

Conversation between Steve Jobs and Developers at WWDC 1997 - akshat
http://almaer.com/blog/an-epic-conversation-between-steve-jobs-and-developers-from-wwdc-97

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A-K
At 50:23 is the first time I've ever seen video of Jobs on the worse side what
appears like a genuinely unpleasant, almost confrontational exchange. He keeps
his cool though, and manages to sort of shift the contours of the
conversation. Really indicative of the time and place--can you imagine him
having to answer that sort of question (posed in that sort of tone) today,
given Apple's astronomical success?

~~~
ugh
I can absolutely imagine Jobs answering a question about, for example, the App
Store approval process in a similar way. He knows what he is doing, he knows
how to be persuasive and how to not come of as an idiot.

Given Apple’s success (also, he’s now the CEO), however, Jobs doesn’t have to
answer questions like that. It would be nice if he had to from time to time.

------
akshat
His clarity of thought is what just astounds me.

~~~
tuckerman
16:00 when he is talking about cloud storage is what drove this home for me.
Really amazing for me to see him forecasting "The Cloud" and thin clients.

Still waiting for better SSO in OS X though...

~~~
jared314
I wouldn't call it a forecast. Thin clients have failed several times before.

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jkupferman
At 5:55 his "saying no to customers" mantra sounded eerily similar to
37signals <http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php>

~~~
jannes
I think that's a basic insight for everyone who wants to create innovative
software.

You need to realize that customers don't think in a creative way. They only
think of what's easiest to think of for them. But most of the time those ideas
are not great, because they tend to complicate things instead of simplify
them.

Truly game-changing concepts take their time to ripen.

But maybe that's just me who thinks in this way. I don't know anyone from
Silicon Valley, because I live in a completely different country. So I'm
clearly not part of the American startup culture.

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pohl
I like how is go-to metaphor for strategic priorities is "the high-order bit".

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rooshdi
At 33:30 into the video, Jobs pushes a powerful insight that many found hard
to believe at the time:

"Apple can win without having to have Microsoft lose."

Maybe, even then, he had a foresight into how significant mobile computing
would become.

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Gring
1:03:30 is great: Jobs about mobile devices: "if you do email, you need a
keyboard". Guess the iPhone wasn't on his list of future plans yet.

~~~
pohl
The iPhone does have a keyboard in the sense that he meant: he didn't want a
"little scribble thing"...which the software keyboard is not.

~~~
xxpor
Specifically, Palm Graffiti.

~~~
ynniv
He was pretty specifically talking about the Newton, which produced either
decently captured raster handwriting or questionably recognized plain text.
You don't want to be the one telling people to use a device in a way which is
best described as questionable. The iPhone produces reasonably keyed plain
text, or questionably smudged handwriting. Since adding cellular modems to
handheld devices was straightforward engineering at the time, that inversion
of input is probably what made the iPhone take another five years of work when
they returned to the idea after stabilizing OS X.

~~~
Poiesis
You know, I might have to dig out my MessagePad 2000 to check, but I'm not all
that certain I get better recognition on my iPhone than I did on that. I
frequently have to go back and correct words on the iPhone, too (usually
because my 3G iPhone is laggy or I'm using words like "laggy" that aren't in
the dictionary.)

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dylanhassinger
great talk from Steve, and awesome that it starts out with some Grateful Dead
:)

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mikecane
I don't effin get this. Another blogger popularized this video weeks ago. I
even extracted excerpts from that video and did three posts. The original blog
was found here as an HN link weeks ago. But NOW it's news?!

~~~
goof
What time of the week was it previously posted to HN? Something like this will
likely do better on the weekend, when there's less going on in general, and
people have more time to watch hour long videos.

