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Nov
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Steve Jobs in 1995, interviewed by Bob Cringely
The passing of Steve Jobs has been one of those unreal events that you knew could very well happen, but were certain it would not. It was an unsurprising total shock. The November release of Robert Cringely’s documentary, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, offers another chance to reflect on what it means for Mac users to continue using Apple products without Jobs guiding the company. After all, Apple already let us down once before in the past when, after having fired Steve, their standards slipped. To the point that Jobs, in the interview, was foreseeing Apple’s imminent demise.
Cringely’s 1995 original 70-minute interview, which was thought lost until after Jobs’ death, sheds a very revealing light on what has motivated Steve Jobs in his passion for Apple. Recorded not long before Apple offered to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back at the helm of the company he had founded, the interview retraces all the steps that led him to create the Macintosh phenomenon and, as Robert Cringely asks Steve Jobs about the future, it also explains the incredible success that was his return. Among the highlights of the interview, Jobs quotes Picasso about good artists copying ideas and great ones stealing them. When you couple that with his final judgment on Microsoft’s lack of taste, one can understand how upsetting it was for him to consider that the iPhone idea had been stolen by Google, another Silicon Valley giant, which, in Jobs’ mind, did not hold art and humanities on par with engineering—a constant pet peeve of Jobs’. In the interview, Cringely asks Jobs if he sees himself as a hippie or a nerd. Jobs chooses the hippie camp. He valued the input of artists and poets as much as, if not more than, that of engineers.
Steve has left Apple once again, this time for good. What does this mean for Mac and iDevice users? First and foremost, if he was right about the need, well detailed in the interview, to surround oneself with top-notch people, then we should be in good hands. This time, Apple is on a good trajectory—that “vector” he describes to Cringely—with carefully picked people to make sure their choices will steer that line in the best direction. We have been the incredulous observers of Apple’s series of unbelievable successes over the past few years, so any future misstep will easily be blamed on Steve’s absence. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes wrongly. After all, not everything Apple attempted during the past 12 years was a sure hit. What was important is that Apple, under Steve Jobs’ guidance, revolutionized the computer industry again, and again, and again.
We have read that Jobs was compared to Thomas Edison as a great inventor; but I would rather consider him a revolutionary captain of industry like Henry Ford was in his time, turning a whole industry upside-down. While Ford was the first carmaker to build vehicles his own workers could buy, Jobs made machines people love. Not love by idolatry or blind “fandomness,” but because those machines were carefully crafted by impassioned humans to help other humans solve their everyday problems.
If not for Steve Jobs, the so-called ultrabook computers (PCs that emulate the MacBook Air), Android tablets and other touch phones may still have to be invented. Remember, not long ago, Netbooks were all the rage… And it happened while Apple’s competitors had a living model to copy or steal from. Very recently, HP squandered the promising WebOS mobile system. Steve Jobs’ philosophy of making products that strive to elevate the user experience was known and admired, but very few have had the courage, charisma or hutzpah to assert it in their boardrooms. Will his example still be followed now that he is not around anymore? I really hope so.
