🔮 Steve Jobs Lost Interview 1990

My notes for this interview.

Computer is the bicycle of the mind

Human with a a bicycle beats the most efficiently moving animal, the condor.

Computer industry's major revolution is to make them more consumer friendly.

1. First big innovation for computers was the spreadsheets
2. Second big innovation was desktop publishing
3. Third is Human to human communication and group work i.e. inter personal computing

As we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great UIs, we're starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task within minutes...We can organize our companies electronically.

At Apple we saw that automation reduced time to market and increased quality. To compete we had to be world-class manufacturers.

Higher education and universities have been the biggest and earlist adopters of the cutting edge in computing.

Microprocessor creators didn't think of a computer, they thought of a calculator. Computer hobbyist were the ones who did it first. Intel didn't quite understand that for a few years. People formed clubs where they shared and discussed their latest computer projects, Homebrew Computer Club in Stanford was the first of its kind.

The UI interface is essential. Your product should just get used, without learning. The Macintosh was a computer for people who want to use a computer not learn how to use it.

The old people want to know how it does what it does but the young people just want to know what it can do.

The advent of the automobile gave us personal freedom of transportation. In the same way, the advent of the PC gave us the ability to do computation permissionlesly.

The largest problems are now that we have these powerful tools but we're still disconnected islands. The next revolution is to connect these things together.

The height to which apps can soar is enabled or limited by the computation platforms.

The networking revolution is larger than any that came before it.

Happily dogfeeding your own product is a proof of its usefulness and potential. Next employees had their Next machines on every desk.

If my computer doesn't work in a completely standalone way, I won't be happy. Our goal is a seamless transition between a networked computer and a standalone computer.

The network will ultimately create the personal computer market. Not be a place to store our recipes, like we thought in 1975. Being a part of that network and not being able to stay away from it while you're at home, will drive people to get a computer in every house, just how we have a telephone in every house.

What about tvs, radios, stereos? I think there will be just multi-media computers, with capabilities of these devices.

A computer is means to an end. The end goal is better productivity and a more connected world.

The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker / doer in one person. If we go back and we examine someone like Da Vinci, he was both a thinker (inventing and creating) but he also mixed his paints, cleaned his brushes, painted his paintings.

It's very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. When you look into, the people that did it are the people that also really did the hard intellectual problems as well.

Death is probably the best invention of life because it means there's a constant turnover.

If you want to make a change in our society, the best place to do it is in the educational system. There're now generations of people to whom computers are second nature now. A hallmark of adoption is to what extent the young people are excited about this and want to use it.

The big expansion from hardware hobbyist was including the software hobbyist, by providing integrated computers that don't require you to buy extra hardware.

Market research can tell you something about what your customers think about something you show them. It can tell you what your customers want as an incremental improvement to what you have. But very rarely can your customers predict something they don't know that they want yet.

No market research could've lead to the development of the personal computer. It's very difficult for market research to have influence in the early phases of innovation. However, once you got the ball rolling (pre or post product laungh) is a good time to check with the market and verify your assumptions.