
Steve Jobs' response to an insult during developer Q&A (1997) - SenHeng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
======
SenHeng
Audio is a little garbled, here's a transcribe from r/Apple [0]

Man: "Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man. It's sad and clear that
on several counts you've discussed you don't know what you're talking about. I
would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms, how, say Java, in
any of its incarnations, expresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when
you've finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have
been doing for the last seven years."

Jobs: "Uh... You know, you can please some of the people some of the time,
but...

One of the hardest things, when you're trying to affect change, is that people
like this gentlemen are right in some areas. I'm sure there are some things
OpenDoc does, probably even more that I'm not familiar with, that nothing else
out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small
commercial app, that demonstrates those things. The hardest thing is, how does
that fit into a cohesive larger vision that's gonna allow you to sell 8
billion dollars - 10 billion dollars of product a year?

One of the things I've always found is that 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.
I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I've
got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it's the case. As we have
tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with "What
incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the
customer?" not starting with, "Let's sit down with the engineers and figure
out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that.
And I think that's the right path to take.

I remember, with the LaswerWriter - we built the world's first laser printer,
as you know, and there was awesome technology in that box. We had the first
Canon cheap laser printing engine in the United States. We had a very
wonderful printer controller, we had Adobe's PostScript software in there, we
had AppleTalk in there, just awesome technology in the box. And I remember
seeing the first print-out come out of it. Just picking it up and looking at
it, and thinking, "You know, we can sell this." Because you don't need to know
anything about what's in that box. All we have to do is hold it up and go, "do
you want this?" And if you can remember back to 1984 before laser printers, it
was pretty startling to see that. People went, "Whoah. Yes."

That's where Apple's gotta get back to. I'm sorry that OpenDoc is a casualty
along the way, and I readily admit there's many things in life that I don't
have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. So I apologize for that too.
But there's a whole lot of people working super, super hard right now at
Apple. You know - Avie, John, Guerrino, Fred, I mean the whole team is working
- burning the midnight oil, and hundreds of people below them - to execute on
some of these things, and they're doing their best.

And some mistakes will be made along the way, by the way. That's good. Because
at least some decisions are being made. We'll find the mistakes, and we'll fix
'em. And I think what we need to do is support that team. Going through this
stage, as they work their butts off - they're all getting calls to go do this,
do that, the valley's hot - none of them are leaving. And I think we need to
support them, and see them through this, and write some damn good applications
out in the market. Mistakes will be made, some people will be pissed off, some
people will not know what they're talking about, but I think it's so much
better than where things were not very long ago. And I think we're gonna get
there.

0:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3faz2u/steve_jobs_in...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3faz2u/steve_jobs_insult_response_transcription/)

