Apple WWDC '97 Steve JobsによるClosing Keynote

For those that haven't seen it the whole thing is worth it: ▶ this video This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be. Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.

I personally feel there's a big overlap between Jobs and Musk—but none more so than the fact that they had the key combination of sufficient intelligence, clear vision, high self-confidence and (most importantly) strong influence over corporate direction. One of my favourite Steve Jobs quotes is just after he returned to Apple and began dismantling the massive pile of legacy cruft. When asked about a particular (terrible) technology that Apple scrapped, Steve went on a particularly insightful rant that holds numerous insights into what he believes to be key to a successful company. And history proved those insights to be exactly right. The quote— "Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good. Because at least some DECISIONS are being made along the way, and we'll find the mistakes and we'll fix them." ▶ this video In other words, as long as you're right often enough, being decisive is more important than being right every single time. Musk strikes me as sharing that mentality. He's right often enough that it's more efficient to "fix" the mistakes than to suffocate big decisions with big committees. And it's not like any big committee is sure to be right more often than Jobs/Elon anyway. (That YouTube video is fantastic IMHO. Watched with the benefit of hindsight it shows that Apple's success wasn't an accident. Steve really did understand the formula that ultimately led to it.)

Thanks for linking to the 1997 WDC (only 1 "w"!) Q&A with Jobs. For those hoping to cut to the chase, the timecode for Jobs' prompt and the hapless attendee who asks "What about OpenDoc" is 4:26 [0] The four and a half minutes prior are interesting (thoughtful introduction, Jobs' framing of the session and his brief thoughts about Apple's current position), but what he says in response to the questions following the OpenDoc question is deeply thought-provoking. Many of the ideas Jobs shares show the general shape of recent and current Apple business decisions macOS and iCloud, for example. Especially interesting are his discussions of NIH syndrome, networking, and more. Thanks, twoodfin, for pointing to this session which punctuates Jobs' return to Apple the year previous. [0] ▶ this video

Many of the Mac sites have been running retrospectives on past Stevenotes leading up to this one. I ended up re-watching a number of them, and in particular a Q&A session Steve did when he returned to Apple (when Gil was still CEO, and the Clone Saga was ongoing) was extremely interesting. He basically blasted the Newton's usability and described the problems the iPhone solves, and that was just about 5% of the total talk. Link: ▶ this video

> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.* Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience ▶ this video