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yeah
yeah I'm ready good
ok it's april twentieth nineteen ninety-five this is the Smithsonian
interview for us
Steve Jobs ok like to begin Steve with some background by graphical information
tell us about when you were born
we're your parents your family there and our memories
i was born in san francisco california USA planet earth on your 24th 1955 that
I could go into a lot of details of my youth but i don't know that anybody
really care about that too much
well I'm 300 years because all the sprints go to disintegrate to tell me a
bit about your parents your family with one of the earliest things to remember
55 eyes now we're still present yeah I don't remember him but i do remember
growing up in the you know sort of the very late fifties early sixties the very
interesting time in the united states of america america was sort of its pinnacle
of post-world War to prosperity I think and everything had been fairly straight
and narrow from haircuts - 22 culture in every way and it was just starting to
kind of broaden into the sixties where things were going to start expanding out
in new directions but it hasn't quite gone that way and everything was still
very successful very young america would seem very very young and naive in many
ways to me for my memories of that time
oh yeah so you would have been about five or six years old when John Kennedy
was right i remember john kennedy being assassinated I remember the dick that
the the exact moment i heard that he had been shot
where were you when I was walking across the grass of my school-yard going home
at about three in the afternoon and somebody yelled out that the president
has been shot and killed and I thought that was I must have been about seven or
eight years old then i guess and i knew exactly what it meant
I also remember very much the the cuban missile crisis
I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights because I was afraid if I
went to sleep I wouldn't wake up and I absolutely and even if I guess that when
I was about six seven years old yeah
again I understood exactly what was going on I think everybody did and and
it was a really a terror that that i will never forget in my life and
probably has never really left and I think that everyone felt it at that time
oh yeah those of us who were older
I remember being in high school making plans of where we'd meet at the country
was devastated was that
yeah strange strange talk one of the things we're trying to get a handle on
is sort of passion and power
only things that you were passionate advance that really interested in that
I was very lucky I had a father named Paul who was a pretty remarkable man he
was
he never graduated from high school he joined the Coast Guard in world war two
and ferry troops around the world for general patent i guess and he I think he
was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to what's private i
think is the lowest right now but he was a machinist by trade and worked very
hard and it was a kind of a genius with his hands and he had a workbench out in
the garage where when I was about five or six he sectioned off a little piece
of and said Steve this is your workbench now and he gave me some of his smaller
tools
you know showed me how to use a hammer and a saw and how to build things and it
it really was very good for me you know we spent a lot of time with me teaching
me how to build things take things apart put things back together and one of the
things that he touched upon was electronics
he did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself but he he
he'd encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things that he
would fix so he showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested
in that and then us
I grew up in Silicon Valley my parents moved from San Francisco to mountain
view when I was five my dad got transferred and that was right in the
heart of Silicon Valley
so they were engineers kind of all around Silicon Valley at that time was
still orchards for the most part of it was apricot orchards and prune tortures
and it was really paradise
I remember they're not being on pilot
I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear where you can see
from one end of the valley to the other
this is what your six seven yea years old right exactly
it was it was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up and there
was a man that moved in down the street
maybe about six or seven houses down the block who was new in the neighborhood
with his wife and it turned out he was an engineer at hewlett-packard and he
was a ham radio operator really into electronics and what he did to get to
know the kids on the block was a rather strange thing he put out a a carbon
microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk
into the microphone and your voice will get amplified on a speaker
it's kind of strange thing to do when you move into a neighborhood but that's
what he did great and I of course started messing around with this and I'd
always been taught that you need an amplifier to amplify the voice of a
microphone for it to come out of a speaker
yeah my father taught me that so i went home and proudly announced to my father
that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with
just a battery
my father told me i didn't know what i was talking about we have a very large
argument about this so I dragged him down and showed him this and he himself
was a little befuddled and I got to know this man whose name was Larry lang and
he taught me a lot of electronics - he was great and he used to build you know
heat kits which they don't really have any more but he kids were really great
maybe these heat kits were these these products that you would buy in kit form
you actually pay more money for them and you would if you just want bought the
finished product
if it was available but these kids would come with detailed manuals and on how to
put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way
and color-coded and you actually build this thing yourself and i would say that
gate that that gave one several things that gave one
understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked
because it would also include a theory of operation but maybe even more
importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that once all
around oneself in the universe and you see these things were not mysteries
anymore when you looked at a television set
you would think well I i haven't built one of those but I could there's one of
those in the heat catalog and I built two other heath kits so i could build a
television set
I could build and nothing things became much more clear that they were the
results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in
one's environment and one had no knowledge of their interiors
so it gave one a tremendous degree of self confidence that that through
exploration and learning one could understand
seemingly very complex things in one's environment and so you know that was my
childhood was very fortunate in that way is a rough time in school
it sounds like you are really lucky to have your dad is both the sort of a
mentor and a
and here and I was going to ask you about school
what was what what was the formal side of your education like it was pretty
hard for me at the beginning light and my mother had taught me how to read
before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two
things i wanted to read books so i love reading books and I wanted to go outside
and chase butterflies and do all the things that you know five-year-olds like
to do and I encountered the authority of a different kind than i've ever
encountered before and I did not like it and they they really they almost got me
they really almost they came this close to really beating any curiosity out of
me by the time I was in third grade I had a a good buddy of mine Rick
Farentino and the only way we had fun was to create mischief
we used to do things like well I remember one time we traded everybody
that there was a big bike rack or everybody put their bikes maybe a
hundred bikes in this bike rack and we traded everybody our lock combinations
for theirs on an individual basis and then went out one day and put
everybody's lock and everybody else's bike and it took until about ten o'clock
at night to get all the bikes unsorted it
stuff like that we set off explosives and teachers desks and stuff and it was
it was pretty serious we got kicked out of school lot and it in fourth grade I
encountered one of the other Saints in my life which was I they discovered they
were gonna put me in this guy Rick Farentino into the same fourth grade
class and the principal said at the last minute and no whoo no bad idea separate
them
so this teacher mrs. Hill said I'll take one of them and she taught the advanced
fourth grade class and thank God I was the the random one that got got put in
her class and she watched me for about two weeks and she then approached me she
said Stephen I'll tell you what I am
I'll make you a deal I have this math workbook and if you take it home and
finish it on your own without any help you bring it back to me if you get it
eighty percent right i will give you five dollars and one of these really big
sucker she bought she held it out in front of you
giant things and I looked at her like are you crazy lady
you know I know he's never done this before and I course i did it and she
basically bribed me back in to learn with with with candy and money and and
what was really remarkable was that you know before very long i had such a
respect for her that I sort of reignited my desire to learn and she was
remarkable she she got me kits for making cameras you know I ground my own
lens and made a camera and it was it was really quite wonderful
and I think I probably learned more academically that one year that I've
ever learned in my life and it was it was it created problems though because
when i got out of fourth grade
they wanted they tested me and they decided to put me in high school and my
parents said no thank god
oh they said you can skip one grade but that's all
but not too hard but you're not high school really don't know it's and i
found skipping one grade
you know to be very troublesome in many ways does that so I that was plenty
enough and but it did to create some problems is I'm going to get myself a
little out of order here but this seems like such a good place to talk about is
your experience in that fourth grade question do you think that had a major
in impact on on your own interest in education and if there is any one of the
computer industry that's associated with computers in education
it's got to be you and
yeah example I'm sure it did but it you know i'm a very top
I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome
I don't believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life's not like that and
he's pretty boring place if it was but I really believe in equal opportunities
and equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education
probably you know the second maybe even more important as a great family life
but I don't know how to do that not only knows how to do that but it
it pains me because we do know how to do provide a great education
we really do we got our act together we can make sure that every young child in
this country
got a great education and we fall far short of that and I know from my own
education that if i hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent
extra time with me
I'm sure I would have been in jail I'm a hundred percent sure if it hadn't been
for mrs. Hill and fourth grade and a few others but it may be even especially her
I absolutely would have ended up in jail because I could you know I could see
those tendencies in myself to sort of have a certain energy to do something
and it could have been directed to doing something interesting that you know
other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that other
people maybe didn't like somebody had to do and and so you know i think when
you're young a little bit of course correction goes a long way and and i
think it takes pretty talented people to do that and and I don't know that enough
of them get attracted to go into public education
you can't even support a family on which prepared
on what you get paid and if you're smart and I sort of feel somebody smart enough
to do you want to turn your kids over to them for the majority of their their
childhood in the majority of their waking hours and their childhood are
spent
not with your parents but with your teachers sure I like the people that are
teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I
work for making a hundred thousand dollars a year
well why should they work at a school for thirty-five forty thousand dollars a
year if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year
absolutely i mean that's not it is an intelligence test I mean it was so good
i think we should basically be hiring them in paying them a hundred thousand
dollars over the problem there of course is the union's the union of the worst
thing that ever happened education because it's not a meritocracy
so it turns into a bureaucracy which is exactly what happened and teachers can't
teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired
it's terrible well some people say that the this new technology may be a
networking road that if if you will maybe a way to bypass that they are you
up to I'm i absolutely don't believe that as you pointed out i've probably
helped put more computers and more schools and anybody else in the world
and I'm up until this point in time and i'm absolutely convinced that that is by
no means the most important thing the most important thing is another person
another person that incites your curiosity that guides your curiosity
that feeds your curiosity and machines cannot do that in the same way people
can the the elements of of discovery are around you you don't need a computer to
know I mean you know here
why does that fall you know why nobody knows why nobody in the entire world
knows why that falls we can describe it pretty accurately but no one knows why I
don't need a computer to get a kid interested in that to spend a week
playing with gravity and trying to understand it and come up with reasons
why what'd you do to a person
you do need a person and
so especially with computers the way they are never the way they are now
computers are very reactive but they're not they are not proactive they are not
agents if you will
they are very reactive so what what children need is something much more
proactive and they need a guide
they don't need an assistant and I think we have the material to solve this
problem in the world is just being deployed in other places and I i I've
been very strong believer that what we need to do in education is go to the
full voucher system i know this isn't what you care about is what I care about
a great deal well this is exactly what we care okay great that's what this was
but believe it or not this is that this is at the end we're one of the things
that I feel is that
right now you know if you ask who are the customers of Education the customers
of education are the society at large employers that hire people write things
like that but ultimately i think the customers are the parents
not even the students with the parents the problem that we have in this country
is that the customers went away the customers stopped paying attention to
their schools for the most part can give your kids to the well what happened was
that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA
meetings and watching their kids school schools became much more
institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their
kids education and what happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets
control which is what's happened in our country is that the service level almost
always goes down
I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one
AT&T the Bell System I remember seeing a of a bumper sticker with the bell logo
on it and it said we don't care we don't have to you know and that's what a
monopoly is
that's what IBM was in their day and that's certainly what this the public
school system is they don't have to care
now it turns out what some go through some economics the most expensive thing
most people buy in their lives as a house
second most expensive thing is a car usually in a car cost average cars
approximately about twenty thousand dollars now sixteen twenty thousand
dollars and an average car last about what eight years right you buy another
one
so approximately two thousand dollars a year right
48 your commitment
well your child goes to school right
approximately eight years in k through eight
right right you don't like to switch schools spend eight year commitment
what is the state of California spend per pupil per year in a public school
going to what they spend per year per pupil is about forty four hundred
dollars
ok about twice as over twice as much as a car
now it turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information
available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices
I mean General Motors and Ford and Toyota and Chrysler and Nissan they are
advertising at me like crazy
I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads and they seem to be able to
make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money
and advertised other people with it so that everybody knows all about these
cars and they keep getting better and better and better each is a lot of
competition was awarded and there's a warranty that's right
but in schools since people don't feel like they're spending their own money
they feel like it's free right
no one does any comparison shopping matter fact if you want to put your kid
in a private school
you can't take the 4400 dollars a year out of the public school and use it
you have to come up with you know five or six thousand dollars of your own or
even forty four hundred dollars of your own money for
normal I believe very strongly that if the the country gave each parents a
voucher check for forty four hundred dollars that they could only spend at
any accredited school that several things would happen number one schools
would start marketing themselves like crazy parents to get students
secondly I think you see a lot of new school starting I've suggested as an
example if you go to stand for business school they have a public policy track
they could start a school administrator track so you could get a bunch of people
coming out of college
tying up with something just going to business school it could be starting
around
cool sure you could have 25 year old kids out of college
very idealistic full of energy instead of starting to Silicon Valley company
they started school and I believe they would do far better than many of our
public school teachers do the third thing you see is I believe that you
would see the quality of schools again just like in a competitive market starts
to rise
some schools to go broke a lot of the public schools would go broke there's no
question about it would be rather painful for the first several years and
deservedly so
and but I think far less painful than the kids going through the system as it
is right now
and some people the biggest complaint is of course that schools would pick off
all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in
either
you know I have a private school or the remit remnants of the public school
to me that's like saying well all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs
and Mercedes is and nobody's going to make a ten-thousand-dollar car
well i think the most hotly competitive market right now is the
ten-thousand-dollar car area you've got you know all the Japanese playing it
you've got general motors that spent five billion dollars subsidizing Saturn
so far so they can compete in that market you've got forward which is just
introduced two new cars in that market
you've got chrysler with the neon so that you're spending 32,000 you're
getting a five-hundred-dollar used car in some cases the the market competition
model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot of providers
willing to tailor their products to fit that need a lot of competition which
keeps forcing them to get better and better so i think the problems we've got
I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the
solution and most of the world's problems and unfortunately it ain't so
it's it's sort of a given analogy a lot of times we think why is television
programming so bad why our television shows so so demeaning
so so poor and the first thought that Kris you as well
there is a conspiracy that this is the networks are feeding us this
wap because it's cheap to produce because of this because of that it's the
networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff to try to
dumb down the American public but the truth of the matter of course if you if
you studied in any depth is the network's absolutely want to give people
what they want
so that they watch the shows if people wanted something different
they would get it and the truth of the matter is that shows that are on
television or on television because that's what people want
the majority of the people in this country want to turn on the television
and turn off the brain and that's what they get and that's far more depressing
than a conspiracy
it's my conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter which is
that a vast majority of the American public or pre- most of the time that
will be armed
I think the school situation is equally there's a parallel here when it comes to
technology
it is so much more hopeful to think the technology can solve the problems that
are really more human and more organizational and more political in
nature and an eight so we need to attack these things that the route which is
people and how we how much freedom we give people the people the competition
that will attract the best people
unfortunately the side effect of pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers that
lost their spirit you know 15 years ago and shouldn't be teaching right now so i
think i feel very strongly about this and I wish it was as simple as giving
every kid a computer but it won't work
yeah and I'm really glad we had a chance to to talk about it up front
sure going to change the taste sure to think about it
I'm sorry for the NEA will like grab and wanted to make sure that we can you got
covered and one of the things was about the books about your life and career
so much has been written about you rather than then go over a lot of those
stories going to ask if there are any of those books that are which one do you
think is the best and and the fairest and if they're there are aspects that
are that of your career that you think have been left out that you like the
dress I have to tell you truly I I'm pretty ignorant about that because i
haven't read any of them
oh I'm ready I realize skimmed 11 time and and the first page
i skim one maybe read about ten percent of it and I i read the first page of
another in it it got my birthday wrong by a year but i thought well if they
can't even get this right
then I this is probably not worth reading the one that I skimmed I
remember which one it was
but you know i i've always considered part of my job was to keep the quality
level of people in the organization I work with very high and that's what i
consider one of the few things I actually you know can contribute
individually myself versus the team that I work with is is is to really tried it
in still in the organization
the goal of having only a player's because in the field that I'm in like in
a lot of fields the difference between maybe a a good
the worst taxicab driver and the best taxi cab driver to get your crosstown
Manhattan might be 21
that's what will get you there in 15 minutes the worst we'll get you in half
an hour or you know the best of the best cook in the worst cook maybe it's three
to one in order
it's something like that most things in life the best you know post person the
worst post person in in the field that I'm in the different software in
particular the difference between and the best person in the worst person is
about a hundred to one or more
the difference between a good software person and a great software person is
probably 50 to 1 25 to 50 one huge dynamic range and therefore i have found
and not just in software it almost everything I've done it really pays to
go after the best people in the world
it's painful it's very painful when you have some people that are not the best
people in the world and you have to get rid of them to to him but I found that
my job has sometimes been exactly that to get rid of some of the people that
didn't measure up
and I've always tried to do it in a humane way but nonetheless it has to be
done and it's not over fun is that the hardest to the most painful part of
managing a company for your pointed not sure of course
and so what I i I've been you know at times I've been pretty hard about it and
a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any
choices
so if somebody wanted to write a book about me
most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find you know the
handful of a few dozen people that I'd fired in my life that hated my guts and
that was certainly the case in this one book i skimmed I mean it was just
let's let's throw the dart Steve and you know such as life I mean that's the sort
of the world I've chosen to live in
and if you know I didn't like that part of it enough I'd escape and I haven't so
I'm willing to put up with that but I certainly didn't find a very accurate
ok then that this gives us a golden opportunity then to let you tell your
own own own story for for a while and I've got a couple of questions I wanted
to ask you about specifically about your experience an apple I mean looking back
to the usual were there
what in your own view where you're you're the accomplishments that you were
most proud of
are there a couple of Apple stories that you really like to tell me Apple was
this incredible journey
I mean we we did some amazing things there
the thing that bound us together at Apple was not it was it was the ability
to make things that we're going to change the world
that was very important to all of us and we were all pretty young the average age
of the company was you know mid to late twenties and we were you know hardly
anybody had families
certainly the beginning and we all work like maniacs and the greatest joy was
that we felt we were fashioning sort of collective works of art much like you
know 20th century physics or anything that will do something important that
would last that a lot of people contributed to and we could actually
then after you know very few people could engineer these things but then
they could give them two more people who could as an example build an automated
factory to build them and then they could give it even more people who could
use them and the amplification factor was very large mean in doing the
Macintosh is an example of a core group of less than a hundred people that did
the mac and yet Apple ship well over 10 million of them so and and of course
everybody's copied it so if you look at what's really happening is enough you
know hundreds of millions at this point in time
that's pretty large amplification write you a million to one
and it's not often in your life that you get that opportunity to amplify your
values a hundred-to-one a million to one
and and that's really what we were doing i mean if you look at what we did what
we tried to do was to say
computation and how it relates to people is really its infancy here and we are in
the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a
little bit
and what's interesting is if you change the course of a vector near its origin
you know by the time it gets a few miles out its way different and we were very
cognizant of this fact
really from almost the beginning an apple that we we were for some
incredibly lucky reason fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right
time to do this
and so the contributions that we tried to make embodied values that were not
only of technical excellence and innovation which I think we did
certainly our share of but innovation in a more humanistic way the things i'm
most proud about of Apple are where those two things came together as an
example in publishing
you know the Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing
and it was because of that
typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence
to implement that electronically coming to those two things coming together
things coming together where people didn't have to understand arcane
computer commands to use the computer so it was a combination of those two things
that I am the most proud of and it happened on the Apple to and happened on
the Lisa although there were other problems with the Lisa that caused it to
be a market failure and then it happened again big time with the Macintosh you
used an interesting word when you were describing what you were doing
you were talking about art not engineering there and not science you
talk about that from it
um sure
I you know I believe that the distinction between a we generally use
the word artist to mean visual artist of some short but I actually think there's
really very little distinction between an artist of that type and a scientist
or engineer of the highest caliber and I've never had a distinction in my mind
between those two types of people they just to me Ben people that pursue
different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to
express some something of the of what they perceive to be the truth around
them so that others can see it so that others can benefit by it and the
artistry is in the elegance of the solution for your charming or
mathematics
no I think the artistry isn't isn't having an insight into what one sees
around them generally putting things together in ways that no one else has
and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that same
insight so that they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes
them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing and and I think
that certainly a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing
that and did exactly that
and if you if you study these people a little bit more what you'll find was you
know in this particular time I don't know how i'll be in 200 years but in
certainly in the in the in the
in the seventies and eighties but the best people in computers would have
normally been poets and writers and musicians I mean almost all of them were
musicians a lot of them were more poets on the side and they went into computers
because it was so compelling because it was fresh and new and it was a new
medium of expression of their creative talents and and the feelings and the
passion that people put into it
we're completely indistinguishable from from a poet or a painter completely
indistinguishable and and I think there was a tremendous amount of you know a
lot of the people also were were not what we're fairly shy people or maybe
fairly inward people who put a lot of their expression about how they felt
about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work that
other people would use a lot of people put a lot of love into these products
and a lot of expression of their appreciation into these things
it's hard to explain no it's passionate not in the true sense of the word
so it's and I don't think this is this is this is becoming less true
unfortunately the computer industry is at a very critical juncture where the
those people are clearly leaving the field now what are they doing
well it's really going
hard to say it's they're not being there not being attracted by something else
they're being driven out of the computer business and they're being driven out of
the computer business because the computer business is becoming a monopoly
with microsoft and without getting into whether Microsoft gain this position
legally or not
who cares the end product of the position is that the ability to innovate
in the industry is being sucked out dry and I think the smartest people are have
already seen some of the writing on the wall and are starting to exit and I
think some of the smartest young people are really growing on questioning
whether they're going to even get in
so hopefully things will change over time but i think it's it's a kind of a
dark dark . right now we're entering that
well Apple had a reputation as a company that that that absolutely broke the mold
and set it on course
looking back from where you are today with next
do you think with what you know now that as Apple group big
it could have sustained that original approach or did it have to become a big
standard
well that's our computer funny question Apple did grow big and sustain that
approach when I left out of it was two billion dollar company that's not too
small we were fortunate 300 and something like 350 largest company in
the country
you know when the mac was introduced we were a billion-dollar corporation so
Apple you know grew from nothing to two billion dollars when i was there that's
a pretty high growth rate and it
you know grew and grew five times since I left basically on the back of the
Macintosh so I i think what's happened since I left in terms of growth rates
Ben Ben trivial compared with what it was like when I was there
now what ruined Apple wasn't growth what ruined Apple was values the John Sculley
rude apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple
which were corrupt and that corrupted some of the top people that were there
drove out some of the ones that were not corruptible and brought in more corrupt
ones and paid themselves literally collectively you know tens of tens of
millions of dollars and cared really more about their own glory and wealth
and they did about what what built apple in the first place which was making
great computers for people to use they didn't care about that anymore and they
didn't have a clue about how to do it and they didn't take any time to find
out because that's not what they cared about
they cared about making a lot of money and so they had this wonderful thing
that a lot of very brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very
greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original
vision which was to make this thing in appliance and get this out there to as
many people as possible
they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years
almost
profitable companies in America for four years and what that cost them was their
future because what they should have been doing is making rational profits
and going from market share which is what we'd always try to do and and
macintosh would have had a thirty-three percent market share right now maybe
even higher
maybe it would have been microsoft but we'll never know
and now it's got a single digit market share and falling and there's no way to
ever get that moment i'm back and the Macintosh will die in another few years
and its really sad and the problem is is that the the recipe for how to create
the next Macintosh
no one at Apple has a clue because no one running any part of Apple was there
when the Macintosh was made or any other product Apple they've just been living
off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and
you know what happened to that so it's kind of tragic but as unemotionally as I
can be
that's what's happening
you know unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat
you know these things companies tend to be long glide slopes because of the
installed basis
sure but apples is gliding down this glide slope and they're losing market
share of a year and things start to spiral once you get under a certain
threshold developers no longer write applications for your computer so you
know again it really starts to spiral down
sure I don't this obviously I mean there's obviously still a lot of the
emotional attachment
oh sure i want Apple it forever and keep shipping great products for ever and an
apple could have been a Apple was for a while like a sony it was the place that
made the coolest stuff is there a is there a user of apple or
our i'll share our story that that you could tell that that saw that in your
mind exemplifies what the company stood for and its values at its best
sort of a you know what but what customers are using the apple products
when you were there were two two kinds of customers i mean basically Apple was
sort of there was the educational aspects of apple and then they were sort
of the the non-educational and the non educational side
you know Apple was was two things when it was the first lifestyle computers and
Macintosh was the first lifestyle computer but secondly it really it's
hard to remember how bad it was
you know in nineteen early eighties with IBM taking over the world with the pc
with toss out there it was it was far worse than the apple -
they tried to copy the Apple too and they did a pretty bad job and if you
needed to know a lot and so things were kind of slipping backwards and Macintosh
was you saw the 1984 commercial you put that I hope you have that in your
archive
you know Macintosh was basically this this relatively small company
you know in cupertino california taking on the Goliath IBM and saying wait a
minute your way is wrong
this is not the way we want computers to go this is not the legacy we want to
leave this is not what we want our kids to be learning this is wrong and we are
going to show you the right way to do it
and here it is it's called Macintosh and this is so much better that it's going
to beat you and we are going to do it and that's what Apple stood for was was
that I was music that was one of the things the other thing was you can go a
little further back in time and your Apple tues one of the things that built
apple with schools buying apple tues but even so there was I think only about ten
percent of the schools that had a computer even one computer in them in
1917
9i think it was and when I grew up I was again lucky because i was in Silicon
Valley when i was 12 i think i saw my first computer 10 make ten are left
maybe 11 or 12 it was down at NASA Ames and it was I didn't see the computer i
saw a terminal and it was theoretically computer on the other in the wire and I
fell in love with it I saw my first desktop computer hewlett-packard which
was one of their is called the 9100 a it was the first first desktop computer in
the world grant basic and APL i think and i fell in love them and I thought as
we looking at the statistics in 1979
I thought you know if there was just one computer in every school
some of the kids would find it you know yeah it was just there someone will find
it and it will change their life and we saw the rate at which this was happening
and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a
computer for school and it was so slow that we realize that a whole generation
of kids was going to go through the school system before they even got their
first computer so we got the kids can't wait for this basically and we wanted to
donate a computer every school in America is that there's about a hundred
thousand schools in America about 10,000 high schools about 90,000 k through
through eight and we couldn't afford that as a company so we studied the law
and it turned out that there was a law already on the books in a national law
that said if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer
to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra
tax deduction for them
that basically means you don't make any money you lose some
but you don't lose too much you lose about ten percent and we thought if we
could apply that law if we could enhance that law a little bit to extend it down
to K through eight and remove the research requirements was just was
educational
then we could give a hundred thousand computers away one to each school
America and it would cost our company 10 million dollars which was a lot of money
to us at that time but it was a lot less than a hundred million boss if we didn't
have that and we decided we willing to do that and we actually was the most
incredible thing you've most incredible things I've ever done
we found our local representative
my name's pete stark over and I think it's a piece bag and Pete and a few of
us sat down and we wrote a bill
we literally drafted a bill to make these changes and we committed we said
if if the if this law changes we will donate a hundred thousand computers and
across the 10 million dollars to us and we call it the kids can't wait bill and
pete stark introduced in the house and our senator dan first introduced in the
Senate and I refuse to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington
myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks and it
was the most incredible thing I met probably two-thirds of the house and
over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with him and it was very
interesting i found the house members were routinely less intelligent than the
Senate members and they were much more major to their constituency which I
found initially quite offensive but I came to understand that maybe that's a
really good idea maybe that's the way the framers wanted him
they weren't supposed to think too much they were supposed to represent the
center's are supposed to think a little more but the precursor it was very it
was very interesting anyway
the bill passed the house with the largest favorable majority of any tax
bill in history this country
ok what happened was it was here in Carter's lame duck session and Bob Dole
who was then the Speaker of the House killed it
he would not bring it to the floor and we ran at a time
and so we would have had to have started the entire process over the next year
and i gave up
I think this is this is crazy
however fortunately something unique happened
california thought this was such a good idea that they came to us and they said
were you not to do a thing we're going to pass a bill that says since you
operate the state of california california tax
we're going to pass this bill that says if the federal bill doesn't pass then
you get the tax break in California you do in california which are 10,000
schools so we did we gave away 10,000 computers instead of California got a
whole bunch of the software companies give you a bunch of software we train
teachers for free and we monitor this thing over the next few years it was
phenom
it was really phenomenal and one of my money one of my great experiences but
also on my biggest regret was that which really try to do this on the national
level and got so close and I don't think bob dole even knew what he was doing but
he really
unfortunately screwed up here yeah major
oh this is no that's a great story that's great but that's what apps also
part of what Apple was about now on the business side
I was at the washington post when the Macintosh was introduced and the
washington post was it an IBM big blue shop and nobody was going to play with
it
that's right and arm the Macintosh infiltrated the post there was almost a
guerrilla movement that started with the
and artists and now the whole front of the newspapers being done on
macintosh' right Apple Apple machines on the business side talk and it was a
fairly common this this this uh sure
gorilla sure Colt move them Yesi we had no concept of how to sell to corporate
America because none of us had ever come from there and it was like another
planet to us I mean unfortunately I've had to learn all that stuff now if I'd
only known then what I know now we could have done a lot better but didn't know
that stuff didn't have any people that did so our attempts to sell the
corporate America would just bungled and we ended up just selling to people that
sort of we're buying a product for its merit not because of the company it came
from
everybody was very focused on big blue back then ok
and they bought IBM mindlessly that famous phrase never get fired for buying
IBM but we fortunately we were able to change a lot of that and Apple as you
know even i believe today is a bigger supplier personal computers in IBM great
stories tell me about to tell me about next what motivated you to establish
next and what were the goals that you set out to accomplish when you set up
this new company
oh that's complicated we basically wanted to keep doing what we were doing
at Apple keep innovating and we didn't see that was going to happen and we made
a mistake which was to try to follow the same metaphor that we did at Apple to
make the whole widget and the market was changing the industry was changing the
scale was changing and in the end we were we knew we would sort of be the
last company that made it or the first didn't you know you're right on that
edge and we thought we'd be the last one that really
it but we were wrong we were the first one that didn't make it and i think
pretty much put an end to the to the companies that have ever tried to do
that and we certainly made our fair share of mistakes but in the end I think
we should have took a little longer and realize that the world was changing and
just going to be a software company right off the bat right off the bat good
with machines that got great reviews and machine was the best machine in the
world and listen they're still believe it or not they're selling on the used
market today for in some cases more than we sold them for originally they're hard
to find even even today and we haven't even made them for you know two years
two and a half years
one of the features that people are other features on the old ex machine old
it's not that old the that are still missing from computers today or share
what will you tell us about
haha well first of all it was a totally plug-and-play machine right
that's except for macintosh that's hard to find it was an extremely powerful
machine that way beyond the Macintosh so it's sort of combine the power of the
workstations with this plug-in plainness of the map which is quite nice
second of all the machine had a fit
sort of a fit and finish that you don't find the day a beautiful tribute
no I don't just mean and packaging I mean sort of operation simple things too
complex than simple things like soft power on and off trivial little thing
but as you know one of the biggest reasons people lose information and
computers as they turn them off at the wrong time and when you get into a multi
tasking network system that can happen that can even have much more severe
consequences
so you know we were the first people to ever do that still some of the only
people to do that when you push a button and you tell the computer request the
computer to turn off it figures out what it needs to do to shut down gracefully
then turns itself off
of course the next computer was the first computer with built-in you know
high quality sound cd-quality sound and most people do that
now which is a rate it took him a long time but most people do that now
just out of its kind yeah just ahead of his time but change the tape
I need right
great we're ready to roll our tell me about to the next step software
what makes a difference
whatever is this but there's one that's the real gem
I'll tell you an interesting story when i was at Apple a few of my acquaintances
said you really need to go over to Xerox Park which was Palo Alto Research Center
parc and see what they've got going over there
they don't usually let too many people in but i was able to get in there and
see what they were doing and I saw their early computer called the Alto which was
a phenomenal computer and they actually showed me three things there that they
had working in 1976
I saw them in 1979 that took really until a few years ago for us to fully
recreate for the industry to fully recreate in this case with with next
step
however I didn't see those three things I only saw the first one which was so
incredible to me that it saturated me it blinded me to see the other two and it
took me years to sort of recreate them to rediscover them and incorporate them
back into the model but they were very far ahead and they're thinking they
didn't have it right and you know the stuff they had done was not really
right but it was the germ of the idea of all three things was there and the three
things were graphical user interfaces object-oriented computing and networking
let me go through those graphical user interfaces the alto had the world's
first graphical user interface it had windows
it had a crude menu system it had crude panels and stuff didn't know it didn't
work right
but it basically was all there
objects they had small talk reading the world's first or not the first but
really basically the first object oriented language similar was sort of
the first but small talk was the first official object-oriented language third
networking they invented ethernet there as you know and they had about 200 altos
with servers hooked up in a local area network they're doing email and
everything else over the network all in 1979
I was so blown away with the potential of the germ of that graphical user
interface stuff i saw that i didn't even a simulator even stick around to
investigate fully the other two
what next step was was the completion of turning some of that vision into a
reality
incorporating the world's first truly commercial object-oriented system next
step and really for its time being the most network system in the world when it
came out and i think the world is has made a lot of progress and networking
but hasn't yet crossed the hurdle into objects and what's happened with next
step is it's really started to get adopted by some very large corporate
customers and is now the most popular object-oriented system in the world as
objects around the threshold of starting to move into the mainstream
and so the company last year recorded its first profit and it's nine years
history and sold 50 million dollars worth of software i think we're going to
have some significant growth this year and it's fairly clear that next can get
up to being a few hundred million dollars software company in the next
three or four years and be the largest company offering objects until Microsoft
comes in
market at some point in time probably with a pretty half baked product
some people say that
the future object-oriented software is going to be the only kind of course that
in the course it's true that the minute I remember it being at xerox in 1979 is
one of those sort of apocalyptic moments yeah I remember
within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff
just knowing that every computer will work this way sometime it's so obvious
once you saw it didn't require tremendous in elective easy to look at
of course every computer is gonna work this way this is so clear
the minute you understand objects that's exactly the same feeling
all software will be written using object or any technology someday you can
argue about how long it's going to take
I when you can argue about who the winners and losers are going to be but
you
I don't think a rational person can argue about its inevitability
tell me give me your thoughts on the current status and the future of the
internet and
commercial online services and how they're affecting computer development
the internet and the world wide web because they become one thing now are
clearly the most exciting thing going on in computing today they're exciting for
three four reasons number one ultimately community computers are turning into
communications devices
ultimately we're spending more and more of the cycles of the computer to not
only make it easy to use but to make it easy to communicate and the web is the
missing piece of the puzzle which really is going to power that vision much
further forward
so it's very exciting in that way secondly it's very exciting because it
is going to destroy vast layers of our economy and it is going to make
available a presence in the marketplace for very small companies that is equal
to very large companies let me give an example a small three-person company in
phoenix arizona can have a web server that looks identical if not better than
then
IBM's or then then you know the gaps or than anybody else any large company and
they can gain access to this electronic distribution channel for free
they don't have to build buildings they don't have to go sign up a thousand
distributors and have people to call on them etc etc
in essence direct distribution from the manufacturer to the customer via the
internet via the web
the direct contact directs transactions and then distribution via UPS or federal
express that's going to be cheaper than going through all these middlemen or
building hundreds of stores around
country it is going to radically change the way goods and services are
discovered sold and delivered
not only in this country but eventually in the world and as you know electrons
travel at the speed of light
and so it tends to bring the world much closer together in terms of providers
and customers
that's very exciting the leveling of big and small
the leveling of closed near and distance
the third reason is very exciting because Microsoft doesn't own it and I
don't think they can i think it's it's the one thing in the industry that
Microsoft probably could never own and I think one of the things that's essential
is that the government continue to fund the internet as a public trust as a
public facility and remove any of these ridiculous notions of privatizing it
that have been brought up I don't think they're going to fly home
thankfully the internet cost the US government about 50 to 75 million a year
this is peanuts for what it's doing right now even if that cost someday
escalated to you know half a billion a year which of course you could build the
whole internet each year for that from scratch if you had to replace all the
equipment etc
that would be an extraordinarily small price to pay for keeping it from getting
into the hands of any one company and thereby starting to destroy your control
the innovation that could take place around the internet it's the one last
bright spot of hope in the computer industry for some serious innovation
happen at a rapid pace and what's also great about it is again the u.s. is in
the forefront here
that's what's great about the whole personal computer and software industry
but this is another example of where the u.s. is in the forefront I think it
should be kept open it should be kept free
how do you feel about
the world wide web is literally is becoming a global phenomenon
yes well you optimistic about it yes free
it's yes i am optimistic about staying free but before you set global too fast
it's estimated that over one-third of the total internet traffic in the world
originates or Destin's in California so I actually think this is pretty typical
where California again is certainly in the leading edge of this not only
technical but cultural shift and so I do expect the web to be a worldwide
phenomenon distributed fairly broadly right now i think it's a it's a u.s.
phenomenon that's moving to be global and again very concentrated in certain
pockets California being one
well eighty-five percent access to write but potential there
you're pretty optimistic tell me about pixar cars very interesting
I got hooked up with some folks again
a friend of mine told me I should go visit these crazy guys up in San Rafael
California who were working at Lucasfilm and George Lucas you know produce the
star wars film trilogy
I was a smart guy and at one point when he would have a lot of money coming in
from these films realize that you have to start a technology group and a few
problems he wanted to solve
let me give you an example of one when you make a copy of an analog audio
recording like a tape cassette to another tape is set
you pick up noise are effects in this case hits on the tape
if you make a second-generation copy gets worse exponentially
the same is true of optical analog copies if you take a piece of filmmaking
optical copy you pick up noise artifacts in this case optical noise which comes
across as blurriness in some cases comes across as other noise artifacts in other
cases
now George to make Star Wars actually had two composite together up to 13
pieces of film for each frame the matte paintings for the backgrounds might be a
few pieces of film the the models might be a few pieces of film the live action
might be a few pieces of film some special effects might be a few pieces of
film and every time he'd make a copy to composite two together then add a third
and a fourth he was adding noise artifacts in each generation and if you
go by a laser disc of starting the Star Wars movies and you stopped it on some
of the frames they are really grungy incredibly noisy very bad quality
George being the perfectionist he was who figured out how to do this at all
said I'd like to do it perfectly
I'd like to digitally nobody's ever done that before so he hired some very smart
people and they figured out how to do it for him
digitally with no noise artifacts software and actually build some
specialized hardware at the time George at some point decided that this was
costing in several million dollars a year and decided you want to fund it
anymore so i bought this group from George Lucas and I incorporated his
Pixar and we said about basically revolutionising high-end computer
graphics if you look at the 10 most important revolutions in high-end
computer graphics in the last 10 years
eight of them have come out of pics are all of the software that was used to
make a terminator as an example to actually construct the the images you
saw on the screen or jurassic park with all the dinosaurs was pixar software
Industrial Light & Magic uses it is the basis for all of their stuff but pixar
had another vision than to do special effects Pixar's vision was to tell
stories to make real films and so are our vision was to make the world's first
animated feature film that was completely computer synthetic sets
characters everything
and after 10 years we have done exactly that we have developed the tools which
are all proprietary to do this to manage the production of this thing as well as
the the drawing of this thing on the computer and computer synthetic drawing
and we are finishing up making the world's first computer animated feature
film Pixar is written it directed it producing it and the walt disney
corporation is distributing it and it's coming out this year as walt disney's
christmas picture
it's coming out in November 11th i believe it's called toy story and you
will hear a lot about it because i think it's going to be the most successful
film of this year . so it's phenomenal
Tom Hanks is the main characters voice - melon is the second main character
randy newman's doing the music for it and it's just phenomena
oh well since this is great to be bargained for what can you tell me a
little bit about the about the story or yeah but there's no purpose in 300 years
I've seen it already so that's true
I'm losing and losing my sense of my sense of myself
we have a couple more are serious questions and then then I would like to
just give you a chance to say anything else that the
but just back from pixar again from it though
there's a lot of hoopla now about sort of Hollywood and Silicon Valley
converging what they call it silly would i think the pics are really is going to
be the first digital studio in the whole world and really combines art and
Technology together and again a very wonderful way
Pixar's got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire
world and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world
to do these kinds of films we have the second largest group of animators in the
world now outside of Disney we think the most talented in the world working
side-by-side with these computer scientists are the best graphics people
in the world and there's really no one else in the world that can do this it's
really phenomenal i think we're probably close to 10 years ahead of anybody else
so it's really well
the question I was going to ask you personally asked and answered it was
about the startup companies as I look around the facility here
literature their Alliance is written all over the walls literally son chair arts
I mean you're aligned with the hewlett-packard son
ormond digital and all the systems in the ground communications companies and
information technology companies are emerging on and becoming one do you
think that it will ever be possible for a new major public major startup company
to develop it they're going to focus on major application
wherever you go there every other yeah you know it's i think yes
intellectually sometimes one would say in despair no but i think yes and the
reason is is because it's not technology keeps on advancing so there there are
opportunities but the thing that makes it possible is that human minds settle
into fixed ways of looking at the world and that that's always been true and
it's probably always going to be true and i think you know I've always felt
that death is the greatest invention of life
I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that that without
death life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young who
didn't know how the world was you know 50 years ago who didn't know how the
world was 20 years ago who sought as it is today without any preconceptions and
saw and dreamed how it could be based on that we are not satisfied based on the
accomplishments of the last 30 years but were dissatisfied because the current
state didn't live up to their ideals without death there would be very little
progress and so one of the things that happens in organizations as well as in
people is they settle in two ways of looking at the world and become
satisfied with those and the world changes and keeps evolving and new
potential arises
but these people that are settled in don't see it and that's what gives
startup companies their greatest advantage is is the this the the
sedentary point of view of of large companies and in addition to that large
companies usually do not have very efficient communication paths from the
people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top
of the company which are the people making the big decisions and so by the
time there may be people at the lower levels of these companies that see these
changes coming but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where
they can do something about it sometimes 10 years passes and even in the case
where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels usually the
upper levels screwed up somehow I mean IBM in the personal computer business
was a good example of that so I think as long as as you know humans don't solve
this this this human nature trait of sort of settling in to a world view
after a while there will always be opportunity for young companies as well
as young people to innovate as it should be
that was going to be my closing my closing question before
give me a chance to just so that we associate on your own and that is to
talk to young people who sort of look you as a as a role model of
opportunities for innovation you think there's still possible
one of the factors for success for young people today
what pitfalls if you're playing the role of elder statesman for entrepreneurs you
have for young young young entrepreneur
oh oh I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is a lot
of people come to me and say well I want to be an entrepreneur and I go that's
great what's your idea and I go I don't have one yet and I say well I think you
should go get a job as a busboy or something to you find something you're
really passionate about because it's a lot of work and i'm convinced that about
half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non successful
ones is pure perseverance
it is so hard you pour so much your life into this thing there are such rough
moments in time that most people give up
I don't blame him it's really tough and it consumes your life I mean if you're
if you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company it's I can't
imagine how one could do it
I'm sure it's been done but it's rough because it's a pretty much you know it
18 hour day job seven days a week for a while
so unless you have a lot of passion about this you're going to not survive
you're gonna give it up
so you got to have an idea of an ax or a problem or a wrong that you want to
write that you're passionate about
otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through and I
think that's half the battle right there
well I lied because you're talking maybe the pic of the other side
that we talk about the passion side what would you say there's passion and power
what would you say about the responsibilities of power
once you've achieved a certain level of success power
yeah what is that you need that you need passion to build a company like Apple
and IBM or or any other major company once you've achieved what once you've
taken a passion to that level and build a company and
are in the position like the Gates of Microsoft or anybody else in yourself
what are the responsibilities of those who succeeded and have economic power
social harmony you change the world
what are your responsibilities
well I think I mean that question to be taken on many levels obviously if you're
running a company you have responsibilities but as an individual I
I don't think you have responsibilities i think the work speaks for itself and I
i don't think that that people have special responsibilities just because
they've done something that other people you know like or don't like or what have
you i think the work speaks for itself
I think people can choose to do things if they want to but you know I mean
we're all going to be dead soon that's my point of view
you know somebody once told me they said live each day as if it will be your last
and one day you'll certainly be right you know and I do that and I I really
you never know when you're going to go but you know you are going to go pretty
soon
and what you know if you're gonna leave anything behind
you know it's going to be you know your kids few friends
you work right so that's what I tend to worry about
I don't tend to think about responsibility
in fact I tend to like to on occasion pretend I don't have any
responsibilities
I try to remember the last day when I didn't have anything to do and I had
nothing to do the following day that I had to do I have no responsibilities and
it was you know decades ago
I have to pretend when I want to feel that way so I I don't think in those
terms
I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get out there for
people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better
stuff
so the responsible use of yourself with your own standards
well in our business you know one person can't do anything anymore but you create
a team of people around you and you have a responsibility of integrity of the
work to that team
everybody does and you try to turn out the best work you can do you have any
final comments or thoughts either
for the record or or off the record
no not really time frames an interesting thing when you think about people you
know looking back I i do think when people look back on this and a hundred
years they're going to see this is a remarkable time in history
visitor incredibly and especially this area believe it or not i mean i think
when you look at the innovation that's come out of this area just this Bay Area
Silicon Valley and the whole San Francisco berkeley bay area and you've
got the invention of the integrated circuit the invention of the
microprocessor the invention of semiconductor memory right
the certainly the invention of the modern hard disk drive the invention of
the floppy disk drive not sorry you mentioned the modern floppy to stir
those were invented IBM the hard disk in the floppy this but the the
commercialization of those things
the invention of the personal computer the invention of genetic engineering the
invention of object-oriented technology the invention of graphical user
interfaces at Park followed by Apple the invention of networking all that
happened in this Bay Area and incredible
yeah why it happened why here why here all these this place is uh two or three
reasons this place is a remarkable place actually mean you have to go back a bit
of history and this is where the beatnik era happened you know
san francisco was pretty interesting thing this is where the hippie movement
happened
this is the only place in America that we're rock and roll really happened
right
it's all the bands i mean most the bands in this country is not a Bob Dylan in
the sixties I mean they all came out of here
anything from Joan by is to you know Jefferson Airplane to the Grateful Dead
I mean everything came out of here
Janis Joplin Jimi Hendrix everybody
why is that that's a little strange when you think about it
and then you've also had Stanford and Berkeley
- awesome universities drawing smart people from all over the world and
depositing them in this clean
sunny nice place where there's a whole bunch of other smart people and pretty
good food right and you know at times a lot of drugs and a lot of fun things to
do so they stayed and and so there's a lot of human capital pouring in here
right
a lot of human capital really smart people the average you know people seem
pretty bright here relative to the rest of the country and people seem pretty
open minded here relative to the rest of the country and I think it's just a very
unique place and it's got I think it's got the track record to prove it
so that tends to attract more people to and I I give a lot of credit to the
university's probably the most credit of anything to Stanford and Berkeley UC
kale yeah thanks
well I cannot tell you how much we should sure I hope it's helpful
oh it will be far will give you a
copy of this and one
well I just did david packard yesterday Subtitles End: mo.dbxdb.com