TV Interview
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
He began tinkering with electronics as a child, and did most of his early work on this bench in his parents' garage.
By the time he was 20, the first Apple Computer emerged.
And in 1976, when he was barely 21, Jobs co-founded Apple Computer Incorporated, with his high school buddy, Steve Wozniak.
Apple grew quickly, attracting a loyal following among early personal computer enthusiasts.
On the day Apple went public in 1980, the 15% share held by Jobs, then just 25, was valued at $217 million.
And some ordinary investors did well, too.
If you were smart or lucky enough to invest $10,000 in Apple Computer at its low in August 1985,
your stock would have been worth more than 10 times that less than six years later.
Even if you didn't know a bit about bytes.
Jobs was center stage when he unveiled the highly successful Macintosh computer in 1984.
I'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself.
Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.
But by 1985, Jobs' relationship with Apple had turned sour.
And he resigned to run not one, but two other businesses.
The first he called Next, a company he built around an ambitious new personal computer that was released with much fanfare in 1988.
But sales were less spectacular, and the sophisticated but expensive black box never caught on.
The project was abandoned and Next, still privately held, moved on to developing a new software writing technique that some technology buffs believe will eventually turn the internet into an indispensable tool for doing online business.
While Next was evolving, Jobs was careful to diversify.
He quietly invested 50 million of his own dollars in Pixar,
a computer animation company in Richmond, California,
that he had purchased from film producer George Lucas in 1986 for 10 million.
Jobs' Pixar employees, including former Disney animator John Lasseter,
spent most of the next decade developing new 3D animation software,
which they fine-tune by producing some memorable television commercials
and short animated films.
This one, entitled Tin Toy, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1988.
Through all that computer-generated fun,
Pixar developed the ability to take crafted models
and reliably turn them into dynamic three-dimensional computer images.
20 million Americans bought tickets to see the result last year
when Disney released Pixar's first feature-length computer-animated film,
Toy Story, a blockbuster hit that has taken in more than $175 million
in domestic box office alone.
To infinity and beyond!
And in what was perhaps the best-timed initial public offering in modern memory,
Pixar made its market debut last November,
just as Toy Story publicity generated by Disney was at its peak.
When the stock soared close to $50 a share on the first day of trading,
Steve Jobs' stake was briefly worth just under $1.5 billion.
$1,000.
Not bad for an entrepreneur who began by tinkering in his parents' garage and is
still barely old enough for a midlife crisis.
What do you say I get someone else to watch the sheep tonight?
Hell yeah!
Pixar's stock has tumbled since then.
Even after gaining nearly two points today, it is still only 24 and a quarter, less than
half where it traded on that giddy first day.
Is that initial excitement all just a fictitious, if thrilling, children's story?
Or is the next chapter for Steve Jobs likely to be his gaudiest?
What should we expect next from Pixar?
Well, you know, Toy Story has really exceeded our expectations.
It's about 180 million right now, I think, at the domestic box office.
It's being released internationally as we speak.
And we're coming out with some CD-ROMs based on Toy Story starting in April.
They're dynamite.
pretty much set a new benchmark for what can be done with CD-ROMs.
Home video was expected later on this year,
and we're well at work on our second film.
We're about a year into development on it.
So I think we have a business model,
which is that we make feature films
and surround them with a suite of related...
products.
In addition to merchandise and home video, there's CD-ROMs and potentially, you know,
sequels at some point in time.
You first came to public attention with Apple.
In recent weeks, it's been one of the failure stories of Wall Street and indeed of the
American economy.
What went wrong in Apple?
Oh, gosh.
You know, Apple, I haven't been there in a long time, but my perception is...
We won't blame you for what's happened in the last ten years.
No, I mean, my perception may not be complete.
But from the way I see it, I mean, Apple is a company that was based on innovation.
When I left Apple 10 years ago, we were 10 years ahead of anybody else.
It took Microsoft 10 years to copy Windows.
The problem was is that Apple stood still.
Even though it invested cumulatively billions in R&D, the output has not been there.
And people have caught up with it, and its differentiation has eroded,
in particular with respect to Microsoft.
And so the way out for Apple,
and I still think Apple has a future.
There's some awfully good people there,
and there's a tremendous brand loyalty to that company.
I think the way out is not to slash and burn.
It's to innovate.
That's how Apple got to its glory,
and I think that's how Apple could return to it.
Next, which is your private venture,
specializes in what's called object-based software.
Could you explain that to someone who's not a computer nerd?
Sure.
The way that most people still build software today, everything's custom, really.
Everything's built by hand and everything's custom.
There's no ability to reuse software that you had written prior or that somebody else had written.
And objects are a way to basically allow people to reuse software an order of magnitude or two more efficiently than they can today.
It's sort of the industrial revolution of software.
Is this, on a grander scale, the equivalent of calling up a macro on the computer?
It's even much beyond that.
It's sort of interchangeable parts,
much like the Industrial Revolution brought to the manufacturing of hard goods.
You have talked about Apple somewhat gently.
You've also mentioned Microsoft.
Much of your current efforts seem directed at constraining Microsoft.
Is that accurate?
Me?
No.
Well, I've read some of these computer-nered publications lately,
and it seems to me that the fight for the Internet you envision as anybody but Bill Gates.
Well, I think there's a lot of people working on stuff for the Internet, and Next is one of those companies as well.
And for me, the most exciting thing, you know, in the software area is the Internet, and part of the reason for that is no one owns it.
It's a free-for-all. It's much like the early days of the personal computer, and the rate of innovation is very high.
And we know from experience now that if any one company gets a dominant position in it, no matter who that is, the rate of innovation is going to drop precipitously.
And we'd like to not see that happen forever, or at least for quite some time.
I assume as a good entrepreneur you want the market to limit him, not the government. Is that correct?
Yeah, I don't get into that so much.
I think I admire Microsoft for their achievements.
And I think, though, that the net may be something that is,
you know, we're going to see innovation contain them.
And I'm hoping that's the case.