Steve Jobs - Macworld 1997 (The return to Apple)
Transcript
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Well, good morning.
I'm Colin Crawford.
I'm the President and CEO of Mac Publications.
This is an exciting, newly formed joint venture
between Ziff Davis and IDG,
which is now responsible for publishing Mac Week and Mac World.
And I'd like to welcome you all on behalf of the sponsors
to Boston and MacWare Expo.
You know, more than any other computer company,
Apple continues to attract a great deal of media attention,
and today is no exception.
For me, and I expect for many of you,
the last year in the Mac market
has felt like being a bit on an emotional roller coaster.
You know, highs of optimism
followed by a trough of near despair
as Apple wrestled with its turnaround strategy.
Jubilation as Apple improved and rationalised its product line
and made progress with its OS strategies,
and then concern as negotiations with the licensees appeared to stall.
But for all the followers of the Apple market,
nearly every possible solution for Apple has been analysed and dissected.
there's certainly no shortage of pundits to give advice.
Gilanilio, Apple's former CEO, once remarked to me his frustration with media coverage.
My response was that Apple would be facing an even bigger problem if the media stopped caring.
Despite all the issues and problems of the past couple of years, the passion and loyalty remain.
People want the Apple Macintosh market to be successful and return to a state of sustained profitability and growth.
Today, I go spare you my solutions for Apple, though having been in this market for over a decade, I've certainly some strong views.
it's much more important that we all hear a vision for the Macintosh platform from Apple and other senior executives in the industry.
What are future plans for hardware and software?
What will persuade independent software and hardware vendors that the Apple market represents a solid business opportunity?
I want to leave Macworld Expo at the end of the week with evidence that the Macintosh platform is still one of the most exciting segments of the computer industry.
I want my belief reinforced that the Macintosh platform is not just relevant in today's marketplace
but the leading age of technology.
To start us off in the right direction is an individual who really needs little introduction.
Thank you.
After all, after all, Steve Jobs has been around since his very first Macintosh.
So please join with me now and welcome from Apple Computer, Steve Jobs.
Thank you very much for that warm welcome.
Now I guess I'm going to have to give a speech.
I came today to give you a status report on what's going on and to try to fill you in
on some of the steps we're taking to get Apple healthy again.
As you know, I'm the chairman and CEO of a company called Pixar.
Thank you.
And I, like a lot of other people, are pulling together to help Apple get healthy again.
And I am extraordinarily confident that that is going to happen.
Now, when I started to get involved, a lot of people gave me advice.
And some of the advice that was the most popular was, Apple has become irrelevant.
There was a great one that was, Apple can't execute anything.
And another one was, the Apple culture is anarchy.
You can't, no one could manage it.
You've read all these things in the press.
And after four weeks, here's what I found.
Quite the opposite of these things, actually.
Apple's not relevant, as relevant as it used to be everywhere, but in some incredibly important market segments, it's extraordinarily relevant.
And I want to share some of that with you today.
Apple is executing wonderfully on many of the wrong things.
The ability of the organization to execute is really high, though.
I mean, I've met some extraordinary people at Apple.
There's a lot of great people at Apple.
They're doing some of the wrong things because the plan has been wrong.
And lastly, what I found is rather than anarchy, I found people that can't wait to fall into line behind a good strategy.
There just hasn't been one.
What I see is the makings of a very healthy company with some extraordinarily talented
people who are still just as passionate and committed to the dream of computing as they
ever were that need to come together and get a great plan and then start to execute it.
That's exactly what's been happening over the last four weeks.
Now what's the fundamental problem?
I think the fundamental problem is a little more subtle.
I think this is a symptom, but in a nutshell, whoops, excuse me, in a nutshell, that's it.
Right?
Apple's sales in 1995 were 11.1 billion.
In 96, they were 9.5 billion, and in this year, they'll be, you know, 7 billion plus
or minus a little bit.
That's the problem, or the symptom, depending on how you look at it.
And that needs to be stabilized and turned around, and people are working very hard to
do that.
So what are some beginning steps that we're going to take?
One of the first ones has to be to start at the top.
Apple has done a lot of change at the bottom, and I think this change needs to start at
the top with the board of directors.
Focus on relevance.
Apple needs to find where it is still incredibly relevant and focus on those areas.
It needs to figure out what its core assets are and invest more in them.
Apple has neglected its core assets for a while.
It has to forge some meaningful partnerships,
not just partnerships and press releases.
And it needs to define some
product paradigms. We've got some great ideas. I'm not going to be talking about products
today though. I just want to let you know that we have some wonderful ideas that you'll
be hearing about between now and the end of the year. So let's talk about some of these.
Board of Directors. Apple had a very decent group of people as the board of directors.
They worked very, very hard for Apple. But I think with Apple in the situation it finds
itself it was time for a change and the directors agreed with that. We have put together a new board
of directors that I would like to announce to you today. There are two members of the prior board
that we are extremely pleased are going to stay on the new board. The first of those is Ed Woolard.
Ed is the chairman and former CEO of DuPont.
I've gotten to know Ed over the last several weeks, and I think he's terrific and has provided
a tremendous amount of leadership during this very critical time for Apple.
Next is Gareth Chang.
Gareth is the president of Hughes International.
Again, he's been on the Apple board for a short while, and Gareth brings a tremendous
international experience to Apple, in particular in Asia, which is a very important market,
in a high growth market for Apple.
And then we're gonna add four new board members.
The rest of the prior board has resigned.
And we're gonna add...
We're gonna add four new board members
to carry the company forward.
The first is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle.
I hope that wasn't a boo I'm hearing.
Larry started Oracle in his garage about a year after we started Apple.
It's grown to be the second largest software company in the world.
We would like to do a lot more in terms of software,
and we thought having some software industry expertise would be a good idea on the board.
Second board member, Jerry York, former CFO of IBM and Chrysler.