WIRED: Steve Jobs, Revolutionary

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Most of the content has less to do with Jobs than with his products. The most recent article, Tabula Rasa, is a stale April, discussion of the original iPad with only a single several-year-old quote from Jobs to add modest perspective. The good news is that the interview is extended and insightful in a way that very few have been since he subsequently returned to Apple, but still, that was over 15 years ago. Thousands of additional iPhone, iPod, and iPad app and game reviews are available here.

I work at Bloomberg in NYC, there was copies of the Steve Jobs issue in the reception area for employees, first come, first serve. All gone by noon. All I got was the front cover page that was for the display rack. And under their terms, in order to cancel, you have to delete the app! Anyone else have this problem, or know how to cancel their subscription but still keep the issue? I just downloaded the Bloomberg issue - amazing! Terms of Use Privacy Policy. Alexa integration coming to Vector on Dec. PhoneSoap unveils PhoneSoap Go, portable…. As the iPod and iTunes prove, it has become the driving technology not just of computers but of consumer electronics.

We're still heavily into the box. We love the box. We have amazing computers today, and amazing hardware in the pipeline. I still spend a lot of my time working on new computers, and it will always be a primal thing for Apple. But the user experience is what we care about most, and we're expanding that experience beyond the box by making better use of the Internet. The user experience now entails four things: We want to do all four uniquely well for our customers.

That's why I dropped the 'interim' from my title. I'm still called iCEO, though, because I think it's cool. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time. That was not just 'Steve's decision' to pull out the fan; it required an enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine.

That is the furthest thing from veneer.

It was at the core of the product the day we started. They were out not so much to make money as to change the world and to build companies that could keep growing and changing. They left incredible legacies. It's like when you're a parent. Although the birth experience is a miracle, what's truly rewarding is living with your child and helping him grow up.

Now when we see new things or opportunities, we can seize them. In fact, we have already seized a few, like desktop movies, wireless networking, and iTools. A creative period like this lasts only maybe a decade, but it can be a golden decade if we manage it properly. Things happen fairly slowly, you know. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you're going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly.

One of our biggest insights [years ago] was that we didn't want to get into any business where we didn't own or control the primary technology because you'll get your head handed to you. It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too.

That's what we get paid to do. So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing. He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. My job is to not be easy on people.

My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I've participated in the hiring of maybe 5,plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it's ultimately based on your gut.

How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: We've got really capable people at Apple. I mean, some people say, 'Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble. And the board would have some good choices about who to pick as CEO. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do. We've got 25, people at Apple. About 10, of them are in the stores. And my job is to work with sort of the top people, that's what I do.

That doesn't mean they're all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know - just explore things. We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores].

But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products. We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.

We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. I do it because that's my job. But when I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being 5 years old.

And I think that person could be me coming home to tell my wife and kids that I just got laid off. Or that could be one of my kids in 20 years. I never took it so personally before. Life is short, and we're all going to die really soon. It's true, you know. You go to your TV when you want to turn your brain off. You go to your computer when you want to turn your brain on. Those are not the same. When I was growing up, a guy across the street had a Volkswagen Bug. He really wanted to make it into a Porsche. He spent all his spare money and time accessorizing this VW, making it look and sound loud.

By the time he was done, he did not have a Porsche. He had a loud, ugly VW. The only purpose for me in building a company is so that it can make products.

See a Problem?

Of course, building a very strong company and a foundation of talent and culture is essential over the long run to keep making great products. On the other hand, to me, the company is one of humanity's most amazing inventions. Sure, you have to build something with bricks and mortar to put the people in, but basically a company is this abstract construct we've invented, and it's incredibly powerful.

My heroes--Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation; Bob Noyce [the late co-founder of Intel] was another. I'm old enough to have been able to know these guys. I met Andy Grove when I was I called him and told him I'd heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch.

I did that with others too. These guys were all company builders, and the gestalt of Silicon Valley at that time made a big impression on me. There are people around here who start companies just to make money, but the great companies, well, that's not what they're about. I don't think much about my time of life.

I just get up in the morning and it's a new day. Somebody told me when I was 17 to live each day as if it were my last, and that one day I'd be right. I am at a stage where I don't have to do things just to get by. But then I've always been that way because I've never really cared about money that much.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel the same way now as I felt when I was That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. This Apple thing is that way for me. I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes.

I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best. What makes you become conservative is realizing that you have something to lose. Remember The Whole Earth Catalog? The last edition had a photo on the back cover of a remote country road you might find yourself on while hitchhiking up to Oregon.

It was a beautiful shot, and it had a caption that really grabbed me. You just are yourself, and you work with other people. If you're inspiring to other people, it makes an impression on them. For example, I hear people at Disney talking about what it was like to work with Walt. I know that people at Pixar are going to talk about their days with John Lasseter in the same way. Maybe someday somebody will feel that way about working with me.

I have no idea. But I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn't do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance. In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I'd have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would've probably done some other things a lot worse. It's more important to be engaged in the present. On vacation recently I was reading this book by [physicist and Nobel laureate] Richard Feynmann.

He had cancer, you know. In this book he was describing one of his last operations before he died. The doctor said to him, 'Look, Richard, I'm not sure you're going to make it. Do you know why? Feynmann said, 'I want to feel what it's like to turn off. Customers can't anticipate what the technology can do. They won't ask for things that they think are impossible. But the technology may be ahead of them. If you happen to mention something, they'll say, 'Of course, I'll take that.

Do you mean I can have that, too? But they rarely wind up getting what they really want that way. You're asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from? With many things --high-performance automobiles, for example-- the aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no different. But I've also found that the best companies pay attention to aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them.

I mean, beyond the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how they run their company, stuff like that. I'm talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don't have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings. The culture at NeXT definitely rewards independent thought, and we often have constructive disagreements--at all levels.

It doesn't take a new person long to see that people feel fine about openly disagreeing with me. That doesn't mean I can't disagree with them, but it does mean that the best ideas win. Our attitude is that we want the best. Don't get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let's go. Somebody once told me, 'Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow. It's things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

I think the same philosophy that drives the product has to drive everything else if you want to have a great company. Manufacturing, for example, [ If you don't pay attention to your manufacturing, it will limit the kind of product you can build and engineer. Some companies view manufacturing as a necessary evil, and some view it as something more neutral. But we view it instead as a tremendous opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. And let me add that the same is true of sales and marketing. You need a sales and marketing organization that is oriented toward educating customers rather than just taking orders, providing a real service rather than moving boxes.

This is extremely important. We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I've seen them again and again throughout my business life. You just make the best product you can, and you don't put it out until you feel it's right. But no matter what you think intellectually, your heart is beating pretty fast right before people see what you've produced.

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. Well, I don't know what this Valley is. I work at Apple. I'm there so many hours a day and I don't visit other places; I'm not an expert on Silicon Valley. What I do see is a small group of people who are artists and care more about their art than they do about almost anything else. It's more important than finding a girlfriend, it's more important Look at the way artists work.

They're not typically the most 'balanced' people in the world. Now, yes, we have a few workaholics here who are trying to escape other things, of course.

But the majority of people out here have made very conscious decisions; they really have. I'm just a guy who probably should have been a semi-talented poet on the Left Bank. I sort of got sidetracked here. I think it's an antiquated notion. There were people in the '60s who were like that and even in the early '70s, but now they're not that way. Now they're the people who would have been poets had they lived in the '60s. And they're looking at computers as their medium of expression rather than language, rather than being a mathematician and using mathematics, rather than, you know, writing social theories.

Even though some people have come out with neat products, if their company is perceived as a sweatshop or a revolving door, it's not considered much of a success. Remember, the role models were Hewlett and Packard. Their main achievement was that they built a company. Nobody remembers their first frequency-counter, their first audio oscillator, their first this or that.

And they sell so many products now that no one person really symbolizes the company. Hewlett and Packard started what became the Valley. See, one of the things you have to remember is that we started off with a very idealistic perspective--that doing something with the highest quality, doing it right the first time, would really be cheaper than having to go back and do it again. I've always thought it would be really wonderful to have a little box, a sort of slate that you could carry along with you.

There are lots of examples where not the best product wins. Windows would be one of those, but there are examples where the best product wins. And the iPod is a great example of that. I have a very simple life. I have my family and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don't do much else. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through. I was very lucky to grow up in a time when music really mattered. It wasn't just something in the background; it really mattered to a generation of kids growing up. It really changed the world. I think that music faded in importance for a while, and the iPod has helped to bring music back into people's lives in a really meaningful way.

Music is so deep within all of us, but it's easy to go for a day or a week or a month or a year without really listening to music. And the iPod has changed that for tens of millions of people, and that makes me really happy, because I think music is good for the soul. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I'll feel I have lost Apple.

But if I'm a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they're still working to make the next great personal computer, then I will feel that my genes are still in there. If I look at myself and ask, 'What am I best at and what do I enjoy most doing? It probably is true that the people who have been able to come up with the innovations in many industries are maybe not the people that either are best skilled at, or, frankly, enjoy running a large enterprise where they lose contact with the day-to-day workings of that innovative process.

Land at Polaroid, he's a perfect example. What I'm best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them. I respect the direction that Apple is going in. But for me personally, you know, I want to make things.

WIRED: Steve Jobs, Revolutionary

And if there's no place for me to make things there, then I'll do what I did twice before. And so I haven't got any sort of odd chip on my shoulder about proving anything to myself or anybody else. And remember, though the outside world looks at success from a numerical point of view, my yardstick might be quite different than that. My yardstick may be how every computer that's designed from here on out will have to be at least as good as a Macintosh. Apple was about as pure of a Silicon Valley company as you could imagine. We started in a garage. Woz and I both grew up in Silicon Valley.

Our role model was Hewlett-Packard.

And so I guess that's what we went into it thinking. Hewlett-Packard, you know, Jobs and Wozniak. I'm not a year-old statesman that's traveled around the world all his life. So I'm sure that there was a situation when I was 25 that if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I could have handled much better. And I'm sure I'll be able to say the same thing when I'm 35 about the situation in I can be very intense in my convictions.

And I don't know; all in all, I kind of like myself and I'm not that anxious to change. You know, my philosophy is--it's always been very simple. And it has its flaws, which I'll go into. My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough that's going to happen next year that's going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully.

But then you have to go and sort of stow away--you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough. And that's my perspective, that everything starts with a great product. And that has its flaws.

I have certainly been accused of not listening to the customers enough.

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