Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

by sayemm • 16 years ago

158 102 16 years ago

wired.com

owyn• 16 years ago

Pretty cool. Originally published in Feb 1996 for those who are curious (like I was).

cubicle675• 16 years ago

I got to the bit where he said he was 40, then googled his birthdate (1955) to arrive at 1995

Clarity1992• 16 years ago

Thanks, I realised it was old, but didn't bothering figuring out the date.

Personally I would like it if people put the publication year in the title when posting articles such as this.

zalew2• 16 years ago

Offtopic: Please, stop this linking to print version nonsense.

Discussion about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966724

Original: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs.html Issue 4.02 | Feb 1996

jmtame• 16 years ago

the original story was split out into 8 pages and is bombarded with ads, i guess i can see why the print version was linked instead

wyclif• 16 years ago

I agree. There is no reason to spread a simple interview over 8 pages so that Wired can get additional ad impressions, and I upvoted the parent because I hate that crap.

srgseg• 16 years ago

To be fair - the only way to have known that this was published Feb 1996 would have been to have had the regular link.

nailer• 16 years ago

Yes, the site and magazine use ads for funding. What's your point?

meadhikari• 16 years ago

Why are you so Interested in we all going through the 8 pages of advertisement.

ugh• 16 years ago

Why was this comment downvoted?

Besides linking to it being on shaky moral ground, the print version misses in this case a very critical piece of information, the date this story was published. There is also no way of going from the print version to the normal version, the reverse, however, is easily possible. It’s just not nice to link to the print version.

kragen• 16 years ago

It didn't occur to me that some HN readers might not know that Wired 4.02 was published in about 1996, but you could be right.

Linking, however, is not on shaky moral ground. If Wired didn't want the print version to be linked to, they wouldn't put it on the web.

sayemm3• 16 years ago

Thanks for including the original Wired link there.

And my apologies guys, I usually include the date of the article on the title if it's something old and link to the original publication on my HN submissions.

I came across the link on Quora out of all places, skimmed it very quickly on a late-Friday night, and submitted it w/ no thought to seeing it get upvoted several times. Regardless, I'm glad we're getting a good discussion here on the interview; glad you guys find it interesting.

ivanzhao• 16 years ago

How funny the Web and Steve's "objects" has become one thing eventually (mashups/infrastructure-SAS/APIs)

Fjslfj• 16 years ago

Jobs was entirely wrong about the web, and continues to be. WebObject's big-company focus ($50,000 for a license) is precisely why it is now dead. Meanwhile Personal HomePage script (now known as PHP) powers the world's largest website -- the little guy's tools won.

lr• 16 years ago

WebObjects, dead? Can you please define "dead"? WebObjects powers the iTunes store. I think it is doing just fine generating billions of dollars/year for Apple.

jfb4• 16 years ago

I question the asserted numbers. It is a dead technology.

wriq• 16 years ago

WebObjects was essentially the precursor to the large j2ee app servers such as WebSphere or WebLogic and not a priority at all after the Apple purchase. They moved WO over to Java and dropped the price to $699(IIRC), although by that time no one cared. I can't think of anyone other then Apple that in 2004 used WebObjects.

Still, I dont think he was wrong. WO/Enterprise Object Framework was incredibly influential in server side java which I believe is still the most popular 'enterprise' language currently.

marbletiles8• 16 years ago

What WebObjects would have allowed us to do today if it hadn't been left to bitrot was write an app's business logic once, customise the interfaces and have a webapp, Mac app and iPhone app all from the same codebase. They would connect to the same database, and sync seamlessly.

You can feel the lack of it every time an iOS developer complains there isn't an out-of-the-box syncing solution. They're all using CoreData (which is a simplified cut-down version of WebObject's EOF); it should be a simple matter just to sync to a Mac app, let alone to a web site.

Instead, devs have to learn three different stacks and join them all up manually. Frustrating to watch when you know we've had something better since 1995, and it's sitting neglected.

If you see WebObjects as competing with PHP then yes, it absolutely lost. If you see it as creating the cloud 15 years before its time, then it's actually the only contender that comes anywhere close.

encoderer4• 16 years ago

"What WebObjects would have allowed us to do today if it hadn't been left to bitrot was write an app's business logic once, customise the interfaces and have a webapp, Mac app and iPhone app all from the same codebase. They would connect to the same database, and sync seamlessly."

I think this is pie-in-the-sky just the same way his prediction of being able to write an app in "20% of the time" was.

"Write an apps business logic once." I've been developing software for a while now, 10 years, and I've never seen true company-wide (let alone world-wide) code reuse on a massive scale.

Yes, there is a lot of code reuse. And yes django and zend framework and RoR are all examples of code reuse.

But I've worked with so many entrepreneurs and CEO's who have this same wish: Write it once, Use it everywhere.

It just doesn't work that way in practice.

bad_user2• 16 years ago

I'm sitting with my iPhone in one hand, reading your post, and before this I checked my Facebook account using the native iPhone client and now I'm wondering ... what the hell are you talking about?

Do you think the hard part of building something like Facebook is that stupid native client (that can sync just fine)?

cubicle675• 16 years ago

Jobs was entirely wrong about the web

For low values of 'entirely'

He's made, in this interview, probably a dozen or more statements about the future of the web. I'd say for many of them bang on, certainly a lot better then most predictions from 15 years ago.

As for web objects being dead (as a commercial product), well that's because it's time has passed. Apple made it free years ago and I think even then they it had had its day in the sun. It was, however, a very good framework and powered a number of very large sites, including Dell.

protomyth• 16 years ago

WebObjects was $50,000 when it was expected to be $50,000. It was running on bigger servers (HP. Sun) when the software on those boxes was very expensive. They dropped the price pretty significantly later when they were bought by Apple.

taphangum• 16 years ago

This was particularly interesting:

"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."

sudont5• 16 years ago

Those diverse experiences are exactly the purpose of a “liberal arts education,” something that’s derided here as bad job training. A degree in Shakespeare won’t help with cache invalidation, but it’ll sure spice up the naming.

mullr• 16 years ago

Ha! One out of two isn't bad.

tel2• 16 years ago

I think of the underlying faults with that point of view on liberal arts education, one stands above all others. As holder of an engineering bachelors, I'll anecdotally attest to the widely known problem that

Undergraduate engineering degrees actively discourage building communication skills.

This above all else is the heart of that linear thinking problem. Many graduating engineers in the US are communication challenged. They can't perform a principled arguments, write evocatively, perform convincing. They lack the skills to perform critical analysis of other communication, any sort of eye for subtlety, and flat out lack the appreciation of good writing.

It's often explained away as if there is this single choice people make when they're young that they'll either be good at math/science or literature/history. Once you've made that choice, you're stuck socially, psychologically, practically. But that's okay, goes the argument, specialization is necessary and everybody is one-sided, really.

So despite wide knowledge of this problem, schools combat it by deliberately watered-down english classes designed to not damage engineering GPAs. My alma mater required two english classes, both of which I got near perfect grades in by skipping class and writing half-minded, fantastical leaps of literary analysis on books I'd skimmed. I got perfect scores and remarks like "This is the best paper I've ever read". Literally. It also required a single semester "technical communication" course where we were introduced to business letter etiquette and the definition of genre.

As a firm believer that writing something down is the fastest, most powerful method to clarifying your thoughts, I find it despicable that engineering colleges don't provide these challenges. I find it corrosive that the dominant societal perspective is that it's ok if you can't write because you're an engineer. I think this directly leads to the sort of creativity rot I saw, all the time, in classmates.

My experiences may be anecdotal and localized to my college, which is one of the top engineering colleges in the US. I hope it is, and that this disgust is misdirected, but really I think it's larger than that.

---

tl;dr? I'm completely convinced that a dreadful number of engineers are missing something central to anyone who wants to deal in complex ideas entirely because it's considered a liberal arts speciality. They're weak at techniques to critically and clearly articulate or analyze ideas aloud or in writing, the art and science of human communication.

(I'll also note that so far a huge part of the advice of how to survive graduate school is learning to write. People tell me it with the look in their eyes that says they've seen so many people fail miserably because of this sudden, new expectation. I'm know my writing needs a lot of improvement, but I know that of many of the people in my graduating class, many would require a near complete literary reversal before they could actually publish.)

</rant>

(Edit: made it more clear that I'm not arguing with what sudont said. Written communication is hard.)

bh23ha2• 16 years ago

You must have had a truly great “liberal arts education”!

I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.

In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment.

Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college.

But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong.

And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.

sayemm3• 16 years ago

That was my most favorite part as well, and what made me want to post this to HN.

Loves this last paragraph especially: "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."

Big point to take away from that is you can't make great consumer products unless you have a good understanding of people and human nature.

Guys like Markus Frind, Jonah Peretti, and esp Zuckerberg are great examples of good hackers who also have that rare quality of knowing what makes people tick.

No surprise that broad thinkers are able to connect the dots better. Makes me think of awesome writers in HN like PG and Derek Sivers who continually write quality posts and insights.

foobarbazoo• 16 years ago

And yet, they are widely known to not be "people persons". Hmm...

siglesias• 16 years ago

Easiest example of this to grasp: Apple bluetooth keyboard, which rolls up in the back to provide elevation. That roll in the back also happens to be a battery compartment: aesthetic and functional. Minimalist. Not just how it looks, but also how it works.

grammr2• 16 years ago

"Jobs's fundamental insight - that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks - was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances."

It's interesting that common sense becomes "prophecy" when you're Steve Jobs.

blader• 16 years ago

It's more that prophecies tend to become common sense 25 years in the future (Jobs first spoke of this in the early 80s).

ecuzzillo• 16 years ago

Also, more humorously, "said this" becomes "spoke of this" when you're talking about Steve.

grammr2• 16 years ago

I'd like to say that it still wasn't all that prophetic back then, but I was only a wee lad and don't seem remember much of the early 80's...

nikster3• 16 years ago

I'd argue that saying something today that will be common sense 25 years in the future is the very definition of prophetic.

None of this was common sense back then, that's for sure. I got my first email account in 1995.

sreitshamer• 16 years ago

In the early 70s the XEROX PARC guys had defined a computer as a communications device rather than a computing device.

jfb4• 16 years ago

Web Objects: yesterday's technology, tomorrow!

cubicle675• 16 years ago

more accurately: yesterday's technology, the day before

jfb4• 16 years ago

I don't dispute that it was years ahead of its time. But it has stalled (five years ago?) and promised improvements are largely vaporware.

maguay2• 16 years ago

Jobs: "The desktop computer industry is dead." And here we are, nearly 15 years later, with this statement seeming truer than ever, in part thanks to Jobs' iOS devices.

maguay2• 16 years ago

In case I was mistaken, I meant that as both a compliment to Jobs and as a reminder of how incredibly hard it is to know when something's truly dead or non-relevant.

crander• 16 years ago

I view it as a compliment to Jobs as a visionary.

From a business perspective, the desktop industry was still to peak and then shifted to a luggable version of the same ecosystem with laptops.

adammichaelc• 16 years ago

Though Web Objects didn't take off, I think the idea behind them did. We just call it SaaS.

In SaaS products, instead of building the same core ingredient over and over again for multiple companies, it is built once and then made available via the web to anybody who wants to use it.

That's what ViaWeb was, it's what WePay is, it's what Salesforce is -- it's what the web has become. You need software to do something, you Google it, you find a web-app and you start using it. Done.

Web Objects, Web Apps, tomato, tomatoe.

danilocampos• 16 years ago

Always thought he was seeing OOP in general, which, of course, took off in a huge way, even if Web Objects didn't. (NeXTStep was hugely OOP, as were OS X and iOS later, of course.)

Estragon• 16 years ago

OOP was pretty big by the time of the interview, so what he says doesn't make sense, if he's talking about OOP in general.

nikster3• 16 years ago

WebObjects was just a really well designed app server. It's obvious things would work that way - even though WO didn't, in the end, "win". Too lazy too look it up but WebObjects might have been designed around the same time as Java.

A predecessor to Ruby on Rails at a time when websites were making extensive use of the <blink> tag.

marbletiles8• 16 years ago

It also did things that have still really to be replicated for web developers in a joined-up way; things like proper developer tools (including Interface Builder for the web), a seriously nifty ORM, and the ability to write the back-end once and produce both a web app and a desktop app.

(I know Interface Builder doesn't appeal to the hardcore set, but at least it is an attempt at a different way of working. Our never-ending focus on creating interfaces programmatically makes me wonder what would have happened to desktop publishing if we'd said "what? We made you a postscript mode for emacs -- what more do you need?" and left it at that.)

joshmaker• 16 years ago

WebObjects now power the iTunes store: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects

nikster3• 16 years ago

I love Jobs' endorsement of Miele washing machines. Where I grew up in Austria all everyone had was Miele. They were ridiculously expensive. Their slogan was "reliability for many years" which was an understatement as they actually ran for 20 or 30 years no problem.

Also him discussing the new washing machine with his family for 2 weeks! Fascinating. I don't think many Billionaires would do that.

WalterBright2• 16 years ago

My Miele never worked right, the plumber couldn't fix it. Finally I had it ripped out and replaced with a Maytag.

LaPingvino• 16 years ago

Just had called the Miele service themselves: they offer a 10 years guarantee plan.

anamax• 16 years ago

> Their slogan was "reliability for many years" which was an understatement as they actually ran for 20 or 30 years no problem.

You say that like it's something odd or distinctive.

My family has gotten that kind of lifetime out of bargain-price "American" washing machines. The only exceptions have involved operator error and "but I want a new one NOW,I've waited long enough for it to die".

0x0• 16 years ago

Is this quote a case of iPad foreshadowing? :)

"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."

hedgehog• 16 years ago

I think these old articles provide valuable perspective. There's an interesting book from 1998 analyzing Apple's fall up to that point:

http://amazon.com/dp/0887309658

I'm partway through and so far it's good. The detailed analysis untainted by the company's current success is quite interesting. At that point Jobs had come back to be involved in the company but not yet officially taken over as CEO (publicly he said he wasn't up for it).

rasur2• 16 years ago

From the mouth of Steve: "And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place."

Riiight, Steve. "App-Store" as Democracy.

jason_tko• 16 years ago

It's still a 'democracy' in the way you're describing it. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet.

rasur2• 16 years ago

I do!

dirtyaura• 16 years ago

On the other hand, AppStore has brilliantly fulfilled another vision mentioned in the article: removing a lot of middlemen and thus making hierarchies flatter. If you worked either in the mobile business or game business, AppStore is indie paradise compared to times before it.

cubicle675• 16 years ago

I was most taken by his ideas on education. The voucher system will never happen, of course, which is a shame. I also love the idea of small school springing up all over the place (I'm not a huge fan of the current education system, and I'd love to see it disrupted)

as for trying to teach computing in schools, well that's long been rant material of mine (ask anyone who's been unfortunate enough to mention to me how pleased they are that their school's spending money on a room full of new computers), so don't get me started...

spydum• 16 years ago

Interestingly enough, many states attempted voucher programs, not to the extent Jobs suggested though. It did spur school upstarts. I know Florida had a Pre-K voucher program, and as a result, Pre-K schools popped up all around. This was sometime in 2006-2008. I'm not sure if they discontinued the program or not, but education levels were on par with public schools, with a per-child cost of about half.

arturadib• 16 years ago

He was right about the "idea" of objects on the web, that is, stuff that can be simply plugged and reused here and there. We call those APIs today.

stcredzero4• 16 years ago

Prediction: Apple is going to move away from the notion of Hard Disks for their consumer-oriented mobile devices. The Flash chips in SSDs are already somewhat like dynamic RAM, though not quite as fast and with some extra requirements and limitations. One could easily give the illusion of a laptop with 256 Gigabytes of orthogonally persistent RAM by using 8 Gigs or so of dynamic RAM as a cache into Flash RAM. No need for any notion of a separate persistent store like a Hard Drive. No need to even boot up! Laptops would only have "hibernate" and "sleep". (You'd need ECC, wear leveling, and ways of transparently "retiring" sections of Flash RAM that go bad.)

Go one step further, and use the cloud as a backing store with an always-on mobile broadband connection. The 256 Gigabytes of Flash RAM would act as a local cache to cloud storage.

guywithabike• 16 years ago

It's not a "prediction" if they've already started doing it, dude(tte).

Prediction: Apple will do away with optical drives.

Prediction: Apple will bring iOS features into MacOS X.

Prediction: Apple will make their laptops smaller and slimmer.

Prediction: Apple will do away with floppy drives.

stcredzero4• 16 years ago

What do you mean "already started doing it?" Please point out the OS X or iOS device whose kernel has no notion of a "Hard Disk" or something like it. With what I'm talking about, the kernel would see nothing but RAM.

As far as I can see, they just started doing away with the case of the hard drive mechanism in their laptops. As far as even their iOS devices go, they still have a notion of a separate persistent store with high latency characteristics completely separate from a non-persistent RAM.

What I'm talking about doing is making dynamic RAM, Flash RAM, and the cloud all just a part of the memory hierarchy with orthogonal persistence.

This is going to entail a lot of engineering which isn't yet in evidence in any of their current products. Such devices would never have to boot-up! I'm not sure such devices would be capable of being booted up. They'd also need more sophisticated error correction than current devices have. (Current devices can just correct the rare memory corruption event by being rebooted.)

cmurphycode• 16 years ago

Fascinating. I find it particularly interesting that Jobs, since moving back to Apple, has done nothing interesting with the Web, but so much with the desktop and hardware. Sure, iTunes delivers music over the Internet, but it is not a web application. On the other hand, he did create the iPad: "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."

Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing

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