121–130 of 157 posts
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."
Pff that will never take off http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
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…
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But the strategy was right, the image of Apple as innovator still stands strong in consumers' minds, despite obvious incorrectness.
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?
You can't argue that their brand is based off the perception of grand innovation. Take a look at every Apple keynote ever.
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That's untrue. Every audio ecosystem, be it iTunes, Zune, Rhapsody, whatever had DRM. It was a requirement from the record labels.
Not true at all if you bought a device that wasn't made by the big players (the majority of early media players). They had no DRM, and provided uniform, simple USB removable media access to the media on the device. The record labels only stepped in when your quoted companies/brands entered the fray.
But then Zunes and iPods could also always run DRM free MP3s copied from other sources as well, so I'm not sure what you think the difference was, or what advantage you think these independent players had with respect to DRM.
> 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 a…
> Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening. It's funny because Apple is now in that same situation. Apple isn't exactly known for innovation anymore (as much as they would like to lead you to believe in their keynotes).
"The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society."
Making technologies acessible and useful to people, where previously they were the domain of specialists and geeks, is pretty much definitive of Apple's entire business model and core competency from 1997 to the present day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding...
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 (Cli…
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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 beg…
Their cars definitely won't change the world. The one area they're working on that might change the world is battery technology.
I have the same thought as you, what Tesla may accomplish as a company may not be affordable electric vehicles but leaps in battery and power storage.
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I don't think it was all that unconventional to think computer networking was going to be big in the mid 1980s. Especially for someone like Jobs who was watching the industry and based in Silicon Valley where it would have been more obvious. (Note that he talks about IBM wiring up large companies.) Look at this google ngram for "information age" - already in full swing by 1982. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c…
Unfortunately, Jobs as visionary is a meme that sticks. Of course, by '85 the idea of a nationwide or world-wide network was common amongst nerds. Heck, around that time I was a kid with a modem then dialing into BBS's. We were already in the baby steps of it all. Universities certainly were ahead of the consumer market with ARPANET and NSFNET, I think at 1.5mbps. Not sure if compuserv was up yet, but it was certainl…
But we shouldn't elevate it to something it's not. The cynical view, and to an extent a correct one, is that this is 1980s conventional wisdom mixed with a guy trying to sell computers.
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 fin…
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 fin…
I am pleasantly surprised to hear that him speaking in terms of the metric system.