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Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

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Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#131

Post by philwelch »

takatin wrote: post #31
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Coming up with products is a bit like coming up with songs or paintings. Market research won't get you Van Gogh's Starry Night or any of the Beatles' songs. Instead it gives you autotune as music and photo filters as art. If you need to come with a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime product, music, painting or anything creative, it has to come from satisficing a basic need in a unique way (often with a personal touch i.e.,…

> Market research won't get you...any of the Beatles' songs.

That's exactly how we got most of the Beatles' songs. The Beatles' function in the music industry was to repeat and popularize the ideas of other artists and to follow nascent trends, the same as any pop artist.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#132

Post by thinkling »

mironathetin wrote: post #88

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…

50 of them got released as Kindle Singles a few years ago.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/06/news/la-jc-the-readi...

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#133

Post by georgegeorges »

joezydeco wrote: post #114
tim333 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ho...

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.

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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

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."

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

Which wasn't a huge prediction; CompuServe's consumer offering had been available for years (and they had at least one smaller national competitor, The Source), and the BBS scene including BBS networks was already a thing. The value of computers as communication devices especially in a network with wide penetration wasn't something that the many observers at the time who made similar comments were extrapolating from scant evidence, its something that people had concrete experience with in the mid-1980s where the trend toward it becoming a key use of computers was widely recognized in social commentary, fiction, etc.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

tdicola wrote: post #11
ddebernardy wrote: post #2

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.

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.

> In fact what would become America Online was just starting out as a BBS.

And CompuServe's nation-wide, consumer-oriented offering (started out as a way to get some revenue for unused capacity on their business-oriented offering) had been available for several years.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#136

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Most people didn't even think a PC would be important for everybody

Literally every single teacher I had in elementary school (which overlapped the time of this interview) raised this -- that learning to use and deeply understand computers would be broadly important for everyone was, if anything more prevalent in the 1980s than today (while its assumed today that everyone will use computers, its controversial that anyone but the tech high priesthood will need to learn to use them specifically.)

> much less internet.

The internet specifically, maybe not; people were widely recognizing the value to the public of consumer-focussed online information services like CompuServe, but "the internet" -- while it existed -- hadn't yet connected with the consumer-focussed world.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#137

Post by drblast »

zurn wrote: post #63
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."

These predictions were very commonplace by then. In 1983, TCP/IP came along and MILNET was split off. This is commonly considered to mark the start of the Internet. First .com domain was registered in 1985.

Remember "The Network Is The Computer?"

1984.

http://www.tcse-k12.org/pages/network.pdf

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#138

Post by dragonwriter »

ihnorton wrote: post #12
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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#139

Post by [deleted] »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #75
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like he couldn't have been more wrong on that one. Now we have messaging apps and minecraft selling for billions.

Well, he said "not in computers". Dell already existed at that point; I can't immediately think of any other qualifying company.

[deleted]

Re: Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

#140

Post by kbruner »

ekianjo wrote: post #39

> 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…

I couldn't disagree more. There was indeed a very dark age due to Microsoft. I often wonder what a world full of scientist and engineers that had the highest quality software available to them would have been like. Instead we got Microsoft's monopolistic and predatory business and consequently we have all suffered. If you perceive Apple as being controlling then you must not have lived through this Dark Age like I did.
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