Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

by yagodragon • 4 years ago

206 160 4 years ago

pstuart2• 4 years ago

Jobs was a flawed man in many ways, but the way he handled and addressed that is a succinct glimpse into why he is rightfully seen as a titan in the computing industry.

racl1012• 4 years ago

I'm guessing for every mean comment he handled in public, behind the scenes Steve ripped apart some poor soul in private for doing much less or some soul for not even trying to incite anything.

pstuart2• 4 years ago

No doubt. It's clear that he could be a real asshole. I think we're well-served to acknowledge the good and the bad (i.e., not deifying him or others of his ilk).

Apple would not exist today without his efforts.

jebronie• 4 years ago

staged, I assume

kieloo• 4 years ago

What makes you think that?

emmanueloga_2• 4 years ago

honestly, staging the question is something I can see Steve Jobs doing. Does anybody know who the guy that asked the question is?

dannyobrien• 4 years ago

Here's one report about who it was: https://www.quora.com/History-of-Apple-Inc-Whos-the-guy-who-...

OriginalPenguin• 4 years ago

He was part of the Silicon Valley Linux User Group in the late nineties.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

That 10 second pause before he responds — 25 seconds if you don't count the reference to the famous quote, which buys him a bit more time — is amazing.

What may be less well understood by people who weren't there is that he's addressing Apple employees just as much as he is Apple developers. Many Apple employees had the same question. [Source: Was at Apple at the time.]

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it." — Steve Jobs

eloff2• 4 years ago

I’d be better off in my relationships if I could master that technique.

22289d5• 4 years ago

Setting emails to a long waiting period, during which you can undo them, has been a game changer for me in that regard. Too bad you can't take back words that came out of your mouth. Or many instant messages.

simmerup• 4 years ago

You’d likely be less real and more distant

kirse• 4 years ago

that 10 second pause

I repeatedly learn this lesson just by being on accidental mute on Zoom calls.

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

Hmm… do I really want to repeat that?

22289d5• 4 years ago

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."

Crypto still hasn't figured this out. The entire focus is on how to get people using the technology.

If you start out being completely unwilling to use a database, that should be a red flag you're falling into this trap.

Would a blockchain be better than a db for some ideas? Sure. But for many it wont be and if you're a) using a blockchain where a db would be better or b) searching for stuff to build in the small sliver of ideas where a blockchain is the right tech - you're not starting with the customer.

1ark• 4 years ago

I think crypto just conveniently bypasses securities laws, that's the point, can't do that with a centralized db. It is sort of decentralized and you can issue tokens in different ways, and as the creator you "happened" to be an early adopter or have a foundation that got 10% of all supply.

musicale• 4 years ago

Jobs importantly said the customer experience.

Remember Jobs also famously said:

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

throw101010• 4 years ago

While you address crypto in general I would suggest that instead you go at the root of it: Bitcoin. The "customer" issue is well identified there, cash was already poised to disappear and any form for peer-to-peer exchange of value with a currency will eventually go with it. CBDCs will replace this, whether we like it or not and the writings of this have been on the walls for a long time. If you don't think this is true please observe countries which are well on their way to become cashless like Sweden or even China.

The idea "for the customer" of Bitcoin is to provided them with a digital alternative currency, an opt-in one, not mandated or controlled by a state. The previous attempts like Digicash, E-gold and few others all had the same fate and lasted very short periods of time because they did not combine a strong and independently verifiable data structure with a way to truely be the basis and incentive of a decentralized P2P network.

Bitcoin solved these issues by taking the best of many of the preceding failed experiments. This implies some compromises that apparently make you think it's unsuitable technology applied to a problem that could so easily be solved with a simple database... but that would be misidentifying the issue it is trying to solve, maybe you are not the current "customer" for it (yet), maybe you don't care about P2P transactions without intermediaries, that cannot be censored... but when (note: it isn't an "if") your government will tell you that you cannot pay for x or y with their CBDC which will be the only currency you will be allowed to earn/spend, then maybe you will rethink this position. And the minor inconvenience of Bitcoin will seem suddenly more acceptable (hopefully by that time progress like the Lightning Network will have ironed these out).

And again, do not take my word for it, observe the cases where Bitcoin has already been used and useful under oppressive regimes and in war times.

cypress66• 4 years ago

Bitcoin did "figure that out". You're referring I think to cashgrabs that slap the Blockchain term to try to milk some money.

Bitcoin originates from a concrete customer experience issue: lack of digital money with some cash like properties (non reversible, pseudonymous, trustless, etc). [1]

Something like that had been tried to create a few times before, but Blockchain was the first solution to that problem. In other words bitcoin solved a problem looking for a solution, not the other way around.

That being said, crypto UX has a LOT to improve. But let's not confuse projects that use "blockchain" because some manager thought it was cool, or literal cashgrabs, with actual crypto projects.

[1] You may think those properties aren't good or useful, but there clearly was and is people that find that useful, so let's not beat the dead horse with that debate.

IAmGraydon3• 4 years ago

Precisely. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

kaputmi• 4 years ago

"Crypto" is not a single entity! What hasn't figured this out yet is crypto markets, collectively — which were rewarding projects based on hype, not value provided to users. But there are some cases where people are building with real users in mind. Arweave and Uniswap come to mind.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

The things blockchain is good at don’t get attention because people who hate crypto hate on everything and people who like crypto think the things are boring, which they are.

Blockchain isn’t good for some society disrupting change of finance… it’s a specialized accounting book. Very few people are excited by ledgers really, and the thing you can do with these new fancy ledgers have a lot to do with mostly mutually trusting businesses keeping track of balances between a small group. This is not exciting, will not change the world, but might make some details of finance folks and the people who write software for them a little easier.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

I once worked at a robotics company that didn’t comprehend this. It’s amazing how frustrating it makes a job when every six months Product is sending us in a different direction. We ended up having to build such generic solutions and they sucked as a result.

fuzzythinker• 4 years ago

Not sure if he can really use that extra 15 secs as it's really hard to multitask on thinking and speaking. Even if he's able to, it would be only some % of it, as even a robot will have to do context switching.

fsckboy2• 4 years ago

with the extra time his emotions will still continue cool, and much of thought is unconscious, and the unconscious is essentially parallel processing, i.e. multitasking. This is how good comedians or poets or Freudian-slippers are able to come up with les mots justes ("just the right words"), the words that do justice on multiple levels.

fleddr• 4 years ago

You should always pause when receiving criticism, it's a great psychological trick. Responding immediately and fiercely rewards the critic.

By pausing, the critic becomes doubtful. Did I go too far? Is something really bad brewing?

IAmGraydon3• 4 years ago

Not everything has to be a manipulation tactic. I think he was just thinking about how he would respond.

xattt2• 4 years ago

In this view, the pause was most hostile action taken by Jobs towards the person asking the question.

For people who answer like this: what goes through your mind during the pause? Are you counting in your head? Are you planning out your answer? Are you playing the question in your head?

alar442• 4 years ago

Salesmen gonna sell. Not sure what the value of this video is.

LASR2• 4 years ago

The value is the approach that sales and product are integrated so much it comes from the mind of a single person.

Remember that this is the early days of technology products. While most of the industry was working from the tech and finding usecases for it, Jobs’ approach was the opposite.

Sales is not just about dollars. It’s about earning the delight and trust of your customer that you have something of value that they want. The dollars flow automatically from that.

alar442• 4 years ago

I don't think this video sells that though. It comes off as a pivoting non answer to me.

mturmon• 4 years ago

Such a great clip.

I’ve been on both sides of that one. Plenty of times where I’m trying to get some advanced tech into a given component, and the manager says No, it’ll increase our risk. “But this tech will enable advanced features A, B, and C.” And the reply: “We don’t need to have A, B, or C … we need the product to deliver on our earlier promise of the baseline capability.”

And a few times when I’m on the other side, shutting someone else down. Never as clearly or succinctly as this, of course. Definitely makes me feel like a turncoat in the tug of war between technologists and product people.

paultopia2• 4 years ago

That is... so much nicer than I expected.

bloodyplonker22• 4 years ago

The title is "insult response" because he is responding to an insult. Not that he is responding with an insult. At least that is how I interpreted it.

paultopia2• 4 years ago

Oh same here, but Jobs's reputation was for... not suffering fools gladly. Based on that reputation, I expected him to come down on the guy like a hammer.

rwbt• 4 years ago

I can't believe people compare Jobs with Musk. Jobs was so much better put together in public and seems like he can still be very coherent and persuasive even when angry (likely in this video) and insulted in public.

LASR2• 4 years ago

I don’t think he was anywhere close to angry. It seems to me by his affect that he regards the audience member as simply not knowing any better about the big picture and what needed to be done to turn Apple around from its darkest days.

rootusrootus2• 4 years ago

I agree, he doesn't look even remotely angry. The guy asking the question sure did, but Jobs looked pretty relaxed. And his response was amazing. No wonder he could create the Reality Distortion Field ;).

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

There’s no interesting comparison to be made, really. Both are rich CEOs, I guess. That’s it.

bink• 4 years ago

I think some people are drawn to this video because they want others to think that Jobs made big changes that were painful and he was very successful, therefore when Musk makes big changes that are painful he will also be successful. I disagree and think the similarities are only superficial, but I can see why some might think that.

the_cat_kittles3• 4 years ago

i think elon has tried to emulate the superficial aspects of steve jobs presentation style, albeit very unconvincingly

starik362• 4 years ago

That’s because back then your interaction with the public was maybe twice a year. Now it’s daily. Apples and oranges.

JumpCrisscross6• 4 years ago

back then your interaction with the public was maybe twice a year. Now it’s daily.

If you choose it to be. Plenty of CEOs are relatively recluse. For example, Apple’s, today.

JumpCrisscross6• 4 years ago

can't believe people compare Jobs with Musk

Go back to Elon learning, during an interview, the things Buzz Aldrin—a childhood hero of his—said about SpaceX. I believe Musk once had the progenitors of this sense of reflection and maturity. Instead, he’s degraded where Steve Jobs learned.

htag3• 4 years ago

Go back to Elon learning, during an interview, the things Buzz Aldrin—a childhood hero of his—said about SpaceX.

Is there a typo here? Can someone explain what this means in slightly different words? I've love to hear what Buzz Aldrin has to say about Elon Musk, but I just can't parse this phrase.

eyelidlessness7• 4 years ago

I love Apple products and have since childhood, and I have little doubt Jobs’ personality, thinking, and talent, are major factors in what I liked about Apple then and do now. And I detest Musk.

That disclosure out of the way… Jobs was notoriously quick to anger, imperious in his internal role, very selectively rational, and generally… well, often kind of a jerk. I know all of that can overlap with coherence and persuasion, in fact in a cynical sense it could be argued it was part of his persuasive strength.

But… this isn’t the most infamous, nor probably the most convincing, example, it’s just the one that always resurfaces in my own memory: dude chucked a camera at some poor soul whose job it was to hand it to him on stage, because he was frustrated by a technical glitch during a presentation. That’s how not “put together” he could be in one of the more publicly visible tech events of the time: he did violence to a person who was helping him with tons of people watching because of something which wasn’t that person’s fault.

I’m not saying Musk is any better, but I’m also not prepared to pretend that Jobs wasn’t an epic asshole.

roperj• 4 years ago

That “poor soul” was a senior director of marketing, not some minimum wage assistant. And violence, a bit hyperbolic, it was an underhanded toss - no one calls that “chucking” where I’m from at least. Sure he had a temper but this is painting a misleading picture of that episode.

JKCalhoun3• 4 years ago

but I’m also not prepared to pretend that Jobs wasn’t an epic asshole.

I think the video linked to (Steve Jobs Insult Response) is honestly one of Steve's finest moments (with regard to dealing with people that is). But to bolster your point, there are of course an overwhelming number of stories that capture Steve's less stellar moments.

adolph2• 4 years ago

The one where Gassee disses him for bad behavior is funny; wonder if it really happened.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped.txt

remote_phone2• 4 years ago

Steve Jobs was a tyrant being closed doors and would often cry in meetings. This sounds very similar to Musk.

Musk is undoubtably a genius, you can’t discount the success that Tesla and SpaceX have had. He’s just extremely heavy-handed and capricious. I heard from someone at Tesla that they loathe being in meetings with him because he will literally fire people on the spot. That type of arrogance did play during the era of tesla going to $1 trillion but now that it’s falling back to earth I wonder how much people will tolerate his arrogance and temper tantrums.

xen2xen1• 4 years ago

Steve Jobs was smart enough to not be dumb in public. That is a very, very important factor.

the_cat_kittles3• 4 years ago

mike lindell is a genius, you cant discount the success he has had with my pillow

_s2• 4 years ago

I wouldn't stretch as far as calling Musk a genius - he's someone with a lot of business acumen, and understands how to use social media effectively to get what he wants (much like Trump), and has deep connections to make his ventures successful.

SpaceX, Tesla etc would not be where they are now without all the funding Musk was able to secure and source from governments (grants, tax breaks, investments etc), and then investors - that's probably his biggest contribution.

TwoNineFive• 4 years ago

Both Musk and Jobs are admired by the same kind of people. And for the reasons.

rowanG077• 4 years ago

Much better put together? The guy who publicly threw away his life and then used his considerable funds to cheat the line of transplants and then died anyway. Musk is definitely not as well spoken as Jobs, but Jobs has Musk beat on the level of insanity by that alone.

ksec2• 4 years ago

I can't believe people compare Jobs with Musk.

I know it is not a very nice thing to say but you may be surprised to learn, Most people cant really do comparison.

Octokiddie• 4 years ago

One thing that's interesting here is how Jobs doesn't answer the specific technical question: How does Java address the ideas embodied in OpenDoc?

Instead, Jobs answers the question behind the question: What role should new technologies play at Apple going forward?

This is a very useful technique to practice. When asked a question whose premise you don't agree with, you can become confrontational on that point. Or you can reach in to grab the question behind the question and answer that instead.

imiric• 4 years ago

Right. His answer effectively dismisses the question on the basis of it being invalid, or even dumb. And points out the larger philosophy that customer experience trumps technology.

It's a classy way to come out on top of an argument, but a) it doesn't work in all situations, and b) not everyone can think on their feet in that way in front of an audience.

It's an admirable trait of charismatic people, but it's also abused to manipulate the conversation to gain an upper hand. Typically used by politicians and lawyers.

Tsiklon2• 4 years ago

Is Jobs' answer technically a non-sequitur rebuttal to a technical question? Only that charisma has "carried the motion" through

JumpCrisscross6• 4 years ago

Jobs answers the question behind the question: What role should new technologies play at Apple going forward?

I saw the questions behind the question being more how do you, a non-technical person, lay claim to a technology company, and, why are you deprecating this technical thing I loved and may have worked on. There is an undeniable, underlying bitterness animating the ask, and one can’t ignore that if attempting to genuinely respond.

Tsiklon2• 4 years ago

I'm not disputing your point - This is a very useful technique to practice - this awareness of what people are really asking. Unfortunately this is a twin edged sword - politicians for example will frequently reach in to the question they've been asked and answer the question they want to answer, not the real question that's beneath the surface. So much so, to the point that they look disingenuous or false. Jobs' speech here was very prescient or rather it was in essence him setting out what he wanted Apple to be, from where it was in 1997.

eyelidlessness7• 4 years ago

I want to second this being both a valuable talent used for good, and a method of deception.

In the use for good case, it can also be valuable to reference the asked question and explain how it’s related. In many cases this is a good heuristic for whether the answer was intended as help or misdirection.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

This is the Robert McNamara strategy for answering questions: don't answer the question that was asked, instead answer the question you wanted to be asked, and by the end of it the asker will usually have forgotten that they actually asked a different question. It's pretty common, but I think few people were as explicit/honest about it as McNamara (later in life, that is).

_s2• 4 years ago

No - the person asking will not have forgotten, but those around will have.

Generally - in my experience - folks that genuinely want to answer or explain something will first rephrase the question, and/or ask more questions to understand what you are trying to ask, and then after their answer they open the dialogue with something akin to "does that answer your question?".

drcongo• 4 years ago

This is known as ABCD: https://action-group.co.uk/the-art-of-bridging-how-to-use-th...

naveen992• 4 years ago

Why even have a pretend open q and a ? Just do your soliloquy and be done with it instead of lying that your are open to questions.

htag3• 4 years ago

The question is just a prompt for the speaker. How the person reacts (dodge the question, address underlying concerns, answer directly, get emotional) can tell you a lot about them. This was 1997, right at Job's return to Apple phase. Job would go on the lead Apple to make the iPod and iPhone. Job's focus on customer experience, defending the quality and dedication of his team, and encouraging 3rd party support says a lot about what he cares about.

judge2020• 4 years ago

I think you're wrong, because Jobs actually does answer the question: "people like this gentleman are right, in some areas. there are some things opendoc does, even more that I'm not familiar with, that nothing else does". He does start talking about Apple in general, but simply in service of explaining why they're not supporting OpenDoc anymore. Politicians rarely support their views by saying 'no' then explaining why, instead diverting away to something only tangentially related and not addressing the initial concern.

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

For everyone talking about politicians and their BS: I want to point out that there's a difference between answering the question that should have been asked, and the question you wish had been asked. The former is honest, and genuinely educational if the answerer is correct in their judgement. The latter is a tactic for sophistry/bullshit and potentially deceptive, especially when it pretends to be the former.

The difference is primarily in intent: it's hard to tell externally, but advice basically takes an internal perspective to its recipient, so it's perfectly reasonable to suggest someone do something with good intentions.

raydiatian4• 4 years ago

I mean if you listen closely Jobs straight up contradicts himself.

LarsDu882• 4 years ago

People who don't understand the dude's question on a technical level don't realize how much doublespeak Jobs is using here.

johnsillings• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate? I don't understand the dude's question on a technical level.

JumpCrisscross6• 4 years ago

Who asked the question? Curious for their response, even if years later.

mrpippy• 4 years ago

Here’s the high quality copy of the whole video:

https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

Some context, all from wikipedia:

OpenDoc

In March 1992, the historic AIM alliance was launched with OpenDoc as a foundation.Taligent adopted OpenDoc, and promised somewhat similar functionality although based on very different underlying mechanisms. While OpenDoc was still being developed, Apple confused things greatly by suggesting that it should be used by people porting existing software only, and new projects should instead be based on Taligent since that would be the next OS. In 1993, John Sculley called Project Amber (a codename for what would become OpenDoc) a path toward Taligent.[5][6] Taligent was considered the future of the Macintosh, and work on other tools like MacApp was considerably deprioritized.

CyberDog

Cyberdog included email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. OpenDoc allowed these components to be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. For instance, a "live" Cyberdog web page could be embedded in a presentation program, one of the common demonstrations of OpenDoc.

A serious problem with the OpenDoc project that Cyberdog depended on, was that it was part of a very acrimonious competition between OpenDoc consortium members and Microsoft. The members of the OpenDoc alliance were all trying to obtain traction in a market rapidly being dominated by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. At the same time, Microsoft used the synergy between the OS and applications divisions of the company to make it effectively mandatory that developers adopt the competing Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. OpenDoc was forced to create an interoperability layer in order to allow developers to use it, and this added a great technical burden to the project.

Kaleida

Kaleida Labs formed in 1991 to produce the multimedia cross-platform Kaleida Media Player and the object oriented scripting language ScriptX that was used to program its behavior. The system was aimed at the production of interactive CD ROM titles, an area of major effort in the early 1990s. When the system was delivered in 1994, it had relatively high system requirements and memory footprint, and lacked a native PowerPC version on the Mac platform. Around the same time, rapid changes in the market, especially the expansion of the World Wide Web and the Java programming language, pushed the interactive CD market into a niche role. The Kaleida platform failed to gain significant traction and the company was closed in 1996.

Taligent

Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel. From 1993 to 1996, Taligent was seen as competing with Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP, even though Taligent didn't ship a product until 1995 and Cairo never shipped at all. From 1994 to 1996, Apple floated the Copland operating system project intended to succeed System 7, but never had a modern OS sophisticated enough to run Taligent technology.

In 1995, Apple and HP withdrew from the Taligent partnership, licensed its technology, and left it as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In January 1998, Taligent Inc. was finally dissolved into IBM. Taligent's legacy became the unbundling of CommonPoint's best compiler and application components and converting them into VisualAge C++[5][6] and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization).[7]

In 1996, *Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system.*

pcurve• 4 years ago

My favorite part is when audience clap to “some mistakes will be made and that’s good because that means decisions will be made “. As a guy who just quit 18 year career at multi billion dollar corporation, that was the biggest reasons for my quitting.

fritzo• 4 years ago

Indecisive leadership was your reason for leaving? (just clarifying!)

dmix2• 4 years ago

“More is lost by indecision than by wrong decision.”

I heard this first on the Sopranos but probably a common phrase

daniel-thompson• 4 years ago

Other comments rightfully address Jobs' extraordinary talent in presentation and persuasion. He was certainly right in the diagnosis about what ailed Apple at the time, and where it needed to get to (or get back to).

Having said that, I have to feel for the guy asking the question, and by extension, all the developers who invested time and money building on top of this platform (OpenDoc) that Apple previously championed. OpenDoc sucked, that's for sure, but Apple killing it they way they did, and the lack of empathy demonstrated here by Jobs to the developers facing the loss of their investment in the platform - basically telling them "tough shit" - must have felt like a real slap in the face.

hodgesrm• 4 years ago

One of the Jobs' virtues was that he didn't sugarcoat his opinions. It was pretty harsh a times, but what should he have said instead?

racl1012• 4 years ago

Here it comes...

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

Another great one from the same day is on the Newton. Spot on.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=3665

bitexploder• 4 years ago

When he stood up, he had everything he was going to say figured out. Pretty cool to watch. This was a common question he knew was coming then though, so some of it is showmanship.

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

“some people who don’t know what they’re talking about”

That was for the guy who asked the question. I love how Jobs had that elegant way of being an asshole back to those that deserved it, and in such a subtle way you hardly noticed him actually being an asshole.

carbocation2• 4 years ago

It's actually perfect, because I don't know if he's occupying the vantage of the questioner and referring to himself from their perspective (which is how I interpreted it) or the way you interpreted it. Perhaps both are intended.

dusing• 4 years ago

That last bit about making mistakes but at least decisions are being made is important. Also connects well with what we have seen in the first 6 weeks of Elon Twitter.

cphoover• 4 years ago

Everyone is cheering this on... But as far as I can tell Apple did not win the Document Editor and business computing war vs MS.

Microsoft clearly won with the Microsoft Office Suite and Microsoft Word... I'm not sure about this specific tech or if OpenDoc would have made any difference... But is it an impossibility that open standards could have been a strong weapon against MS market dominance?

Either way the man is undeniably a legendary public speaker.

carbocation2• 4 years ago

I don't think people are cheering this on because the business decision led to product victory.

I think people are cheering this on because he gave a really thoughtful answer to an aggressive question, and how he did it is worth thinking about.

dmix2• 4 years ago

A serious problem with the OpenDoc project that Cyberdog depended on, was that it was part of a very acrimonious competition between OpenDoc consortium members and Microsoft. The members of the OpenDoc alliance were all trying to obtain traction in a market rapidly being dominated by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. At the same time, Microsoft used the synergy between the OS and applications divisions of the company to make it effectively mandatory that developers adopt the competing Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. OpenDoc was forced to create an interoperability layer in order to allow developers to use it, and this added a great technical burden to the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cyberdog

pdevr• 4 years ago

Steve Jobs anticipated what was coming, and handled that very maturely.

Even though he says technology should not be in search of a solution, he does say that as soon as he saw the Canon printout, he realized it will sell itself. So his theme, with that nuance, seems to be that a technology should not be in search of a solution, unless it is so good as to sell itself.

gyulai2• 4 years ago

...if you think about it, it's the phrase "sell 8 billion dollars of product a year" that does the heavylifting, where he sets up the overall tone as "Me: Successful business tycoon. You: Angry nobody."

It would come across as less arrogant, if he had just resisted the temptation to say that at all. He probably realizes that himself as he speaks and then wraps it into a humblebrag when he says "And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room".

It's also a sentiment that one needs to be very careful with: Some people think they're right about everything because their success proves them right. It's this kind of hubris that, more often than not, will set you up for failure.

The substance of the argument: "Solution looking for a problem" vs "problem getting a solution" is a bit of a tired old cliche (although I don't know whether it already was, back then).

sn0w_crash• 4 years ago

This is the crux of the argument, however arrogant it might sound.

Brilliant genius engineer guy with shiny thing needs to be able to articulate how to sell $8B of the thing. This of course has not happened, as OpenDoc had been failing for years until that point.

That statement is the final blow. And probably deserved by a person who just accused their boss in public of being uneducated on the topic. Something elitist engineers love to do and seem to get away with time and again. Yet when they are put on the spot about their own shortcomings, we are to assume this is some kind of attack? Please.

gyulai2• 4 years ago

I don't know enough about the specifics of the OpenDoc thing to be able to comment on that.

I also don't know enough about the specifics of what happened to that guy. Was he an Apple engineer? Do we know whether he got fired the next day? If not, we don't really know whether he got away with anything at all, do we?

The morals of angrily accusing your boss of something in public take a bit of unpacking. In my experience, bosses throw angry accusations at their subordinates much more frequently than the other way around. In fact, many bosses seem to think it's their job description. And they get away with it pretty much all the time (again: my experience).

Why should the social norms that govern a boss's behaviour towards their subordinates differ so radically from those that govern subordinates' behaviour towards their bosses? I mean: If this is the Prussian army in the 19th century, I kind of get it. But if those are highly educated professionals working on a common cause like Apple and we're in California in 1997, then this asymmetry doesn't sit with me as easily. Any tech company that I would want to work for would have to be basically pretty egalitarian.

Even though I know nothing about the specifics of the situation, I can sort of empathise with the overall theme: Imagine you're an "individual contributor" who takes shit from their bosses all day long, and the higher-ups just thanked you for it by flushing your career down the tube when they decided to cancel some project or some commitment or something that was deeply important to you. You go home and tell your wife, and she thinks you're a f#ing loser to put yourself in a situation where they can just treat you like that. You aren't even doing anything (because: What can you do?) to stand up for yourself. You have a difficult time looking yourself in the mirror. Then some public event like this comes along, and it may be the only chance you'll ever have to directly interact with that CEO. If you air your grievance and show them how angry you are, it may well help you, psychologically. You may or may not have a job the next day, but, if you don't, then, at least in your own mind, you died an "honorable" martyr's death. Even though I've never done anything like that (and probably wouldn't), I can sort of relate to that.

ksec2• 4 years ago

The Apple then and Apple now.

These days it is all going backwards to MBA style business decisions. Instead of making insanely great product and services that will make them lot of money, they are now thinking what product and services they could do to make them lots of money.

I thought It was also important to note the term "Customer", which is still being used in today's Apple. Comparing to most in Silicon Valley using the term "Users" instead.

33955985• 4 years ago

Could someone mention the context for the question? I have seen this clip before and it always escapes me.

Steve Jobs Insult Response (1997) [video]

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