Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview (11 May 2012) [VO] [ST-FR] [Ultra HD 4K]

I'm Bob cringley 16 years ago when I was making my television series Triumph of the Nerds I interviewed Steve Jobs that was in 1995 10 years earlier Steve had

left Apple following a bruising struggle with John Scully the CEO he' brought into the company at the time of our interview Steve was running next the niche computer company he founded after

leaving Apple little did we know that within 18 months he would sell next to Apple and 6 months later he'd be running the place the way things work in television we used only a part of that

interview in the series and for years we thought the interview was lost forever because the Master tape went missing while being shipped from London to the US in the 1990s then just a few days ago series

director Paul sen found a VHS copy of that interview in his garage there are very few TV interviews with Steve Jobs and almost no good ones they rarely show

the Charisma cander and vision that this interview does and so to honor an amazing man here is that interview in its entirety most of this has never been seen

before so how did you get involved uh with personal computers H well

um I ran into my first computer when I was about 10 or 11 um and it's hard to remember back then but I'm I'm an fossil now I'm an old fossil so when I was 10 or 11 it was

about 30 years ago and no one had ever seen a computer to the extent that they'd seen them they'd seen them in movies and they were these big boxes with woring for some reason they fixated on the tape drives as being the icon of

what the computer was or or flashing lights somehow and so nobody had ever seen one they're very mysterious very powerful things that did something in the background and um so to see one and

actually get to use one was a real privilege back then and I I got into NASA am Research Center down here and I got to use a a time sharing terminal so I didn't actually see the computer but I saw a a time sharing terminal and in

those days again it's it's hard to remember how primitive it was there was no such thing as a as a a computer with a graphics video play it was literally a printer it was a teletype printer with a

keyboard on it so you would keyboard these commands in and then you would wait for a while and then the thing would go and it would tell you something out but even with that it was still

remarkable especially for a 10-year-old that you could write a program in basic let's say or Fortran and actually this

machine would sort of take your idea and it would it would sort of execute your idea and give you back some results and if they were the results that you

predicted your program really worked it was an incredibly thrilling experience um so I became very um captivated by by a computer and a

computer to me was still a little mysterious because it was at the other end of this wire and I I'd never really seen the actual computer itself and then I got tours of computers after that and saw the insides and then I was part of

this group at huet Packard um I when I was 12 I called up um Bill huet who lived in huet Packard at the time and again this dates me but there was no such thing as an unlisted telephone

number then so I could just look in the book and looked his name up and he answered the phone and I said hi my name is Steve Jobs you don't know me but I'm 12 years old and I'm I'm building a a

frequency counter and I'd like some spare parts and so uh he talked to me for about 20 minutes I I'll never forget it as long as I live and he he gave me the parts but he also gave me a job working in hulet Packard that summer and

I was I was 12 years old and and that really made a remarkable influence on me uh I hulet Packard was really the only company I'd ever seen in my life at that

age and uh it Formed my view of what a company was and how well they treated their employees you know uh at that time I mean they didn't know about cholesterol back then but at that time they used to bring a big cart full of

duts and coffee out at 10:00 every morning everybody take a coffee and donnut break and just little things like that it it was clear that the company was was the company recognized that its

true value was its employees so anyway um things led to things with hul Packard and I started going up to their paloalto research Labs every Tuesday night with a small group of people to meet some of

their researchers and stuff and I saw the first desktop computer ever made which was the huid Packard 9100 it was uh about as big as a suitcase but it actually had a small

cathode ray tube display in it um and it was completely self-contained there was no wire going off behind the curtain somewhere and and I fell in love with it and you could program it in basic and

APL and um and I would just for hours you know get get a ride up to hulet Packard and just hang around that machine and write programs for it

and so that was the early days and and I met Steve wnac around that time too maybe maybe a little early when I was about 14 15 years

old and we immediately it off he was the first person I've met that knew more about Electronics than I did and so I was uh I liked him a lot and he was uh maybe 5 years older than I he he'd gone

off to college and gotten kicked out for pulling pranks and was living with his parents and going to Dian of the local junior college so um we became fast friends and started doing projects

together we read about um we read about the the story in Esquire magazine about this guy named Captain Crunch who could supposedly make free telep phone calls

you've heard about this I'm sure and uh we again we were captivated how could anybody do this and we thought it must be a hoax and we started looking through

the libraries looking for the secret tones that would allow you to do this and it turned out we were at Stanford linear accelerator Center one night and

way in the bowels of their Technical Library way down at the last bookshelf in the in the Corner bottom rack we found an AT&T technical Journal that

laid out the whole thing and and it's another moment I'll never forget when we saw this journal we thought my God it's all real and so we set out to build a device to make these tones and and the

way it worked was you know when you make a long-distance call you used to hear right in the background they were tones that sounded like the touch tone you could make on your phone but they were different frequencies so you couldn't make them it turned out that

that was the signal from one telephone computer to another controlling the computers in the network and AT&T made a fatal flaw when they designed the original telephone Network digital telephone network was they put the

signaling from computer to computer in the same band as your voice which meant that if you could make those same signals you could put it right in through the handset and literally the

entire AT&T international phone network would think you were an AT&T computer so after 3 weeks we finally built a box like this that worked and I remember the

first call we made was down to uh La so one of W's relatives down in Pasadena we dialed the wrong number but we woke some guy up in the middle of the night and we were yelling at him like don't you understand we made this call for free

and this person didn't appreciate that but it was it was miraculous and we built these little boxes to do blue boxing as it was called and we put a little note in the bottom of them our

logo was He's Got The Whole World in His Hands and they work we built the best blue box in the world it was all digital no adjust ments and um so you could go up to a pay phone and you could you

could you know take a trunk over to White planes and then take a satellite over to Europe and then go to Turkey take a cable back to Atlanta you know and you could go around the world you could go around the world five or six

times because we we learned all the codes for how to get on the satellites and stuff and then you could call the pay phone next door and so you could shout in the phone and after about a minute it would come out the other phone it was it was miraculous um and and you

might ask well what's so interesting about that what's so interesting is that we were young and what we learned was that we could build something

ourselves that could control billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in the world that was what we learned was that

us too you know we didn't know much we could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson I don't think there would have ever been an Apple computer

had there not been blue boxing well I said you called the pope yeah we did call the pope he um he pretended to be Henry Kissinger and we got the number of the Vatican and we called the pope and they started waking people up in the

hierarchy you know I don't know Cardinals and this and that and and they actually sent someone to wake up the pope when when finally we just burst out laughing and they realized that we weren't Henry Kissinger and so we never

got to talk to the pope but it was very funny so so the jump from uh blue boxes to personal computers what what sparked

that well um necessity uh in the sense that there was time sharing computers available and there was a time sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free

time on so um but we needed a terminal and we couldn't afford one so we designed and built one and that was the first thing we ever did we built this

terminal and so what an apple one was was really an extension of this terminal putting a micro processor on the back end that's what it was it was really kind of two separate projects put

together so first we built the terminal and then we built the Apple One um and we we really built it for

ourselves uh because we couldn't afford to to uh buy anything and we'd scavenge Parts here and there and stuff and we build these all by hand I mean they'd take you know 40 to 80 hours to build one and then they'd always be breaking

because there's all these tiny little wires and so um it turned out a lot of friends wanted to build them too and although they could scavenge most of the parts as well uh they didn't have the

sort of skills to build them that we had acquired by training ourselves through building them and so we ended up helping them build most of their computers and it was really taken up all of our time and we thought you know if we could make

what's called a printed circuit board which is a piece of fiberglass with copper on both sides that's etched to form the wires so that you could build a computer one of you know you could build an apple one in a few hours instead of 40 hours if we could if we only had one

of those we could sell them to all our friends for you know as much as it cost us to make them and make our money back um and everybody be happy and we'd say you know we get a life again uh so we

did that uh I sold my Volkswagen bus and Steve sold his calculator and we got enough money to pay a friend of ours to make the artwork to make a printed circuit board and we made some printed

circuit boards and we we sold some to our friends um and I was trying to sell the rest of them so that we could get our micrus and calculator back and I walked into the first computer store in

the world which was the bite shop of Mountain View I think on El Camino uh I I it it metamorphosized into an adult

bookstore a few years later but at this point it was the bite shop and uh he the the the person that ran that I think his name was Paul Terell he said you know

I'll take 50 of those I said this is great he said but I want them fully assembled we'd never thought of this

before so we then uh kicked this around we thought why not why not try this and so I spent the next several days on the phone talking with electronics parts Distributors we didn't know what we were

doing and we said look here's the parts we need we need we need we figured we'd we'd uh buy a 100 sets of Parts build 50 sell them to the bite shop for twice what it cost us to build them therefore

paying for the whole hundred and then we'd have 50 left and we could make our profits by selling those so um we convinc these Distributors to give us the parts on net 30 days credit we had no idea what that meant net 30

sure sign here and so we had 30 days to pay them um and so we bought the parts we built the products and we sold 50 of them to the bite shop in paloalto and

got paid in 29 days and then went and paid off the parts people in 30 days and so we were in business but we had the classic marxian profit realization crisis and that our profit wasn't in a liquid currency our profit was in 50

computers sitting in the corner so then all of a sudden we had to think wow how are we going to realize our profit and so we started thinking about distribution are there any other computer stores and we started calling the other computer stores that we'd

heard of across the country and and we just kind of eased in business uh that way the third key figure in the creation of Apple was former Intel executive Mike

Mara I asked Steve how he came aboard we were designing the Apple 2 um and we really had some some much higher Ambitions for the Apple 2 W's Ambitions

were he wanted to add color Graphics uh my ambition was that it was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of Hardware

hobbyists they could assemble their own computers or at least take our board and add the Transformers for the power supply and the case and the keyboard and go get a you know Etc go get the rest of the stuff for every one of those there

were a thousand people that couldn't do that but wanted to mess around with programming software hobbyists just like I had been when I was you know 10 discovering that computer and so my

dream for the Apple 2 was to sell the first real packaged computer packaged personal computer where you didn't have to be a hardware hobbyist at all and so combining both of those dreams we

actually designed the product and we we I found a designer and we designed the packaging and everything and we wanted to make it out of plastic and we had the whole thing ready to go but we needed some money for tooling the case and

things like that we needed we needed a few hundred, and this was way beyond our means so I went looking for some venture capital and um I ran across one venture capitalist named Don Valentine who came

over to the garage and he later said I looked like a renegade from the human race that was his famous quote and he said he wasn't willing to invest in us but he he he recommended a few people that might and one of them was Mike Mara

so I called Mike on the phone and Mike came over and Mike had retired at about 30 or 31 from Intel he was a product manager there and gotten a little bit of stock and you know made like a million bucks on stock options which at that

time was quite a lot of money and um and he been invest investing in oil and gas deals and kind of staying home and doing that sort of thing and he I think was was kind of antsy to get back into

something and Mike and I hit it off very well um and so Mike said okay I'll invest after a few weeks and I said no

no we don't want your money we want you so we convinced Mike to actually throw in with us as an equal partner and so Mike put in some money and Mike put

in himself and the three of us went off and we took this design that was virtually done with the Apple 2 and tooled it up and announced it um a few

months later at the West Coast computer Fair what was that like it was great uh we got the the best I mean this is the West Coast computer fair was small at

that time but to us it was very large and so uh we had this fantastic booth there uh we had a projection television showing the Apple 2 and showing its Graphics which today looked very crude

but at that time were by far the most advanced graphics on a personal computer and I think you know my recollection is we stole the show and a lot of dealers

and Distributors started lining up and we were off and running how old were you 21 21 you're 21

you're a big success you know you you have no you just sort of done it by the seat of your pants you don't have any particular training in this how do you how do you learn to run a company

um you know throughout the years in business I found something which was I'd always ask why you do things and the answers you invariably get are oh that's

just the way it's done nobody knows why they do what they do nobody thinks about things very deeply in business that's what I found I'll give you an example

um when we were building our Apple ones in the garage we knew exactly what they cost uh when we got into a factory in

the Apple 2 days um the accounting had this notion of a standard cost where you'd kind of set a standard cost and at the end of a quarter you'd adjust it

with a variance and I kept asking well why do we do this and the answer was well that's just the way it's done and and after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don't really have

good enough control to know how much it costs so you guess and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter and the reason you don't know how much it cost is because your information systems aren't good

enough so but nobody said it that way and so later on when we designed this automated Factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these Antiquated Concepts and know exactly

what something cost to the second um so in business a lot of things are I I call it folklore they're done

because they were done yesterday and the day before and so what that means is is if you're willing to sort of ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard you you can learn business pretty fast it's not the

hardest thing in the world it's not rocket science it's not rocket science no now when you were first coming in contact with these computers inventing them and before that working on the HP

9100 you know we talk about writing programs MH what sort of programs what do people actually do with these things um see what we did with

them well I'll give you a simple example when we were uh designing our blue box we used uh we wrote a lot of custom programs to help us design it you know and to to uh do a lot of the the dog

work for us in terms of calculating Master frequencies with subd divisors to get other frequencies and things like that we we used the computer quite a bit and to calculate you know how how much eror we would get in the frequencies and

how much could be tolerated so we use them in our work but but much more importantly it had nothing to do with using them for anything practical it had

to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process to actually learn how to think words I think the greatest value of

learning how to I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think it's like going to law school I don't think anybody should be a lawyer

but I think going to law would actually be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way in the same way that computer programming teaches you in a slightly different way how to think and so I I view computer science as a

liberal art it should be something that everybody learn you know takes a takes a year in their life one of the courses they take is you know learning how to

program yeah but I learned APL which you know obviously is part of the reason why I'm going through life sideways well was it in you cons you look back and consider it an enriching

experience that taught you to think in a different way or not uh no not that particularly not other languages perhaps more so but I started with ATL

um so uh I mean obviously the Apple 2 was a was a terrific success yeah just incredibly so and the company grew like Topsy and eventually went public and you

guys got really rich what's it like to get rich it's very interesting I was worth um about over a million dollars when I was

23 and over $10 million when I was 24 and over $100 million when I was 25

um and it's it wasn't that important uh because I never did it for the money uh I I I think money is wonderful thing

because it enables you to do things it enables you to invest in ideas that don't have a short-term payback and things like that but especially at that point in my life it was it was not the most important thing the most important

thing was the company the people the products we were making what we were going to enable people to do with these products so uh I didn't think about it a great deal you I never sold any stock

and just really believe that the company would would do very well over the long term Central to the development of the personal computer was the pioneering work being done at xerox's paloalto

Research Center which Steve first visited in 1979 I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I to get my rear over to Xerox Park and see what they were doing

and uh so I finally did I went over there and they were very kind and they showed me what they were working on and they showed me really uh three things

but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two uh one of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming they showed me that but I didn't even see

that the other one they showed me was really a networked computer system they had over a 100 Alto computers all networked using email etc etc I didn't even see

that I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life now remember it was very flawed what we saw

was incomplete they' done a bunch of things wrong but we didn't know that at the time it's still though they had the germ of the of the idea was there and they' done it very well

and within you know 10 minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday it was it was obvious you could argue about how many years it would take you could argue about who the winners and losers might be but you couldn't argue about the

inevitability of it was so obvious you would have felt the same way had you been there you know that's those are the exact words that Paul Allen used yeah it's really interesting yeah it was

obvious and but there were two two visits you saw it then you brought some people back with you yeah and uh what what happened the next time they made you cool your heels for a while no no

well Adel Goldberg says otherwise what do you mean well she did the demo when the group came back and she said that that she argued against doing it for 3 hours and they took you other places and

showed you other things while she was arguing with Oh Oh you mean they were reluctant to show us the demo she was oh okay I don't I have no idea oh okay yeah I don't remember that not that you meant something else so they were very

skillful yeah but they did show us yeah so um and it's good that they showed us because the the technology crashed and burned at Xerox and they used to call the what's that no

I was just why yeah why oh very I actually thought a lot about that and uh I I learned more about that with John Scully later on and I I think I understand it now pretty well what happens

is like with John Scully um John came from PepsiCo and they they at most would change their product you know once every 10 years I mean to them a new product was like a new new size bottle right so

if you were a product person you couldn't change the course of that company very much so who influenced the success of PepsiCo the sales and marketing people therefore they were the ones that got promoted and therefore

they were the ones that ran the company well for PepsiCo that might have been okay but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies

that get get monopolies like oh IBM and Xerox if you were a product person at IBM or Xerox so you make a better copy or a better computer so what when you have a

monopoly market share the company's not anymore successful so the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people and they end up running the companies and the product

people get driven out of the decision-making forums and the companies forget what it means to make great products it sort of the product

sensibility and the the product gen genus that brought them to to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a

bad product they have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product and they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the

customers so that's what happened at Xerox that the people at Xerox Park used to call the people that ran Xerox toner heads uh and they just had these toner heads would come out to Xerox Park and they just had no CL clue about what they were seeing and for our our audience

toner is what oh toner toner is what you put into a copier yeah you know the toner that you add to a to an industrial copier the black stuff the black stuff yeah so basically they were copier heads

that just had no clue about uh a computer what it could do and so they they just grabbed uh grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry Xerox could have owned the

entire computer industry today um could have been you know a company 10 times its size could have been IBM could have been the IBM of the '90s could have been the Microsoft of the 90s so um but

anyway that's all ancient history it doesn't really matter anymore sure you mentioned IBM when when IBM entered the market was that a daunting thing at for

you at Apple oh sure um I mean here was Apple a you know1 billion doll company and here was IBM at that time probably about a 30 some odd billion dollar company entering the market sure it was

it was very scary uh we made a very big mistake though the IBM's first product was terrible was really bad and we made a mistake of uh of not realizing that a lot of other

people had a very strong vested interest in helping IBM make it better so uh if it had just been up to IBM they would have crashed and burned but IBM did have a I think a genius in their approach

which was to have a lot of other people have a vested interest in their success and that's what saved them in the end so you came back from uh visiting Xerox park with a vision M and how did you

implement the vision well uh um I got our best people together and started to get them working on this the problem was that we'd hired a bunch of people from

hulet Packard and um they didn't get this idea they didn't get it I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people who

thought the coolest thing in user interface was soft keys at the bottom of a screen you know they had no concept of proportionately spaced fonts no concept of a mouse matter of fact I remember arguing with these folks people

screaming at me that it would take us 5 years to engineer a mouse and it would cost $300 to build and I finally got fed up I just went outside and found David Kelly design and uh asked him to design

me a mouse and in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for 15 bucks that was phenomenally reliable so I found that in a way

apple apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways and there was a core team that did but there was a a larger

team that most had mostly had come from hulet Packard that that didn't have a clue well this this becomes this issue of professionalism there's a dark side and a light side to it isn't well no you

know what it is no it's not dark and light it's that people get confused companies get confused when they start getting bigger they want to replicate their

initial success and a lot of them think well somehow there's some magic in the process of how that success was created so they start to try to institutionalize

process across the company and before very long people get very confused that the process is the content that's ultimately the downfall of IBM IBM has the best processed people in the world

they just forgot about the content and that's what happened a little bit at Apple too we had a lot of people who were great at management process they just didn't have a clue as

to the content and in my career I found that the best people you know are the ones that really understand the content and they're a pain in the butt to manage

you know but you put up with it because they're so great at the content and that's what makes great products it's not process it's content so we had a little bit of that problem at Apple and

that problem eventually resulted in in the Lisa which had its moments of Brilliance in a way it was very far

ahead of its time but there wasn't enough fundamental content understanding Apple drifted too far away from its roots to H these H Packard guys $10,000

was cheap to our Market to our distribution channels $10,000 was impossible so we produced a product that was a complete mismatch for the culture of our company for the image of our company for the distribution channels of

our company for our current customers none of them could afford a product like that and it it failed um now you and and and John couch fought for leadership of

the absolutely and I lost that's correct how how did that come about well I thought Lisa was was in serious trouble I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction as I've just described and

um uh I could not convince enough people and the Senior Management of Apple that that was the case and we ran the place

as a team for the most part uh so I lost and um at that point in time you know I brooded for a few months but it it was it was not very long after that that it

really occurred to me that if we didn't do something here The Apple 2 was running out of gas and we needed to do something with this technology fast or

else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was and so I formed a small team to do the Macintosh and you know we we were on a mission from God

you know to save Apple no one else thought so but it turned out we were right and it as we evolved the Mac it it became very clear that this was also a

way of Reinventing Apple we we reinvented everything we reinvented manufacturing I made I visited probably 80 automated factories in Japan and we built the world's first automated

computer Factory in the world in California here so we adopted the uh 68,000 microprocessor that Lisa had we negotiated a price that was a fifth of what Lisa was going to pay for it because we were going to use it in much higher volume

and we really started to design this product that could be sold for $1,000 uh called the Macintosh and um we didn't make it we we could have sold it at $2,000 although we

came out at 2500 and um yeah we spent four years of our life doing that we built the product we built the automated Factory the machine to build the machine uh we built

a completely new distribution system we built a completely different marketing approach and um I think it worked pretty well

now you motivated this team I mean you had to guide them uh we had to build a team build a team uh motivate it guide them deal with them you know we we we've interviewed just lots and lots of people

from the Macintosh team and and uh and you know what it keeps coming down to is is your passion your vision and and you know how do you order your priorities in there what what what's important to you

in the development of a product you know one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Scully got a very serious

disease and that disease I've seen other people get it too it's um it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work and that if you

just tell your all these other people you know here's this great idea then of course they can go off and make it happen and the problem with that is is that there's a just a tremendous amount

of craftsmanship in in between a great idea and a great product and as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because

you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make I mean you know there are there are just certain things you you can't make electrons do there are certain things you can't make plastic do

or glass do and and and as you get in or Factories do or robots do and as you get into all these things designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your

brain these Concepts and fit fitting them all together in in in kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what

you want and and every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently and it's that

process that is the magic um and so we had a lot of great ideas when we started but what I've always felt that a team of people doing something they really

believe in is like is is like when I was a young kid um there was a um a widowed man that lived up the street and uh he he was in his

80s uh he's a little scary looking and and I got to know him a little bit um I think he might have paid me to cut his mow his lawn or something and one day he said come on into my garage I want to show you something and he pulled out

this Dusty old rock tumbler it was a a motor and a and a and a coffee can and a little you know band between them and and he said come on with me we went out to the back and we got some just some

rocks some regular old ugly rocks and he and we put them in the can with a little bit of uh of liquid and a little bit of of uh of grit powder and um we closed

the can up and and he turned this motor on he said come back tomorrow and this can was making a you know racket as the stones went around and I came back the next day and we took we opened the can

and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks um the same common stones that had gone

in through rubbing against each other like this a little bit of friction creating a little bit of noise had come out these beautiful polished rocks and that's always been in my mind my

metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about is is that it's through the team through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other having

arguments having fights sometimes making some noise and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas and what comes out are these

really beautiful Stones you so it's hard to explain um and it's certainly not the result of one person I mean people like symbols so I'm the symbol of certain things

but it really is was a team effort on the Mac now in my life I I observed something fairly early on uh at Apple um

which is I didn't know how to explain it then but I've thought a lot about it since if you most things in life the dynamic range between average and the best is at most 2 to one right like if

you go to New York City and you're get an average taxi cab driver versus the best taxi cab driver you know you're probably going to get to your destination with the best taxi cab maybe 30% faster you know in an

automobile what's the difference between an average and the best maybe I know 20% uh the best CD player and an average CD player I don't know 20% so two to one is a big big dynamic range in in most of

life um in software and it used to be the case in Hardware too the difference between average and the best is 50 to

one maybe 100 to one easy okay I've very few things in life are like this but what I was lucky enough to spend my life

in is like this and so I've built a lot of My Success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and

C players but really going for the a players and I found something I found that when you get enough a players together when you go to through the incredible work to find you know five of

these a players they really like working with each other because they they've never had a chance to do that before and they don't want to work with B andc players and so it becomes self- policing and they only want to hire more a

players and so you build up these pockets of a players and it propagates and that's what the Mac team

was like they were all a players and um um these were extraordinarily talented people so but there are also people who

now say that they don't have the energy anymore to work for you mhm sure oh I I think if you talk to a lot of people on the Mac team they will tell

you um it was the hardest they've ever worked in their life some of them will tell you it was you know the happiest they've ever been in their life but I think all of them will tell you that it is certainly one of the most intense and

cherish experiences they will ever have in their life mhm yeah they did so you know it's uh some of those things you you are not sustainable for some people what what

does it mean when you tell someone their work a uh it usually means their work is sometimes it means I think your

work is and I I'm wrong but uh uh usually it means their their work is not anywhere near good enough we have this great quote from

Bill ainson who says when you say is someone's work is you really mean I don't quite understand it would you please explain it to

me no that's not usually what I meant uh I you know when you get really good people

um they know they're really good and you don't have to Baby people's egos so much and what really matters is the work that everybody knows that that's all that

matters is the work so it people are being counted on to do

specific pieces of the puzzle and the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who's really good and who's really being counted on is to point out

to them when um they're not their work isn't good enough and to do it very clearly and to articulate why uh and to to get them back on track and you need

to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation that it's their work the work that they've done for this

particular thing is not good enough to support the goal of the team and that's a hard thing to do um and I've always taken a very direct approach so um and I

think if you talk to people that have worked with me um the really good people have found it beneficial uh some people have hated it

you know but um and I'm also one of these people that I I don't really care about being right you know I just care about

success so you'll find a lot of people that will tell you that uh I had a very strong opinion and uh they you know presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I completely changed

my mind because I'm like that I don't mind being wrong and I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot it doesn't really matter to me too much what matters to me is that we do the right thing so how and why did

Apple get into desktop publishing which would become the max killer app I don't know if you know this but we got the first Canon Laser Printer engine shipped in the United States at Apple and we had

it hooked up to Alisa actually Imaging Pages before anybody before HP long before HP long before Adobe but I I heard a few times people would tell me hey there's these guys over in this

garage left zerox Park you got to go see him and I finally went and saw them and um I saw what they were doing and it was better than what we were doing and they were going to be a hardware company they wanted to make printers and the whole

thing and so what I I talked him into being a software company and we um within two or three weeks uh we had cancelled our internal project a bunch

of people wanted to kill me over this but we did it and uh I had cut a deal with Adobe to use their software and we bought 19.9% of adobe at Apple they needed some financing we wanted a little

bit of control and uh we were Off to the Races and so we got the engines from Canon we designed the first laser printer controller at Apple uh and we got the software from Adobe and we

introduced the laser Rider and no one at the company wanted to do it but but a few of us in the Mac Group everybody thought a $77,000 printer was crazy what they didn't understand was you could share it with apple talk I mean they

understood it intellectually but they didn't understand it viscerally because the last really expensive thing we tried to sell was Lisa so we pushed this thing through and I had to basically do it over a few dead bodies but we pushed this thing through and and it it was the

first laser printer on the market as you know and um you know the rest is history when I left apple apple was the largest printer company by re measured by Revenue in the

world wow it lost that distinction to H Packard about 3 four years after I left unfortunately but uh when I left it was the largest printer company in the world did you envision desktop publishing was

that a a no-brainer you know yes but we also envisioned really the networked office and so in January of

1995 when we had our annual meeting and introduced our new products I made probably the largest marketing blender of my career 1985 1985 sorry uh made probably the largest marketing blender

of my career by announcing the Macintosh office instead of just desktop publishing and uh we had desktop publishing as a major component of that but we announced

a bunch of other stuff uh as well and I think we should have just focused on desktop publishing at that time after serious disagreements with Apple's CEO John Scully Steve left the company in

1985 tell us about your departure from Apple oh it was it was very painful I'm not even sure I want to talk about it um what can I say I hired the wrong guy

that was was Skully yeah and uh he destroyed everything i' spent 10 years working for um starting with me but that wasn't

the saddest part I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I'd wanted it to um he basically got on a rocket ship

that was about to leave the pad and the rocket ship left the pad and um it kind of went to his head got confused and thought that he built a rocket

ship um and then he kind of sort of changed the trajectory so that it was inevitably going to crash

into the ground well it was always the in the pre- Macintosh days and the early Macintosh days it was always a Steven and John show you know you two were kind of joined at the hip for a while there and then something happened to split you

what was that correct what was that Welly what happened was that the industry went into a

recession in late 1984 sales started seriously Contracting and John didn't know what to

do he had not a clue and there was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple uh there were fairly strong general managers running the divisions I was running the Macintosh division somebody else was running the Apple 2 Division

Etc there were some problems with some of the divisions there was a person running the storage division that was completely out lunch a bunch of things that needed to be changed but all of those problems got put in a pressure

cooker because of this contraction in the marketplace and there was no leadership and um

John was in a situation where the board was not happy and where he was probably not long for the

company and one thing I did not ever see about John uh until that time was he had an incredible survival Instinct uh somebody once told me this guy didn't

get to be this you know the president of PepsiCo without these kinds of instincts and um and it was true and John decided

that um a really good person to be the root of all these problems would be me and so uh we we came to loggerheads and

John had cultivated a very close relationship with the board um and they believed him so that's what happened so there were competing Visions

for the company oh clearly and and well not so much competing Visions for the company because I don't think John had a vision for the company well I guess I'm I'm asking what was your vision that that lost out in this instance it it

wasn't an issue of vision it was an issue um of

execution in the sense that uh my belief was that Apple needed much stronger leadership uh to sort of unite these various factions that we created with

the divisions that the Macintosh was the future of Apple that we needed to reain back expenses dramatically in the Apple 2 area that we needed to be spending

very heavily in the Macintosh area um things like that and John's Vision was that um he should remain the CEO of the

company and anything that would help him do that would would be acceptable so so uh I think that

uh you know Apple was in a state of paralysis in the early part of 1985 and I wasn't at that time capable I

don't think of running the company as a whole you know I was 30 years old and I don't think I had enough experience to run a$2 billion company um unfortunately

John didn't either and um so anyway I I uh I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no job

for me it was really really tragic Siberia yeah it would have been far smarter for Apple to sort of you know let me work on the next I volunteer I said why don't I start a research Division and uh you know give me a few million bucks a year and I'll go hire

some really great people we'll do the next great thing and I was told there was no opportunity to do that oh wow so uh and my office was taken away it was

it was I mean I'll get real emotional if we keep talking about this so anyway that but that's irrelevant I'm just one person and the company was a lot more people than me so that that's not the

important part the important part was the values of Apple you know over the next several years were systematically destroyed I then asked Steve for his

thoughts on the state of Apple remember this was 1995 a year before he would go back to Apple remember too that when Apple bought bought next a year after this interview Steve immediately sold

the Apple stock he received as part of the sale Apple's dying today Apple's dying a very painful death uh it's on a

Glide slope to to die and uh the reason is is because you know when I walked out the door at Apple we had a 10-year lead on everybody else in the industry Macintosh was 10 years ahead I you know

we watched Microsoft take 10 years to catch up with it well the reason that they could catch up with it was because Apple stood still I mean the Macintosh that's shipping today is like you know

25% different than the day I left they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D I mean you know a total of probably billion dollar on

R&D what did they get for it I don't know but it was the what happened was the the

the understanding of how to move these things forward and how to create these new products somehow evaporated and I think a lot of the good people stuck around for a while but

there wasn't an opportunity to get together and do this uh because there wasn't any any leadership to do that so what's happened with apple now is is that they' they've fallen behind uh in in many respects certainly in market

share and and most importantly their differentiation has has has been eroded by Microsoft and so what they have now is they have their installed base which is not growing and which is shrinking

slowly but will provide a a you know a a a good Revenue stream for several years but it's a Glide slope that's just going to go like this yeah so um it's

unfortunate and I I don't really think it's reversible at this point in time that's do I what about Microsoft I mean that's the Juggernaut now right and it's you know and it it's

it's it's a kind of a you know Ford LTD going into the into the future it's definitely not a Cadillac it's not a BMW it's yeah it's just you know what what's

going on there how did those guys do that well Microsoft's orbit was made possible

by a Saturn 5 booster called IBM and uh I know Bill would get upset with me for saying this but of course it was true and

um much to Bill and Microsoft's credit they used that fantastic opportunity to create more opportunity for themselves uh most people don't remember but in 19 until 1984 with the Mac Microsoft was

not in the applications business it was dominated by lotus and Microsoft took a big gamble to write for the mac and they came out with applications that were terrible but they kept at it they made

them better and eventually they dominated the Macintosh application market and then used a springboard of of Windows to get into the PC market with those same applications and now they dominate the applications in the PC

Space 2 so they have two characteristics I think they're very strong opportunists and I don't mean that in a bad way and two they're like the Japanese they just keep on coming now they were able to do

that because of the revenue stream from the IBM deal uh but nonetheless they they made the most of it and I I give them a lot of credit for that the only problem with Microsoft is they just have

no taste they have absolutely no taste and and and what that means is I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way in the sense that

they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product um and and you say well why is that important well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from

type setting and beautiful books that's where one gets the idea if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products um and so I I

guess I am saddened not by Microsoft's success I have no problem with their success they've earned their success for the most part I have a problem with the

fact that they just make really Third Rate products their products have no Spirit to them their products have no sort of spirit of Enlightenment about

them they are very pedestrian and the sad part is is that most customers don't don't have a lot of that spirit either but it but the way that we're going to

ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the

subtlety of these better things um and and Microsoft's just you know it's

McDonald's so um that's what saddens me not that Microsoft is one but that uh Microsoft's products don't display more

um more insight and and more cre creativity so what are you doing about it tell us about next well I'm not doing anything about it okay uh because next

is too small of a company to do anything about that um I'm just watching it and uh there's there's really nothing I can

do about it next we talked about next the company Steve was running in 1995 which Apple was soon to buy next software would become the heart of the

Mac in the form of os 10 you don't want to hear about next do you yes I do you do okay um well maybe the best thing SP much time is I just tell you what next is

today in the whole history the the there hasn't [Music] been clearly the the innovation in the computer

industry is happening in software right now and there haven't there hasn't been a revolution in how we create software in a long

sorry sorry um The Innovation in the industry is in software and there hasn't ever been a real revolution in how we created software certainly not in the last 20

years matter of fact it's gotten worse while the Macintosh was a revolution for the end user to make it easier to use it it was the opposite for the developer the develop paid the price and software

got much more complicated to write as it became easier to use for the end user so software is is infiltrating everything we do these days uh in businesses software is one of the most

potent competitive weapons I mean the most successful business war was friends and family mci's friends and family you know in the last 10 years and what was that it was a brilliant idea and it was

custom billing software AT&T didn't respond for 18 months yielding billions of dollars worth of market share to MCI not cuz they were stupid but because they couldn't get the billing software

done so in in in ways like that in smaller ways software is becoming an incredible force in this world um to provide new goods and services to people

whether it's over the Internet or you know what have you software is going to be a major enabler in our society we have taken another one of

those brillient original ideas at Xerox Park that I saw in 1979 but didn't see really clearly then called object oriented technology and we have perfected it and commercialized it here

and become the biggest supplier of it to the market and this this object technology lets you build software 10 times faster and it's better and um so

that's what we do and we've got a small to mediumsized business and we're the largest supplier of objects but you know we're a 50 to 75 million company got about 300 people and that's what we

do and the the the end of the third show actually is the one moment where we do look into the future because Channel 4 has asked us to do that sure and uh so what's your vision of you know 10 years

from now with this technology that you're that you're developing well you know I think the internet and the web there are two exciting things happening in software

and in Computing today I think one is objects but the other one is the web the web is incredibly exciting because it is the the Fulfillment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would

ultimately not be primarily a device for computation but metamorphosize into a device for communication and the with the web that's finally happening um and secondly it's exciting because Microsoft doesn't

own it and therefore there's a tremendous amount of innovation happening so I think uh that the web is going to be profound in what it does to our society as you know about 15% of the goods and services in the US are sold

via catalogs over the television all that's going to go on the web and more billions and billions tens of billions of dollars where the goods and services are going to be sold on the web if you could a way to think about it is it is

the ultimate direct to customer distribution Channel another way to think about it is the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company in the world on the web

so I guess um I think the web as we look back 10 years from now the web is going to be the defining technology the defining social uh um the defining

social moment for computer and um I think it's going to be huge I think it's breathed a whole new generation of life into personal

Computing and um I think it's going to be huge yeah and you're making software that oh absolutely but so is everybody I mean just forget about what we're doing

just as an industry the web is going to open a whole new door to this industry it's another one of those things that it's obvious once it happens but five

years ago who would have guessed right that's right isn't this a wonderful place we live in I was Keen to know about Steve's passion what drove him I read an article

when I was very young in Scientific American and it um it measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet so for you know

bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish how many kilo calories per kilometer did they spend to move and and and humans were measured too and uh

the Condor one it was the most efficient and Mankind the crown of creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list

um but somebody there had the Brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor all the way off the charts and I remember this

really had an impact on me I I really remember this that humans are tool Builders and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human

abilities and to me we actually ran an ad like this very early to Apple that the personal computer was the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body that that of all the inventions of

humans the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back and it is the

most awesome tool that we have ever invented and and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time

historically where this invention has has taken form and and as you know when you set a vector off in space if you can change this direction a little bit at the beginning it's dramatic when it gets a few miles out in space I feel we've we

we are still really at the beginning of that vector and if we can nudge it in the right directions uh it will be a much better thing uh as it as it progresses on and and I look you know I

think we've had a chance to do that a few times and uh and it it brings I think all of us associated with a tremendous satisfaction but how do you know what's the right direction you

know ultimately it comes down to taste it comes down to taste it's it comes down to trying to expose

yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing I mean Picasso had a saying he said good

artists copy great artists steal and we have you know always been Shameless about stealing great ideas um and I

think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and Poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also

happen to be the best computer scientists in the world but if it hadn't been for computer science these people would have all been you know doing amazing things in life in other fields and they brought with them we all

brought to this to this effort uh a very liberal arts a sort of air a very a very um

liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in these other fields into this field and um I

don't think you get that if you very narrow one of the questions I asked everyone in the series was are you a hippie or a nerd oh if I had to pick one of those

two I'm clearly a hippie yeah yeah okay that in 30 all the people I work with were clearly in that

category too really do I yeah yeah you ask why that is yeah why I mean is you you seek out hippies or they are attracted to you well ask yourself what is a

hippie um I mean this is an old word it has a lot of connotations but to me you know because I grew up I mean remember that the 60s happened in the early 70s right so we have to remember that and that's sort of when I came of age so I saw a

lot of this and uh you know a lot of it happened right in our backyard here um

so to me the spark of that was that there was something Beyond sort of what you see every day there's something going on here in life

beyond just a job and a family and two cars in the garage and a career there's something more going on there's another side of the coin that we don't talk

about much and and and and we experience it when there's gaps when we kind of just aren't really when everything's not ordered and perfect when there's kind of

a gap you experience this inrush of something and and a lot of people have set off throughout history to find out what that was you know whether it's thorough or whether it's you know some Indian Mystics or whoever it might be

and and the hippie movement got a little bit of that and they wanted to find out what that was about and that life wasn't about what they saw their parents doing and of course the pendulum swung too far

the other way and it was crazy but there was a germ of something there and um it's it's the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of

Bankers you know and and I think that's a wonderful thing and I think that that same Spirit can be put into products and those products can

be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit I if you talk to people that use the Macintosh they love it you don't hear people loving thing products very often you know

really but but you could feel it in there there was something really wonderful there so um I I don't think that most of the

really best people that I've worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers they've work with computers because they are the

medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people does that make any sense to you oh yeah

and you know before they invented these things all these people would have done other other things but but they but computers were invented they did come along and all these people did get interested in in school or before school

and and and and said hey this is the medium that I think I can say something in mhm you know