Steve Jobs at the first D All Things Digital conference in 2003
Transcript
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Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Jobs.
Good luck.
You say you're on a revolution,
you never know.
Good morning.
Nice chair.
Yeah, pretty good, huh?
So first of all, thank you for coming.
Thank you for inviting me.
You're not a habituate of these conferences,
and so we really appreciate you being here.
You were there at the beginning of the digital personal computer revolution.
You and Steve Wozniak developed what was the first really successful personal computer for the mass market,
and that was 26 years ago, I think.
77.
This spring.
Apple II.
And you've stayed with it all this time in different ways, different formats.
You run the most digital movie studio there is with Pixar,
and I have to say that they have a new movie coming out in a couple of days.
But where do you think we are in the arc of this story of the PC, the Internet, the whole digital deal?
Well, the personal computer has been a pretty amazing thing in that it's morphed into these different things over the years and the decades.
So first it was a hobbyist tool, and the reason the Apple II was successful was because we saw that for every hardware hobbyist that wanted to put a hardware kit together, there were thousands of software hobbyists that didn't know how to do that, didn't have soldering irons, but wanted to mess with software.
And so we sold really the first ready-to-go personal computer.
And that's what it was for the early days.
And then Bricklin and Frankston.
Who's here.
Frankston is here.
I know.
I saw him last night.
Invented the first spreadsheet.
And that kicked off something entirely new.
And before long, the personal computer was being welcomed into business.
And the whole productivity, the age of productivity began.
And that's what really fueled a lot of the growth.
But then as the personal computer sort of saturated that particular function,
people were speaking of its plateau and even its demise in the early 90s.
The Internet came along.
And all of a sudden, the next great age of the personal computer started.
And everyone replaced their personal computers with faster ones that could run these new web browsers
and everybody got on the internet, and the industry was very healthy for a while.
And then, you know, starting early in this decade, that had plateaued,
and everyone was saying the personal computer would pass its prime.
But we feel very strongly at Apple that there's a third great age of the personal computer coming,
and it's where the personal computer becomes sort of your digital hub.
And we articulated this, you know, three years ago.
and a lot of people have said the same words since then
but hardly anybody's delivered on it
but it's slowly starting to happen
and we've tried to deliver on that as well
and people say, well, what's that mean?
And, you know, how many of you have a digital camera?
Right.
Well, you can't do anything with a digital camera
without a personal computer.
There's nothing to do with it.
I mean, you look at the pictures
on the tiny little display on the camera,
that's about it.
So your pictures are in your computer now.
Anyone under 25, their entire music library is in their personal computer.
Now it's not in CDs in some bookshelf in their living room, it's on their personal computer.
And hopefully on their iPod.
And so it's becoming the hub for your photography, your movies, your music obviously.
And it's really your, you know, it's the number one high speed connection you have to the outside world in terms of data.
in terms of data.
So I think it's starting to become integral
to our digital lifestyle.
And you think it will always remain there at the hub,
or do you think, and there's perennial talk about,
well, the television will be a hub,
or a point of contact with your digital stuff.
Things like the iPod, he makes a music player,
do you guys know that?
The iPod.
Why couldn't that have its own Wi-Fi connection
the Internet and not require you to use the computer.
Well, it can, but a personal computer, I mean, it's very basic, so it's got a really
big hard drive in it. It's got a really big display. It's got a really big keyboard, and
it's got a really fat pipe to the Internet, and it's got a reasonable processor in it
that can run really big applications. So the iPod might be great. It holds all your music,
but we see it more as a satellite device because you'd never, you couldn't really do a music
store on it as an example because the music store needs just more screen real estate and
these things fight each other.
So if you want a compact thing you can put in your pocket, unless there's a breakthrough
in foldable
displays over time or something like that, it's going to be hard to really browse a music
store and find the music you want on the iPod itself, even if it has an internet connection.
So since you've been back at Apple, it's been about, I think, what, six years?
97 you came back? Six years this 4th of July.
You've had quite a few hit products.
You've gotten lots of critical praise, not only in terms of the Mac, but the iPod also
being generally regarded as by far the best music player.
But the market share for Apple,
and there's a whole history of reasons
why Apple doesn't dominate the field,
and we won't go over that,
but the market share for Apple
has not really increased dramatically.
So why?
You're doing great products.
Actually, you're much more price competitive.
In some cases, in my research,
you're actually priced more aggressively
a Windows counterpart in some of your models?
How come you're not doubling your market share or whatever?
Well, we ask ourselves that a lot.
If you get a little surgical about it,
what you see is that the markets that we serve,
we serve many markets,
but the three primary ones are consumer, education,
and the creative professional market.
The problem that we've had is that our creative professional market,
you know, graphics houses, ad agencies, etc., etc.,
have been in the toilet for the last several years,
more so than the general market has.
And so our creative pro market's been suffering.
Secondly, education, we've made some mistakes,
and as you know, education is down the last three years.
But some of your rivals have gained ground on you in education, right?