Steve Jobs in 2010, at D8 Conference (Full Video)
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Without further ado, let's bring out the Steve I think you all are here to see.
Steve Jobs.
I wasn't alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find.
Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind.
We are glad you're here.
I like the Beatles.
Do you like that?
Yeah.
I don't know.
We heard you like them.
We can pick between Dylan and the Beatles.
But just to begin, we want to say, both Walt and I want to say,
professionally and personally, we are thrilled you're here.
Thank you.
After all this time.
I am too.
Yeah.
I can imagine.
Thanks for being here.
So we're going to start off with kind of an easy one.
Just this week, you surpassed Microsoft in market valuation,
and we thought you might have a thought or two about that.
For those of us that have been in the industry a long time, it's surreal.
But it doesn't matter very much.
It's not what's important.
It's not what makes you come to work in the morning.
It's not why any of our customers buy our products.
So I think it's good for us to keep that in mind
to just remember what we're doing and why we're doing it.
But I have to, I just have to ask.
But it is a little surreal.
It is a little surreal.
And I remember talking to you right when you were coming back to Apple.
We talked a number of times.
And if I remember correctly, the company was sort of on its way to oblivion.
Oh, it was on the rocks, yeah.
So could you ever have imagined something like this?
Even though I know market cap isn't why people buy our products or anything.
It's just like, what did it feel like when it happened?
Well, Apple was about 90 days away from going bankrupt back then in the early days.
And it was much worse than I thought when I went back initially.
But there were people there who I'd expected all the good people would have left.
And I found these miraculous people, these great people.
And I said, why?
I tried to ask this as tactfully as I could.
but why are you still here?
And, you know, a lot of them had this little phrase.
They said, because I bleed in six colors,
which was the old six-color Apple logo.
And that was code for,
because I love what this place stands for,
or at least stood for.
And that just made all of us want to work that much harder
to have it survive and have those values survive and bring it back.
So we want to spend most of this session talking about your thoughts from your really interesting
position because you know the conference is sort of about the juncture of technology and
media and you're sitting there right at that juncture in a lot of ways.
We want to spend most of the session talking about where you think things are going in
the future.
but there have been some controversies lately that we want to ask you about.
And I guess I'd start with Flash and your sort of war with Adobe.
So you published a long, open letter, something like, what did you call it,
Thoughts on Flash or something like that?
So you've clearly stated your case there.
But even if, here's my question, even if everything you say in there is true
about its inferiorities of technology
and other things being available to replace it
and already replacing it.
Is it really fair or the best thing for consumers
who buy, say, an iPad or an iPhone to just be abrupt?
In other words, if we're in a transition
where there are better things than Flash,
why be abrupt and cut off consumers?
Well, two things.
Number one, I'll come back in a minute
to what really happened there
because what you said isn't exactly chronologically correct.
But Apple is a company that doesn't have the most resources of everybody in the world.
And the way we've succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride really carefully, technically.
We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future and that are headed up.
And, you know, technology, different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles.
They have their springs and summers and autumns,
and then they, you know, go to the graveyard of technology.
And so we try to pick things that are in their springs.
And if you choose wisely...
you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything.
And you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform,
rather than just okay because you're spreading yourself too thin.
So we have a history of doing that.
As an example, we went from the 5-inch floppy disk to the 3-1⁄2-inch floppy disk with the Mac.
Before other people, right?
We were the first to do that.
We made the 3.5-inch floppy disk popular.
Sony invented it, and we put it in the first products.
And there were some good reasons we did that.
We got rid of the floppy disk altogether in 1998 with the first iMac.
We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel ports.
And we were the first to adopt USB, even though Intel had invented it.
You first saw it in mass on iMacs.
And so we have gotten rid of things.
We were one of the first to get rid of optical drives with the MacBook Air.
And I think things are moving in that direction as well.
And sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac, people call us crazy.
Or at least premature, maybe.
No, they call us crazy.
Oh, okay.
And, and, and, but sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they're going to be the right horses to ride going forward.
And, and Flash looks like a technology that had its day, but is really on, is waning.
And HTML5 looks like the technology that's really on the ascendancy right now.
and to incorporate flash into systems is a lot of work.
There's no smartphone shipping with flash on it now, as you know.
But you know that there will be, right?
Well, you know, there's going to have been for the last two or three years,
and every six months it gets updated.
So I'm sure that eventually they will,
and there's a lot of issues with that in terms of battery life
and, you know, security and other things.
But more importantly, HTML5 is starting to emerge.
You know, there's been an avalanche of people that have said, we're doing HTML5 video.
And the video looks better, and it works better, and you don't need a plug-in to run it.