What may be less well understood by people who weren't there is that he's addressing Apple employees just as much as he is Apple developers. Many Apple employees had the same question. [Source: Was at Apple at the time.]
"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it." — Steve Jobs
Crypto still hasn't figured this out. The entire focus is on how to get people using the technology.
If you start out being completely unwilling to use a database, that should be a red flag you're falling into this trap.
Would a blockchain be better than a db for some ideas? Sure. But for many it wont be and if you're a) using a blockchain where a db would be better or b) searching for stuff to build in the small sliver of ideas where a blockchain is the right tech - you're not starting with the customer.
Remember Jobs also famously said:
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
Bitcoin originates from a concrete customer experience issue: lack of digital money with some cash like properties (non reversible, pseudonymous, trustless, etc). [1]
Something like that had been tried to create a few times before, but Blockchain was the first solution to that problem. In other words bitcoin solved a problem looking for a solution, not the other way around.
That being said, crypto UX has a LOT to improve. But let's not confuse projects that use "blockchain" because some manager thought it was cool, or literal cashgrabs, with actual crypto projects.
[1] You may think those properties aren't good or useful, but there clearly was and is people that find that useful, so let's not beat the dead horse with that debate.
The idea "for the customer" of Bitcoin is to provided them with a digital alternative currency, an opt-in one, not mandated or controlled by a state. The previous attempts like Digicash, E-gold and few others all had the same fate and lasted very short periods of time because they did not combine a strong and independently verifiable data structure with a way to truely be the basis and incentive of a decentralized P2P network.
Bitcoin solved these issues by taking the best of many of the preceding failed experiments. This implies some compromises that apparently make you think it's unsuitable technology applied to a problem that could so easily be solved with a simple database... but that would be misidentifying the issue it is trying to solve, maybe you are not the current "customer" for it (yet), maybe you don't care about P2P transactions without intermediaries, that cannot be censored... but when (note: it isn't an "if") your government will tell you that you cannot pay for x or y with their CBDC which will be the only currency you will be allowed to earn/spend, then maybe you will rethink this position. And the minor inconvenience of Bitcoin will seem suddenly more acceptable (hopefully by that time progress like the Lightning Network will have ironed these out).
And again, do not take my word for it, observe the cases where Bitcoin has already been used and useful under oppressive regimes and in war times.
Blockchain isn’t good for some society disrupting change of finance… it’s a specialized accounting book. Very few people are excited by ledgers really, and the thing you can do with these new fancy ledgers have a lot to do with mostly mutually trusting businesses keeping track of balances between a small group. This is not exciting, will not change the world, but might make some details of finance folks and the people who write software for them a little easier.
By pausing, the critic becomes doubtful. Did I go too far? Is something really bad brewing?
For people who answer like this: what goes through your mind during the pause? Are you counting in your head? Are you planning out your answer? Are you playing the question in your head?
I repeatedly learn this lesson just by being on accidental mute on Zoom calls.
Instead, Jobs answers the question behind the question: What role should new technologies play at Apple going forward?
This is a very useful technique to practice. When asked a question whose premise you don't agree with, you can become confrontational on that point. Or you can reach in to grab the question behind the question and answer that instead.
The difference is primarily in intent: it's hard to tell externally, but advice basically takes an internal perspective to its recipient, so it's perfectly reasonable to suggest someone do something with good intentions.
In the use for good case, it can also be valuable to reference the asked question and explain how it’s related. In many cases this is a good heuristic for whether the answer was intended as help or misdirection.
Generally - in my experience - folks that genuinely want to answer or explain something will first rephrase the question, and/or ask more questions to understand what you are trying to ask, and then after their answer they open the dialogue with something akin to "does that answer your question?".
I saw the questions behind the question being more how do you, a non-technical person, lay claim to a technology company, and, why are you deprecating this technical thing I loved and may have worked on. There is an undeniable, underlying bitterness animating the ask, and one can’t ignore that if attempting to genuinely respond.
It's a classy way to come out on top of an argument, but a) it doesn't work in all situations, and b) not everyone can think on their feet in that way in front of an audience.
It's an admirable trait of charismatic people, but it's also abused to manipulate the conversation to gain an upper hand. Typically used by politicians and lawyers.
If you choose it to be. Plenty of CEOs are relatively recluse. For example, Apple’s, today.
That disclosure out of the way… Jobs was notoriously quick to anger, imperious in his internal role, very selectively rational, and generally… well, often kind of a jerk. I know all of that can overlap with coherence and persuasion, in fact in a cynical sense it could be argued it was part of his persuasive strength.
But… this isn’t the most infamous, nor probably the most convincing, example, it’s just the one that always resurfaces in my own memory: dude chucked a camera at some poor soul whose job it was to hand it to him on stage, because he was frustrated by a technical glitch during a presentation. That’s how not “put together” he could be in one of the more publicly visible tech events of the time: he did violence to a person who was helping him with tons of people watching because of something which wasn’t that person’s fault.
I’m not saying Musk is any better, but I’m also not prepared to pretend that Jobs wasn’t an epic asshole.
I think the video linked to (Steve Jobs Insult Response) is honestly one of Steve's finest moments (with regard to dealing with people that is). But to bolster your point, there are of course an overwhelming number of stories that capture Steve's less stellar moments.
Go back to Elon learning, during an interview, the things Buzz Aldrin—a childhood hero of his—said about SpaceX. I believe Musk once had the progenitors of this sense of reflection and maturity. Instead, he’s degraded where Steve Jobs learned.
Is there a typo here? Can someone explain what this means in slightly different words? I've love to hear what Buzz Aldrin has to say about Elon Musk, but I just can't parse this phrase.
I know it is not a very nice thing to say but you may be surprised to learn, Most people cant really do comparison.
Musk is undoubtably a genius, you can’t discount the success that Tesla and SpaceX have had. He’s just extremely heavy-handed and capricious. I heard from someone at Tesla that they loathe being in meetings with him because he will literally fire people on the spot. That type of arrogance did play during the era of tesla going to $1 trillion but now that it’s falling back to earth I wonder how much people will tolerate his arrogance and temper tantrums.
SpaceX, Tesla etc would not be where they are now without all the funding Musk was able to secure and source from governments (grants, tax breaks, investments etc), and then investors - that's probably his biggest contribution.
Microsoft clearly won with the Microsoft Office Suite and Microsoft Word... I'm not sure about this specific tech or if OpenDoc would have made any difference... But is it an impossibility that open standards could have been a strong weapon against MS market dominance?
Either way the man is undeniably a legendary public speaker.
I think people are cheering this on because he gave a really thoughtful answer to an aggressive question, and how he did it is worth thinking about.
I’ve been on both sides of that one. Plenty of times where I’m trying to get some advanced tech into a given component, and the manager says No, it’ll increase our risk. “But this tech will enable advanced features A, B, and C.” And the reply: “We don’t need to have A, B, or C … we need the product to deliver on our earlier promise of the baseline capability.”
And a few times when I’m on the other side, shutting someone else down. Never as clearly or succinctly as this, of course. Definitely makes me feel like a turncoat in the tug of war between technologists and product people.
It would come across as less arrogant, if he had just resisted the temptation to say that at all. He probably realizes that himself as he speaks and then wraps it into a humblebrag when he says "And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room".
It's also a sentiment that one needs to be very careful with: Some people think they're right about everything because their success proves them right. It's this kind of hubris that, more often than not, will set you up for failure.
The substance of the argument: "Solution looking for a problem" vs "problem getting a solution" is a bit of a tired old cliche (although I don't know whether it already was, back then).
Brilliant genius engineer guy with shiny thing needs to be able to articulate how to sell $8B of the thing. This of course has not happened, as OpenDoc had been failing for years until that point.
That statement is the final blow. And probably deserved by a person who just accused their boss in public of being uneducated on the topic. Something elitist engineers love to do and seem to get away with time and again. Yet when they are put on the spot about their own shortcomings, we are to assume this is some kind of attack? Please.
I also don't know enough about the specifics of what happened to that guy. Was he an Apple engineer? Do we know whether he got fired the next day? If not, we don't really know whether he got away with anything at all, do we?
The morals of angrily accusing your boss of something in public take a bit of unpacking. In my experience, bosses throw angry accusations at their subordinates much more frequently than the other way around. In fact, many bosses seem to think it's their job description. And they get away with it pretty much all the time (again: my experience).
Why should the social norms that govern a boss's behaviour towards their subordinates differ so radically from those that govern subordinates' behaviour towards their bosses? I mean: If this is the Prussian army in the 19th century, I kind of get it. But if those are highly educated professionals working on a common cause like Apple and we're in California in 1997, then this asymmetry doesn't sit with me as easily. Any tech company that I would want to work for would have to be basically pretty egalitarian.
Even though I know nothing about the specifics of the situation, I can sort of empathise with the overall theme: Imagine you're an "individual contributor" who takes shit from their bosses all day long, and the higher-ups just thanked you for it by flushing your career down the tube when they decided to cancel some project or some commitment or something that was deeply important to you. You go home and tell your wife, and she thinks you're a f#ing loser to put yourself in a situation where they can just treat you like that. You aren't even doing anything (because: What can you do?) to stand up for yourself. You have a difficult time looking yourself in the mirror. Then some public event like this comes along, and it may be the only chance you'll ever have to directly interact with that CEO. If you air your grievance and show them how angry you are, it may well help you, psychologically. You may or may not have a job the next day, but, if you don't, then, at least in your own mind, you died an "honorable" martyr's death. Even though I've never done anything like that (and probably wouldn't), I can sort of relate to that.
Having said that, I have to feel for the guy asking the question, and by extension, all the developers who invested time and money building on top of this platform (OpenDoc) that Apple previously championed. OpenDoc sucked, that's for sure, but Apple killing it they way they did, and the lack of empathy demonstrated here by Jobs to the developers facing the loss of their investment in the platform - basically telling them "tough shit" - must have felt like a real slap in the face.
That was for the guy who asked the question. I love how Jobs had that elegant way of being an asshole back to those that deserved it, and in such a subtle way you hardly noticed him actually being an asshole.
https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...
Apple would not exist today without his efforts.
OpenDoc
In March 1992, the historic AIM alliance was launched with OpenDoc as a foundation.Taligent adopted OpenDoc, and promised somewhat similar functionality although based on very different underlying mechanisms. While OpenDoc was still being developed, Apple confused things greatly by suggesting that it should be used by people porting existing software only, and new projects should instead be based on Taligent since that would be the next OS. In 1993, John Sculley called Project Amber (a codename for what would become OpenDoc) a path toward Taligent.[5][6] Taligent was considered the future of the Macintosh, and work on other tools like MacApp was considerably deprioritized.
CyberDog
Cyberdog included email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. OpenDoc allowed these components to be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. For instance, a "live" Cyberdog web page could be embedded in a presentation program, one of the common demonstrations of OpenDoc.
A serious problem with the OpenDoc project that Cyberdog depended on, was that it was part of a very acrimonious competition between OpenDoc consortium members and Microsoft. The members of the OpenDoc alliance were all trying to obtain traction in a market rapidly being dominated by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. At the same time, Microsoft used the synergy between the OS and applications divisions of the company to make it effectively mandatory that developers adopt the competing Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. OpenDoc was forced to create an interoperability layer in order to allow developers to use it, and this added a great technical burden to the project.
Kaleida
Kaleida Labs formed in 1991 to produce the multimedia cross-platform Kaleida Media Player and the object oriented scripting language ScriptX that was used to program its behavior. The system was aimed at the production of interactive CD ROM titles, an area of major effort in the early 1990s. When the system was delivered in 1994, it had relatively high system requirements and memory footprint, and lacked a native PowerPC version on the Mac platform. Around the same time, rapid changes in the market, especially the expansion of the World Wide Web and the Java programming language, pushed the interactive CD market into a niche role. The Kaleida platform failed to gain significant traction and the company was closed in 1996.
Taligent
Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel. From 1993 to 1996, Taligent was seen as competing with Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP, even though Taligent didn't ship a product until 1995 and Cairo never shipped at all. From 1994 to 1996, Apple floated the Copland operating system project intended to succeed System 7, but never had a modern OS sophisticated enough to run Taligent technology.
In 1995, Apple and HP withdrew from the Taligent partnership, licensed its technology, and left it as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In January 1998, Taligent Inc. was finally dissolved into IBM. Taligent's legacy became the unbundling of CommonPoint's best compiler and application components and converting them into VisualAge C++[5][6] and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization).[7]
In 1996, *Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system.*
These days it is all going backwards to MBA style business decisions. Instead of making insanely great product and services that will make them lot of money, they are now thinking what product and services they could do to make them lots of money.
I thought It was also important to note the term "Customer", which is still being used in today's Apple. Comparing to most in Silicon Valley using the term "Users" instead.
Even though he says technology should not be in search of a solution, he does say that as soon as he saw the Canon printout, he realized it will sell itself. So his theme, with that nuance, seems to be that a technology should not be in search of a solution, unless it is so good as to sell itself.
Remember that this is the early days of technology products. While most of the industry was working from the tech and finding usecases for it, Jobs’ approach was the opposite.
Sales is not just about dollars. It’s about earning the delight and trust of your customer that you have something of value that they want. The dollars flow automatically from that.
