Steve Jobs's thoughts on the Internet in 1996

The section under "Shooting the Web in the foot" might guide some of what's been done with WebKit and HTML5.

I suspect that Wired detects that you're on a phone and thus serves you content formatted for a phone. However, many times I have seen sites do what you describe: redirecting you to the mobile version of the homepage rather than of the article you wanted to see in the first place.

This is very lazy (and frustrating) programming.

So, the link is not broken. Wired is broken.

> Jobs's obsession with his old rival took the form of an unusual proposal for all parties to voluntarily keep the Web simple and avoid increasingly popular client-side enhancements like HotJava.

So Jobs didn't like the idea of Flash back in 1996. He didn't just make that up recently as an excuse.

He's probably referring to Apple's WebObjects framework for making web applications - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webobjects

I don't think it's widely used at all these days although I believe Apple web apps like the iTunes store and their online store use it.

On how the web would evolve, Jobs was profoundly wrong

The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumer.

On how soon the web (and software development) would go from custom development to "lego blocks", Jobs was premature.

The number of applications that need to be written is growing exponentially. Unless we can find a way to write them in a tenth of the time, we're toast. The end result of objects - this repackaging of software - is that we can develop applications with only about 10 to 20 percent of the software development required any other way.

Even today, while frameworks like Django are finally providing the basic building blocks, a lot of web development is still 'custom'.

But in the end, this is one of the most profound interviews I have seen of jobs.

But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.

I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it's not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be?

Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.