Steve Jobs: The Fresh Air Interview (1996) | Fresh Air
Transcript
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The history of the computer would have been different if it weren't for my guest, Stephen Jobs.
He co-founded Apple Computer, the company that pioneered the user-friendly computer.
He oversaw the creation of the Macintosh. He was ousted from the company in 1985 and formed a new computer company called Next.
The computer designed by Next was a commercial failure. Now the company is creating software for the World Wide Web.
Jobs is also the head of Pixar, the computer animation company that produced Toy Story, the first computer animated feature-length film.
Jobs became a billionaire when Pixar went public in November.
I asked Jobs first about the software Next produces.
It's designed to make pages on the World Wide Web interactive.
I asked him why they're usually static now.
Well, you know, as you know, the web's a pretty miraculous thing.
and it was a very simple paradigm that was invented, which was that people could construct web pages in some arcane languages,
one called HTML, and people could then touch those pages and view them with a browser.
Now, these things are created by human beings for the most part, and they're fairly laborious to create.
Once you make one, people can view it.
so you can be viewing a web page along with a quarter million other people looking at exactly
the same page. And it's pretty miraculous how it all works and with the internet being wired
everywhere and with the navigation that's been put in with the web. You can navigate around the web
and look at all of these pages and it's stunning how good it is. However, the page you may be
looking at is the same page that everyone else is looking at if they happen to be on that website
looking at that page. There's nothing custom about it for you. So if you have any questions
you want answered, you're kind of out of luck unless the person that created that page thought
to answer your question, you know, a month ago when they created that page. So you might want to
say, you know, where is my Federal Express package? And obviously no one created a page to tell you
where the Federal Express box you sent yesterday is right now. So wouldn't it be great if you could
ask questions and those questions could get answered via a webpage built just for you?
And that's why you might want a more dynamic web page in the simplest sense.
And Federal Express did just that.
They took several months and created some computer programs,
which when you type in your package tracking number,
will go to their mainframes, find out all the data about where your package is,
get all that data, and then rather than give it to thousands of gnomes
that will create these web pages on the fly,
a computer program will build the web page on the fly
and send it off to your web browser.
And it's magic.
I mean, it was made custom just for you, telling you exactly where your package was.
And they've got about 10,000 people a day using the service instead of calling them, which is kind of cool.
Now, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
It turns out that companies, when they really want to vend information about their products or services
or they want to start doing commerce on the web, really need to start building these web pages dynamically
based on what the consumer wants.
And that is going to be the next big change in the web.
And this is what you're working on, enabling these pages to be more interactive.
Exactly. We call it WebObjects, and we announced it about three weeks ago.
We're giving away the basic version. We put it up on our website, and it runs on servers.
And I think people have already downloaded close to 10,000 copies of it for free.
So how do you think that the web might change in the near future with the help of the type of software that you are producing now?
You know, I think most large companies and medium-sized companies and even small companies
are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel,
bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer.
And that's a pretty powerful concept when you think about it.
One of the things that I love is that, you know, a very small company,
if they invest a lot in their website, can look just as formidable and just as solid on the web
as a very large company can. As a matter of fact, some of the smaller companies are more hip on the
web, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so they actually look better than some of the large
companies do right now. And it's going to be this very leveling phenomenon. But I think a tremendous
amount of goods and services is going to be sold or at least the demand created for such things
over the web. What else do you see in the near future for the web besides the ability to shop
in a more kind of complete way through the web? It's not just shopping for goods and services.
It's shopping for information. I mean, you're going to find out already, you know, when I want
to find out the movies that are playing around Silicon Valley, I just go up on the local web
page and check it out. It's a lot faster than going to the newspaper.
And a lot faster than calling the theaters, et cetera.
And more and more, we're shopping for information on the web.
I just recently bought a Sony, you know, one of the new Sony camcorders, you know.
And I basically, I went on Sony's webpage, and I found out all about the ones they offer
and picked the one I wanted right from that webpage before I even called a store, you
know, to try to find it physically.
I basically, you know, the demand to get me to buy that thing was created from Sony's
webpage.
And I think we're going to see more and more of that.
You're going to be buying information or you're finding information and really making a lot of decisions about what you're going to do with your life or what you're going to purchase from the web.
Is the whole idea of going to the store to buy software going to become obsolete too?
Do you think we'll be downloading our software from the web?
Of course.
Yeah, there's no question about it.
It's just – there's no question that that will happen and I think it will happen in the next 24 months.
There's some software right now that's still very large.
and the web on-ramps and off-ramps to corporations are now very fast,
but the off-ramps to the consumer's homes are still not so fast.
And so for buying large software such as CD-ROM games and stuff,
they'll still be distributed on physical media for a while.
But when the off-ramps to the consumer get faster,
possibly with cable modems in the near future,
then that could possibly go fully electronic as well.
So tell me what else you see for the web beyond the world of retail.
Yeah, it's not – there's a lot of things happening with the web right now in terms of allowing people access to information that they would just never have before.
And what this does is, of course, it lets special interest groups get together.
So, you know, you have, I know people who have had, as an example, a stroke and have gotten on the web and found that there are several web pages now devoted to information for stroke victims where they can learn about, you know, some of the latest treatments.
They can learn about avoidance, you know, the latest in avoidance advice and things like that.
And those things didn't exist before as well.
Steve Jobs is my guest.
You started off in the business of designing computers.
When did you start thinking that the future wasn't in building the individual computers,
but rather in the computer network?
Because after all, what you're doing now is designing software for the web.
You know, I had sort of a landmark visit to Xerox PARC in 1979, that's Palo Alto Research Center,
where they invented a lot of the cornerstones of the modern graphical user interface.
And actually, they showed me what they were doing in 1979.
And actually, they'd done three things.
The first was the brilliant work they had done on graphical user interfaces.
And the second was networking.
They had over 100 of their computers at that time networked in a fully electronic environment using email routinely.
And the third thing that they'd done was object-oriented programming.
They'd invented Smalltalk and other object-oriented languages as well.
And I was so blinded by the brilliance of the first, the graphical user interface, that I didn't even see the other two in 1979.
And so when we went to make the Macintosh, it really completed the job that they had started on the graphical user interface,
but really did not address object-oriented technology, nor did it address networking.
Let's define our terms, the graphic user interface.
You're talking about, like, icons on the computer?
Yeah, you know, using plain English in menus, icons, drag and drop, all of that stuff.
And the objects that you're talking about.
Object-oriented programming is a technology that is sort of like it brings to software what the industrial revolution brought to the production of hard goods, which is reusable parts.
The way software is built today is the same way it was built when it was invented, if you will, 50 years ago.
Everything is custom.
And what object-oriented technology lets you do is start to build software in a much more modern way with reusable components.
and you end up being able to build software about 10 times faster.
And it's slowly starting to seep into the software culture,
and I think it's an unstoppable trend.
And this is what you're in the business of now?