Steve Jobs on Computer Science as a Liberal Art

You were first coming in contact with these computers, inventing them, and before that working on the HP-9100. You know, we talk about writing programs. What sort of programs? What do people actually do with these things? See, what we did with them... Well, I'll give you a simple example. When we were designing our blue box, we wrote a lot of custom programs to help us design it. You know, and to do a lot of the dog work for us in terms of calculating master frequencies with sub-divisors to get other frequencies and things like that. We used the computer quite a bit to calculate how much error we would get in the frequencies and how much could be tolerated.

So we used them in our work, but much more importantly, it had nothing to do with using them for anything practical. It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think. In other words, I think the greatest value of learning how to... I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer. You should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. It's like going to law school. I don't think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school would actually be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way that computer programming teaches you, in a slightly different way, how to think. And so I view computer science as a liberal art.

It should be something that everybody learns. It takes a year in their life. One of the courses they take is learning how to program. Yeah, but I learned APL, which obviously is part of the reason why I'm going through life sideways. Do you look back and consider it an enriching experience that taught you to think in a different way or not? No, not that particularly. Other languages perhaps more so, but I started with APL. Obviously, the Apple II was a terrific success. Just incredibly so. The company grew like Topsy and eventually went public and you guys got really rich. What's it like to get rich? It's very interesting. I was worth over a million dollars when I was 23, and over 10 million dollars when I was 24, and over 100 million dollars when I was 25.

It wasn't that important because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don't have a short-term payback and things like that. But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people to do with these products. I didn't think about it a great deal. I never sold any stock. I just really believed that the company would do very well over the long term. Central to the development of the personal computer was the pioneering work being done at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which Steve first visited in 1979.

I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. So I finally did. I went over there, and they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on. They showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, etc., etc. I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface.

I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time. Still, though, they had the germ of the idea was there, and they'd done it very well. Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners and losers might be. But you couldn't argue about the inevitability of it. It was so obvious. You would have felt the same way had you been there. Those are the exact words that Paul Allen used. It's really interesting. It was obvious.

But there were two visits. You saw it, then you brought some people back with you? Yeah. What happened next time? They made you cool your heels for a while? No. No? Well, Adele Goldberg says otherwise. What do you mean? Well, she did the demo when the group came back, and she said that she argued against doing it for three hours. And they took you other places and showed you other things while she was arguing. Oh, you mean they were reluctant to show us the demo? She was. Oh, okay. I have no idea. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't remember that. I thought you meant something else. So they were very skillful. Yeah. But they did show us. Yeah. And it's good that they showed us, because the technology crashed and burned at Xerox.

They used to call it... What's that? No, I was just... Why? Yeah, why? I actually thought a lot about that, and I learned more about that with John Scully later on. And I think I understand it now pretty well. What happens is, like with John Scully, John came from PepsiCo. And they at most would change their product once every ten years. Because a new product was like a new size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn't change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies.

Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copy or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers. So that's what happened at Xerox. The people at Xerox PARC used to call the people that ran Xerox toner heads. And these toner heads would come out to Xerox PARC, and they just had no clue about what they were seeing. And for our audience, toner is what? Oh, toner. Toner is what you put into a copier. Yeah, you know the toner that you add to an industrial copier? The black stuff. The black stuff, yeah. Basically, they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry.

Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. It could have been a company ten times its size. It could have been IBM. It could have been the IBM of the 90s. It could have been the Microsoft of the 90s. But anyway, that's all ancient history. It doesn't really matter anymore. Sure. You mentioned IBM. When IBM entered the market, was that a daunting thing for you at Apple? Oh, sure. I mean, here was Apple, a $1 billion company, and here was IBM, at that time, probably about a $30-some-odd billion company entering the market. Sure it was. It was very scary. We made a very big mistake, though. IBM's first product was terrible. It was really bad. And we made a mistake of not realizing that a lot of other people had a very strong vested interest in helping IBM make it better.

So if it had just been up to IBM, they would have crashed and burned. But IBM did have, I think, a genius in their approach, which was to have a lot of other people have a vested interest in their success. And that's what saved them in the end. So you came back from visiting Xerox PARC with a vision. And how did you implement the vision? Well, I got our best people together and started to get them working on this. The problem was that we'd hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard. And they didn't get this idea. They didn't get it. I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people who thought the coolest thing in user interface was soft keys at the bottom of a screen.

They had no concept of proportionally spaced fonts, no concept of a mouse. In fact, I remember arguing with these folks, people screaming at me that it would take us five years to engineer a mouse and it would cost $300 to build. And I finally got fed up. I just went outside and found David Kelly Design and asked him to design me a mouse. And in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for 15 bucks that was phenomenally reliable. So I found that, in a way, Apple did not have the caliber of people that was necessary to seize this idea in many ways. And there was a core team that did, but there was a larger team that mostly had come from Hewlett-Packard that didn't have a clue.

Well, this becomes this issue of professionalism. There's a dark side and a light side to it, isn't there? Well, no. You know what it is? No, it's not dark and light. It's that people get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, well, somehow there's some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. That's ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that's what happened a little bit at Apple, too.

We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn't have a clue as to the content. And in my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content. And they're a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they're so great at the content. And that's what makes great products. It's not process. It's content. So we had a little bit of that problem at Apple. And that problem eventually resulted in the Lisa, which had its moments of brilliance. In a way, it was very far ahead of its time. But there wasn't enough fundamental content understanding.

Apple drifted too far away from its roots. These Hewlett Packard guys, $10,000 was cheap. To our market, to our distribution channels, $10,000 was impossible. So we produced a product that was a complete mismatch for the culture of our company, for the image of our company, for the distribution channels of our company, for our current customers. None of them could afford a product like that. And it failed. Now, you and John Couch fought for leadership of the Lisa. Absolutely. And I lost. That's correct. How did that come about? Well, I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction, as I've just described. And I could not convince enough people and the senior management of Apple that that was the case.

And we ran the place as a team, for the most part. So I lost. And at that point in time, I brooded for a few months. But it was not very long after that that it really occurred to me that if we didn't do something here, the Apple II was running out of gas, and we needed to do something with this technology fast, or else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was. And so I formed a small team to do the Macintosh. And we were on a mission from God to save Apple. No one else thought so, but it turned out we were right. And as we evolved the Mac, it became very clear that this was also a way of reinventing Apple.

We reinvented everything. We reinvented manufacturing. I visited probably 80 automated factories in Japan. And we built the world's first automated computer factory in the world, in California here. So we adopted the 68,000 microprocessor that Lisa had. We negotiated a price that was a fifth of what Lisa was going to pay for it, because we were going to use it in much higher volume. And we really started to design this product that could be sold for $1,000, called the Macintosh. And we didn't make it. We could have sold it at $2,000, although we came out at $2,500. And we spent four years of our life doing that. We built the product. We built the automated factory, the machine to build the machine.

We built a completely new distribution system. We built a completely different marketing approach. And I think it worked pretty well. Now, you motivated this team. I mean, you had to guide them. We had to build a team. You build a team, motivate it, guide them, deal with them. We've interviewed just lots and lots of people from the Macintosh team. And what it keeps coming down to is your passion, your vision, and how do you order your priorities in there? What's important to you in the development of a product? You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease.

And that disease, I've seen other people get it, too. It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And that if you just tell all these other people, you know, here's this great idea, then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there's tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. I mean, you know, there are just certain things you can't make electrons do.

There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it's that process that is the magic. And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started. But what I've always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street.

And he was in his 80s. He's a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he might have paid me to mow his lawn or something. And one day he said, come on into my garage. I want to show you something. And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. And it was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, come on with me. We went out to the back and we got just some rocks, some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder. And we closed the can up and he turned this motor on. He said, come back tomorrow. And his can was making a racket as the stones went around.

And I came back the next day and we opened the can and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. And that's always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about, is that it's through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise. And working together, they polish each other.

And they polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones. So it's hard to explain, and it's certainly not the result of one person. I mean, people like symbols, so I'm the symbol of certain things. But it really was a team effort on the Mac. Now, in my life, I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didn't know how to explain it then, but I've thought a lot about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best is at most two to one. Like if you go to New York City and you get an average taxicab driver versus the best taxicab driver, you're probably going to get two to one.