

Rolling Stone meets Steve Jobs: "I don't want to talk about Apple" (1994) - jlees
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/31896381/from_the_archives_a_revealing_interview_with_steve_jobs/print

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fjabre
If you think about it he is responsible for the first gen modern PC interface
and it looks like he's going to be responsible for the second gen with the
iPad on the horizon.

HyperCard is also considered by some to have been a precursor to the web..

I can't think of one other figure in the last 25 years that has shaped the
industry this much in terms of innovation.

~~~
lanstein
Tim Berners-Lee

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fjabre
Definitely up there. No doubt.

Interesting side note: _This NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and
became the world's first Web server._ from Wikipedia.

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JeremyBanks
Very interesting, particularly the parts where the goals he describes wander
off from where Apple is today. For instance...

 _The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally,
now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think
the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet
into people's houses is going to be really what the information superhighway
is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that's going to
do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent
my movie. I'm not very excited about that. I'm not excited about home
shopping. I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den._

...whereas these days "home shopping" for media is obviously a huge source of
revenue for Apple.

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karzeem
It's interesting that in 1994, Steve Jobs considered it a foregone conclusion
that video rental stores would get killed by the internet. He says it so
blithely that it seems like it was conventional wisdom.

The interesting part is that a) Netflix wasn't founded until three years
later, and b) it's only now that we're starting to get good products for
renting movies via the internet.

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pyre
He doesn't say that he _knows_ that the video rental stores are going out of
business. He says about 'digital convergence in the set-top box', that "All
that's going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me
a trip to rent my movie." It's not hard to see that hooking the Internet up to
a television saves will allow you to have video delivered to your television
over the Internet. You'll notice that he's poo-pooing the digital set-top box
in that quote, not praising it.

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jfarmer
And yet we have AppleTV. :)

I think it was mostly posturing.

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shin_lao
_Writing a new spreadsheet or word-processing program these days is a tedious
process, like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented
programming will change that. (...) Because these objects will work with a
wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also eliminate many of
the compatibility problems that plague traditional software._

That object oriented programming thingy looks really cool! I've heard someone
is writing a C with classes to do that. Once this is released, I'm confident
bugs will be gone forever.

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redstripe
Q: "You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by
that?" A: "They're the mainstream. And a lot of people who don't want to think
about it too much are just going to buy their product. "

I wonder if that makes Apple the Microsoft of the 2010's.

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prospero
_With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can
blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away._

and later:

 _I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software
will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it.
You can argue about how many years it's going to take, you can argue who the
winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry,
but I don't think a rational person can argue that all software will not be
built this way._

How much of this has actually been realized? Certainly OO programming is the
dominant model, but a lot of popular languages were created around the same
time as this interview, and languages tend to reflect "best practices" from
whenever they were first designed. Is OO popular just because it's popular, or
because it's genuinely the superior approach?

And, as a bonus question, how much does that still hold now that concurrency
is a major concern?

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socratees
Who would've thought of multi-core CPU's at that time?

~~~
prospero
I'm not saying they were dumb for thinking OOP was a great leap forward at the
time, I'm just wondering how correct they were in retrospect. OOP is
ubiquitous enough that it's hard to find a baseline for comparison.

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cmos
I really like how we understand where his mindset was at that time. Toy Story
wasn't released until 1995, so overall he was literally at a crossroads in his
life, with a glorious past and a somewhat unknown future.

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csmeder
"What's your personal relationship with Bill Gates like? _I think Bill Gates
is a good guy. We're not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month_ "

Wow, thats interesting, I had no idea.

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padmanabhan01
He has been so spot on right about so many things it's amazing!

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bitwize
Stating this stuff in 1994, in the peak of cyber-hype, was not terribly
prescient.

Steward Brand travelling to Xerox PARC in 1973, seeing what all those crazy
ARPANET guys were up to, and stating "So much for record stores as we know
them" -- _that_ was prescient.

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CamperBob
His last remark is certainly poignant: "After that ... who knows? Maybe
there's another locked door behind this door, too; I don't know. But someone
else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one."

Yeah, Steve. Someone else is going to have to figure out how to jailbr- er,
"unlock" it.

