Steve Jobs: The Fresh Air Interview (1996) | Fresh Air

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 Lane 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 ones 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 um people can view it so you can be viewing a web page along with uh you know 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 it's stunning how 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 um where's 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 web page 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 you know rather than give it to you know 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 it's magic I mean it was made custom just for you telling you exactly where your package was and they've got about you know 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 uh companies when they really want to vend you know 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 you know 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 exactly these pages to be more interactive exactly we call it web objects 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 we've already uh down I think people have already downloaded close to 10 000 copies of it for free

so how do you think that um uh the web might change in the near future with the help of the the type of software that you are producing now um 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 you know 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 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 to shop in a more kind of complete way through the web um 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 webpage and check it out it's a lot faster than going to the theater going to the newspaper and um a lot faster than calling the theaters Etc

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 web page and I found out all about the ones they offer and pick the one I wanted right from that web page 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 web page and I think we're going to see more and more

of that you're going to be buying information or you know 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 it's 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 a it's just it just there's no question that that will happen and I think it'll 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 the the off-ramps to the consumers 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 medium media for a while but when the the uh the off-ramps to the consumer get faster possibly with cable modems in the near future um then that could could possibly go fully electronic as well what else you see for the for the web beyond the world of retail

yeah it's not um 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 it lets special interest groups get together so you know you have I I know people who 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 so they can learn

about avoidance uh you know the latest in avoidance uh advice and things like that and 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 what you're doing now is is designing software for the web you know um I had sort of a landmark visit to Xerox Park in 1979 that's Palo Alto Research Center where they invented uh a lot of the the

cornerstones of the modern graphical user interface and actually they showed me what they were doing in 1979 and actually they've done three things the first was the the brilliant work they had done on graphical user interfaces and the second was networking they had over a hundred of their computers at at that time networked in a fully electronic environment using email routinely and the third thing that they done was object-oriented programming they had invented small talk and other object-oriented languages as well and I was so blinded by the the the Brilliance of the first the the

graphical user interface that I didn't even see the other two in 1979 and so when we went to make the Macintosh um 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 of graphic user interface you're talking about like icons on the computer uh yeah you know using plain English in menus icons drag and drop all of that stuff and and the objects that you're talking about object-oriented programming is a technology that is sort of like

um 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 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 with 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 it's slowly starting to seep into the software culture uh and I think it's a it

you know it's an Unstoppable Trend and this is what you're in the business of now uh what next does is next works on object-oriented software and it's just launched a bunch of web products which incorporate object-oriented software bringing that technology to the web as well now when you started next your goal was to make a a new a new kind of computer but that computer failed on the market did that's right did that failure help lead you in the direction of working more toward the web toward web oriented software um you know when we started

next we I I guess have to take credit for this uh made a mistake that I've I don't think is terribly uncommon which is you you leave something where you were pretty successful and the next thing you do you try to copy a lot of the paradigms of success that worked the last time and uh don't realize that the world is changing from underneath your feet that's what we did at next we made a really great computer but the world had changed enough to where the door to establish a new hardware company really had closed

even before we started the company we just didn't know that at the time fortunately the software that we built for this this computer was so far ahead of its time that even after we exited the hardware business and became a software company we were still five years ahead of anybody else and so as next became a software company um we really had something that a lot of people wanted Stephen Jobs we'll talk more after a break this is fresh air Steven Jobs is my guest co-founder of Apple computer now the chairman of next computer incorporated

and also the head of Pixar Studios which made Toy Story what was the very first computer you had um I was very lucky I I was born in San Francisco and I grew up in Silicon Valley and I was able to go to NASA Ames Research Center nearby and play with a time sharing computer which was a you know a loud mechanical terminal hooked up with a wire somewhere and there was supposedly a computer on the other end of it and I got a chance to you know program in Fortran and and basic and uh

those are the computer languages of the time the computer languages at the time and I was I was captured by it and how did you get into the computer business what made you think I've got a this is going to be my life um well I I met uh I met my future partner in apple Steve Wozniak when I was about uh I guess about 13 years old and um he was the first person I'd met that knew more about electronics and computers than I did at the time and we became fast friends and started

to build electronic devices together we built blue boxes together for a while which were little devices that could allow you to make free phone calls everywhere illegally I might add and oh so you were a hacker uh yeah yeah we had we built the first digital blue box in the whole world it was wonderful we had a little our tagline which we put a little card in the bottom of each one was He's Got The Whole World in His Hands and uh the reason we we built a computer uh was that we wanted one and

we couldn't afford one we couldn't afford to buy one there were thousands of you know thousands of dollars at that time we were just two two teenagers and uh so we started trying to build them and uh you know scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could and after a few attempts we managed to uh to put together something that was uh the Apple One and all of our friends wanted them too they wanted to build them so it turned out that it took maybe 50 hours to build one of these things by hand and

it was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not not that skilled at building them so Waz and I were building them for them and we thought you know if if we could just get what's called a printed circuit board where you could kind of just plug in the parts instead of having to hand wire the whole thing we could cut the assembly time down from you know maybe 50 hours to more like you know an hour and so was sold as HP calculator and I sold my VW Microbus and we

got enough money together to pay someone to design one of these printed circuit boards for us and our goal was to just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our friends and make enough money to recoup our calculator and transportation and what happened was that one of the early computers matter of fact the first computer store in the world which was in Mountain View at the time said well I'll take I'll take 50 of these computers but I want them fully assembled which was a Twist that we'd never thought of so we we went

and bought the parts to build a hundred computers and we built 50 of them and delivered them um and then we got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts for the parts and we had then we had the classic marxian profit realization crisis which was our profit wasn't liquid it was in 50 computers sitting on the floor so we decided we had to to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the 50 computers and get back our money and that's how we got into business

and we we took we took our idea to to a few companies one where was worked and one where I worked at the time and and uh and neither one was interested in pursuing it so we we started our own company you you led the team that uh created the Macintosh and um from what I've read it sounds like you were really the advocate for having a mouse on the Mac why did you push for that and what was the argument against it um well as I mentioned earlier I went to Xerox Park uh Palo

Alto Research Center in 1979 and I saw the early work on graphical user interfaces that they had done and they had a mouse and uh it was obvious that that you needed a pointing device and a mouse seemed to be the best one we tried a bunch of other ones subsequently at apple and a mouse indeed was the best one we refined it a little bit we found that you know Xerox has had three buttons we found that people would push the wrong button or be scared that they were going to push the wrong button

so they always looked at the mouse instead of the screen so we got it down to one button so that you could never push the wrong button made some refinements like that um the Xerox you know mouse cost about a thousand dollars a piece to build we had to engineer one that cost 20 bucks to build so we had to do a lot of those kinds of things but the basic concept of the mouse came originally from a company called SRI through Xerox and then to Apple and there were a lot of people at Apple

that just didn't get it we had we fought tooth and nail with a variety of people there who thought the whole concept of a graphical user interface was crazy but uh on the grounds that it either couldn't be done or on the grounds that uh real computer users didn't need you know menus in plain English and real computer users didn't care about you know putting nice little pictures on the screen um but fortunately I was the largest stockholder in the chairman of the company so I won Steve Jobs is my guess the co-founder of Apple

computer now the head of next computer incorporated and also the head of Pixar Studios which made Toy Story um I think that when you were ousted from Apple that people kind of wrote you off I mean here you are with these big successes now oh golly I don't know um I'm sure that a lot of people did and and that was fine uh it was a very painful time as you might imagine so to be forced out of the company you created of course yeah it was a very painful time and um but you know

you just March forward and you try to learn from it and one of the things I always I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail you know when you have something that doesn't work out a lot of times people's reaction is to to get very protective about ever wanting to fall on their face again and I think that's that that's a big mistake because you never you never achieve what you what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there so I've tried to

not be afraid to fail and matter of fact I failed quite a bit quite a bit since leaving Apple are you surprised at the problems apple is happening is having now or did you see that coming um you know I try not to talk about Apple too much but what I will say is that that uh you know the day I left Apple we had a 10-year lead over Microsoft and in the technology business a 10-year lead is really hard to come by it happens you know maybe a company has that once every few decades

whether it be a Xerox or an IBM with mainframes uh Apple had that with the graphical user interface and the problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating you know if you look at the Mac that ships today it's 25 different than the day I left and that's not enough for 10 years and and billions of dollars in r d and it wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac it's that the Mac was a Sitting Duck for 10 years and that's Apple's problem is that their differentiation evaporated and unlike unlike

a Compaq or others who play in the in the Intel Microsoft standard space where they only compact only has to be five percent better than its competitors for everyone to want to buy their computers Apple has to be 50 or 100 percent better because when you buy something that is is you know out of the mainstream a little bit you take a risk and you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk and unfortunately that that differentiation has not completely evaporated but for the most part it has and that's the predicament Apple's in now

and that's why you know cost cutting and other things that Apple are not going to be the Cure the cure for apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament and there's a lot of good people left at Apple that that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership so this is what's been missing some mac users are afraid that the the Mac operating system is in danger of becoming obsolete in the way that beta video became obsolete because it was it was outdone by uh by VHS um what do you think

you know I think with the appropriate leadership at Apple that's not going to happen but I think you know we're gonna have to wait and see do you care I mean how how how how still involved and vested do you feel in the future of Apple the company you co-created um I'm happy every time a Mac gets shipped I still have people you know sending me emails telling me how much they love their Max um and it's sort of how do you explain it it's it's it's like the first uh person you're ever in love

with you know it's like your first love and there will never be another one like it um you know and in my case you know we we uh we were together for 10 years and that's a long time but you know if you move on in your life uh you know you can't always stay in love with your first girlfriend right so do you think that Apple would have been better off if it licensed this operating system to other companies which which it didn't do and it's been criticized for yeah until recently with Motorola yeah

you don't know who knows okay I have no idea Steven Jobs co-founded Apple computer he's now the head of the software company NeXT and he's the president of Pixar the computer animation company that produced Toy Story he'll be back in the second half of the show I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air what do you think the state of the computer would be if it weren't for Apple this is a chance I guess for really self-serving answer but I mean I'm really curious what you think I usually believe that if you know if if

one group of people didn't do something uh within a certain number of years the times would produce another group of people that would accomplish similar things we happen to be at the right place exactly the right time with the right group of people and we did some wonderful work I'm extraordinarily proud of the work that the team at Apple did when I was there and I think that personally our major contribution was was a little different than some people might think um I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view

to uh the use of computers yeah explain what you mean by that what I mean by that is that you know if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh the the driving motivation behind that was to bring uh not only ease of use to people so that many many more people could use computers for non-traditional things at that time but it was to bring you know beautiful fonts and typography to people it was to bring Graphics to people not for you know plotting uh laminar flow calculations but so that they could

see beautiful you know photographs or pictures or artwork uh Etc to help them communicate what they were doing potentially our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what it had traditionally been uh you know a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience what made you think that that more liberal arts Direction was the direction to head in because in my perspective and the way I was raised was that um that that science and and computer science is a liberal art it's something that everyone should know how to

use at least and harness uh in their life it's not something that should be you know should be relegated to uh to five percent of the population over in the corner it's something that everybody should be exposed to everybody should should have a Mastery of to some extent and um that's how we viewed you know computation or these computation devices and you think that you know that that concept really caught on in the whole industry um eventually you know it's in the Pro it's Apple certainly that that's the seed of Apple um you know computers

for the rest of us and I I think the the sort of the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple I'm not so sure that it lives that many other places I mean one of the reasons I think Microsoft took 10 years to copy the Mac was because they didn't really get it at its core do you think the PC as we know it is on the verge of changing that's a really big question um I think the PC as we know it's going to be around for quite some time but but the

the heart of the question is are we entering a Time window where we might see the first successful post PC devices uh you know personal digital assistants or pdas uh attempted to be that and failed and the next attempt is going to be I think these very low-cost consumer internet appliances which is can you know can somebody make a 300 box that hooks up to your television on one side and maybe hooks up to ISDN or a cable modem on the other side and allows you you know for three hundred dollars to have a web

browser on your TV and to access the entire internet and I think that's entirely possible and I think that uh we're going to see those devices soon and hopefully some some Innovative marketing and distribution techniques surrounding those devices so that you know a lot of people can all of a sudden have an internet browser in their living room and I think that's going to be very exciting and I think that could be the beginning of the first real post PC market I know at Apple there was a at least early on a very informal you

know non-corporate type of atmosphere I wonder if there are any lessons you learned about what worked and didn't work in the corporate lifestyle at Apple that you've applied to your current companies next and Pixar well you know I don't know what a corporate lifestyle is I mean Apple was a was a corporation we were very conscious of that we were very driven to make money so that we can continue to invest in the things we loved I I would say apple was a corporate lifestyle but it had a few very big differences to other corporate

Lifestyles that I'd seen the first one was uh a real belief that um that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped into the hierarchy of the organization in other words great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense in terms of where the ideas came from and apple was a very Bottoms Up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas um and we hired you know truly great people and uh and gave them the room to you know to to do

great work and I a lot of companies I know it sounds crazy but a lot of companies don't do that they hire people to tell them what to do we hired people to tell us what to do we figure we're paying them all this money you know their job is to figure out what to do and tell us and that meant that that that led to a very different corporate culture and one that's that's really um you know much more um much more collegial than um hierarchical but in spite of this kind of different approach

to the corporate hierarchy it was probably still a very high stress place um well you know we were very young and um most of the folks were not married and so they could work you know 15-hour days so the the you didn't have a typical situation where you know you work so that you can support your life your work was your life in many cases dude you feel you've changed from that is that still your life um I feel it is still my life but it's not all my life it's less you know it's less

of a percentage but I I still don't really I've never been able to sort of think of my work and my life as different things they're the same thing but it's it where it used to be you know 99 of my life it's you know maybe 50 of my life now you've had a very big success with Pixar your computer animation company which created Toy Story and um and in fact I think you became a billionaire when it went public last November um what made you think that part of your future would lie in computer

animation I mean I understand the direct the connection with what you'd been doing at Apple but it's it's still a pretty different application of it um you know I I have spent a lot of my my um life in computer Graphics uh the Apple II was the first personal computer that had color graphics on it uh the macintosh's ease of use was obtained through uh the use of of better graphics than it ever been on a computer to date at that time and the laser rider was using PostScript and was very Graphics intensive but nothing

that I had ever been involved in was as good as what I saw Pixar was doing when I met a a man named ed catmore in 1986 and he was then running a division of lucasfilm that was up for sale and Ed and I really hit it off and he had a dream to make the world's first computer animated feature film which I bought into both both spiritually and financially and uh so we we formed Pixar in 1986 buying the division from lucasfilm and starting to add people with that vision in mind and there's an

incredible team of people at Pixar that have worked for 10 years to make that dream come true videos what was your involvement with the actual creation of Toy Story what what level did you function on you know I didn't get to animate one frame we've got people that are so so great at that that they're the best in the world that unfortunately not being an a visual artist myself you know there were several of us that didn't get to to really help make the film per se what what I was able to do was was

try to make the environment in which you know the great team that we have that made the film could successfully make the film so I had to negotiate the deal with Disney and all of the other things in terms of running the company uh that were more of this really really just support for the great team that made the film the most incredible thing to me though was it was Pixar was the first time in my life that I went from worrying about you know supplying computers to other people to being a consumer of computation

um you know as an example each frame and Toy Story took on average 300 megabytes of data to represent all of the elements in that frame wow and there's a hundred and fourteen thousand frames in that film so you know each one of those frames took on average three hours to draw using the fastest computers around so we were a consumer of computers for the first time and um it was really great you know when somebody comes out with a faster computer it used to be oh no and now it's hooray Steve Jobs co-founded Apple

computer he's now the head of the software company NeXT and he's the president of Pixar the computer animation company that produced Toy Story