 
I'm Bob Cringle 16 years ago when I
was making my television series triumph
of the Nerds
I interviewed Steve Jobs that was in
1995 10 years earlier Steve had left
Apple following a bruising struggle with
John Sculley the CEO he brought into the
company at the time of our interview
Steve was running next the niche
computer company he founded after
leaving Apple little did we know that
within 18 months he would sell Next to
Apple and six months later he'd be
running the place the way things work in
television we use only a part of that
interview in the series and for years we
thought the interview was lost forever
because the master tape went missing
while being shipped from London to the
u.s. in the 1990s then just a few days
ago series director Paul sin found a VHS
copy of that interview in his garage
there are very few TV interviews with
Steve Jobs and almost no good ones they
rarely show the charisma candor and
vision that this interview does and so
to honor an amazing man here's that
interview in its entirety most of this
has never been seen before so how did
you get involved with personal computers
hmm
well I ran into my first computer when I
was about 10 or 11 and it's hard to
remember back then but I'm an apostle
now I'm not possible so when I was 10 or
11 was about thirty years ago and no one
had ever seen a computer to the extent
that they'd seen them they'd seen them
in movies and there were these big boxes
with whirring for some reason they
fixated on the tape drives as being the
icon of what the computer was or
flashing lights somehow and so nobody'd
ever seen one they're very mysterious
very powerful things that did something
in the background and so to see one and
actually get to use one was a real
privilege back then and I got into NASA
Ames Research Center down here and I got
to use a time-sharing terminal so I
didn't actually see the computer but I
saw a time-sharing terminal and in those
days again it's hard to remember how
primitive it was it there was
such thing as a as a computer with a
graphics video display it was literally
a printer it was a teletype printer with
a keyboard on it so you would keyboard
these commands in and then you would
wait for a while and then the thing
would tell you something out but even
with that it was still remarkable
especially for a ten-year-old that you
could write a program in basic let's say
or Fortran and actually this machine
would sort of take your idea and it
would it would sort of execute your idea
and give you back some results and if
they were the results that you predicted
your program really worked it was an
incredibly thrilling experience so I
became very captivated by by a computer
and a computer to me was still a little
mysterious because it was at the other
end of this wire that I'd never really
seen the actual computer itself and then
I got tours of computers after that and
saw the insides and then I was part of
this group at Hewlett Packard when I was
12 I called up Bill Hewlett who lived in
Hewlett Packard at the time and again
this dates me but there was no such
thing as an unlisted telephone number
then so I could just look in the book
and look this name up and he answered
the phone and I said hi my name is Steve
Jobs you don't know me but I'm 12 years
old and I'm I'm building a frequency
counter and I'd like some spare parts
and so he talked to me for about 20
minutes I'll never forget it as long as
I live and he he gave me the parts but
he also gave me a job working at Hewlett
Packard that summer and I was I was 12
years old and and that really made a
remarkable influence on me I Gila
Packard was really the only company I'd
ever seen in my life at that page and it
formed my view of what a company was and
how well they treated their employees
you know at that time I mean they didn't
know about cholesterol back then but at
that time they used to bring a big cart
full of donuts and coffee out at 10
o'clock every morning everybody take a
coffee and donut break and just little
things like that it was clear that the
company
was was the company recognized that
his true value was its employees so
anyway things led the things with
Hewlett Packard and I started going up
to their Palo Alto research labs every
Tuesday night with a small group of
people to meet some of their researchers
and stuff and I saw the first desktop
computer ever made which was the Hewlett
Packard 9100 it was about as big as a
suitcase but it actually had a small
cathode ray tube display in it and it
was completely self-contained there was
no wire going off behind the curtains
somewhere and and I fell in love with it
and you could program it in basic and
APL and and I would just for hours you
know get a ride up to hewlett-packard
and just hang around that machine and
write programs for it and so that was
the early days and and I met Steve
Wozniak around that time to no one maybe
maybe a little early when I was about 14
15 years old and we immediately hit it
off he was the first person I'd met that
knew more about electronics than I did
and so I was I liked him a lot and he
was uh maybe five years older than I
he'd he'd gone off to college and gotten
kicked out for pulling pranks and was
living with his parents and going to
deeanne's of the local junior college so
we became fast friends and started doing
projects together we read about we read
about that the story in Esquire magazine
about this guy named Captain Crunch who
could supposedly make free telephone
calls you've heard about this I'm sure
and we again we were captivated how
could anybody do this and we thought it
must be a hoax and we started looking
through the library's looking for the
secret tones that would allow you to do
this and it turned out we were at
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center one
night and way in the bowels of their
technical library way down at the last
bookshelf in the in the corner bottom
rack we found an
AT&T technical journal that laid out the
whole thing and and that's another
moment I'll never forget we saw this
journal we thought my god it's all real
and so we set out to build a device to
make these tones and the way it worked
was you know when you make a
long-distance call you used to hear
right in the background
they were tones that sounded like the
touch tongue you can make on your phone
but they were different frequencies so
you couldn't make them it turned out
that that was the signal from one
telephone computer to another
controlling that computers in the
network and AT&T made a fatal flaw when
they designed the original telephone
network digital telephone network was
they put the signaling from computer to
computer in the same band as your voice
which meant that if you could make those
same signals you could put it right in
through the handset and literally the
entire AT&T international phone network
would think you were an AT&T computer so
after three weeks we finally built a box
like this that worked and I remember the
first call we made was down to LA one of
Woz's relatives down in Pasadena we
dialed the wrong number but we woke some
guy up in the middle of the night we
were yelling at him like don't you
understand we made this call for free
and this person didn't appreciate that
but it was it was miraculous and we
built these little boxes to do blue
boxing as it was called and we put a
little note in the bottom of him our
logo was he's got the whole world in his
hands and they worked we built the best
blue box in the world it was all digital
no adjustments and so you could go up to
a payphone you could you could you know
take a trunk over to White Plains and
then take a satellite over to Europe and
then go to Turkey take a cable back to
Atlanta you know and you could go around
the world you could go around the world
five or six times because we we learned
all the codes for how to get on the
satellites and stuff and then you could
call the payphone next door and so you
could shout in the phone and after about
a minute it would come out the other
phone it was it was miraculous and and
you might ask well what's so interesting
about that what's so interesting is that
we were young and what we learned was
that we could build something
our selves that could control billions
of dollars worth of infrastructure in
the world that was what we learned was
that us too you know we didn't know much
we could build a little thing that could
control a giant thing and that was an
incredible lesson I don't think that
would have ever been an Apple Computer
had there not been blue boxing well I
said you called the Pope yeah we did
call the Pope he he pretended to be
Henry Kissinger and we got the number of
the Vatican and we called the Pope and
they started waking people up in the
hierarchy you know I don't know
Cardinals in this net and and they
actually sent someone to wake up the
Pope when when finally we just burst out
laughing and they realized that we
weren't Henry Kissinger and so we never
got to talk to the Pope but it was very
funny though so the jump from blue boxes
to personal computers what what sparked
that well necessity in the sense that
there was time sharing computers
available and there was a time sharing
company in Mountain View that we could
get free time on so but we needed to
terminal and we couldn't afford one so
we designed and built one and that was
the first thing we ever did we built
this terminal and so what an Apple one
was was really an extension of this
terminal putting a microprocessor on the
back end that's what it was it was
really kind of two separate projects put
together so first we built the terminal
and then we built the Apple one and we
we really built it for ourselves because
we couldn't afford to to buy anything
and we'd scavenge parts here and there
and stuff and we build these all by hand
I mean they take you know 40 to 80 hours
to build one and then they'd always be
breaking because there's all these tiny
little wires and so it turned out a lot
of our friends wanted to build them too
and although they could scavenge most of
the parts as well they didn't have the
sort of skills to build them that we had
acquired
by training ourselves through building
and so we ended up helping them build
most of their computers and it was
really taken up all of our time and we
thought you know if we could make what's
called a printed circuit board which is
a piece of fiberglass with copper on
both sides that's etched to form the
wires so that you could build a computer
one of you know you can build an Apple
one in a few hours instead of 40 hours
if we could if we only had one of those
we could sell them to all our friends
for you know as much as it cost us to
make them and make our money back and
everybody be happy we'd say we get a
life again so we did that
I sold my Volkswagen bus and Steve sold
his calculator we got enough money to
pay a friend of ours to make of the
artwork to make a printed circuit board
and we made some printed circuit boards
and we we sold some to our friends and I
was trying to sell the rest of them so
that we could get our micro bus and
calculator back and I walked into the
first computer store in the world which
was the byte shop of Mountain View I
think on El Camino I did it
metamorphosized into an adult bookstore
a few years later but at this point it
was the byte shop and he the the person
that ran I guess I think was name was
Paul Terrell he said you know I'll take
50 of those I said this is great he said
but I want him fully assembled we'd
never thought of this before
so we then kick this around we thought
why not why not try this and so I spent
the next several days on the phone
talking with electronics parts
distributors we didn't know what we were
doing and we said look here's the parts
we need we need we need we figured we'd
we'd buy a hundred sets of parts build
50 sell them to the byte shop for twice
what it cost us to build them they're
for paying for the whole hundred and
then we'd have 50 left and we could make
our profits by selling those so we
convinced these distributors to give us
the parts on net 30 days credit we had
no idea what that meant and if there'd
sure sign here and so we had 30 days to
pay them and so we bought the parts we
built the products and we sold
50 of them to the byte shop in Palo Alto
and got paid in 29 days and then went
and paid off the parts people in 30 days
and so we were in business but we had
the classic Marxian profit realization
crisis and that our profit wasn't in a
liquid currency our profit was in 50
computer sitting in the corner so then
all of a sudden we had to think wow how
are we going to realize our profit and
so we started thinking about
distribution are there any other
computer stores and we started calling
the other computer stores that we'd
heard of across the country and and we
just kind of eased into business that
way
the third key figure in the creation of
Apple was former Intel executive Mike
Markkula I asked Steve how he came
aboard we were designing the Apple 2 and
we really had some some much higher
ambitions for the Apple 2 woz his
ambitions where he wanted to add color
graphics my ambition was that it was
very clear to me that while there were a
bunch of hardware hobbyists they could
assemble their own computers or at least
take our board and add the transformers
for the power supply in the case and the
keyboard and go get it you know etc go
get the rest of the stuff for every one
of those there were a thousand people
that couldn't do that but wanted to mess
around with programming software
hobbyists just like I had been when I
was you know 10 discovering that
computer and so my dream for the Apple 2
was to sell the first real packaged
computer packaged personal computer we
didn't have to be a hardware hobbyist at
all and so combining both of those
dreams we actually designed the product
and we I found a designer and we
designed the packaging and everything
and we wanted to make it out of plastic
and we had the whole thing ready to go
but we needed some money for tooling the
case and things like that we needed we
needed a few hundred thousand dollars
and this was way beyond our means so I
went looking for some venture capital
and I ran across one venture capitalist
named Don Valentine who came over to the
garage and later said I looked like a
renegade from the human race that was
his famous quote and he said he wasn't
willing to invest in us but he he he
recommended a few people that might and
one of them was Mike Markkula
so I
Mike on the phone and Mike came over and
Mike had retired at about 30 or 31 from
Intel he was a product manager there and
gotten a little bit of stock and you
know made like a million bucks on stock
options which at that time it was quite
a lot of money and and he'd been
investing in oil and gas deals and kind
of staying home and doing that sort of
thing and he I think was was kind of
antsy to get back into something and
Mike and I hit it off very well and so
Mike said okay I'll invest after a few
weeks and I said no no we don't want
your money we want you so we convinced
Mike to actually throw in with us as an
equal partner and so Mike put in some
money and Mike put in himself and the
three of us went off and we took this
design that was virtually done with the
Apple two and tooled it up and announced
it a few months later at the West Coast
computer fair what was that like it was
great we got the the best I mean this is
the West Coast computer fair was small
at that time but to us it was very large
and so we had this fantastic booth there
we had a projection television showing
the Apple 2 and showing its graphics
which today look very crude but at that
time we're by far the most advanced
graphics on a personal computer and I
think you know my recollection as we
stole the show and a lot of dealers and
distributors started lining up and we
were off and running how old were you 21
21 yeah you're 21 you're a big success
you know you you have no you just sort
of done it by the seat of your pants you
don't have any particular training in
this how do you how do you learn to run
a company
you know throughout the years in
business
I found something which was I'd always
ask why you do things and the answers
you invariably get are oh that's just
the way it's done nobody knows why they
do what they do nobody thinks about
things very deeply in business that's
what I found I'll give you an example
when we were building our Apple ones in
the garage we knew exactly what they
cost when we got into a factory in the
Apple two days the accounting had this
notion of a standard cost where you'd
kind of set a standard cost and then at
the end of a quarter you'd adjust it
with a variance and I kept asking why
did we do this and the answer was well
that's just the way it's done and after
about six months of digging into this
what I realized was the reason you do it
is because you don't really have good
enough controls to know how much it
costs so you guess and then you fix your
guess at the end of the quarter and the
reason you don't know how much it cost
is because your information systems
aren't good enough so but nobody said it
that way and so later on when we
designed this automated Factory for
Macintosh we were able to get rid of a
lot of these antiquated concepts and
know exactly what something cost to the
second so in business a lot of things or
I call it folklore they're done because
they were done yesterday and the day
before and so what that means is is if
you're willing to sort of ask a lot of
questions and think about things and
work really hard you can learn business
pretty fast that's not the hardest thing
in the world not rocket science it's not
rocket science no no when you were first
coming in contact with these computers
inventing them and before that working
on the HP 90 100 you know we talked
about writing programs what sort of
programs what do people actually do with
these things
see what we did with them well I'll give
you a simple example when we were
designing our blue box we used we wrote
a lot of custom programs to help us
design it you know and to do a lot of
the the dog work for us in terms of
calculating master frequencies with sub
divisors to get other frequencies and
things like that we use the computer
quite a bit to calculate you know how
how much air we would get in the
frequencies and how much could be
tolerated so we use them in our work but
but much more importantly it had nothing
to do with using them for anything
practical it had to do with using them
to be a mirror of your thought process
to actually learn how to think there was
I think the greatest value of learning
had I think everybody in this country
should learn how to program a computer
should learn a computer language because
it teaches you how to think it's like
going to law school I don't think
anybody should be a lawyer but I think
going to law school would actually be
useful because it teaches you how to
think in a certain way in the same way
that computer programming teaches you in
a slightly different way how to think
and so I I've you computer science as a
liberal art it should be something that
everybody learned you know takes it it
takes a year in their life one of the
courses they take is you know learning
how to program yeah but I learned APL
which you know obviously is part of the
reason why I'm going through life
sideways what was it in you can you look
back and consider it an enriching
experience that taught you to think in a
different way or not uh no not that
particularly okay not other languages
perhaps more so I started with APL yeah
so I mean obviously the Apple 2 was a
was a terrific success yeah
just incredibly so and the company grew
like Topsy and eventually went public
and you guys got really rich what's it
like to get rich it's very interesting I
was worth about over a million dollars
when I was 23 and over ten million
dollars when I was 21
or over a hundred million dollars when I
was 25 and it wasn't that important
because I never did it for the money I I
think money is wonderful thing because
it enables you to do things
it enables you to invest in ideas that
don't have a short-term payback and
things like that but especially at that
point in my life it was it was not the
most important thing the most important
thing was the company the people the
products we were making what we were
gonna enable people to do with these
products so I didn't think about it a
great deal you know I never sold any
stock and just really believed that the
company would would do very well over
the long term central to the development
of the personal computer was the
pioneering work being done at Xerox's
Palo Alto Research Center which Steve
first visited in 1979 I had three or
four people who kept bugging me that I
get my rear over his Xerox PARC and see
what they were doing and so I finally
did I went over there and they were very
kind and they showed me what they were
working on and they showed me really
three things but I was so blinded by the
first one that I didn't even really see
the other two one of the things they
showed me was object-oriented
programming
they showed me that but I didn't even
see that the other one they showed me
was really a networked computer system
that over a hundred Alto computers all
networked using email etc etc I didn't
even see that I was so blinded by the
first thing they showed me which was the
graphical user interface I thought it
was the best thing I'd ever seen in my
life now remember it was very flawed
what we saw was incomplete they done a
bunch of things wrong but we didn't know
that at the time it still though they
had the germ of the of the idea was
there and they done it very well and
within you know 10 minutes it was
obvious to me that all computers were
work like this someday it was obviously
you could argue about how many years it
would take you could argue about who the
winners and losers might be but you
couldn't argue about the inevitability
of it was so obvious you would have felt
the same way had you been there you know
that's those are the exact words that
Paul Allen used yeah it's really
interesting yeah it was obvious and but
there were two two visits you saw it
then you brought some people back with
you yeah and what what happens next time
they made you cool your heels for a
while no no well Adele Goldberg is there
several parts what do you mean well she
did the demo when the group came back
and she said that that she argued
against doing it for three hours and
they took you other places and showed
you other things while she was arguing
oh oh you mean they were reluctant to
show us the demo she was oh okay oh I
don't have no idea okay yeah I don't
remember that not even something else so
they were very skillful yeah
but they did show us yeah so and it's
good that they showed us because that
the technology crashed and burned it
xeroxing what I used to call the what's
that no I was just why yeah why
oh very actually thought a lot about
that and I learned more about that with
John Sculley later on and I think I
understand it now pretty well what
happens is like with John Sculley John
came from PepsiCo and they they at most
would change their product you know once
every 10 years I mean to them a new
product was like a new sized bottle
right so if you were a product person
you couldn't change the course of that
company very much
so who influenced the success of PepsiCo
the sales and marketing people therefore
they were the ones that got promoted and
therefore they were the ones that ran
the company well for PepsiCo that might
have been okay but it turns out the same
thing can happen in technology companies
that get it get monopolies like Oh
IBM and Xerox if you are a product
person at IBM or Xerox so you make a
better copy or a better computer so what
when you have a monopoly market share
the company's not any more successful
so the people that can make the company
more successful our sales and marketing
people and they end up running the
companies and the product people get
driven out of the decision making forums
and the companies forget what it means
to make great products it's sort of the
product sensibility and the product
genius that brought them to those to
that monopolistic position gets rotted
out by people running these companies
who have no conception of a good product
versus a bad product they have no
conception of the craftsmanship that's
required to take a good idea and turn it
into a good product and they really have
no feeling in their hearts usually about
wanting to really help the customers so
that's what happened at Xerox that the
people at Xerox PARC used to call the
people that ran Xerox toner heads and
they just had these toner heads would
come out to Xerox PARC and I just had no
clue about what they were seeing and for
our our audience toner is what Oh toner
toner is what you put into a copier yeah
that you know the toner that you add to
a to an industrial copier the black
stuff the black stuff yeah so the
basically they were copier hands it just
had no clue about a computer what it
could do and so they they just grabbed
grab defeat from the greatest victory in
the computer industry Xerox could have
owned the entire computer industry today
could have been you know a company ten
times its size could have been IBM could
have been the IBM of the 90s could've
been the Microsoft of the nineties so
but anyway that's all ancient history it
doesn't really matter anymore
sure you mentioned IBM when when IBM
entered the market was that a daunting
thing at for you at Apple oh sure I mean
here was Apple you know one
billion-dollar company and here was IBM
at that time probably about a thirty
some odd billion dollar company entering
the market sure it was it was very scary
we made a very big mistake though the
IBM's first product was terrible it was
really bad and we made a mistake of of
not realizing that a lot of other people
had a very strong vested interest in
helping IBM make it better so if it had
just been up to IBM they would have
crash
and burned but IBM did have a I think a
genius in their approach which was to
have a lot of other people have a vested
interest in their success and that's
what saved them in the end so you came
back from visiting Xerox PARC with a
vision and how did you implement the
vision well I got our best people
together and started to get them working
on this the problem was that we'd hired
a bunch of people from Hewlett Packard
and they didn't get this idea they
didn't get it I remember having dramatic
arguments with some of these people who
thought the coolest thing in user
interface was soft keys at the bottom of
a screen you know they had no concept of
proportionally spaced fonts no concept
of a mouse a matter of fact I remember
arguing with these folks people
screaming at me that it would take us
five years to engineer a mouse and it
would cost three hundred dollars to
build and I finally got fed up I just
went outside and found David Kelly
design and asked him to design me a
mouse and in 90 days we had a mouse we
could build for 15 bucks that was
phenomenally reliable so I found that
you know way Apple Apple did not have
the caliber of people that was necessary
to seize this idea in many ways and
there was a core team that did but there
was a larger team that most had mostly
had come from Hewlett Packard that that
didn't have a clue well this becomes
this issue of professionalism there's a
dark side and the light side to it is
well know you know what it is no it's
not dark and light it's that people get
confused companies get confused when
they start getting bigger they want to
replicate their initial success and a
lot of them think well somehow there's
some magic in the process of how that
success was created so they start to try
to institutionalize process across the
company and before very long people get
very confused that the process is the
content
that's ultimately the downfall of IBM
IBM has the best process people in the
world they just forgot about the content
and that's of what happened a little bit
at Apple too we had a lot of people who
are great at management process they
just didn't have a clue as to the
content and in my career I found that
the best people you know are the ones
that really understand the content and
they're a pain in the butt to manage you
know but you put up with it because
they're so great at the content and
that's what makes great products it's
not process its content so we had a
little bit of that problem at Apple and
that problem eventually resulted in in
the Lisa which had its moments of
brilliance in a way it was very far
ahead of its time but there wasn't
enough fundamental content understanding
Apple drifted too far away from its
roots to Hewlett these hewlett-packard
guys $10,000 was cheap to our market to
our distribution channels $10,000 was
impossible so we produced a product that
was a complete mismatch for the culture
of our company for the image of our
company for the distribution channels of
our company for our current customers
none of them could afford product like
that and it failed not UN and and John
couch right thought for a leadership
role absolutely and I lost
that's correct how did that come about
well I thought Lisa was was in serious
trouble I thought Lisa was going off in
this very bad direction as I've just
described and I could not convince
enough people and the senior management
of Apple that that was the case and we
ran the place as a team for the most
part so I lost and at that point in time
you know I brooded for a few months but
it was it was not very long after that
that it really occurred to me that if we
didn't do something here the Apple 2 was
running out of gas and we needed to do
something with this technology fast or
else Apple might see
to exist as the company that it was and
so I formed a small team to do the
Macintosh and you know we we were on a
mission from God you know to save Apple
no one else thought so but it turned out
we were right and it as we evolved the
Mac it became very clear that it this
was also a way of reinventing Apple we
reinvented everything we reinvented
manufacturing I made I visited probably
80 automated factories in Japan and we
built the world's first automated
computer factory in the world in
California here so we adopted the 68000
microprocessor that Lisa had we
negotiated a price that was a fifth of
what Lisa was gonna pay for it because
we were gonna use it much higher volume
and we really started to design this
product that could be sold for $1,000
called the Macintosh and we didn't make
it we could have sold it at $2,000
although we came out of 2,500 and we
spent four years of our life doing that
we built the product we built the
automated factory the machine to build
the machine we built a completely new
distribution system we built a
completely different marketing approach
and you know I think it worked pretty
well no you motivated this team I mean
you had to guide them way to build a
team yeah we build a team motivated
guide them you deal with them you know
we we've interviewed just lots and lots
of people from the Macintosh team and
and and you know what it keeps coming
down to is your passion your vision and
and you know how do you order your
priorities in there what what what's
important to you in the development of
the product
you know
one of the things that really hurt Apple
was after I left John Sculley got a very
serious disease and that disease I've
seen other people get it too it's um
it's the disease of thinking that a
really great idea is 90 percent of the
work and then if you just tell your all
these other people you know here's this
great idea then of course they can go
off and make it happen
and the problem with that is is that
there's a just a tremendous amount of
craftsmanship in in-between a great idea
and a great product and as you evolve
that great idea it changes and grows it
never comes out like it starts because
you learn a lot more as you get into the
subtleties of it and you also find
there's tremendous trade-offs that you
have to make I mean you know there are
there are just certain things you you
can't make electrons do there are
certain things you can't make plastic do
or glass do and and and as you get into
or factories do or robots do and as you
get into all these things designing a
product is keeping 5,000 things in your
brain these concepts and fitting them
all together in in kind of continuing to
push to fit them together in new and
different ways to get what you want and
every day you discover something new
that is a new problem or a new
opportunity to fit these things together
a little differently and it's that
process that is the magic and so we had
a lot of great ideas when we started but
what I've always felt that a team of
people doing something they really
believe in is like is like when I was a
young kid there was a widowed man that
lived up the street and he was in his
80s he's a little scary-looking and and
I got to know him a little bit I think
he might have paid me to cut his Mo was
lawn or something and one day he said
come on into my garage I want to show
you something and he pulled out this
dusty old rock
it was a motor and a and a coffee can
and a little you know band between and
and you said come on with me we went out
to the back and we got some just some
rocks some regular old blue rocks and we
put them in the can with a little bit of
liquid and a little bit of grit powder
and we closed the can up and he turned
this motor on he said come back tomorrow
and as can was making a you know racket
as the stones were and I came back the
next day and we took we opened the can
and we took out these amazingly
beautiful polished rocks the same common
stones that had gone in through rubbing
against each other like this create a
little bit of friction creating a lit of
noise had come out these beautiful
polished rocks and that's always been in
my mind my metaphor for a team working
really hard on something they're
passionate about is is that it's through
the team through that group of
incredibly talented people bumping up
against each other having arguments
having fights sometimes making some
noise and working together they polish
each other and they polish the ideas and
what comes out are these really
beautiful stones so it's hard to explain
and it's certainly not the result of one
person I mean people like symbols so I'm
the symbol of certain things but it
really is it was a team effort on the
Mac now in my life I observed something
fairly early on at Apple which I didn't
know how to explain it then but I
thought a lot about it since
if you most things in life the dynamic
range between average and the best is it
most
two to one all right like if you go to
New York City and you're getting an
average taxi cab driver versus the best
taxi cab driver you know you're probably
gonna get to your destination with the
best taxi cab maybe 30% faster you know
in an automobile what's the difference
between an average and the best maybe
20% the best CD player in an average CD
player I know 20% so 2 2 1 is a big big
dynamic range in most of life in
software and it used to be the case in
hardware to the difference between
average and the best is 50 to 1 maybe a
hundred to one easy ok I've very few
things in life for like this but what I
was lucky enough to spend my life in is
like this and so I've built a lot of my
success off finding these truly gifted
people and not settling for B and C
players but really going for the a
players and I found something I found
that when you get enough a players
together when you go to through the
incredible work to find you know five of
these eight players they really like
working with each other because they've
never had a chance to do that before and
they don't want to work with B and C
players and so it becomes self-policing
and they only want to hire more a
players and so you build up these
pockets of a players and it propagates
and that's what the Mac team was like
they were all a players and these were
extraordinarily talented people so but
there are also people who now say that
they don't have the energy anymore to
work for you mm-hmm sure oh I think if
you talk to a lot of people on the Mac
team they will tell you it was the
hardest they've ever worked in their
life some of them will tell you it was
you know the happiest they've ever been
in their life but I think all of them
will tell you that is certainly one of
the most intense than cherish
experiences they will ever have in their
life yeah they do it so you know it's
some of those things you are not
sustainable for some people what what
does it mean when you tell someone their
work is shit it usually means their work
is shit sometimes it means I think your
work is shit and I I'm wrong but usually
it means their their work is not
anywhere near good enough we have this
great quote from Bill Atkinson who says
when you say is get someone's work as
shit you really mean I don't quite
understand it would you please explain
it to me no that's not usually what I
meant all right you know when you get
really good people they know they're
really good and you don't have to baby
people's egos so much and what really
matters is the work that and everybody
knows that that's all that matters is
the work so it people are being counted
on to do specific pieces of the puzzle
and the most important thing I think you
can do for somebody who's really good
and who's really being counted on is to
point out to them when they're not their
work isn't good enough and to do it very
clearly and to articulate why and to to
get them back on track and you need to
do that in a way that does not call into
question your confidence in their
abilities but leaves not too much room
for interpretation that it's their work
the work that they have done for this
particular thing is not good enough to
support the goal of the team and that's
a hard thing to do and I've always taken
a very direct approach so and I think if
you talk to people that have worked with
me the really good people have found it
beneficial
some people have hated it
no but and I'm also one of these people
that I I don't really care about being
right you know I just care about success
so you'll find a lot of people that will
tell you that I had a very strong
opinion and they you know presented
evidence to the contrary and five
minutes later I completely changed my
mind because I'm like that I don't mind
being wrong and I'll admit that I'm
wrong a lot it doesn't really matter to
me too much
what matters to me is that we do the
right thing so how and why did Apple get
into desktop publishing which would
become the max killer app I don't know
if you know this but we got the first
canon laser printer engine shipped in
the United States at Apple and we had it
hooked up to ELISA actually imaging
pages before anybody for HP long before
HP long before Adobe but I heard a few
times people would tell me hey there's
these skies over in this garage the left
Xerox PARC you gotta go seen him and I
finally wasn't saw him and I saw what
they were doing and it was better than
what we were doing and they were gonna
be a hardware company they wanted to
make printers in the whole thing and so
what I him into being a software company
and we within two or three weeks we had
cancelled our internal project and bunch
of people want to kill me over this but
we did it and I had cut a deal with
Adobe to use their software and we
bought 19.9% of Adobe at Apple they
needed some financing we wanted a little
bit of control and we were off to the
races and so we got the engines from
Canon we designed the first laser
printer controller at Apple and we got
the software from Adobe and we
introduced the laser writer and no one
at the company wanted to do it but but a
few of us in the Mac Group everybody
thought a $7,000 printer was crazy what
they didn't understand was you could
share it with Apple talk I mean they
understood it intellectually but they
didn't understand it viscerally because
the last really expensive thing we try
to sell was Lisa so we pushed this thing
through and I had to basically do it
over a few dead bodies but we push this
thing through and it was the first laser
printer on the market as you know
and you know the rest is history when I
left Apple Apple was the largest printer
company by rep measured by revenue in
the world
it lost that distinction that he would
Packard about three four years after I
left unfortunately but when I left it
was the largest printer company in the
world did you envision desktop
publishing was that a no-brainer you
know yes
but we also envisioned really the
networked office and so in January of
1995 when we had our annual meeting and
introduced our new products I made
probably the largest marketing blunder
of my career 1985 1985 sorry made
probably the largest marketing blunder
of my career by announcing the Macintosh
office instead of just desktop
publishing and we had desktop publishing
as a major component of that but we
announced a bunch of other stuff as well
and I think we should have just focused
on desktop publishing at that time after
serious disagreements with Apple's CEO
John Sculley Steve left the company in
1985
tell us about your departure from Apple
oh it was very painful I'm not even sure
I want to talk about it what can I say I
hired the wrong guy that was going yeah
and he destroyed everything I spent 10
years working for starting with me but
that wasn't the saddest part I would
have gladly left Apple if Apple would
have turned out like I'd wanted it to he
basically got on a rocket ship that was
about to leave the pad and the rocket
ship left the pad and it kind of went to
his head he got confused and thought
that he built the rocket ship
and then he kind of sort of changed
their trajectory so that it was
inevitably gonna crash into the ground
well it was always the in the pre
McIntosh days and the early Macintosh
days it was always a Steven John show
you know you two I would kind of
joined-at-the-hip full right there and
then something happened to split you
what was that rekt what was that
well havelis what happened was that the
industry went into a recession in late
1984 sales started seriously contracting
and John didn't know what to do he had
not a clue and there was a leadership
vacuum at the top of Apple there were
fairly strong general managers running
in divisions I was running the Macintosh
division somebody else was running the
Apple 2 division etc there were some
problems with some of the divisions
there was a person running the storage
division that was completely out to
lunch and bunch of things that needed to
be changed but all of those problems got
put in a pressure cooker because of this
contraction in the marketplace and there
was no leadership and John was in a
situation where the board was not happy
and where he was probably not long for
the company and one thing I did not ever
see about John until that time was he
had an incredible survival instinct
somebody once told me this guy didn't
get to be this you know the president of
PepsiCo without these kinds of instincts
and and it was true and John decided
that a really good person to be the root
of all these problems would be me and so
we we came to loggerheads and John had
cultivated a very close relationship
with the board and they believed him so
that's what happened so there were
competing visions for the company Oh
clearly and and well not so much
competing visions for the company
because I don't think John had a vision
for the company well I guess I'm sure
I'm asking what was your vision that
lost out in this instance it wasn't an
issue of vision it was an issue of
execution in the sense that my belief
was that Apple needed much stronger
leadership to sort of unite these
various factions that we created with
the divisions that the Macintosh was the
future of Apple that we needed to rein
back expenses dramatically in the Apple
2 area that we needed to be spending
very heavily in the Macintosh area
things like that and John's vision was
that he should remain the CEO of the
company and anything that would help him
do that would would be acceptable so I
think that you know Apple was in a state
of paralysis in the early part of 1985
and I wasn't at that time capable
I don't think of running the company as
a whole you know I was 30 years old and
I don't think I had enough experience to
run a two billion dollar company
unfortunately John didn't either and so
anyway I I was told in no uncertain
terms that there was no job for me it
was really really tragic Liberia yeah it
would have been far smarter for Apple to
sort of you know let me work on the next
dive volunteer I said why don't I start
a research division and you know give me
a few million bucks a year and I'll go
hire some really great people we'll do
the next great thing and I was told
there was no opportunity to do that
so in my office was taken away it was it
was I mean I'll get real emotional if we
keep talking about this
so anyway that but that's irrelevant I'm
just one person and the company was a
lot more people than me so that that's
not the important part the important
part was the values of Apple you know
over the next several years were
systematically destroyed I then asked
Steve for his thoughts on the state of
Apple
remember this was 1995 a year before he
would go back to Apple remember too that
when Apple bought next a year after this
interview Steve immediately sold the
Apple stock he received as part of the
sale Apple's dying today apples dying a
very painful death it's on a glide slope
to to die and the reason is is because
you know when I walked out the door to
Apple we had a ten-year lead on
everybody else in the industry Macintosh
was 10 years I had I you know we watched
Microsoft take 10 years to catch up with
it well the reason that they could catch
up with it was because Apple stood still
I mean the Macintosh that shipping today
is like you know 25% different than the
day I left they've spent hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on R&D I mean
you know a total of probably five
billion dollars on R&D what did they get
for it I don't know but it was the what
happened was the but the understanding
of how to move these things forward and
how to create these new products somehow
evaporated and I think a lot of the good
people stuck around for a while but
there wasn't an opportunity to get
together and do this because there
wasn't any any leadership to do that so
what's happened with Apple now is is
that they've fallen behind in in many
respects certainly in market share and
and most importantly their
differentiation has been eroded by
Microsoft and so what they have now is
they have their installed base which is
not growing and which is shrinking
slowly but will provide a you know a a
good revenue stream for several years
but it's a glide slope that's just gonna
go like this
so it's unfortunate and I don't really
think it's reversible at this point in
time that's going well what about
Microsoft I mean that's the juggernaut
now right and it's you know and it it's
it's it's a kind of a you know Ford LTD
going into the into the future it's
definitely not a Cadillac it's not a BMW
it's yeah it's just you know what what's
going on there how did those guys do
that
well Microsoft's orbit was made possible
by a Saturn 5 booster called IBM and I
know bill would get upset with me for
saying this but of course it was true
and much to Bill and Microsoft's credit
they used that fantastic opportunity to
create more opportunity for themselves
most people don't remember but in
nineteen until 1984 with the Mac
Microsoft was not in the applications
business it was dominated by Lotus and
Microsoft took a big gamble to write for
the Mac and they came out with
applications that were terrible but they
kept at it and they made them better and
eventually they dominated the Macintosh
application market and then used a
springboard of Windows to get into the
PC market with those same applications
and now they dominate the applications
in the PC space too so they have two
characteristics I think they're very
strong opportunists and I don't mean
that in a bad way
and two they're like the Japanese they
just keep on coming now they were able
to do that because of the revenue stream
from the IBM deal but nonetheless they
they made the most of it and I give them
a lot of credit for that the only
problem with Microsoft is they just have
no taste they have absolutely no taste
and and and what that means is I don't
mean that in a small way I mean in a big
way in the sense that
they they don't think of original ideas
and they don't bring much culture into
their product and and you say well what
why is that important well you know
proportionally spaced fonts come from
typesetting and beautiful books that's
where one gets the idea if it weren't
for the Mac they would never have that
in their products and so I guess I am
saddened not by Microsoft success I have
no problem with their success they've
earned their success for the most part I
have a problem with the fact that they
just make really third-rate products
their products have no spirit to them
their products have no sort of spirit of
enlightenment about them they are very
pedestrian and the sad part is is that
most customers don't don't have a lot of
that spirit either but but the way that
we're gonna ratchet up our species is to
take the best and to spread it around to
everybody so that everybody grows up
with better things and starts to
understand the subtlety of these better
things and and Microsoft's just you know
that it's McDonald's so that's what
saddens me not that Microsoft is one but
that Microsoft's products don't display
more more insight and more creativity so
what are you doing about it
tell us about next well I'm not doing
anything about it okay
because next is too small of a company
do anything about that
I'm just watching it and there's there's
really nothing I can do about it next we
talked about next the company Steve was
running in 1995 which Apple was soon to
buy next software would become the heart
of the Mac in the form of OS 10 you
don't really want to hear about next to
you yes I do you
okay well maybe the best thing severe
and much times I just tell you what next
is today yeah
the the there hasn't been
clearly the the innovation in the
computer industry is happening in
software right now and there happen
there hasn't been a revolution in how we
create software in a long sorry the
innovation in the industry is in
software and there hasn't ever been a
real revolution in how we created
software certainly not in the last 20
years
matter of fact it's gotten worse while
the Macintosh was a revolution for the
end-user to make it easier to use it it
was the opposite for the developer the
developer paid the price and software
got much more complicated to write as it
became easier to use for the end-user so
software is is infiltrating everything
we do these days in businesses
software's one of the most potent
competitive weapons I mean the most
successful business war was friends and
family MC eyes friends and family in the
last 10 years and what was that it was a
brilliant idea and it was custom billing
software AT&T didn't respond for 18
months
yielding billions of dollars worth of
market share to MCI not because they
were stupid but because they couldn't
get the billing software done so in in
ways like that in smaller ways software
is becoming an incredible force in this
world to provide new goods and services
to people whether it's over the Internet
or you know what have you software is
going to be a major enabler in our
society we have taken another one of
those brilliant original ideas at Xerox
PARC that I saw in 1979 but didn't see
really clearly then called
object-oriented technology and we have
perfected it and commercialized it here
and become the biggest supplier of it to
the market and this this object
technology lets you build software 10
times faster and it's better and so
that's what we do and we've got a small
to medium-size business and we were the
largest supplier of objects but you know
we're 50 to 75 million dollar company
I've got about 300 people
and that's what we do and the the the
end of the third show actually is the
one moment where we do look into the
future not because Channel four has
asked us to do that sure and so what's
your vision of you know ten years from
now with this technology that you're
that you're developing well you know I
think the Internet and the web there are
two exciting things happening in
software and any computing today I think
one is objects but the other one is the
web the web is incredibly exciting
because it is the the fulfillment of a
lot of our dreams that the computer
would ultimately not be primarily a
device for computation but
metamorphosize into a device for
communication and the with the web
that's finally happening and secondly
it's exciting because Microsoft doesn't
own it and therefore there's a
tremendous amount of innovation
happening so I think that the web is
going to be profound and what it does to
our society as you know about 15% of the
goods and services in the US are sold
via catalogs over the television all
that's going to go on the web and more
billions and billions soon tens of
billions of dollars worth of goods and
services are gonna be sold on the web if
you could a way to think about it is it
is the ultimate direct to customer
distribution channel another way to
think about it is the smallest company
in the world can look as large as the
largest company in the world on the web
so I guess I think the web is we look
back 10 years from now the web is going
to be the defining technology the
defining social the defining social
moment for computing and I think it's
going to be huge I think it's breathed a
whole new generation of life into
personal computing and I think it could
be huge yeah and you're making software
that oh it so is everybody I mean you
forget about what we're doing just as an
industry the web is gonna open a whole
new door to this industry it's another
one of those things that it's obvious
once it happens
but five years ago who would have
guessed right that's right isn't this a
wonderful place with I was keen to know
about Steve's passion what drove him I
read an article when I was very young in
Scientific American and it it measured
the efficiency of locomotion for various
species on the planet so for you know
bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and
birds and fish
how many kilocalories per kilometer did
they spend to move and and humans were
measured too and the Condor one
it was the most efficient and mankind
the crown of creation came in with a
rather unimpressive showing about 1/3 of
the way down the list but somebody there
had the brilliance to test a human
riding of bicycle blew away the Condor
all the way off the charts and I
remember this really had an impact on me
I really remember this that humans are
tool builders and we build tools that
can dramatically amplify our innate
human abilities and to me we actually
ran an ad like this very early to Apple
that the personal computer was the
bicycle of the mind and I believe that
with every bone in my body that that of
all the inventions of humans the
computer is going to rank near if not at
the top as history unfolds and we look
back and it is the most awesome tool
that we have ever invented and and I
feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly
the right place in Silicon Valley at
exactly the right time historically
where this invention has taken form and
and as you know when you set a vector
off in space if you can change its
direction a little bit at the beginning
its dramatic when it gets a few miles
out in space I feel we but we are still
really at the beginning of that vector
and if we can nudge it in the right
directions it will be a much better
thing as it as it progresses on and I
look
you know I think we've had a chance to
do that a few times and and it brings I
think all of us associated with it
tremendous satisfaction how do you know
what's the right direction
you know
ultimately it comes down to taste it
comes down to taste it's it comes down
to trying to expose yourself to the best
things that humans have done and then
try to bring those things in to what
you're doing
I mean Picasso had a saying he said good
artists copy great artists steal and we
have you know always been shameless
about stealing great ideas and I think
part of what made the Macintosh great
was that the people working on it were
musicians and poets and artists and
zoologists and historians who also
happen to be the best computer
scientists in the world but if it hadn't
been for computer science these people
would have all been you know doing
amazing things in life in other fields
and they brought with them we all
brought to this to this effort a very
liberal arts at sort of err a very very
liberal arts attitude that we wanted to
pull in the best that we saw in these
other fields into this field and I don't
think you get that if you are very
narrow one of the questions I asked
everyone in the series was are you a
hippie or a nerd well I had to pick one
of those two I'm clearly a hippie yeah
yeah
okay that and third of all all the
people I work with we're clearly in that
category too anyway yeah yeah yeah why
are we music do you seek out hippies or
they are attracted to you well ask
yourself what is a hippie I mean this
isn't a word has a lot of connotations
but to me you know because I grew up so
I mean remember that the 60s happened in
the early 70s right so we have to
remember that and that's sort of when I
came of age so I saw a lot of this and
you know a lot of it happened right in
our backyard here so to me the spark of
that was that there was something beyond
sort of what you see every day there's
something going on here in life beyond
just a job and a family and two cars in
the garage and a career there's
something more going on there's another
side of the coin that we don't talk
about much and and and and we experience
it when there's gaps when we kind of
just aren't really when everything's not
ordered and perfect when there's kind of
a gap you experience this in rush of
something and and a lot of people have
set off throughout history to find out
what that was
and whether it's throw or whether it's
you know some Indian mystics or whoever
might be and and the hippy movement got
a little bit of that and they wanted to
find out what that was about and that
life wasn't about what they saw their
parents doing and of course the pendulum
swung too far the other way and it was
crazy but there was a germ of something
there and it's it's the same thing that
causes people to want to be poets
instead of bankers you know and and I
think that's a wonderful thing and I
think that that same spirit can be put
into products and those products can be
manufactured and given to people and
they can sense that spirit I mean if you
talk to people that use the Macintosh
they love it
you don't care people
loving thing products very often you
know really but but you could feel it in
there there was something really
wonderful there so I I don't think that
most of the really best people that I've
worked with have worked with computers
for the sake of working with computers
they've worked with computers because
they are the medium that is best capable
of transmitting some feeling that you
have that you want to share with other
people does that make any sense - yeah
and you know before they invented these
things that all these people would have
done other other things but but they but
computers were invented they did come
along and all these people did get
interested in school or before school
and and and and said hey this is the
medium that I think I can say something
you
