~ The Biography Of Steve Jobs ~

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Interview with Steve Jobs
Produced by: WGBH
Date: May 14, 1990

http://www.youtube.com/v/qBS4QNBDoz8&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs on Paul Rand (Doug Evans and Alan Pottasch)
Produced by: AMP Films
Date: 1993

http://www.youtube.com/v/xb8idEf-Iak&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs in 1994 (Jeff Goodell)
Published in: Rolling Stone
Date: Jun 16, 199

It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to you?
People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time. The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry. It hasn't happened that often. The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to be the fueling agent for these changes. It's simply because they have a lot of money. They're willing to pay money for things that will save them money or give them new capabilities. And that's a hard one sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in this business aren't doing it because they want to help corporate America. A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff, like Apple's Newton. I'm not real optimistic about it, and I'll tell you why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother's going to have one, and you're going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don't think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals. And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product. To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.

Is that the period you're emerging from now?
I hope so. I've been there before, and I've recently been there again. As you know, most of what I've done in my career has been software. The Apple II wasn't much software, but the Mac was just software in a cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn't run on any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software. And what we've done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson. When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk. So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else they won't take it What we learned was that the reward can't be one and a half times better or twice as good. That's not enough. The reward has to be like three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the mainstream. The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter of fact, I think that the leap that we've made is at least five years ahead of anybody.

Let's talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near future will be able to do everything that traditional desktop computers can do. Is the PC revolution over?
No. Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by your question, but I think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the Mac was — well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft. Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet — basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out. They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself. So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that's great. The question is, what's next? And what's going to keep driving this PC revolution? If you look at the goal of the '80s, it was really individual productivity. And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the '90s — well, if you look at the personal computer, it's going from being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It's going from individual productivity to organizational productivity and also operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for mainframe and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market. And people don't buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate the heart of their company. And they don't buy these applications shrink-wrapped. You can't go buy an application to run your hospital, to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network. They don't exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much that they're really custom apps by the time you get through with them. These custom applications really used to just be in the back office — in accounting, manufacturing. But as business is getting much more sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel and a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn't implement the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without the custom app, it doesn't have the new product or service. I'll give you an example. MCI's Friends and Family is the most successful business promotion done in the last decade — measured in dollars and cents. AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them billions of dollars. Why didn't they? They're obviously smart guys. They didn't because they couldn't create a custom app to run a new billing system.

So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?
I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by much more advanced software, and it's going to be driven by custom software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped software on the PCs, and that's why PCs haven't really touched the heart of the business. And now they want to bring them into the heart of the business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps alongside their shrink-wrapped apps because that's how the enterprise is going to get their competitive advantage in things. For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now. They're giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer just runs these custom apps, they're networked back to a server in Seattle, and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your phone works on the entire McCaw network. In addition to that, the applications business right now — if you look at even the shrink-wrap business — is contracting dramatically. It now takes 100 to 200 people one to two years just to do a major revision to a word processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really creative people who like to work in small teams of three, four, five people, they've all been squeezed out of that business. As you may know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn't have any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft's advantage. You can't have small teams of programmers writing word processors and spreadsheets — it might upset their competitive advantage. And they can afford to have 200 people working on a project, no problem. With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.

That may be so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think of the man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses — not to corporate America.Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.
What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both. What's going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better. They're not sitting around thinking that they have a giant problem that needs to be solved — whereas corporations are. The PC market has done less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need, and they know it. We don't have to spend money educating them about the problem — they know they have a problem. There's a giant vacuum sorrying us in there, and there's a lot of money in there to fuel the development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from that I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit's been written about — it was a very important visit. I remember being shown their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete, some of it wasn't even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And within 10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might be, but I don't think rational people could argue that every computer would work this way someday. I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it. You can argue about how many years it's going to take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry, but I don't think a rational person can argue that all software will not be built this way.

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?
Objects are like people. They're living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we're doing right here. Here's an example: If I'm your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, "Can you get my clothes laundered, please." I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, "Here are your clean clothes." You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can't even hail a taxi. You can't pay for one, you don't have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn't have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That's what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact that Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software industry with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers should work?
I don't really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do you feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we had ... well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It's not my goal anyway. The thing I don't think is good is that I don't believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying — and indeed, in the beginning, that's just what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate — look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can't say the same thing about Microsoft. And I become very concerned, because I see Microsoft competing very fiercely and putting a lot of companies out of business — some deservedly so and others not deservedly so. And I see a lot of innovation leaving this industry. What I believe very strongly is that the industry absolutely needs an alternative to Microsoft. And it needs an alternative to Microsoft in the applications area — which I hope will be Lotus. And we also need an alternative to Microsoft in the systems-software area. And the only hope we have for that, in my opinion, is NeXT.

Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented operating system —
They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too. I'm sure they're working on it. Microsoft's greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is Windows. Windows is so non-object-oriented that it's going to be impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without throwing Windows away, and they can't do that for years. So they're going to try to patch things on top, and it's not going to work.

You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by that?
They're the mainstream. And a lot of people who don't want to think about it too much are just going to buy their product. They have a market dominance now that is so great that it's actually hurting the industry. I don't like to get into discussions about whether they accomplished that fairly or not. That's for others to decide. I just observe it and say it's not healthy for the country.

What do you think of the federal antitrust investigation?
I don't have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by breaking some of the rules. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't think it matters. I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue is, America is leading the world in software technology right now, and that is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of. I personally believe that it would be in the best interest of the country to break Microsoft up into three companies — a systems-software company, an applications-software company and a consumer-software company.

Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple days, when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is Microsoft. And instead of Apple that will save us, it's NeXT. Do you see parallels here, too?
Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That's not important. What's important is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and what Microsoft is doing today.... I think we came closer than we think to losing some of our computer industry in the late '70s and early '80s, and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the healthiest thing that's happened in this industry in the last 10 years.

What's your personal relationship with Bill Gates like?
I think Bill Gates is a good guy. We're not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month.

A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden boys of the computer revolution —
I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill very much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the companies we built were very different from each other.

A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft has on the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope for is that it will be a niche product.
Apple's a niche product, the Mac was a niche product. And yet look at what it did. Apple's, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion when I left. They're doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent market share of the system-software business? I'd be happy now. I'd be very happy. Then I'd go work like crazy to get 20.

You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you founded now, what do you think?
I don't want to talk about Apple.

What about the PowerPC?
It works fine. It's a Pentium. The PowerPC and the Pentium are equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you measure them. They're the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That's good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be? No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000 architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least equal, but it's not a compelling advantage.

You can't open the paper these days without reading about the Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?
The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people's houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that's going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I'm not very excited about that. I'm not excited about home shopping. I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den.

Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all over each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think will be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?
I've talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business, and believe me, they have no idea what they're doing here. And the people who are talking the loudest know the least.

Who are you referring to –John Malone?
I don't want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is going to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They don't understand that that's a little computer that they're going to have in the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they're going to have to come up with some very sophisticated software.

Let's talk more about the Internet. Every month, it's growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?
I don't think it's too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

I'm interested in bearing your ideas.
I don't think of the world that way. I'm a tool builder. That's how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is... you can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.

Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long. It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on. The second thing that we've done is the communications side of it. By creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice. We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies together and start to act as if they were a virtual organization. So I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. And I don't think it's anywhere near over.

When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?
I don't know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment — however you define it. But these are private things. I don't want to talk about this kind of stuff.

Why?
I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it's very important to keep a private life.

Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon Valley?
I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It's not me. Because otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot writes about you — you just can't take it too personally. But then that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.

I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day, and they mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a few months ago. You didn't want to participate in that. Has it been a burden, the pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some people have compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work, and it's all downhill from there.
I'm very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I'm going to be on. Guess I'm going to have to start eating a lot of pie. [Laughs.] I don't know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it. But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with. But I also think that what we're now may turn out in the end to be more profound. Because the Macintosh was the agent of change to bring computers to the rest of us with its graphical-user interface. That was very important. But now the industry is up against a really big closed door. Objects are going to unlock that door. On the other side is a world so rich from this well of software that will spring up that the true promise of many of the things we started, even with the Apple II, will finally start to be realized. After that ... who knows? Maybe there's another locked door behind this door, too; I don't know. But someone else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one.

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs interview from Triumph of the Nerds
Produced by: PBS
Date: 1995

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (Gary Wolf)
Published in: Wired
Date: Feb 1996

The Macintosh computer set the tone for 10 years. Do you think the Web may be setting the tone today?
The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade. It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over. The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it's ubiquitous. There will be Web dial tone everywhere. And anything that's ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don't think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it. There's going to be a lot more innovation, and that will create a place where there isn't this dark cloud of dominance.

Why do you think the Web has sprouted so fast?
One of the major reasons for the Web's proliferation so far is its simplicity. A lot of people want to make the Web more complicated. They want to put processing on the clients, they want to do this and that. I hope not too much of that happens too quickly. It's much like the old mainframe computing environment, where a Web browser is like a dumb terminal and the Web server is like the mainframe where all the processing's done. This simple model has had a profound impact by starting to become ubiquitous.

And objects?
When I went to Xerox PARC in 1979, I saw a very rudimentary graphical user interface. It wasn't complete. It wasn't quite right. But within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday. And you could argue about the number of years it would take, and you could argue about who would be the winners and the losers, but I don't think you could argue that every computer in the world wouldn't eventually work this way. Objects are the same way. Once you understand objects, it's clear that all software will eventually be written using objects. Again, you can argue about how many years it will take, and who the winners and losers will be during this transition, but you can't argue about the inevitability of this transition. Objects are just going to be the way all software is going to be written in five years or - pick a time. It's so compelling. It's so obvious. It's so much better that it's just going to happen.

How will objects affect the Web?
Think of all the people now bringing goods and services directly to customers through the Web. Every company that wants to vend its goods and services on the Web is going to have a great deal of custom-application software to write. You're not just going to be able to buy something off the shelf. You're going to have to hook the Web into your order-management systems, your collection systems. It's going to be an incredible amount of work. 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.

We see how people won the battle of the desktop by owning the operating system. How does one win on the Web?
There are three parts to the Web. One is the client, the second is the pipes, and the third is the servers. On the client side, there's the browser software. In the sense of making money, it doesn't look like anybody is going to win on the browser software side, because it's going to be free. And then there's the typical hardware. It's possible that some people could come out with some very interesting Web terminals and sell some hardware. On the pipe side, the RBOCs are going to win. In the coming months, you're going to see a lot of them offering a service for under $25 a month. You get ISDN strung into your den, you get a little box to hook it into your PC, and you get an Internet account, which is going to be very popular. The RBOCs are going to be the companies that get you on the Web. They have a vested interest in doing that. They'd like to screw the cable companies; they'd like to preserve the customers. This is all happening right now. You don't see it. It's under the ground like the roots of a tree, but it's going to spring up and you're going to see this big tree within a few years. As for the server market, companies like Sun are doing a nice business selling servers. But with Web server software, no one company has more than a single-digit market share yet. Netscape sells hardly any, because you can get free public-domain software and it's very good. Some people say that it's even better than what you can buy. Our company decided that people are going to layer stuff above this very simple Web server to help others build Web applications, which is where the bottleneck is right now. There's some real opportunity there for making major contributions and a lot of money. That's what WebObjects is all about. What other opportunities are out there? Who do you think will be the main beneficiary of the Web? Who wins the most?

People who have something -
To sell!

To share.
To sell!

You mean publishing?
It's more than publishing. It's commerce. People are going to stop going to a lot of stores. And they're going to buy stuff over the Web!

What about the Web as the great democratizer?
If you look at things I've done in my life, they have an element of democratizing. The Web is an incredible democratizer. A small company can look as large as a big company and be as accessible as a big company on the Web. Big companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars building their distribution channels. And the Web is going to completely neutralize that advantage.

What will the economic landscape look like after that democratic process has gone through another cycle?
The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place. The Web's not going to capture everybody. If the Web got up to 10 percent of the goods and services in this country, it would be phenomenal. I think it'll go much higher than that. Eventually, it will become a huge part of the economy.

What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?
The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

That's going to break people's hearts.
I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all. These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important. The Web is going to be very important. Is it going to be a life-changing event for millions of people? No. I mean, maybe. But it's not an assured Yes at this point. And it'll probably creep up on people. It's certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It's certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It's not going to be that profound.

Then how will the Web impact our society?
We live in an information economy, but I don't believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It's primarily because of television. People are reading less and they're certainly thinking less. So, I don't see most people using the Web to get more information. We're already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

The problem is television?
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

So Steve Jobs is telling us things are going to continue to get worse.
They are getting worse! Everybody knows that they're getting worse! Don't you think they're getting worse?

I do, but I was hoping I could come here and find out how they were going to get better. Do you really believe that the world is getting worse? Or do you have a feeling that the things you're involved with are making the world better?
No. The world's getting worse. It has gotten worse for the last 15 years or so. Definitely. For two reasons. On a global scale, the population is increasing dramatically and all our structures, from ecological to economic to political, just cannot deal with it. And in this country, we seem to have fewer smart people in government, and people don't seem to be paying as much attention to the important decisions we have to make.

But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.
I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids. The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much. 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. I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year. If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies. They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school? God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that? These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education. Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology. 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.

If you go back five years, the Web was hardly on anybody's horizon. Maybe even three years ago, it wasn't really being taken seriously by many people. Why is the sudden rise of the Web so surprising?
Isn't it great? That's exactly what's not happening in the desktop market.

Why was everyone, including NeXT, surprised, though?
It's a little like the telephone. When you have two telephones, it's not very interesting. And three is not very interesting. And four. And, well, a hundred telephones perhaps becomes slightly interesting. A thousand, a little more. It's probably not until you get to around ten thousand telephones that it really gets interesting. Many people didn't foresee, couldn't imagine, what it would be like to have a million, or a few tens of thousands of Web sites. And when there were only a hundred, or two hundred, or when they were all university ones, it just wasn't very interesting. Eventually, it went beyond this critical mass and got very interesting very fast. You could see it. And people said, "Wow! This is incredible." The Web reminds me of the early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything. There are no experts. All the experts have been wrong. There's a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. And it hasn't been confined, or defined, in too many ways. That's wonderful. There's a phrase in Buddhism,"Beginner's mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.

Earlier, you seemed to say there's a natural affinity between the Web and objects. That these two things are going to come together and make something very new, right?
Let's try this another way. What might you want to do on a Web server? We can think of four things: One is simple publishing. That's what 99 percent of the people do today. If that's all you want to do, you can get one of a hundred free Web-server software packages off the Net and just use it. No problem. It works fine. Security's not a giant issue because you're not doing credit card transactions over the Web. The next thing you can do is complex publishing. People are starting to do complex publishing on the Web - very simple forms of it. This will absolutely explode in the next 12 to 18 months. It's the next big phase of the Web. Have you seen the Federal Express Web site where you can track a package? It took Federal Express about four months to write that program - and it's extremely simple. Four months. It would be nice to do that in four days, or two days, or one day. The third thing is commerce, which is even harder than complex publishing because you have to tie the Web into your order-management system, your collection system, things like that. I think we're still two years away. But that's also going to be huge. Last is internal Web sites. Rather than the Internet, it's intranet. Rather than write several different versions of an application for internal consumption - one for Mac, one for PC, one for Unix - people can write a single version and have a cross-platform product. Everybody uses the Web. We're going to see companies have dozens - if not hundreds - of Web servers internally as a means to communicate with themselves. Three of those four functions of the Web require custom applications. And that's what we do really well with objects. Our new product, WebObjects, allows you to write Web applications 10 times faster.

How does the Web affect the economy?
We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time. The reason Federal Express won over its competitors was its package-tracking system. For the company to bring that package-tracking system onto the Web is phenomenal. I use it all the time to track my packages. It's incredibly great. Incredibly reassuring. And getting that information out of most companies is usually impossible. But it's also incredibly difficult to give information. Take auto dealerships. So much money is spent on inventory - billions and billions of dollars. Inventory is not a good thing. Inventory ties up a ton of cash, it's open to vandalism, it becomes obsolete. It takes a tremendous amount of time to manage. And, usually, the car you want, in the color you want, isn't there anyway, so they've got to horse-trade around. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all that inventory? Just have one white car to drive and maybe a laserdisc so you can look at the other colors. Then you order your car and you get it in a week. Today a dealer says, "We can't get your car in a week. It takes three months." And you say, "Now wait a minute, I want to order a pink Cadillac with purple leather seats. Why can't I get that in a week?" And he says, "We gotta make it." And you say, "Are you making Cadillacs today? Why can't you paint a pink one today?" And he says, "We didn't know you wanted a pink one." And you say, "OK. I'm going to tell you I want a pink one now." And he says, "We don't have any pink paint. Our paint supplier needs some lead time on that paint.'' And you say, "Is your paint supplier making paint today?" And he says, "Yeah, but by the time we tell him, it takes two weeks." And you say, "What about leather seats?" And he says, "God, purple leather. It'll take three months to get that." You follow this back, and you find that it's not how long it takes to make stuff; it's how long it takes the information to flow through the system. And yet electronics move at the speed of light - or very close to it. So pushing information into the system is sometimes immensely frustrating, and the Web is going to be just as much of a breakthrough in terms of pushing information in as getting information out.

Your view about the Web is an alternative to the commonly held one that it's going to be the renaissance of personal publishing. The person who can't get published through the broadcast media will get a chance to say something.
There's nothing wrong with that. The Web is great because that person can't foist anything on you - you have to go get it. They can make themselves available, but if nobody wants to look at their site, that's fine. To be honest, most people who have something to say get published now.

But when we ask how a person's life is changed by these technologies, pushing information to customize products makes marginal differences. You go to the store and there's a lot of different kinds of toilet paper - some have tulips embossed on them and some don't. You're standing there making a choice, and you want the one with the embossed tulips.
I like the ones without the tulips.

I do, too - and unscented. But that customization is relevant to you for that second but in no other way. For the average person, the possibility to participate as a publisher or a producer has a higher value for them.
I don't necessarily agree. The best way to think of the Web is as a direct-to-customer distribution channel, whether it's for information or commerce. It bypasses all middlemen. And, it turns out, there are a lot of middlepersons in this society. And they generally tend to slow things down, muck things up, and make things more expensive. The elimination of them is going to be profound.

Do you think large institutions are going to be the center of the economy, basically driving it as they are now? Some people say the big company is going to fragment.
I don't see that. There's nothing wrong with big companies. A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it's a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it's a meritocracy. There are very visible examples in business of where it breaks down but it's probably a lot less than in most other areas of society.

You don't think that structural economic changes will tend to shrink the size of these large companies?
Large companies not paying attention to change will get hurt. The Web will be one more area of significant change and those who don't pay attention will get hurt, while those who see it early enough will get rewarded. The Web is just going to be one more of those major change factors that businesses face every decade. This decade, in the next 10 years, it's going to be the Web. It's going to be one of them.

But doesn't the Web foster more freedom for individuals?
It is a leveling of hierarchy. An individual can put up a Web site that, if they put enough work into it, looks just as impressive as the largest company in the world. I love things that level hierarchy, that bring the individual up to the same level as an organization, or a small group up to the same level as a large group with much greater resources. And the Web and the Internet do that. It's a very profound thing, and a very good thing.

Yet the majority of your customers for WebObjects seem to be corporations.
That's correct. And big ones.

Does that cause you any kind of conflict?
Sure. And that's why we're going to be giving our WebObjects software away to individuals and educational institutions for noncommercial use. We've made the decision to give it away.

What do you think about HotJava and the like?
It's going to take a long time for that stuff to become a standard on the Web. And that may shoot the Web in the foot. If the Web becomes too complicated, too fraught with security concerns, then its proliferation may stop - or slow down. The most important thing for the Web is to stay ahead of Microsoft. Not to become more complicated.

That's very interesting. Java pushes the technology toward the client side. Do you find that wrong?
In my opinion? In the next two years? It's dead wrong. Because it may slow down getting to ubiquity. And anything that slows down the Web reaching ubiquity allows Microsoft to catch up. If Microsoft catches up, it's far worse than the fact the Web can't do word processing. Those things can be fixed later. There's a window now that will close. If you don't cross the finish line in the next two years, Microsoft will own the Web. And that will be the end of it.

Let's assume for a second that many people share an interest in a standard Web that provides a strong alternative to Microsoft. However, when it comes to every individual Web company or Web publisher, they have an interest in making sure that their Web site stays on the edge. I know we do at HotWired. And so we have to get people into HotJava - we have to stay out there - which doesn't bode well for retaining simplicity. We're going to be part of that force pushing people toward a more complicated Web, because we have no choice.
The way you make it more complex is not by throwing stuff on the client side but by providing value, like Federal Express does, by becoming more complex on the server side. I'm just very concerned that if the clients become smart, the first thing this will do is fracture the Web. There won't be just one standard. There'll be several; they're all going to fight; each one has its problems. So it's going to be very easy to say why just one shouldn't be the standard. And a fractured Web community will play right into Microsoft's hands. The client-server relationship should be frozen for the next two years, and we shouldn't take it much further. We should just let it be.

By collective agreement?
Yeah. By collective agreement. Sure. Go for ubiquity. If Windows can become ubiquitous, so can the existing Web.

How did Windows become ubiquitous?
A force of self-interest throughout the industry made Windows ubiquitous. Compaq and all these different vendors made Windows ubiquitous. They didn't know how to spell software, but they wanted to put something on their machines. That made Windows ubiquitous.

So it just kind of happened.
No, it was sort of an algorithm that got set in motion when everyone's self-interest aligned toward making this happen. And I claim that the same sort of self-interest algorithm is present on the Web. Everyone has a self-interest in making this Web ubiquitous and not having anyone own it - especially not Microsoft.

Is the desktop metaphor going to continue to dominate how we relate to computers, or is there some other metaphor you like better?
To have a new metaphor, you really need new issues. The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long. I don't store anything anymore, really. I use a lot of e-mail and the Web, and with both of those I don't have to ever manage storage. As a matter of fact, my favorite way of reminding myself to do something is to send myself e-mail. That's my storage. The minute that I don't have to manage my own storage, and the minute I live primarily in a connected versus a stand-alone world, there are new options for metaphors.

You have a reputation for making well-designed products. Why aren't more products made with the aesthetics of great design?
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn't have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better - but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They're too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: A discussion with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter (Charlie Rose)
Produced by: PBS
Date: Oct 30, 1996

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Wall $treet Week (Louis Rukeyser)
Produced by: PBS
Date: LAte 1996

http://www.youtube.com/v/SaJp66ArJVI&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Interview exclusive de Steve Jobs (Christophe Rasch)
Produced by: LaTélé
Date: Late 1996

http://www.youtube.com/v/MVppAvaKJcs&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve’s Job: Restart Apple (Cathy Booth)
Published in: Time Magazine
Date: Aug 18, 1997

Steve Jobs is sitting in the Apple boardroom. Actually, he is slouched like a teenager in one of the cushy leather chairs, his worn jogging shoes resting on the directors' table. The table is very long, very impressive--and very empty. Just Jobs here, wearing shorts and an impish grin. The old board of directors at Apple is history, he says. He's about to leave for Boston, where he'll make that news public, along with a far more dramatic announcement. One more thing, he says, feet still propped up on the executive woodwork--the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., is history too. Eight stories of corporate excess are about to be abandoned. "I hate this building," says Jobs. "This building has come to symbolize everything that went wrong with Apple. It's about corporate hubris. Greed." This is not a building that can make "insanely great" computer products.

The rebel flag is flying over Apple Computer, Inc., again, thanks to Jobs. The Silicon Valley visionary who co-founded Apple in his father's garage in 1976, who launched the wildly successful Macintosh only to be booted by the corporate pinheads in 1985, is back running his first love. No, he's not the CEO, nor even chairman of the board. But until there's a new boss, Jobs is firmly at Apple's helm, and take it from us, the beleaguered company will never be the same. Take it too from the 1,600 Macintosh believers who gave him a standing ovation at the Macworld Expo in Boston last week, then booed, hissed and finally sat in shocked silence as Jobs announced that Apple's salvation would be a strategic alliance with none other than... Bill Gates of Microsoft.

Understand, the idea of Jobs returning to Apple is something akin to that of Luke Skywalker returning to fight what, until last week, cultists regarded as the evil empire. Gates, by comparison, was perceived as a dweeb Darth Vader, the billionaire bad guy who usurped the idea of the Macintosh's friendly point-and-click operating system for his now dominant Microsoft Windows.

Boo, hiss, a strategic alliance indeed. Is Jobs crazy? "Madman at the wheel, eh?" he said, laughing, as he walked off the stage in Boston.

American business has had its share of imaginative entrepreneurs, malevolent bosses, boardroom plotters who hatch late-night coups, strategic decision makers who make disastrous turns and heroic turnaround artists who restore corporate glory with breakthrough thinking and messianic zeal. Generally, that would describe more than one person. But Jobs is a one-man miniseries of capitalism whose ratings are rising again. Within hours of the announcement, Apple stock soared 33% to $26.31. Sipping a celebratory water on the plane ride home, Jobs pointed out that people had been so shocked they missed the big news: Microsoft would be paying an undisclosed amount to settle claims that it had used seminal Apple computer patents. "Three or four weeks ago," said Jobs, "I called Bill and said Microsoft and Apple should work more closely together, but we have this issue to resolve, this intellectual-property dispute. Let's resolve it." With Jobs' no-nonsense negotiating, it was done quickly, with Gates not only promising to pay off Apple but even investing $150 million in nonvoting Apple stock. The rebels can now withdraw to their original "campus" in Cupertino--the one without the fancy boardroom--and live on to fight another day.

The tale of Steve Jobs has long been a Silicon Valley legend. It was Jobs who, as a long-haired and barefoot twentysomething, set in motion the revolution called the personal computer by making it "user friendly" to the masses. Jobs didn't invent the machine; his partner Steve Wozniak was the real engineer. But Jobs understood before anyone else the key to transforming the computer from a geek's expensive toy into a household appliance. Instead of writing commands in computerese, Macintosh owners used a mouse to point and click on easily identifiable icons on the screen--a trash can and a file folder. Jobs also paired the laser printer with the computer, thus sparking the desktop-publishing revolution. "We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," laughs Jobs.

Jobs is intimidating at first. He has, after all, been portrayed as an abusive monster, and countless colleagues attest to his arrogance and intolerance. But now, even during the week of the highest stress he has faced in years, he exudes his other side: the Zen-like calm and the impish aura that make him so different from his arch friend and arch rival Gates, a man of competitive intensity and analytical rigor. This Jobs literally lopes into the room, and he keeps using the word golly. So O.K., golly, it's true that the famed "Reality Distortion Field"--that renowned Jobsian ability to bamboozle and bedazzle--still works, but it's a slower seduction these days, not a manic pitch. At 42, he may have mellowed, but as a motivator and marketer he still has no equal.

The adopted son of working-class parents, Jobs became a millionaire by age 25, an American icon by age 30 and corporate history the same year, all thanks to Apple. It would be easy to read his return--12 years after he was booted by the board--as a moment of sweet revenge. But for Jobs, who grew up idolizing the Hewlett-Packard ideal of an egalitarian workplace where ideas came before hierarchy, returning to Apple is something akin to rescuing a son before he loses himself to booze and bad company. There has been a literal deathwatch on Apple in recent weeks. It had sales of $9.8 billion last year, but revenues have dropped significantly in 1997. Losses have mounted--more than $1.5 billion over 18 months. Jobs prefers to see hope in the 20 million to 25 million users who remain. He even has a hard time uttering the D word. "Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could--I'm searching for the right word--could, could..." He pauses and gives in: "die."

All last week, Jobs allowed TIME to follow him as he negotiated his detente with Gates and prepared for the Boston meeting, then headed back to California to work at what he calls his "preferred squeeze"--Pixar Animation Studios, the Jobs company that created the 1995 hit movie Toy Story, the first animated feature film made entirely by computer. Pixar represents pure creation, a whole new era of entertainment that blends good storytelling with computers. "It's so fun at Pixar," he says, reveling in his new role as Hollywood mogul on the make. Apple, on the other hand, requires heavy lifting. "It's like turning a big tanker. There were a lot of lousy deals that we're undoing."

So why go back to a company that has ejected CEOs like so many bad diskettes? "I wouldn't be honest if some days I didn't question whether I made the right decision in getting involved," he says. "But I believe life is an intelligent thing--that things aren't random." In other words, there's a reason why his path has crossed Apple's again. A chance to pay penance? Or perhaps to prove he has grown up.

On Monday, two days before the fateful announcement, Jobs has the run of Apple headquarters. Most of the executive suites are already empty, their inhabitants gone to Macworld or just plain gone. Apple's management ranks have been thinning at an alarming rate. Only Fred Anderson, the chief financial officer, is roaming the halls as Jobs negotiates with Microsoft by phone and works on a quickie video of the new Apple board he virtually handpicked--naturally to include his buddy, Oracle chief Lawrence Ellison, who considered his own takeover bid of Apple this spring. "We caught Larry Ellison in the San Jose airport last Friday before he left for vacation," says Jobs, chuckling, as he watches raw video footage in the boardroom. "Apple is the only life-style brand in the computer industry," Ellison is saying onscreen. "It's the only company people feel passionate about. My company, Oracle, is huge; IBM is huge; Microsoft is huge; but no one has incredible emotions with our companies." Jobs is pleased.

All day long, the de facto helmsman races in and out, trying out bits of his Wednesday speech. He is aware of the naysaying, that Apple, with its single-digit market share, is doomed to fall before the Goliath of Microsoft. At Macworld, he will stress instead Apple's domination of education and desktop publishing. He fiddles with a paper clip as he thinks out loud.

"What if Apple didn't exist? Think about it. TIME wouldn't get published next week. Some 70% of the newspapers in the U.S. wouldn't publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn't have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn't have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn't exist," he says. "So there's something worth saving here. See?"

Painful as it is for a founding father, he keeps up daily with the rumbles about Apple on the Internet, the world's most extensive gossip mill. The chatter is of proxy fights and takeovers, the frustrations vented by clonemakers and Mac users alike. He understands; he really does. He gave up on Apple himself just two months ago and unloaded the 1.5 million shares he got as part of the $424 million Apple paid him for NeXT Software Inc. last December. "Yes, I sold the shares," he says. "I pretty much had given up hope that the Apple board was going to do anything. I didn't think the stock was going up." He ruefully notes that he sold them in June when the price was around $15 a share, about $16 million less than they'd be worth now. Today he holds a symbolic one share of Apple--and is unapologetic about not holding more. "If that upsets employees," he says, "I'm perfectly happy to go home to Pixar."

Within weeks of his sale, of course, the board ousted CEO Gilbert Amelio after 17 months on the job. Jobs says the board came to him and offered him both the CEO's and chairman's job. "I thought about it," he admits, "but decided it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life." Taking the chairman's job, in particular, he said would "scare away" any real candidate for the CEO's job, given Jobs' penchant for down-your-throat management. Yet it may not be much better for the new CEO to have him sitting on the board, especially the reconstituted activist board of Jobs allies that he hopes will keep Apple on the right path. "I've agreed to be a board member, and that's all I can give. I have another life now."

The Steve Jobs who is currently running two sophisticated companies lives in a turn-of-the- century English-style country house in Palo Alto with his wife Laurene, 33, their two young children and his 19-year-old daughter Lisa, home from college for the summer. The house is run with a distinct 1960s flavor. Laurene has planted a garden of wildflowers, herbs and vegetables all around. The rooms are sparsely decorated, the only extravagances being Ansel Adams photographs. We dine as the Jobses always do: both are strict vegans, eating no meat products. Dinner is pasta with raw tomatoes, fresh raw corn from the garden, steamed cauliflower and a salad of raw shredded carrots. While the adults eat, their six-year-old son picks lemon verbena and other herbs in the garden for the after-dinner tea. His reward is a tickle and being tucked into bed by Dad.

Over dinner, Jobs tells how Laurene overloaded his circuits eight years ago while he was speaking at nearby Stanford University. "I couldn't take my eyes off her," he says of the brainy blond M.B.A. He "bagged" a business dinner to be with her, he says, and they've been together ever since. Conversation is a mix of politics, Laurene's work setting up a mentor group for a nearby high school and tales of a presidential visit last summer when Bill Clinton rang up and invited himself to dinner so he could meet with Silicon Valley executives. "We had to rent a Dumpster to clean out the house before they came!" says Jobs, whose prenuptial housing style was "spare," if that's the term for lacking furniture. The couple giggle over their search for cheap wine glasses to serve the President. The menu was, naturally, vegan.

Tuesday Jobs heads for Boston, traveling commercial, albeit first class. Once there, he surveys the Castle, a puny downtown venue chosen months ago for what was expected to be a snoozer of a speech to Mac enthusiasts by Amelio. Jobs has assembled an army of showmen to orchestrate his- -and Apple's--return to competition. There is theatrical lighting and a concert-quality sound system. He stares at the mega columns with the Apple logo cut into them, grimaces at their "Hitlerish" appearance, but decides it's too late to do anything about them. Then he sets to work on his slide-show presentation--run from an IBM ThinkPad. The software, thank heaven, is from his old company, NeXT.

Less than 12 hours before his big announcement, nobody here knows yet about the bombshell to come. In fact, Jobs is still negotiating it here at the Castle--on a cell phone. "Hi, Bill," you hear him say in the echo chamber of the old hall. Then his voice drops, and for nearly an hour he paces the stage, running through last-minute details with Gates. All the while, he leans over his computer, paces, lies down on the stage, paces, lurks in dark corners, paces and talks, paces and talks.

This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, "There are a lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up things." Then, to his crew, he yells, "Have we got satellite contact with the other side?" Assured this has been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates about what to wear on the morrow ("I'm just going to wear a white shirt," he assures him), and he finally ends the conversation with a heartfelt "Thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it." And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call.

The deal is vintage Jobs. Amelio began the process of repairing relations between the two longtime rivals. But once he was out the door at Apple, Jobs contacted Gates to try to get talks started again. Gates dispatched his CFO, Gregory Maffei, who met Jobs at his home. Jobs suggested they go for a walk. Grabbing a couple of bottles of mineral water from the fridge, the two took off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. "It was an interesting scene," Maffei recalls. "It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies." The two walked for nearly an hour, through Palo Alto's green university area, as they pounded out the details of a potential deal. Jobs, Maffei says, was "expansive and charming. He said, 'These are things that we care about and that matter.' And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn't ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured about what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal."

That credibility would be tested as Jobs delivered the speech to the faithful. And then he was there, on the giant screen. Gates appeared, amid boos and hisses, to announce that Microsoft would invest in and cooperate with Apple. Jobs is disappointed by the "childish behavior" of those who booed. "I'm sure some people want to cling to old identities. I was a little disappointed at the unprofessional reaction. On the one hand, people are dying to get the latest release of Microsoft Office on their Macs, and on the other hand, they're booing the CEO of the company that puts it out. It seems really stupid to me." He adds, "Apple has to move beyond the point of view that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose."

Until a new CEO is on board, Jobs is up to his trim 35-in.-waist jeans in determining Apple's future. "I'm here almost every day," he said, sitting in the boardroom last week, "but just for the next few months. I'm really clear on it." His position is fairly critical to the company's success, according to Edgar Woolard Jr., chairman of E.I. DuPont and one of only two board members who survived the latest assault. "It's conceivable Apple could turn around without Steve, but the probability goes up significantly with Steve. Steve is noted for his intellect and vision, but he can also bring a spirit of enthusiasm to users and employees alike."

He can also buy that spirit. To restore morale, Jobs says, he went to the mat with the old board to lower the price of incentive stock options, which had become virtually worthless as the share price sagged. In Silicon Valley, where job opportunities are as common as Porsches, stock options are crucial to retain employees. When the board members resisted, he pushed for their resignations. Jobs repriced the option at $13.25. Apple employees have already made 100%.

There's not one area of Apple that doesn't bear Jobs' fingerprints. Take product development. "We've reviewed the road map of new products and axed more than 70% of the projects, keeping the 30% that were gems. Plus we're adding new ones that are a whole new paradigm of looking at computers," he says. "The product teams at Apple are very excited. There's so much low-hanging fruit, it's easy to turn around."

Next on the list is Apple's fuzzy marketing message. (Quick: Can you think of it?) Jobs dismissed Apple's ad agency and held a "bake-off" for the account among three firms. The winner was TBWA Chiat/Day, the company that created Apple's legendary 1984 Super Bowl ad (only to be fired). Jobs is wildly enthusiastic about the new ad, which features the theme "Think Differently," but when he plays it for his inner team at the Castle Tuesday night, the group nixes it as not ready for prime time. Look for it soon, however. "There's a germ of a brilliant idea there," Jobs rhapsodizes.

The key, Jobs believes, is to take advantage of the Apple brand itself. "What are the great brands? Levis, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category," he says. "You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn't been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think 'outside the box,' people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done."

Although many computer wonks still think Apple is too tempting for Jobs to resist, the truth is that he's been much better at building new companies than running existing ones. Pixar, his latest love, is taking off. Eleven years ago, he clicked his mouse on the Hollywood icon and bought Pixar from Star Wars director George Lucas. He has dumped upwards of $55 million of his own money into the venture and fairly burbles with that famed charisma over his new mission: marrying Silicon Valley technology to Hollywood's creative genius. His studio became the first--besides Disney--to hit it big with an animated movie, Toy Story, which cleared a respectable $37 million for the fledgling studio. Jobs owns 60% of Pixar, which is valued at anywhere from $700 million to $800 million.

Just entering the door at Pixar's headquarters in the San Francisco suburb of Richmond tells you all you need to know about the difference in cultures between Pixar and Apple. Pixar is what Apple used to be: cool. Everybody's office here is the same size, even Jobs'. He's in shorts; so is everybody else.

During our visit, Toy Story's Academy Award-winning director, John Lasseter, is excited about a "bug cam" the size of a matchbook. It was designed on a lark by Pixar engineers to photograph real bugs for A Bug's Life, the first in Pixar's five-picture deal with Disney. The hallways are crawling with pictures of exotic bugs and plants that will eventually populate the movie. "It's way cool working here," says Lasseter. "The atmosphere is fun. We respect creative people and make them feel satisfied."

Musing on the differences between the computer biz and the animation biz, Jobs notes, "Look, you work on a technical product, and if you're really lucky, it ships. If you're really, really lucky, it's a hit and lasts a year. If you're in the pantheon of products it lasts a decade, then it rapidly becomes a sediment layer on which the next layer of technology is built. I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years."

On the other hand, animated films have an infinite life cycle. "Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it's a 60-year-old production," Jobs points out. "People don't read Herodotus or Homer to their kids anymore, but everybody watches movies. These are our myths today. Disney puts those myths into our culture, and hopefully Pixar will too. At Pixar we're just getting started, and it's very magical. It's like the computer industry was in the early days."

Jobs is working hard to make Pixar a brand name as powerful as Disney's. Michael Eisner, head of Disney, says he doesn't even think of the two companies as separate anymore. "We are joined at the hip, at the computer and at the soul," he told TIME. "Pixar's success is not a fluke. One thing I always think is essential is enthusiasm, and Steve Jobs is massively enthusiastic. Jobs' bravado is his charm. He's a serious businessman, but he's out there with his charisma. It's fun to be with him."

Unlike Apple, Pixar is expanding, having gone from 175 people to 375 this year alone. The original Richmond studio now has an outpost working busily on a direct-to-video sequel to Toy Story, and here's a mysterious third major project in the works too. Jobs has plans for a new studio, to prawl on 16 acres in industrial Emeryville, near Berkeley. Interior plans have been carefully drawn--before the exterior--to ensure a cross-pollination of ideas. And of course, he says, all the offices will be the same size.

For the next few months, however, Steve Jobs' main job will be Apple. The Microsoft Death Star may be rotating in friendly orbit, but Jobs must still find a new leader for the Mac troops. Then he can resume being a Hollywood mogul and a model dad, right? Even after this amazing week, Jobs insists he will pass the diskette to a new generation and then stand aside to let it run the program. But Apple is his first child, and you know how hard it is to let the first child go. Watch for the sequel here.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Francisco and Valerie Marchant/New York

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs on Apple's resurgence (Andy Reinhardt)
Published in: Business Week
Date: May 12, 1998

Now that you've introduced the new, bold-looking iMac, are you going to do some radically different products?
There's a lot of talk about such things -- about handhelds, set-top boxes. A lot of computer companies have been searching for a consumer product. My view is that the personal computer has been the most successful consumer product of the last 10 years. What we have to do, what the industry stopped doing, is targeting [the consumer PC] sector of the market. IBM wants to be IBM. Dell is just selling to the corporate market, primarily. Compaq just bought DEC -- my God! There's nothing wrong with wanting to be IBM. But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business. Apple is certainly moving closer to doing that with these new products. Also, I've had some experience in the entertainment industry because of Pixar. And I've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and a television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet.

The $1,299 price of the iMac, even competitive with sub-$1,000 PCs, is still not in the range of consumer electronics products.
No PCs are in the price range. But people are seeing the value at these prices, and our goal is to continue to lower prices on products like iMac. Part of it relates to how much of a necessity you think these devices are. And a lot of people are starting to feel that having a personal computer, especially one that is able to deliver as robust an Internet experience as the iMac can in the home, is an essential utility. An iMac costs about as much as heating a New England home in the winter, a lot less than an automobile. We're not in the sweet spot totally, but we're getting there. For Apple, this is a pretty big step. Apple hasn't had a compelling product under $2,000 for the last several years.

Did you do consumer research on the iMac when you were developing it?
No. We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why a lot of people at Apple get paid a lot of money, because they're supposed to be on top of these things.

Why did you decide against including an internal floppy drive and opt for a slower modem?
You know, you've got to do the right thing. Just take the floppy: People aren't thinking clearly. Nobody's going to back up a 4-gigabyte drive onto 1-megabyte floppies. They'll use a Zip drive -- but they're too expensive to build into a consumer product. Besides, hardly anybody backs up anyway, so why build cost into every system? The second reason for a floppy is software distribution, but a lot of software now comes on CD-ROMs because it's better and cheaper [the iMac includes a CD-ROM drive].

How much of a role did you have in the design of the product?
A fair bit. [Smiles] There were several teams. On a day-to-day basis, my job wasn't to head any of them. We have really talented people to do that. But when I got here last July, it took me about two weeks to figure out that Apple didn't have a consumer product in the pipe. I began a crash program in August to create one. We put together various teams.

But you smiled when I asked the question. Do you feel this is your baby?
We all feel like it's our baby. Everybody at Apple has a pride in it, because it represents what Apple ought to be doing. You expect this kind of innovation from Apple. Apple is getting back to that, and it's something we can all be proud of.

What are you doing about increasing the number of Mac software programs?
Let's focus first on the real problem. Forget the perception. The real problem is that a lot of developers have had a really tough time dealing with Apple over the last few years. I talked to these folks. It wasn't even about the volume of Mac sales declining -- it was problems in dealing with Apple. We fixed almost all of that. The developers are coming back, and it feels really good. We haven't brought everybody back yet, but a lot of them.

Are you going to take the CEO job permanently?
There's nothing new to report. I just decided one day that for me, it just wasn't such a big deal. I didn't have to lose sleep over this, worry about this. I'm Apple's interim CEO, and it won't be forever, and I'm doing the best that I can. But I'm the full-time CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, and I love it, and I also have a family. I'm doing the best I can here. If folks think there's a better solution, I'll be glad to step aside. And eventually we'll find somebody else to take the reins.

What about stock ownership? Do you intend to take a stake in the company?
This isn't about money for me.

I'm talking about the symbolic value.
That's not my problem. I've worked my tail off here. I don't think I could work any harder. I'm trying to help Apple. I do have more time now to be with my family. We've filled out our senior management team. We've got a good team now, and we're firing on all cylinders. And as the strategy becomes clearer to more of the people in the company, it really makes things much easier. The organization is clean and simple to understand, and very accountable. Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

There's a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?
You're missing it. This is not a one-man show. What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now. So, the first thing to invigorating people is winning again. They're seeing us win, by the customer reactions to the products, by the sales, the profitability, all of those signs that people want what we've got again. And, that we can run our business well. That our own house is in order, that we've stopped the waste that people have seen with their own eyes without knowing what to do about it. There's sanity returning. The second thing that's reinvigorating them is that Apple is starting to innovate again. There's been a vacuum in this industry for a long time, in many ways, and that vacuum is in a lot of areas where Apple's legacy is. So Apple is back to its roots, starting to innovate again, and people are sensing that, seeing it concretely, and really feeling good about it. That's why they came here. That's what they want to do. When they see the iMac, for example, they think we really can produce industry-leading products like this. It's not about charisma and personality, it's about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.

What's the coolest stuff you have coming down the product pipe?
We have some pretty cool stuff coming, but we don't talk about it.

Will they be computers?
Yes. We're not going off into la-la land.

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: MarketWrap with Steve Jobs (Bill Griffeth)
Produced by: CNBC
Date: Aug 14, 1998

http://www.youtube.com/v/vSEYcEc0xAg&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Cavuto Buiness Report with Steve Jobs (Neal Cavuto)
Produced by: Fox News
Date: Aug 14, 1998

http://www.youtube.com/v/xO4cdNnBL4Y&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: The Three Faces Of Steve (Brent Schlender)
Published in: Fortune
Date: Nov 9, 1998

You knew it would be bleak when you went back to Apple. Just how bad was it?
Much worse than I could imagine. The people had been told they were losers for so long they were on the verge of giving up. The first six months were very bleak, and at times I got close to throwing in the towel too. I'd never been so tired in my life. I'd come home at about ten o'clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absentia.

A lot of people thought you had a plan in mind when you walked in the door because you moved so swiftly to cut off the clone business and extraneous projects like the Newton.
In a situation like that, you don't have time to study everything. But, yeah, I had some ideas. What I told people was that every decision didn't have to be right, just enough of them had to be right, so don't get paralyzed. There were some very hard decisions to make. Like the decision to end the clone business. In hindsight that looks smart, but have you ever gotten death threats? That was scary.

FORTUNE ran a story right after you came back to Apple in which we accused you of acting cynically, of returning just to satisfy your ego.
If I was cynical, why would I have put myself through all that?

But why did you sell all but one of your Apple shares before you even started trying to revive the company? You had to know that would send a bad signal.
There's an explanation. During the negotiations when Apple wanted to buy NeXT, Apple said it would pay me 1.5 million shares in stock--which was about a sixth of my share of the purchase price--and the rest in cash. There was a catch: They wanted it to be unregistered stock so I couldn't sell it for six months. It was a big mistake, and here's why. At the end of six months they had to register the stock with the SEC as they promised. When they did, the business press--a la you guys--assumed I was preparing to sell, even though I hadn't even thought about selling. When that all blew up, I thought, "Gee, Apple's taking a big PR hit on this. If I sell in three or six months, there will be a second hit, so I might as well sell now." This was, by the way, before the Apple board began to twist my arm to come back and run the company. Gil Amelio was running the place. So I was also thinking, "Do I really want this $20 million worth of stock when I think the company is going to be worthless in a year?" So I sold it. Literally within a few days, I got a call from [Apple director] Ed Woolard to discuss coming back. Selling that stock actually was a good thing. I don't get a salary at Apple. I get a dollar a year so that my family can be on the health plan, but that's it. You could argue, as you did, that I don't have a stake in Apple. But I was able to walk in with some moral authority and say, "Look, this isn't about me or the money I'm going to make. This is about what's right for Apple." It was purer in some ways.

Let's look ahead now. The iMac has begun shoring up Apple's market share. But can you really hope to make your share grow?
There are three kinds of iMac purchasers: No. 1, the Macintosh installed base; that's the most important segment. We're constantly listening to those folks, and we'll try to build computers that they want and need. They seem to be responding to the iMac. The second kind is new users. Between five million and ten million new users will enter the market in the next year or two, and we'd like to get a much greater proportion of those than our current market share. We're in a pretty good position to do that. The third place to get customers is from the Wintel installed base. Now, the Wintel market is actually two: diehard PC users--and we know we're not going to get many of them--and former Mac users who converted to Wintel. We are getting some of those people back.

Now that you've stabilized the ship, will Apple start pioneering again?
The iMac is a pretty good indication of where we're headed. The whole strategy for Apple now is, if you will, to be the Sony of the computer business. I don't really believe that televisions and computers are going to merge. I've spent enough time in entertainment to know that storytelling is linear. It's not interactive. You go to your TV when you want to turn your brain off. You go to your computer when you want to turn your brain on. Those are not the same. Computers have a bright future. The question is, where can Apple fit in? Dell and Compaq and Hewlett-Packard sell mainly to the corporate market. Yet there's this whole consumer market, which hardly anybody with the right skills is focusing on. In audio and video electronics, Sony has a consumer products business, which is their core, and a professional business, which serves broadcasters. Well, our professional business is our design/publishing business, and our consumer business is education and pure consumers. The consumer business is pretty cool because it's very high-volume and you really get to interact with individual customers. Beyond that, Apple's the only PC company left that makes the whole widget--hardware and software. That means Apple can really decide that it will make a system dramatically easier to use, which is a great asset when you're going after consumers. The technology isn't the hard part. The hard part is, What's the product? Or, Who's the customer? How are they going to buy it? How do you tell them about it? So besides having the ideas and the technology and the manufacturing, you have to have good marketing to be able to reach the consumer.

Can we expect Apple to move into related consumer electronics businesses?
If Mercedes made a bicycle or a hamburger or a computer, I don't think there'd be much advantage in having its logo on it. I don't think Apple would get much equity putting its name on an automobile, either. And just because the whole world is going digital--TV, audio, and all that--doesn't mean there's anything wrong with just being in the computer business. The computer business is huge. Listen, consumers are smart enough to know what the boundaries of brands are. If Apple can find things that are complementary to its core, that's great. I thought buying the PalmPilot from 3Com would have been complementary, but it didn't come to pass. I won't go into what other complementary things there might be, but when you look back in a year, it will all make sense. Here's a problem I see in spotting new products. People focus too much on entirely new ideas, as if that's what's required to grow a new business. Maybe that's not the right way to do it. Most good products really are extensions of previous products. For example, computers are still awful. They're too complicated and don't do what you really want them to do--or do those things as well as they could. We have a long way to go. People are still making automobiles after nearly 100 years. Telephones have been around a long time, but even so the cellular revolution was pretty exciting. That's why I think the computer revolution is still in its early stages. There's a lot of room for doing new and exciting things with the same basic product.

You're CEO of not one but two companies that are very different. Tell us about some of those differences.
Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people that I have ever witnessed. There's a person who's got a Ph.D. in computer-generated plants--3-D grass and trees and flowers. There's another who is the best in the world at putting imagery on film. Also, Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it is much smaller. Pixar's got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that Pixar has now if you went to 2,000 people. Another difference is that all the things in the computer business that we labored over 20 years ago are now discarded--part of the sedimentary layer. Nobody uses an Apple II anymore. Yet when Snow White [Disney's first big animated film] was re-released a few years back, we were one of the tens of millions of families that went to see it. That film is 60 years old, and my son loved it. I'd like to think people are going to love [Pixar's upcoming movie] A Bug's Life 60 years from now. But I doubt anybody will be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.

Have you seen Antz [a computer-animated film distributed by DreamWorks that is strikingly similar to A Bug's Life]?
I should have, but I've just been too busy. That reminds me of another big difference between Apple and Pixar: The computer business is a zero-sum game. If a customer buys the other guy's computer, he won't buy yours. But in the film industry, time and again, audiences have shown that if there are three really good films out there, they'll go see all three; but if there are three not-so-good films, they won't go see any. If A Bug's Life is really good, Antz is not going to hurt us much, even if it's really good too. We're competing with "Can we make a great movie?," not with Antz or another studio.

People you've worked with say the word that best describes your management style is persistent. Where did you get your persistence?
I don't think of it as persistence at all. When I was growing up, a guy across the street had a Volkswagen Bug. He really wanted to make it into a Porsche. He spent all his spare money and time accessorizing this VW, making it look and sound loud. By the time he was done, he did not have a Porsche. He had a loud, ugly VW. You've got to be careful choosing what you're going to do. Once you pick something you really care about, and it's a worthwhile thing to do, then you can kind of forget about it and just work at it. The dedication comes naturally.

You seem to enjoy building companies as much as you enjoy building products.
Uh, no. The only purpose for me in building a company is so that it can make products. Of course, building a very strong company and a foundation of talent and culture is essential over the long run to keep making great products. On the other hand, to me, the company is one of humanity's most amazing inventions. It's totally abstract. Sure, you have to build something with bricks and mortar to put the people in, but basically a company is this abstract construct we've invented, and it's incredibly powerful.

Still, if you look at your first tenure at Apple, part of your goal was to build a new kind of company. You had much the same goal at Pixar.
I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money. My heroes--Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation; Bob Noyce [the late co-founder of Intel] was another. I'm old enough to have been able to know these guys. I met Andy Grove when I was 21. I called him and told him I'd heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with others too. These guys were all company builders, and the gestalt of Silicon Valley at that time made a big impression on me. There are people around here who start companies just to make money, but the great companies, well, that's not what they're about.

Maybe so, but today Silicon Valley seems to be fueled as much by stock options as by idealism.
Of course you want to have your people share in the wealth you create. At Apple we gave all our employees stock options very early on. We were among the first in Silicon Valley to do that. And when I returned, I took away most of the cash bonuses and replaced them with options. No cars, no planes, no bonuses. Basically, everybody gets a salary and stock. The great thing about stock is that if the value of one person's shares goes up, everyone's does. It's a very egalitarian way to run a company that Hewlett-Packard pioneered and that Apple, I would like to think, helped establish. At Pixar one of the most gratifying things is that there are a lot of folks who don't really care about getting rich but who care a lot about the art or the technology. Yet they will never have to worry about money for the rest of their lives. Their families can live in a nice house, and they can concentrate on what they really love to do. It's wonderful.

You've always taken time to troll for new technologies that you could turn into new kinds of products. Are you able to do that now as much as you used to?
There's a certain amount of homework involved, true; but mostly it's just picking up on things you can see on the periphery. Sometimes at night when you're almost asleep, you realize something you wouldn't otherwise have noted. I subscribe to a half-dozen Internet news services, and I get 300 E-mails a day, many from people I don't know, hawking crazy ideas. And I've always paid close attention to the whispers around me.

You're 43. You've already made it big in business, yet you're not on the downhill slope of your life yet. Have your motivations changed as a middle-ager?
I don't think much about my time of life. I just get up in the morning and it's a new day. Somebody told me when I was 17 to live each day as if it were my last, and that one day I'd be right. I am at a stage where I don't have to do things just to get by. But then I've always been that way because I've never really cared about money that much. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel the same way now as I felt when I was 17.

But you react to things differently now.
Of course. I'm an old man. When you're older, you realize that sometimes there's nothing you can do about certain things.

Do you ever think you may be getting a little conservative in your old age?
One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. This Apple thing is that way for me. I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best. What makes you become conservative is realizing that you have something to lose. Remember The Whole Earth Catalog? The last edition had a photo on the back cover of a remote country road you might find yourself on while hitchhiking up to Oregon. It was a beautiful shot, and it had a caption that really grabbed me. It said: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." It wasn't an ad for anything--just one of Stewart Brand's profound statements. It's wisdom. "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Do you want to be a mentor to someone who could succeed you?
I don't think it works that way. You just are yourself, and you work with other people. If you're inspiring to other people, it makes an impression on them. For example, I hear people at Disney talking about what it was like to work with Walt. They loved him. I know that people at Pixar are going to talk about their days with John Lasseter in the same way. Who knows? Maybe someday somebody will feel that way about working with me. I have no idea.

But if you had a partner or an understudy, wouldn't it reassure those who worry about the word "interim" in your title?
Here's what that issue is about. I'm also CEO of Pixar, and I'd like to remain there for the foreseeable future because I love it. That does place some limitations on what I can do at Apple. What happened with me ever since I returned to Apple was that everybody was hounding me about this "interim" business, asking how long I was going to stay. Very early this year I remember waking up and thinking, "This is not my problem. This is their problem. I'm not losing sleep over it, and it doesn't make me work any less hard for Apple." So I just decided, with all the other problems that I'd taken on, that I didn't need this one too, and I haven't looked back a day.

What's your biggest screwup in your adult life?
Personal stuff.

No regrets about business decisions?
Sure, there are a zillion things I wish I'd done differently. But I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn't do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance. In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I'd have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would've probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It's more important to be engaged in the present. I'll give you a perfect example. On vacation recently I was reading this book by [physicist and Nobel laureate] Richard Feynmann. He had cancer, you know. In this book he was describing one of his last operations before he died. The doctor said to him, "Look, Richard, I'm not sure you're going to make it." And Feynmann made the doctor promise that if it became clear he wasn't going to survive, to take away the anesthetic. Do you know why? Feynmann said, "I want to feel what it's like to turn off." That's a good way to put yourself in the present--to look at what's affecting you right now and be curious about it even if it's bad. I'll tell you something else that makes you look at things differently. Once you have kids, it doesn't take a very big leap to realize that everybody is a kid. Everybody came out of their mother and was a baby, and hopefully everybody was loved by somebody as much as you love your kids. That may not sound profound, but a lot of people forget that. So when we laid some people off at Apple a year ago, or when I have to take people out of their jobs, it's harder for me now. Much harder. I do it because that's my job. But when I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being 5 years old. And I think that person could be me coming home to tell my wife and kids that I just got laid off. Or that could be one of my kids in 20 years. I never took it so personally before. Life is short, and we're all going to die really soon. It's true, you know.

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Moneyline with Steve Jobs (Willow Bay)
Produced by: CNN
Date: Jul 21, 1999

http://www.youtube.com/v/IrQ0QATrhjo&feature=player_embedded

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Interviews
Dozens of interviews that Steve Jobs gave over the years

Name: Steve Jobs at 44 (Michael Krantz)
Published in: Time Magazine
Date: Oct 18, 1999

Differences and Similarities Between Apple and Pixar
Apple turns out many products--a dozen a year; if you count all the minor ones, probably a hundred. Pixar is striving to turn out one a year. But the converse of that is that Pixar's products will still be used fifty years from now, whereas I don't think you'll be using any product Apple brings to market this year fifty years from now. Pixar is making art for the ages. Kids will be watching Toy Story in the future. And Apple is much more of a constant race to continually improve things and stay ahead of the competition.

His Role At Pixar
At Pixar my job is to help build the studio and recruit people and help create a situation where they can do the best work of their lives. And to some degree it's the same at Apple. But at Pixar, I don't direct the movies, whereas at Apple probably, if I had to pick a role out of a film production, I'd be the director. So it's a different job for me too, and I'm very conscious of that. My job at Pixar is to help manage the studio processes. But I don't say, "Well, I think we should have that character do that." I do give notes, just like other people do. There was one situation, for the first time, about three months ago, where I gave the best note. Which is really good, actually, because there were some very smart people there. But that will hardly ever happen.

Getting Sarah Mcarthur to Pixar
Ed [Catmull] is a genius for technology and John [Lasseter] is a genius for creative. Sarah McArthur runs all of production. We never had great production. I would always call Peter Schneider, who was then running Disney's feature animation unit, and say, "Can't you spare one of your second-tier producers to come and run production here, because we really need somebody." And they could never spare anybody. It's hard because there are so few people with experience in this area. But one day he called me up and said, "I can't believe I'm making this call, but I have the ultimate production leader for you." I said, "Really. Who's that?" He said, "Sarah McArthur, she's our VP of production for feature animation. She is the most senior production executive at the Walt Disney Company for animation." I said, "It's not April 1st, Peter." He said, "Well, she's going to leave us. She's going to move to Northern California for personal reasons, she has to, and I'd rather lose her to you than to anyone else." She is incredible. She was executive producer of "The Lion King." She's the best in the business. These movies are $100 million projects. We have a few going on at any given time. Most of the people at the studio actually work, in terms of chain of command, for Sarah. In terms of day-to-day trains running on time, it"s Sarah McArthur.

Apple's Product Lines
There were 15 product lines when I got here. It was incredible. You couldn"t figure out what to buy. I started asking around, and nobody could explain it to me. This year we updated the PowerBook, in May, the iBook in July, the G4, replacing the G3, in August at Seybold, and now the iMacs in October. I added up the time: in 148 days, we've completely changed every product. [He laughs.] We've been working too hard.

Apple's Vertical Integration
Apple is really a serious player in this stuff now. When we first got here two years ago, Apple was being bombarded by criticism that it was the last vertically integrated PC company, and management should break it up. Our competitors — the Gateways, Dells and Compaqs — they're really distribution companies. They take technology from Microsoft and Intel, package it up in the Far East and ship it out. And what determines whether they're successful or not is their distribution model and their logistical efficiency. They don't engineer anything. The innovation in that business has really slowed down dramatically, or even come to a halt. You get incremental innovation: the disk drive gets bigger for the same price. But what's really changed? Nothing. Nothing in scope — what's it going to do for you? Apple's the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing. It turns out that that, in my opinion, is Apple's greatest strategic advantage. We didn't have a plan, so it looked like this was a tremendous deficit. But with a plan, it's Apple's core strategic advantage, if you believe that there's still room for innovation in this industry, which I do, because Apple can innovate faster than anyone else.

I'll give you an example: when we shipped the iMac, we decided to go to this new I/O scheme called USB. Right after we shipped it I got a call from a very senior executive at Intel. He said, "You know who invented USB, don't you?" I said, "No, who?" He said, "Intel. Five years ago. And we've been trying to get the PC industry to use it for five years, and in literally 30 days you have jumped so far ahead of us it's unbelievable. It was like trying to herd cats."

Whereas we say, "Okay, we're going to build it in the hardware, build it in the software, evangelize the developers." We can pick half a dozen things like that a year and go make that innovation.

Believe me, the product pipeline for the next 18 months looks unbelievably strong. Our mission is just to build the best personal computers in the world.

Why He Isn't the Only Important Person
Both Pixar and Apple are team sports, even more so in my funny situation. I rely on a very great management team at Pixar because I'm not there all the time. I'm here [at Apple] a little more than I am there [at Pixar] these days. And without those folks, nothing of value would happen. I guess what I'm trying to say is, there's different things in life you can do. You can become a painter, you can become a sculptor. You can make something by yourself. But that's not what I do. I do the other thing, which is, you work at things that one person can't do, and that you need large numbers of people to do. I know people like symbols, but it's always unsettling when people write stories about me, because they tend to overlook a lot of other people.

The Promise of the Broadband Web
I think there's a lot of possibility there, but there are a lot of problems between here and there. The Internet offers no guaranteed delivery. There's no gauranteed latency. You get a lot of traffic on that backbone, you have all sorts of problems. When you try to start moving huge amounts of information around with big high-fidelity images, there's just a lot of problems there. But they will get solved.

The Apple Cafeteria
This is the nicest corporate cafe I've ever seen. When we got here this was dog food. There was this company called Guggeinheim that it was farmed out to and it was just shit. And finally we fired them and got this friend of mine who runs Il Fourniao restaurant to come and he did everything and now it's great. So... [ starts pointing ] ...there's a burrito bar, a salad bar, there's some pasta over there, there's a wood-burning pizza oven right there...there's sometimes sushi, and there's another salad bar over there...

Palo Alto Development
I live in Palo Alto, I moved there about ten years ago when I got married and we had a child, because I wanted to be in more of a community and have neighbors. The problem is that it's a nice community, and a lot of people want to live there, and they're not making any more Palo Alto. San Mateo's great, Burlingame's great, San Carlos is great, all those towns are really good right now. But they're getting discovered.

The Word 'Broadband'
My personal belief is that you shouldn't use a word like broadband. It's this myterious thing. It's just fast networking, and I think people can understand that; high-speed networking vs. slower speed networking. I think this term broadband throws a lot of people off; they think it's something new and mysterious when all it is is their modem running 100 times faster.

Whether, When Pondering Future Products, He Thinks About the Year 1999 or the Year 2010
Um, neither. [ Long pause. ] I look for vectors going in time. What's changing, what are the trends? What windows have just opened and what windows are closing? Like, a trivial example, the USB was a window that was opening. It was a trend that Apple had started with ease of use of plug-and-play, and USB let us take it further, simplify two or three ports down to one. The trend was toward serial high-speed I/O. You used to have parallel I/O with these big fat cables and big fat connectors. But now with the technology we have, you could serialize the bits on that, pump bits much faster but only need one or two wires to do it. And the cables are smaller, and the connectors are smaller and it's more consumer-oriented. Put some software around it and make it self-addressing, so it's just plug-and-play.

You try to spot those things and how they're going to be changing over time and which horses you want to ride and at any point in time, balancing all those things to make a product. The product is like the physical incarnation of all these things you've got to keep in your mind and understand where you're going to place your bets. You can't be too far ahead, but you have to be far enough ahead, because it takes time to implement. So you have to intercept a moving train. And you also have to pick horses to ride for five to ten year periods because you don't want to be changing things. If I give you 20 bricks, you could lay them all on the ground and you'd have 20 bricks on the ground. Or you can lay them on top of each other and start building a wall. We don't want to go back and start relaying the bricks we laid last year. So we want to choose wisely the standards we're going to ride, the directions we're going to go, so that each project builds upon the last one and we can invest our engineering efforts into new things, rather than redoing things we just did a year or two ago. You have to invest in thinking through the architecture of things. Otherwise when you get up to the 10th floor, the building starts to collapse.

Reinventing Apple
One of the things that happened when we got back to Apple was, we said, Apple's all confused. Apple's forgotten what it is. Who is Apple? Why is Apple here? Remember, the roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. At the time we started Apple, IBM built computers for corporations. Now it's Microsoft and Intel. But there was nobody building a computer for people. Funny enough, 20 years after we started Apple, there was nobody building computers for people again. You know? They were trying to sell consumers last year's corporate computers. We said, "Well, these are our roots. This is why we're here. The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq. They need an Apple." We said, "Our thrust is not going to be to make computers for CEOs and enterprise companies." We have a lot of customers in the enterprise. But we don't ever go talk to the CEO of Time Warner. We talk to the people who put out the magazines.

The Main Attribute That Apple and Pixar Share
I remember the first time I saw a piece of paper come out of the laser printer prototype we had. It was running this very sophisticated printer from Canon, this very sophisticated controller we had designed and Postscript software from Adobe. An amazing amount of technology. The piece of paper came out and I looked at it and it was so beautiful, I thought, "We can sell this. Because we don't need to tell anybody anything about what's in this box. All we have to do is hold this piece of paper up and go, Do you want this? If you do, buy this box." That's our whole marketing strategy.

Well, that's how I've always looked at this stuff. What Apple stands for is this: Technology has exploded. It's getting more complicated by the day. And there are very few ways for us mere mortals to approach all this technology. People don't have a week to research things and figure out how they work. Apple has always been, and I hope it will always be, one of the premiere bridges between mere mortals and this very difficult technology. We may have the fastest PCs, which we do, we may have the most sophisticated machines, which we do. But the most important thing is that Apple is the bridge.

When I first met Ed Catmull, he told me about all the awesome technology that they at the time were using to create digital imagery. Today we have the biggest computer farm I know of. We're using over 1500 of Sun's fastest processors to make each picture. And the software we've invented, which is all proprietary, is a monumental acheivement. The technologoy that goes into making a Pixar movie is staggering. And yet we sell a consumer product for $7. You pay your $7 and sit down in a movie theater and you don't need to know one iota about the technology that went into making that production order to enjoy that product.

Apple and Pixar are the same in that regard--they both deliver a product that has immense technology unerpinnings and yet they both strive to say you don't need to know anything about this techology in order to use it. In the case of Apple, we're going to make it easy as possible to use this.

The Question of Art. Vs. Technology
I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that. People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, "I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science," and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried.

You said "corporate" and "technical" as if they go together. Technology has nothing to do with the corporate world. I don't see technology and the corporate world as being necessarily intertwined, any more than art and the corporate world are intertwined. Yes, I knew a lot of people when I was in my formative years who were very clear that they didn't want to grow up and work for some faceless corporation. They wanted to do something different with their lives, and a lot of them did. But that has nothing to do with science and technology and art. A lot of scientists have never worked in a corporation. And a lot of them started their own.

The Apple II
The Apple II had a few qualities about it. Number one, it was the first computer ever with a plastic case on it. You could mold it and shape it to be a more cultural shape rather than just a rectangular box. And secondly, it was the first personal computer with color graphics on it. Third, in everything it did, it was the first PC that came fully assembled. Every other computer came in a kit. We figured for every hardware hobbyist out there, there was at least a thousand software hobbyists. People who'd want to play with the software but couldn't build one. Even back then, that was how we were thinking.

This Exciting Moment in History
It's a wonderful time right now. What we can put in a computer for $1000 is just mindblowing. We can use it to do wonderful things like video. It's pretty exciting right now. Apple is a large company, in a good sense. One of the reasons I came here was, when I was using NeXTStep, it was entropying. I didn't want to use the present state of Mac or Windows for the rest of my life. But another one was Apple had just lost a billion dollars. But what people forget is — someone once said that profit is the very small difference between two very large nubmers: revenue and cost. Well, if Apple sold $7 billion worth of stuff, and it lost a billion, that means it spent $8 billion. That's a huge amount of money! It meant that this was a company that could spend $5, $6, $7 billion dollars a year and still make a profit! Which NeXT could not. If you could eliminate waste and work to come up with a focused strategy, you have enormous resources to do good work. It's a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.

Whether He Has Changed As He Got Older
Sure, I mean people change. I get older. I'm a lot older. I'm 15 years older then when I left Apple. I left when I was 30. I'll be 45 in February. So, sure people change. When does your life really start as an adult? Lets say it starts when you're 15, you become totally conscious as an adult. So, I'm twice as old as an adult as when I was 30.

You know, I'm not sure it's always a good idea to chronicle one's point of view about oneself. I can tell you this: I've been married for 8 years, and that's had a really good influence on me. I've been very lucky, through random happenstance I just happened to sit next to this wonderful woman who became my wife. And it was a big deal. We have 3 kids, and it's been a big deal. You see the world differently. [When he came back to Apple] We had to lay some people off. A lot of people. I've done it before and it's always hard. But before, I didn't really think too much about it. But when I got here, every one that I had to do personally, I thought, "A lot of these fathers and mothers are going to have to go home and tell their families they just lost their jobs." And I'd never really thought about that before. You succeed at some things, you fail at some things. You start to understand what's important.

How Being a Family Man Changes Your Work Priorities
I've read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, "I worked really, really hard in my 20s." And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it forever, and you don't want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more. Just working smarter to get things done. Because you can't work 15 hour days, 7 days a week.

What His Typical Workday Is Like
I'm a good morning person. I like it early in the morning. I wake up six-ish. About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I'm actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody's going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I'm at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It's all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I'm not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email. So I'll work a little before the kids get up. And then we'll all have a little food and finish up some homework and see them off to school. If I'm lucky I'll stay at home and work for an hour because I can get a lot done, but oftentimes I'll have to come in. I usually get here about 9. 8 or 9. Having worked about an hour or half or two at home.

How He'd Describe His Job
My job is thinking and working with people and meeting and email. Both Apple and Pixar, they don't produce giant factories with robots in them. Their product is pure intellectual property. Bits on a disk. Pixar--what do we make? In the end we produce bits on a disk that get written onto film. At Apple we produce bits on a disk that get cut into steel for plastics tooling and get cut into silicon for custom integrated circuits and get put on a hard disk for software. So both Apple and Pixar are pure intellectual property companies. And so it's about ideas. And it's about processes to turn those ideas into tangible products.

My job is to interact with other people and hopefully have something to contribute in that realm of ideas. Because that's what makes Apple and Pixar go around. They're not hierarchical organizations where you say, "You work for me, so do this." That's long gone. If a really good person works for you and you tell them what to do all the time, they're just going to say, "I'm going to go work for somebody else who lets me tell them what we're going to do." What I tell people around here is that the reason we pay you all this money is that you're supposed to tell us what to do. I took away almost all the bonus programs here. None of the senior team is on it. It's all stock. We gave everybody a lot of stock. It's very entrepreneurial in two or three regards.

Number one, everybody is compensated like a startup. Number two, we have a very simple, clear organization. It's very easy to know who has authority for what, who has responsiblity for what. There's no politics about it, they're virtually politics-free organizations. There's no turf wars. Avi runs software. John runs hardware. Mitch runs Sales. It's really simple. Number 3, we have a very simple mission. It's very easy to communicate what we're trying to do.

I have a blast because I get to work with these super-talented people. Take Jony Ive. The last few weeks we've been working on this new product we're going to have a year from now. Just working out the concept for how it's gonna be. How we're going to engineer it, present it, what it's going to look like. We've had some incredible breakthroughs in a series of four or five hour-long conversations. Incredible breakthroughs. Our design group is light-years ahead of their peers.

Managing All These People
There are approximately 10,000 people at Apple. And so it's a complex organization that requires a lot of coordination and information flowing back and forth. One of the challenges in both and Pixar and Apple is managing complexity. In Pixar, we started off doing short films, and our first short film, Luxo Jr., took three hours on the fastest computer we could get our hands on to render one frame of the movie. 13 years later, as we finish Toy Story 2, we're using computers that are a thousand or more times faster. And how long does it take to render one frame of film? Three hours. Because complexity has gone up a thousandfold.

So part of our job at Pixar is to manage complexity. Take a frame from A Bug's Life, where all the grass is moving around. Well, if an animator had to move every blade of grass through the wind, they'd never get to the main characters. So in order to have those blades of grass blow in the wind, we had to come up with smart grass. Grass that knows how to blow by itself in the wind. So all the animator has to do is say, "The wind is coming from this direction, this is the burst pattern, and the grasses will just do their own thing." Our next film, Monsters Inc., we're going to be throwing five times the computing power at it. And we're going to get it done with the same number of people.

And the same concept is true of organizations. You've got to figure out a way to manage the complexity of large projects yet still allow your core teams to focus on the essentials. And the way you do that is, you build up capabilities within your organization to do things on a high quality level on a routine basis with good leaders leading small and medium-sized teams and coordinating with their peers in other groups so you can collectively do things that are very impressive. Now, I don't get a chance to interact with 10,000 people. The number of people I get to interact with in this company is probably about 50 on a regular basis. Maybe 100. And one of the things that I've always felt is that most things in life, if you get something twice as good as average you're doing phenomenally well. Usually the best is about 30% better than average. Two to one's a big delta. But hat became really clear to me in my work life was that, for instance, [Steve] Woz[niak] was 25 to 50 times better than average. And I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do stuff that no number of average people could do. So what I learned early on was that if you could assemble a team of these very high-performance people, extremely talented people, a few things happen: number one, unlike what you'd think, they actually all got along with each other. This whole prima donna thing turned out to be a myth with the very best people. Secondly, small and medium-sized teams of these people could accomplish extraordinary things and run circles around large large teams of normal people. And so I have spent my work life trying to find and recruit and retain and work with these kind of people. My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself. If the top 50 people are right, it just cascades down throughout the whole organization.

His Typical Day, Again
I've proably had 25 emails with Pixar people. So far. And I've made probably 10 Pixar-related phone calls. So I multi-task wherever I am. There's not a day that goes by that I don't do stuff on Pixar, even if I'm not physically there. And there's not a day that I'm at Pixar that I don't do stuff on Apple.

His Role At Pixar, Again
I don't direct the movies. What I do do is worry about the studio. I'm the primary manager of our relationship with Disney, which is a phenomonally good relationship. I've had two great business relationships in my career. One is the one that Apple had with Adobe in the early days, and the second is the one that Pixar has with Disney. Any relationship takes a lot of time and attention. The marketing of our films. The planning for the studio. I have dinner this week with a very promising young director we're trying to recruit. I do a lot of mentoring. We've got a lot of super-talented young people at the studio who are doing great but need a little bit of mentoring from time to time.

Answering Apple Email
Today's a slow day; I'll probably just have about 100 emails, Apple related. All these customers email me all these complaints and questions, which I actually have grown to like. It's like having a thermometer on practically any issue. If somebody doesn't flush a toilet around here, I get an email from Kansas about it. Sometimes I can get about 100 or more of those a day from people I will never meet. But I zing 'em around, and it's good to keep us all in touch.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley
Hollywood's really different than Silicon Valley. And neither understands the other at all. People up here think being creative is some guys in their late 20s and early 30s sitting around old couches drinking beer thinking up jokes. It couldn't be further from the truth. The creative process is just as disciplined as the technical process; it requires just as much talent. And yet people in Hollywood think technology is only as deep as something you buy. There's no technical culture in Hollywood, they couldn't attract and retain good engineers to save their life, because they're second class citizens down there. Just like creative people are second class citizens in Silicon Valley.