![]() ![]() And people still treat you like you were a year to 18 months ago. And it’s really frustrating sometimes when you’re growing up and you’re becoming more capable and you’ve had some personality quirks you’ve kind of gotten over, whatever it may be. You know, I’m sure that a lot of you have had this experience where you’re changing, you’re growing as a person and people tend to treat you like you were 18 months ago. They don’t know that we’re building icebergs and building from the bottom up. They don’t know what’s going on in the future. They don’t know shit about operating systems. And, it’s clear that it’s perception versus reality. Question: What do we do about the press? Wall Street Journal reporters get up in the morning, sell Apple short and then go write stories about us. Yes, sir? The Press and the Stock Price will Take Care of Themselves And even the OpenDoc guys were basically trying to rewrite the whole thing in java anyway, which was a restart. And I think as a container strategy there is some stuff in the java space that is much better. The rest of the world isn’t going to use OpenDoc. I mean, I think it was great technology but it didn’t fit. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.Īnd OpenDoc … I was for putting a bullet in the head of OpenDoc. I think there will be stories like that, but focusing is about saying no. And you know, they leave and it’s like the company’s going to fall apart the next day. I read these articles about some of these people that have left. So you take your lumps.Īnd Apple’s been taking their share of lumps for the last 6 months in a very unfair way and has been taking them like an adult. And it’s really a pisser because you want to be nice, you don’t want to tell the Santa Fe Mercury a person was asked to leave or this or that. And then you go talk to the Santa Fe Mercury and they write a shitty article about you. The hardest thing is … you think about focusing, right? You think, “well, focusing is saying yes”. And micro-cosmically they made sense, macro-cosmically they made no sense. And so we had to decide, “what are the fundamental directions we’re going in?” and “what makes sense and what doesn’t?” And there were a bunch of things that didn’t. The total is less than the sum of the parts. ![]() And what happened was you look at the farm that’s been created with all these different animals going in different directions and it doesn’t add up. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. But Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I know some of you spend a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. Steve: What about OpenDoc? What about it? It’s dead, right? Well, let me say something. So, I am open to entertaining any of your questions and I hope you have some good ones this morning! Focusing is About Saying NO And I believe very firmly that there is still a very sizable market for some really great products and there are some giant holes that we can fill with your help. And that strategy revolves around one fundamental concept, which is to make some really great products. I think that there are some really good people who you met this week running the key areas of Apple now, and I think they are making enormous progress toward executing what is a pretty clear strategy. Just to set the tone a little bit, I’m actually pretty excited about the way things are going. I figured if you just wanted to start asking some questions, we’ll go to some good places. What I want to do is just chat, and so we get to spend 45 minutes or so together and I want to talk about whatever you want to talk about. I know you’ve been getting lots of presentations all week so I didn’t want to do a big fancy presentation. I wanted to come and have a chat this morning. Focussing on Connectivity, instead of Individual Computers.How to Convince Corporates to Stay with Experimental Software.Start with the customer experience, work backward to the technology.Marketing Apple with Television, PR, and Newspapers.Empowering Developers to Serve the Market.Pricing and Licensing Apple’s Operating System Rhapsody.How to Compete with Industry Leaders: Build What You and your Friends Want.Opportunities for the Software Developer Ecosystem.Implement A Vision Faster Through End-to-End Product Design.Being Better is More Important than Being Different.Proprietary Software versus Adopting Open Standards.The Press and the Stock Price will Take Care of Themselves.Table of content for Steve Jobs’ WWDC 1997 Q&A: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |