
Steve Jobs’s Interview with Red Herring (1996) - ingve
http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/15396323139/steve-jobss-interview-with-red-herring-1996
======
rconti
"... the site I just showed you will help Chrysler sell cars, because it
distributes information to customers far better than Chrysler’s dealers can."

almost 20 years later, and nothing has changed. I'm trying to buy a specific
car, and the Internet knows everything, dealers know nothing. The salespeople
and dealers know less about the cars on their lots than the consumers do.

The consumers know about new models before they're even announced; dealers
don't know about them until they show up. Dealers can't tell you when a
certain car will be built or shipped, you're lucky if they can even tell you
when it arrives at port and is on a train or truck destined for their
dealership.

I'm spending a lot of time online where "insiders" sneak information about
production numbers and ship dates and tracking and so on, and the "official"
channels are utterly worthless.

It's amazing, disastrously bad. And we pay for it. I can't way to see the
dealership model die.

~~~
nbevans
Tesla is trying to change that by getting rid of dealerships.

~~~
stevehawk
Tesla isn't trying to get rid of dealerships. They're just trying to remove
the legal requirement of dealerships for small auto manufacturers.

------
pjc50
> _Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape. And it has a certain track
> record of being successful at those kind of things. So I wouldn’t write off
> Microsoft right now. But all I am trying to say is that no one is going to
> make money by selling browsers. I do think a lot of people are going to make
> money off the pipes, but that ain’t us. The pipe is going to be owned by the
> RBOCs. Pac Bell and all those guys are going to provide cheap ISDN lines
> into the home that come with a little box that turns it into Ethernet, and
> they are going to be impossible to compete with. But, as we’ve been talking
> about, the new Web set-up is just like the mainframe computing model, where
> all the apps will run off the server, and these will mostly be custom apps._

Microsoft tried and very nearly succeeded in replacing the open web with the
ActiveX "information superhighway". If they had done so we might not yet have
the smartphone-with-browser, due to the difficultly in implementing competing
ActiveX implementations to run on it.

Lots of people making money off the pipes? Comcast.

New mainframe computing model with web apps? That's certainly arrived.

> _As an example, I predict that by the end of this year, Microsoft will
> announce that it has a Visual Basic variant or deviant that it proposes as
> the Web-client language. And Sun and Microsoft will have a war. And
> Microsoft will put everything it has into that war, because if it can win,
> it will have killed Netscape along the way. Netscape will put everything it
> has into that war, because if it loses, it is in trouble. So I ask you, who
> will win that war? Probably Microsoft._

Everybody lost. Microsoft built IE6's fortress of incompatibility that it now
struggles to get rid of, like that indestructible anti-aircraft tower in
Berlin. Netscape went bust and open-sourced everything. Sun folded into
Oracle. Java is now the annoying thing that you have to update while avoiding
the Ask toolbar in the installer, and many people have banned it too from
their browser. VBScript in the browser is dead.

Only Javascript remains.

------
ryanchartrand
Loved the whole bit on Netscape.

"We are not going to make any money by selling browsers, and I personally
don’t think they are going to make any money from it either. If you can get a
browser from Microsoft for free, why are you going to pay $39 to Netscape?"

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Its crazy that even today diehards defend the DOJ's insane war on MS in the
90s. Do you guys really want to pay for browsers or every single thing in a OS
ala carte? MS was in the right here (the browser is just part of the OS) and
the judgement just empowered OEMs to go apeshit with crapware and bundling,
helping make the MS experience a lot crappier than it should be.

~~~
nolok
Your starting point is wrong there: the DOJ wasn't against them for making it
free, but for bundling it with their OS.

They could offer it for free all they want. Similar in the EU, they weren't
against them for it being free, and once they stopped bundling it and windows
media player, they were off the hook (even though they still offered them for
free).

~~~
adventured
The browser was ultimately mid-level on the list of grievances the DOJ had
with Microsoft. That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system
today and nobody cares, including the US government.

If all Microsoft had done is bundled a free browser with the OS, it would have
never stood up in court in terms of anti-trust prosecution. It would have been
a laughable case.

What the DOJ got them on, was restraint of trade issues with OEMs,
restrictions on API access, deep integration of IE into the OS (lying about
being able to remove it), and market place conduct through leveraging their
monopoly, leading to (in the DOJ's opinion) harm to consumers. Microsoft also
basically taunted the bull in the countless ways they tried to jam the
government, the ways they acted like assholes at every turn (including to the
judge), the quotes that came out on things they said about competition, etc.
They ended up with nearly everyone against them and looked like the ultimate
bullies. If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more
powerful than the US Government, and pretend you can stone-wall them.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>That's why MS can bundle IE and Edge with the operating system today and
nobody cares, including the US government.

No, the only reason MS is suddenly bundling more, including Anti-Virus, is
because the judgement expired in 2011.

>If you want to have a bad time, be a monopoly and pretend you're more
powerful than the US Government,

Or from a realpolitik stance, if Netscape has more friends with the Clintons
than you do (which they did), you're going to have a bad time. A lot of
"careers" were made at the DoJ over this asinine case, that changed nothing
for the better.

~~~
bmelton
That is incorrect. Microsoft has always been allowed to bundle things, except
for the brief period between the original verdict and the appeal.

Bundling was the surface issue, but the antitrust violation was their undue
exercise of monopoly power by refusing to let vendors bundle non-Microsoft
software and using their Windows-compatible certification program as the stick
to that particular carrot.

From Wikipedia on the settlement: "The proposed settlement required Microsoft
to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and
appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's
systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure
compliance.[24] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of
its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the
future."

------
acqq
The interview was made in 1995 as the following Steve's words show: "it will
go into beta by the end of this year, and we are shipping in production in the
first quarter of 1996 – my guess is by February." The date of the magazine is
1 Jan 1996, so I guess not later than November 1995.

At that moment Microsoft only had:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2)

Even then, Jobs says: "Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape."

------
bluedino
_The way we set up the car financing feature is that it actually sends an OLE
call to another Windows computer that launches an Excel spreadsheet that does
the calculation for you, and then OLE messages the information back and shoves
it onto the Web page._

If you came across something like that today it would probably make the
DailyWTF

------
almightysmudge
I have absolutely no love for the man, but he had some amazing visions of the
future back then.

~~~
MCRed
He was an amazing man. All of the hate is because he dared to follow that
vision where it went, instead of merely being a vendor of software for
Microsoft, or subservient to Google (eg: Apple built the entire infrastructure
to do maps merely because Google wanted to sell apple customers information.)

I've yet to meet a Steve Jobs hater who actually understood what the guy did.

The steve jobs hate is all ideological and comes form the Apple hate which
comes from people getting sold PCs by pimply nosed kids in the 1990s and being
jealous of their friends much superior macintoshes (which fwiw, since the mid
1990s have been cheaper than comparable PCs, yet the myth is spread otherwise
still to this day, because you can go buy a tagamochi for $4.99 and claim it's
cheaper than a macintosh, and therefore the mac is overpriced.)

So, yeah, you should re-think what you believe about this guy and learn a bit
about the real history.

I've been following him since the late 1980s, and he's always been a
passionate, compassionate, genuine, honest and opinionated guy.

~~~
almightysmudge
I'd suggest reading any of his biographies or watching Pirates of Silicon
Valley. My problem is not with Apple at all, it's with the man himself.

~~~
nbevans
What has he done to you to make you so upset about him?

~~~
almightysmudge
That's a very odd question to ask. I mentioned a distaste for him, not any
sort of active upset. Kim Jong Un (deliberately avoiding reductio ad hitlerum)
has done nothing to me personally, and I have to say I'm not a fan.

Edit: I don't like the way he treat his friends, family, staff or even
applicants, details you can get by reading the biographies or watching the
documentaries as I've said before.

------
mmphosis
It's 1996 and they're tossing around the term "apps."

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I seem to remember it being commonly used at the time (and earlier) as a
shortened form of "applications". I don't think Jobs invented the term. :)

~~~
digi_owl
It was more common in the Apple camp however, and ended up "mainstream" with
the iPhone.

------
cbr
The Herring: What do you think about Netscape’s vision that someday soon we
will all be automatically hooked to the Net when we boot up our computers, and
their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world?

Jobs: I wish the world could work that easily, but it doesn’t. You are talking
about ideas, I am talking about reality.

~~~
bluedino
20 years later with Chromebooks this finally happened.

~~~
MCRed
No, it happened four years later with the iMac.

At the time of the article, you had trouble getting a computer with a TCP/IP
stack on it out of the box. The NeXT machines did, and Macs did, but most
people had windows and didn't even have TCP/IP, IIRC

The iMac was the first internet connected out of the box machine.

~~~
bluedino
There's more to it than being connected to the Internet out of the box.

>> their Navigator platform will be our primary interface to the world

Replace Netscape with Google and Navigator with 'Chrome'

------
andy_ppp
Gotta love those timescales! I don't know what _you_ can build in 4 hours but
the Fedex (even in 1996) certainly is somewhat hyperbolic!

"For example, it took Federal Express four months to build its Web site –
using WebObjects, you could build that same site in four hours."

~~~
digi_owl
Jobs, hyberbole, perish the thought...

------
mc32
Tho brings back memories of the biz-tech magazine heyday of the late 90s early
2000s which emphasized layout, graphics and story. Some were more buzz than
substance, but they enlivened the scene and made tech more popular while
feeding off the frenzy. Kind of like the techcrunches, gigaom, pandos of the
day.

So, red herring, the standard, fast company, business2.0, wired, others.

~~~
MCRed
Sadly, tech journalism has only gotten worse in the past 20 years. As bad as
it was then-- there was no surprise that reporters didn't understand
technology-- now they think they do, which is worse.

~~~
mc32
Most amusing were the wild predictions and unbridled blind enthusiasm. How
they might explain why webvan would be the next juggernaut, for example. Not
sure they did a story on webvan in particular, but in general very frothy
reporting.

~~~
noComment
I miss webvan! Still have some of their branded delivery boxes..

