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Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

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Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#41

Post by hueving »

coldtea wrote: post #28
tdicola wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Is it really that prescient? By 1985 there were lots of BBSes you could dial into and connect with people from across the nation. Yeah, it's really that prescient. The fact that BBS existed and there was some networking in colleges is irrelevant. Most people didn't even think a PC would be important for everybody, much less internet. It was seen as a totally geek / big business thing. Read how the media pundits and…

>(as a fad, novelty, for nerds only, etc)

You mean exactly the same way that electric cars were being addressed over the last 4 years or so?

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#42

Post by utopkara »

jordhy wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#43

Post by enraged_camel »

>>[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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#45

Post by bokonist »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18
ulyssesgrant wrote: post #3

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 researc…

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 succes…

How many successful businesses have actually be built by using landing page tests as the primary mechanism to evolve the product idea? I feel like the lean startup fashion is overplayed. The most important thing for a startup is to have a lead customer - a person that passionately wants the idea to exist so they can use it, and knows what it should do. That lead user needs to be either the founders or someone the founders can work very, very closely with.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#46

Post by ekianjo »

> 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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#47

Post by judk »

enraged_camel wrote: post #43

>> [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 le…

Cordata / Google Now / Siri

People just gesture at the terminal, and the software interprets it.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#48

Post by dsrguru »

treblig wrote: post #33

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."

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

"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."

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#49

Post by jobebob »

> "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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#50

Post by Rambunctious »

asimov42 wrote: post #10

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.

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.
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