Original link is here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/steve-jobs-in-1994-the-rolling-stone-interview-20110117
CB
On 10/23/11 10:34 PM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Hi All,
I promised to share this, and I am sorry it took longer than planned.
I must admit that since my dad's recent passing, I can have a hard
time getting things done.
Anyway, it totally amazing, the article, not just because of what it
reveals about Jobs, but about how he was thinking ahead. So much so
that you may laugh out loud at how correct he was...even about how
long it would take cable boxes to do very much. He even points out
why it is hard for screen reader developers to get Windows to be as
flexible as the mac, although the comment is not specific to speech.
it is all here, and a long one, but worth it.
Karen
Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview
Anne Knudsen/Liaison
The story of Apple CEO Steve Jobs is one of the most familiar in
American business -- shaggy Bob-Dylan-loving kid starts a computer
company in a Silicon Valley garage and changes the world. But like
any compelling story, it has its dark moments. Before the iPad or the
iPhone, Jobs, then the head of the short-lived NeXT Computer, sat down
with Rolling Stone's Jeff Goodell. It was 1994, Jobs had long ago been
booted from Apple, the internet was still the province of geeks and
academics, and the personal computer revolution looked like it might
be over. But even at one of the low points in his career, Jobs still
had confidence in the limitless potential of personal computing. Read
on to get Jobs' prescient take on PDAs and object-oriented software,
as well as his relationship with Bill Gates and why he wanted the
internet in his den, but not living room. Steve Jobs died of
pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 on October 5th, 2011.
Like other Phenomena of the '80s, Steve Jobs was supposed to be long
gone by now. After the spectacular rise of Apple, which went from a
garage start-up to a $1.4 billion company in just eight years, the
Entrepreneur of the Decade (as one magazine anointed him in 1989)
tried to do it all again with a new company called NeXT. He was going
to build the next generation of the personal computer, a machine so
beautiful, so powerful, so insanely great, it would put Apple to shame.
It didn't happen. After eight long years of struggle and after
running through some $250 million, NeXT closed down its hardware
division last year and laid off more than 200 employees. It seemed
only a matter of time until the whole thing collapsed and Jobs
disappeared into hyperspace.
But it turns out that Jobs isn't as far gone as some techno-pundits
thought. There are big changes coming in software development -- and
Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy
Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it
will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial
revolution had om manufactured goods. "In my 20 years in this
industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as this," says
Jobs, with characteristic understatement. "You can build software
literally five to 10 times faster, and that software is much more
reliable, much easier to maintain and much more powerful."
This article appeared in the June 16, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone.
The issue is available in the online archive.
Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new revolution
to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs -- Mr. Revolution himself --
is bound to raise some eyebrows. "Steve is a little like the boy who
cried wolf," says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a PC
industry newsweekly. "He has cried revolution one too many times.
People still listen to him, but now they're more skeptical." And even
if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a
minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly
sees himself as. Whatever role Jobs ends up playing, there is no
question evolutionary forces will soon reshape the software industry.
Since the Macintosh changed the world 10 years ago with its brilliant
point-and-click interface, all the big leaps in computer evolution
have been on the hardware side. Machines have gotten smaller, faster
and cheaper. Software, by contrast, has gotten bigger, more
complicated and much more expensive to produce. 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. To put it simply, it will allow
gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of
starting from the ground up every time, layering in one line of code
after another, programmers will be able to use preassembled chunks to
build 80 percent of a program, thus saving an enormous amount of time
and money. 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.
For now, the beneficiary of all this is corporate America, which needs
powerful custom software to help manage huge databases on its
networks. Because of the massive hardware requirements for
object-oriented software, it will be years before it becomes practical
for small businesses and individual users (decent performance out of
NeXT's software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24
megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive). Still, in the long run,
object-oriented software will vastly simplify the task of writing
programs, eventually making it accessible even to folks without
degrees from MIT.
No one disputes the fact that NeXT has a leg up on this new
technology. Unlike most of its competitors, whose object-oriented
software is still in the prototype stage, NEXTSTEP (NeXT's operating
system software) has been out in the real world for several years.
It's been road-tested, revised, refined, and it is, by all accounts, a
solid piece of work. Converts include McCaw Cellular, Swiss Bank and
Chrysler Financial. But as the overwhelming success of Microsoft has
shown, the company with the best product doesn't always win. For NeXT
to succeed, it will have to go up against two powerhouses: Taligent,
the new partnership of Apple and IBM, and Bill Gates and his $4
billion-a-year Microsoft steamroller. "Right now, it's a horse race
between those three companies," says Esther Dyson, a Silicon Valley
marketing guru. A recent $10 million deal with Sun Microsystems -- the
workstation company that was once NeXT's arch rival -- has breathed
new life into NeXT, but it is only one step in a very long journey.
Still, few dare count NeXT out.
Today, Jobs, 39, seems eager to distance himself from his reputation
as the Wunderkind of the '80s. He wears small, round John Lennon-style
glasses now, and his boyish face is hidden behind a shaggy, Left
Bank-poet beard. During our interview at the NeXT offices in Redwood
City, Calif., just 20 miles north of his old Apple fiefdom, he took
particular joy in bashing his old rival Bill Gates but avoided
discussing other heavyweights by name. Trademark Jobsian phrases like
"insanely great" or "the next big thing" were nowhere to be found.
Friends say the Sturm und Drang of the past few years has humbled Jobs
ever so slightly; he is a devoted family man now, and on weekends, he
can often be seen Rollerblading with his wife and two kids through the
streets of Palo Alto.
"Remember, this is a guy who never believed any of the rules applied
to him," one colleague says. "Now, I think he's finally realized that
he's mortal, just like the rest of us."
It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look
around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to
you?
People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the
world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest.
It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the
graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was
pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research
Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank
at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the
mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a
10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time.
The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination of
technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make
significant change in our industry. It hasn't happened that often.
The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to be
the fueling agent for these changes. It's simply because they have a
lot of money. They're willing to pay money for things that will save
them money or give them new capabilities. And that's a hard one
sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in
this business aren't doing it because they want to help corporate
America.
A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff, like
Apple's Newton. I'm not real optimistic about it, and I'll tell you
why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them
because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them
to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company
that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to
have these, your grandmother's going to have one, and you're going to
all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in
them, I don't think too many people are going to buy three or four for
their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five
years are mobile professionals.
And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these
things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on
planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product.
To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that
combination of technical acumen and business and marketing -- and a
culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your
product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great
respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing
in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary
changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more
stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where
everybody tells you that you've completely failed.
Is that the period you're emerging from now?
I hope so. I've been there before, and I've recently been there again.
As you know, most of what I've done in my career has been software.
The Apple II wasn't much software, but the Mac was just software in a
cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn't run on
any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved
in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software.
And what we've done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to
sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson.
When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk.
So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else
they won't take it
What we learned was that the reward can't be one and a half times
better or twice as good. That's not enough. The reward has to be like
three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the
mainstream.
The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice
as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it.
You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or
one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before
everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter
of fact, I think that the leap that we've made is at least five years
ahead of anybody.
Let's talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of
American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game
machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near
future will be able to do everything that traditional desktop
computers can do. Is the PC revolution over?
No. Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by your question, but I
think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the
Mac was -- well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft.
Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the
Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet --
basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last
10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are
completely lost.
They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time.
The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10
percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10
years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately,
doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds
of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They
produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself.
So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the
earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there
are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that's
great. The question is, what's next? And what's going to keep driving
this PC revolution?
If you look at the goal of the '80s, it was really individual
productivity. And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped
applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the
'90s -- well, if you look at the personal computer, it's going from
being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It's going
from individual productivity to organizational productivity and also
operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for
mainframe and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market And
people don't buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and
word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate
the heart of their company. And they don't buy these applications
shrink-wrapped. You can't go buy an application to run your hospital,
to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network.
They don't exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much
that they're really custom apps by the time you get through with them.
These custom applications really used to just be in the back office --
in accounting, manufacturing. But as business is getting much more
sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom
apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new
product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel
and a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn't
implement the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without
the custom app, it doesn't have the new product or service. I'll give
you an example. MCI's Friends and Family is the most successful
business promotion done in the last decade -- measured in dollars and
cents. AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them
billions of dollars. Why didn't they? They're obviously smart guys.
They didn't because they couldn't create a custom app to run a new
billing system.
So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?
I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by much
more advanced software, and it's going to be driven by custom
software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped
software on the PCs, and that's why PCs haven't really touched the
heart of the business. And now they want to bring them into the heart
of the business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps
alongside their shrink-wrapped apps because that's how the enterprise
is going to get their competitive advantage in things.
For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the
world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now.
They're giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when
you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get
you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer
just runs these custom apps, they're networked back to a server in
Seattle, and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your
phone works on the entire McCaw network. In addition to that, the
applications business right now -- if you look at even the shrink-wrap
business -- is contracting dramatically. It now takes 100 to 200
people one to two years just to do a major revision to a word
processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really creative people who
like to work in small teams of three, four, five people, they've all
been squeezed out of that business. As you may know, Windows is the
worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn't have
any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really
hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft's advantage. You
can't have small teams of programmers writing word processors and
spreadsheets -- it might upset their competitive advantage. And they
can afford to have 200 people working on a project, no problem.
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. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save
them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much
money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.
That may be so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think of the
man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses -- not to
corporate America.
Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.
What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let
consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into
corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running
Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and
our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and
Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and
Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were
selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both.
What's going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The
consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees
them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because
unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't
know any better. They're not sitting around thinking that they have a
giant problem that needs to be solved -- whereas corporations are. The
PC market has done
less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need,
and they know it. We don't have to spend money educating them about
the problem -- they know they have a problem. There's a giant vacuum
sucking us in there, and there's a lot of money in there to fuel the
development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from that
I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit's been
written about -- it was a very important visit. I remember being shown
their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete, some of
it wasn't even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And within
10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way
someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could
argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue about
who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might
be, but I don't think rational people could argue that every computer
would work this way someday.
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.
Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented
software is?
Objects are like people. They're living, breathing things that have
knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside
them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with
them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level
of abstraction, like we're doing right here.
Here's an example: If I'm your laundry object, you can give me your
dirty clothes and send me a message that says, "Can you get my clothes
laundered, please." I happen to know where the best laundry place in
San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my
pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me
to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I
jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes
and say, "Here are your clean clothes."
You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry
place. Maybe you speak French, and you can't even hail a taxi. You
can't pay for one, you don't have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew
how to do all of that. And you didn't have to know any of it. All that
complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a
very high level of abstraction. That's what objects are. They
encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high
level.
You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact that
Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software industry
with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers should work?
I don't really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do you
feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we
had... well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the
cemetery. It's not my goal anyway. The thing I don't think is good is
that I don't believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent
for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution.
The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying -- and
indeed, in the beginning, that's just what they did. But they got
quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate -- look at
automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can't say
the same thing about Microsoft. And I become very concerned, because
I see Microsoft competing very fiercely and putting a lot of companies
out of business -- some deservedly so and others not deservedly so.
And I see a lot of innovation leaving this industry. What I believe
very strongly is that the industry absolutely needs an alternative to
Microsoft. And it needs an alternative to Microsoft in the
applications area -- which I hope will be Lotus. And we also need an
alternative to Microsoft in the systems-software area. And the only
hope we have for that, in my
opinion, is NeXT.
Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented
operating system -- They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too.
I'm sure they're working on it
Microsoft's greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is
Windows. Windows is so nonobject-oriented that it's going to be
impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without
throwing Windows away, and they can't do that for years. So they're
going to try to patch things on top, and it's not going to work.
You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean
by that?
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. They have a
market dominance now that is so great that it's actually hurting the
industry. I don't like to get into discussions about whether they
accomplished that fairly or not That's for others to decide. I just
observe it and say it's not healthy for the country.
What do you think of the federal antitrust investigation?
I don't have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not
whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by
breaking some of the rules. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't
think it matters. I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue
is, America is leading the world in software technology right now, and
that is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that
potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think
the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry --
both the system and the applications software and the potential third
sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box
sector-- is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in
the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever
think of. I personally believe that it would be in the best interest
of the country to break Microsoft up into three companies -- a
systems-software company, an applications-software company and a
consumer-software company.
Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple days,
when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the
establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is
Microsoft. And instead of Apple that will save us, it's NeXT. Do you
see parallels here, too?
Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That's not important. What's important
is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that
IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and
what Microsoft is doing today.... I think we came closer than we think
to losing some of our computer industry in the late '70s and early
'80s, and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the
healthiest thing that's happened in this industry in the last 10 years.
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.
A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden
boys of the computer revolution --
I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill very
much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the companies we
built were very different from each other.
A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft has on
the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope for is
that it will be a niche product.
Apple's a niche product, the Mac was a niche product And yet look at
what it did. Apple's, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion
when I left They're doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent
market share of the system-software business? I'd be happy now. I'd be
very happy. Then I'd go work like crazy to get 20.
You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you
founded now, what do you think?
I don't want to talk about Apple.
What about the Power-PC?
It works fine. It's a Pentium. The Power-PC and the Pentium are
equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you
measure them. They're the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That's
good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be?
No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000
architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least
equal, but it's not a compelling advantage.
You can't open the paper these days without reading about the Internet
and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?
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.
Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all over
each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think will
be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?
I've talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business, and
believe me, they have no idea what they're doing here. And the people
who are talking the loudest know the least
Who are you referring to -John Malone?
I don't want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they
have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is
going to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They
don't understand that that's a little computer that they're going to
have in the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they're
going to have to come up with some very sophisticated software.
Let's talk more about the Internet. Every month, it's growing by leaps
and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way
we live in the future?
I don't think it's too good to talk about these kinds of things. You
can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.
I'm interested in bearing your ideas.
I don't think of the world that way. I'm a tool builder. That's how I
think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my
gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is... you
can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the
direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get.
Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take
on a life of their own.
Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower
people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith
in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.
Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in
people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them
tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that
you have faith in -- tools are just tools. They work, or they don't
work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still
optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.
It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people
can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place
- The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things
that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before.
What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to
the marketplace -- not just the marketplace of commerce but the
marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace
of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small
groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded
organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue.
You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as
powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.
The second thing that we've done is the communications side of it. By
creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the
difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice.
We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to
communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies
together and start to act as if they were a virtual organization. So
I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. And I don't
think it's anywhere near over.
When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not
to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?
I don't know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal is
to seek enlightenment -- however you define it. But these are private
things. I don't want to talk about this kind of stuff.
Why?
I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it's very
important to keep a private life.
Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon
Valley?
I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It's not me. Because
otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot
writes about you -- you just can't take it too personally. But then
that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally
either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.
I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day, and they
mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a few months
ago. You didn't want to participate in that. Has it been a burden, the
pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some people have
compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work, and it's
all down hill from there.
I'm very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I'm
going to be on. Guess I'm going to have to start eating a lot of pie.
[Laughs.] I don't know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful
romance in your life that you once had -- and that produced about 10
million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll
still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you
open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell
that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you
feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.
But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you
might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you
to do something wonderful with.
But I also think that what we're now may turn out in the end to be
more profound. Because the Macintosh was the agent of change to bring
computers to the rest of us with its graphical-user interface. That
was very important. But now the industry is up against a really big
closed door. Objects are going to unlock that door. On the other side
is a world so rich from this well of software that will spring up that
the true promise of many of the things we started, even with the Apple
II, will finally start to be realized. 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.
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