Steve Jobs lost interview highly recommended by entrepreneurs
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
A few questions.
Is this out of the picture if I put it here?
Great.
What we're hoping to do in this whole series is look at this technology.
Why is a computer so interesting?
So I'm going to start that way.
What's different about this machine?
One quick request.
And that is don't throw your fingers in front of that mic.
Because that's the one picking you up.
Alright, you're on.
By the way, the next time when you do an interview at the factory, that place that we found, probably the best location.
We found a way to boost you up enough so you're over the rail and you can see the two-armed robot.
Yeah, great.
It's a nice shot.
We have speed?
Speed.
Okay.
What is it about this machine?
Why is this machine so interesting?
Why has it been so influential?
I'll give you my point of view on it.
I remember reading a magazine article a long time ago
when I was 12 years old maybe.
I think it was Scientific American, I'm not sure.
And the article proposed to measure the efficiency of locomotion
for lots of species on planet Earth
to see which species was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B.
And they measured the kilocalories that each one expended.
So they ranked them all.
And I remember that the condor won.
The condor was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B.
And humankind, the crown of creation, came in with a rather unimpressive showing
about a third of the way down the list.
So that didn't look so great.
But let me do this over again because I'm just sure I can say this better.
I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been Scientific American,
where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth.
How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B?
And the condor one came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else,
and humans came in about a third of the way down the list,
which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.
But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle.
A human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list.
And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders
and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.
And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
And I think we're just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages, and we've come only a very short distance.
And it's still in its formation, but already we've seen enormous changes.
I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years.
in program 6 we're going to look at some of the past predictions of why people have been so wrong
about the future and one of the notions is that today's vision of a stand-alone computer is just
as limited as those past visions of it being only a number cruncher what's the difference
philosophically between a network machine and a stand-alone machine let me answer that question
in a slightly different way.
There have been, if you look at why the majority of people
have bought these things so far,
there have been two real explosions
that have propelled the industry forward.
The first one really happened in 1977,
and it was the spreadsheet.
I remember when Dan Feilstra,
who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet,
walked into my office at Apple one day
and pulled out this disc from his vest pocket and said,
I have this incredible new program.
I call it a visual calculator, and it became VisiCalc.
And that's what really propelled the Apple II to the success it achieved,
more than any other single event.
And with the invention of Lotus 1-2-3, and I think it was 1982,
that's what really propelled the IBM PC to the level of success that it achieved.
So that was the first explosion was the spreadsheet.
The second major explosion that's driven the desktop industry has been desktop publishing.
Excuse me.
We just lost a light.
Check the, get a break.
Chris.
Yeah, control, Michael.
When is this going to be broadcast?
Next year sometime?
Yeah, for all of anyone.
Co-production of the BBC.
Actually, one part is going to be interesting.
I'm going to answer you at the end.
We're going to dramatize the future.
What we guess our future is.
Because we've got a dramatic budget in England.
Whatever our guess is, it's going to be wrong.
At least we want to give people a vision of where things are heading.
So can I just start off with the second one?
Sure.
The second really big explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing.
Happened in 1985 with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter printer.
And at that point, people could start to do on their desktops things that only typesetters
and printers could do prior to that.
And that's been a very big revolution in publishing.
And those are really, those two explosions have been the only two real major revolutions
which have caused a lot of people to buy these things and use them.
The third one is starting to happen now.
And the third one is, let's do for human-to-human communication
what spreadsheets did for financial planning
and what desktop publishing did for publishing.
Let's revolutionize it using these desktop devices.
And we're already starting to see the signs of that.
As an example, in an organization,
we're starting to see that as business conditions change faster and faster with each year
we cannot change our management hierarchical organization very fast relative to the changing
business conditions we can't have somebody working for a new boss every week we also can't change our
geographic organization very fast matter of fact even slower than the management one we can't be
moving people around the country every week.
But we can change an electronic organization like that.
And what's starting to happen is, as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated
networks and great user interfaces, we're starting to be able to create clusters of
people working on a common task, literally in 15 minutes worth of setup.
And these 15 people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are, geographically,
no matter who they work for hierarchically.
And these organizations can live for as long as they're needed
and then vanish.
And we're finding we can reorganize our companies
electronically very rapidly.