (and RadioShack has completely missed the boat on the 3d printing and "maker" movements). We don't have smartphones with BASIC installed. Computer makers don't even care about that aspect of their devices (that is, that they are programmable). Things have changed quite dramatically.

pptr1 12y ago

I can't think of someone else right now who could come up with such an easy way to understand computers. "Playboy: Maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is. How do they work? Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]"

robg 12y ago
It's a great answer but, a minor quibble, we have thousands of hours studying physics and the laws of motion before we ever drive a car. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics
- eruditely 12y ago
  No this is not the same thing.
- Diamons 12y ago
  You completely missed his point

mentos 12y ago

"...That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently." Apropo today given Notch's announcement.

graeme 12y ago

Interesting comment about the petrochemical revolution here: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront. --------- What I think is interesting is that the computer revolution is, and will continue to be, dependent on the petrochemical revolution. We are in the process of finding out whether we can replace petrochemicals with renewables. If we can't, or only partially can, computing gets more expensive. This goes contrary to our expectations of more and cheaper computer, indefinitely.

himanshuy 12y ago

I envy Steve Jobs the way he articulates technical terms in simple words.