Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996) • Hacker News Board

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#11

Post by cbr » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:24 PM UTC

The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world?

Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#12

Post by mmphosis » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

It's 1996 and they're tossing around the term "apps."

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#13

Post by almightysmudge » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:29 PM UTC

I have absolutely no love for the man, but he had some amazing visions of the future back then.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#14

Post by acqq » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:31 PM UTC

The interview was made in 1995 as the following Steve's words show: "it will go into beta by the end of this year, and we are shipping in production in the first quarter of 1996 – my guess is by February." The date of the magazine is 1 Jan 1996, so I guess not later than November 1995.

At that moment Microsoft only had: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2

Even then, Jobs says: "Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape."

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#15

Post by mc32 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

Tho brings back memories of the biz-tech magazine heyday of the late 90s early 2000s which emphasized layout, graphics and story. Some were more buzz than substance, but they enlivened the scene and made tech more popular while feeding off the frenzy. Kind of like the techcrunches, gigaom, pandos of the day.

So, red herring, the standard, fast company, business2.0, wired, others.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#16

Post by acveilleux » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:42 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #11

The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world? Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.

I got there (on the net all the time) in '96, that's probably the earliest it was possible for a residential customer here (Canada). Before that, unlimited plans weren't a thing.

I stopped being on the net all the time in late '97 when my ISP banned me from the modem pool during prime-time since my Linux box would tie up one of their line 24/7.

Then I got it back again in late '99 when we moved somewhere with DSL coverage (early Nortel 1024/128k "DSL".) I have had high-speed, always on internet continuously since. Currently FTTH at 100/30m.

So Jobs, speaking in 1994 about average consummers, was right. Late '90s / early '00s saw ubiquitous DSL/Cable take over as the dominant access technology. Obviously iPhone brought always online to the mobile phone market later.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#17

Post by MCRed » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:46 PM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #10

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its crazy that even today diehards defend the DOJ's insane war on MS in the 90s. Do you guys really want to pay for browsers or every single thing in a OS ala carte? MS was in the right here (the browser is just part of the OS) and the judgement just empowered OEMs to go apeshit with crapware and bundling, helping make the MS experience a lot crappier than it should be.

MS got up to a lot more than just bundling browsers

For instance, around the time this article was written, someone from Microsoft was sitting across the desk from me (this is in Seattle) and told me "you can re-engineer our product to use our technology, or we will bury you". Re-engineering would have made us microsoft windows only, and dependent on them for everything... and we would have lost all our value because it doesn't make any sense technically (the guy didn't understand what we did.)

Well, it's now been almost 20 years, and Microsoft has still never released what they claimed they were going to release and have us build on top of them.

So yeah, I have no love lost for Microsoft. Yet they're still not as evil as Google.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#18

Post by bluedino » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

cbr wrote: post #11

The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world? Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking about ideas, I am talking about reality.

20 years later with Chromebooks this finally happened.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#19

Post by bluedino » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:48 PM UTC

ryanchartrand wrote: post #2

Loved the whole bit on Netscape. "We are not going to make any money by selling browsers, and I personally don’t think they are going to make any money from it either. If you can get a browser from Microsoft for free, why are you going to pay $39 to Netscape?"

I love the next question just as much

The Herring: But if Navigator is platform-independent, and…

Jobs: But everybody uses Windows. Come on – 90%+ of the people use Windows, so 90%+ of the people are going to hook into the Internet using Microsoft. Now, you know me, I love the Mac too, but I am trying to be really objective here.

Re: Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996)

#20

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Aug 18, 2015, 3:48 PM UTC

> Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape. And it has a certain track record of being successful at those kind of things. So I wouldn’t write off Microsoft right now. But all I am trying to say is that no one is going to make money by selling browsers. I do think a lot of people are going to make money off the pipes, but that ain’t us. The pipe is going to be owned by the RBOCs. Pac Bell and all those guys are going to provide cheap ISDN lines into the home that come with a little box that turns it into Ethernet, and they are going to be impossible to compete with. But, as we’ve been talking about, the new Web set-up is just like the mainframe computing model, where all the apps will run off the server, and these will mostly be custom apps.

Microsoft tried and very nearly succeeded in replacing the open web with the ActiveX "information superhighway". If they had done so we might not yet have the smartphone-with-browser, due to the difficultly in implementing competing ActiveX implementations to run on it.

Lots of people making money off the pipes? Comcast.

New mainframe computing model with web apps? That's certainly arrived.

> As an example, I predict that by the end of this year, Microsoft will announce that it has a Visual Basic variant or deviant that it proposes as the Web-client language. And Sun and Microsoft will have a war. And Microsoft will put everything it has into that war, because if it can win, it will have killed Netscape along the way. Netscape will put everything it has into that war, because if it loses, it is in trouble. So I ask you, who will win that war? Probably Microsoft.

Everybody lost. Microsoft built IE6's fortress of incompatibility that it now struggles to get rid of, like that indestructible anti-aircraft tower in Berlin. Netscape went bust and open-sourced everything. Sun folded into Oracle. Java is now the annoying thing that you have to update while avoiding the Ask toolbar in the installer, and many people have banned it too from their browser. VBScript in the browser is dead.

Only Javascript remains.