Steve Jobs on the Web: Dynamic Pages and the Future

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The history of the computer would have been different if it weren't for my guest Stephen Jobs. He co-founded Apple Computer, the company that pioneered the user-friendly computer. He oversaw the creation of the Macintosh. He was ousted from the company in 1985 and formed a new computer company called Next. The computer designed by Next was a commercial failure. Now the company is creating software for the World Wide Web. Jobs is also the head of Pixar, the computer animation company that produced Toy Story, the first computer animated feature-length film. Jobs became a billionaire when Pixar went public in November. I asked Jobs first about the software Next produces. It's designed to make pages on the World Wide Web interactive. I asked him why they're usually static now. Well, you know, as you know, the web's a pretty miraculous thing and it was a very simple paradigm that was invented, which was that people could construct web pages in some arcane languages, one called HTML, and people could then touch those pages and view them with a browser. Now these things are created by human beings for the most part and they're fairly laborious to create. Once you make one, people can view it. So you can be viewing a web page along with, you know, a quarter million other people looking at exactly the same page. And it's pretty miraculous how it all works and with the internet being wired everywhere and with the navigation that's been put in with the web. You can navigate around the web and look at all of these pages and it's stunning how good it is. However, the page you may be looking at is the same page that everyone else is looking at if

they happen to be on that website looking at that page. There's nothing custom about it for you. So if you have any questions you want answered, you're kind of out of luck, unless the person that created that page thought to answer your question, you know, a month ago when they created that page. So you might want to say, you know, where is my Federal Express package? And obviously no one created a page to tell you where the Federal Express box you sent yesterday is right now. So wouldn't it be great if you could ask questions and those questions could get answered via a web page built just for you? And that's why you might want a more dynamic web page in the simplest sense. And Federal Express did just that. They took several months and created some computer programs, which when you type in your package tracking number, will go to their mainframes, find out all the data about where your package is, get all that data, and then, you know, rather than give it to, you know, thousands of gnomes that will create these web pages on the fly, a computer program will build the web page on the fly and send it off to your web browser. And it's magic. I mean, it was made custom just for you, telling you exactly where your package was. And they've got about, you know, 10,000 people a day using the service instead of calling them which is kind of cool. Now that's just the tip of the iceberg. It turns out that companies, when they really want to vend, you know, information about their products or services, or they want to start doing commerce on the web, really need to start building these web pages dynamically based on, you know, what the consumer wants. And that is going to be the next big change in the web. And this is what you're working on, enabling these pages to be more interactive.

Exactly. We call it WebObjects, and we announced it about three weeks ago. We're giving away the basic version. We put it up on our website, and it runs on servers. And we've already downloaded, I think people have already downloaded, close to 10,000 copies of it for free. So how do you think that the web might change in the near future with the help of the type of software that you are producing now? You know, I think most large companies and medium-sized companies, and even small companies, are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel, bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer. And that's a pretty powerful concept when you think about it. One of the things that I love is that, you know, a very small company, if they invest a lot in their website, can look just as formidable and just as solid on the web as a very large company can. As a matter of fact, some of the smaller companies are more hip on the web, you know, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so they actually look better than some of the large companies do right now. And it's going to be this very leveling phenomenon. But I think a tremendous amount of goods and services is going to be sold, or at least the demand created for such things over the web.

What else do you see in the near future for the web besides the ability to shop in a more, kind of, complete way through the web? It's not just shopping for goods and services, it's shopping for information. I mean, you're going to find out already, you know, when I want to find out the movies that are playing around Silicon Valley, I just go up on the local web page and check it out. It's a lot faster than going to the newspaper, and a lot faster than calling the theaters, etc. And more and more we're shopping for information on the web. I just recently bought a Sony, you know, one of the new Sony camcorders, you know, and I basically, I went on Sony's web page and I found out all about the ones they offer and picked the one I wanted right from that web page before I even called a store, you know, to try to find it physically. I basically, you know, the demand to get me to buy that thing was created from Sony's web page. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. You're going to be buying information, or you're going to be finding information and really making a lot of decisions about what you're going to do with your life, or what you're going to purchase from the web.

Is the whole idea of going to the store to buy software going to become obsolete, too? Do you think we'll be downloading our software from the web? Of course. Yeah, there's no question about it. It's just, there's no question that that will happen, and I think it'll happen in the next 24 months. There's some software right now that's still very large, and the web on-ramps and off-ramps to corporations are now very fast, but the off-ramps to the consumers' homes are still not so fast. And so for buying large software, such as CD-ROM games and stuff, they'll still be distributed on physical media for a while. But when the off-ramps to the consumer get faster, possibly with cable modems in the near future, then that could possibly go fully electronic as well. So tell me what else you see for the web beyond the world of retail. Yeah, it's not, there's a lot of things happening with the web right now in terms of allowing people access to information that they would just never have before. And what this does is, of course, it lets special interest groups get together. So, you know, you have, I know people who have had, as an example, a stroke and have gotten on the web and found that there are several web pages now devoted to information for stroke victims, where they can learn about, you know, some of the latest treatments, they can learn about avoidance, you know, the latest in avoidance advice and things like that. And those things didn't exist before as well. Steve Jobs is my guest. You started off in the business of designing computers. When did you start thinking that the

future wasn't in building the individual computers, but rather in the computer network? Because after all, what you're doing now is designing software for the web. You know, I had sort of a landmark visit to Xerox PARC in 1979, that's Palo Alto Research Center, where they invented a lot of the cornerstones of the modern graphical user interface. And actually, they showed me what they were doing in 1979. And actually, they'd done three things. The first was the brilliant work they had done on graphical user interfaces. And the second was networking. They had over a hundred of their computers at that time networked in a fully electronic environment, using email routinely. And the third thing that they'd done was object-oriented programming. They'd invented Smalltalk and other object-oriented languages as well. And I was so blinded by the brilliance of the first, the graphical user interface, that I didn't even see the other two in 1979. And so when we went to make the Macintosh, it really completed the job that they had started on the graphical user interface, but really did not address object-oriented technology, nor did it address networking. Let's define our terms, the graphic user interface.

You're talking about like icons on the computer? Yeah, you know, using plain English in menus, icons, drag-and-drop, all of that stuff. And the objects that you're talking about? Object-oriented programming is a technology that is sort of like, it brings to software what the Industrial Revolution brought to the production of hard goods, which is reusable parts. The way software is built today is the same way it was built when it was invented, if you will, 50 years ago. Everything is custom. And what object-oriented technology lets you do is start to build software with, in a much more modern way, with reusable components. And you end up being able to build software about 10 times faster. And it's slowly starting to seep into the software culture, and I think it's a, you know, it's an unstoppable trend. And this is what you're in the business of now?

What NeXT does is, NeXT works on object-oriented software and has just launched a bunch of web products which incorporate object-oriented software, bringing that technology to the web as well. Now when you started NeXT, your goal was to make a new kind of computer, but that computer failed on the market. That's right. Did that failure help lead you in the direction of working more toward web-oriented software? You know, when we started NeXT, we, I, I guess I have to take credit for this, made a mistake. that I don't think is terribly uncommon, which is you leave something where you were pretty successful and the next thing you do, you try to copy a lot of the paradigms of success that worked the last time and don't realize that the world is changing from underneath your feet.

That's what we did at NeXT. We made a really great computer, but the world had changed enough to where the door to establish a new hardware company really had closed. Even before we started the company, we just didn't know that at the time. Fortunately, the software that we built for this computer was so far ahead of its time that even after we exited the hardware business and became a software company, we were still five years ahead of anybody else. And so as NeXT became a software company, we really had something that a lot of people wanted. My guest is Stephen Jobs. We'll talk more after a break. This is Fresh Air. Stephen Jobs is my guest, co-founder of Apple Computer, now the chairman of NeXT Computer, Inc., and also the head of Pixar Studios, which made Toy Story.

What was the very first computer you had? I was very lucky. I was born in San Francisco and I grew up in Silicon Valley. I was able to go to NASA Ames Research Center nearby and play with a time-sharing computer, which was a loud mechanical terminal hooked up with a wire somewhere, and there was supposedly a computer on the other end of it. I got a chance to program in Fortran and BASIC. Those were the computer languages of the time. The computer languages of the time, and I was captured by it. How did you get into the computer business? What made you think, this is going to be my life? I met my future partner in Apple, Steve Wozniak, when I was about 13 years old.

He was the first person I'd met that knew more about electronics and computers than I did at the time. We became fast friends and started to build electronic devices together. We built blue boxes together for a while, which were little devices that could allow you to make free phone calls everywhere, illegally, I might add. So you were a hacker? Yeah. We built the first digital blue box in the whole world. It was wonderful. Our tagline, which we put a little card in the bottom of each one, was, He's got the whole world in his hands. The reason we built a computer was that we wanted one and we couldn't afford one. We couldn't afford to buy one. There were thousands of dollars at that time.

We were just two teenagers. So we started trying to build them, scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. After a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple One. And all of our friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them. So it turned out that it took maybe 50 hours to build one of these things by hand. And it was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not that skilled at building them. So Woz and I were building them for them. And we thought, you know, if we could just get what's called a printed circuit board where you could kind of just plug in the parts instead of having to hand wire the whole thing, we could cut the assembly time down from maybe 50 hours to more like an hour.

And so Woz sold his HP calculator, and I sold my VW microbus. And we got enough money together to pay someone to design one of these printed circuit boards for us. And our goal was to just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our friends and make enough money to recoup our calculator and transportation. And what happened was that one of the early computers – as a matter of fact, the first computer store in the world, which was in Mountain View at the time – said, well, I'll take 50 of these computers, but I want them fully assembled, which was a twist that we'd never thought of. So we went and bought the parts to build 100 computers, and we built 50 of them and delivered them. And then we got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts for the parts.

And then we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn't liquid. It was in 50 computers sitting on the floor. So we decided we had to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the 50 computers and get back our money. And that's how we got into business. And we took our idea to a few companies, one where Woz worked and one where I worked at the time, and neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company. You led the team that created the Macintosh, and from what I've read, it sounds like you were really the advocate for having a mouse on the Mac. Why did you push for that, and what was the argument against it? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I went to Xerox PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, in 1979, and I saw the early work on graphical user interfaces that they had done.

And they had a mouse, and it was obvious that you needed a pointing device, and a mouse seemed to be the best one. We tried a bunch of other ones subsequently at Apple, and a mouse indeed was the best one. We refined it a little bit. We found that Xerox has had three buttons. We found that people would push the wrong button or be scared that they were going to push the wrong button, so they always looked at the mouse instead of the screen. So we got it down to one button so that you could never push the wrong button and made some refinements like that. The Xerox mouse cost about $1,000 a piece to build. We had to engineer one that cost $20 to build. So we had to do a lot of those kinds of things, but the basic concept of the mouse came originally from a company called SRI through Xerox and then to Apple. And there were a lot of people at Apple that just didn't get it.

We fought tooth and nail with a variety of people there who thought the whole concept of a graphical user interface was crazy. On what grounds? On the grounds that it either couldn't be done or on the grounds that real computer users didn't need menus in plain English, and real computer users didn't care about putting nice little pictures on the screen. But fortunately, I was the largest stockholder and the chairman of the company, so I won. Steve Jobs is my guest, the co-founder of Apple Computer, now the head of Next Computer, Inc., and also the head of Pixar Studios, which made Toy Story. Do you think that when you were ousted from Apple that people kind of wrote you off?

I mean, here you are with these big successes now. Oh, golly, I don't know. I'm sure that a lot of people did, and that was fine. It was a very painful time, as you might imagine. To be forced out of the company you created. Oh, of course. It was a very painful time. But you just march forward and you try to learn from it. And one of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn't work out, a lot of times people's reaction is to get very protective about ever wanting to fall on their face again. And I think that's a big mistake because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there.

So I've tried to not be afraid to fail. As a matter of fact, I've failed quite a bit since leaving Apple. Are you surprised at the problems Apple is having now, or did you see that coming? I try not to talk about Apple too much. But what I will say is that the day I left Apple, we had a 10-year lead over Microsoft. And in the technology business, a 10-year lead is really hard to come by. It happens. Maybe a company has that once every few decades, whether it be a Xerox or an IBM with mainframes. Apple had that with the graphical user interface. And the problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating.

If you look at the Mac that ships today, it's 25% different than the day I left. And that's not enough for 10 years and billions of dollars in R&D. And it wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It's that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. And that's Apple's problem is that their differentiation evaporated. And unlike Compaq or others who play in the Intel-Microsoft standard space, where Compaq only has to be 5% better than its competitors for everyone to want to buy their computers, Apple has to be 50% or 100% better. Because when you buy something that is out of the mainstream a little bit, you take a risk. And you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk.

And unfortunately, that differentiation has not completely evaporated, but for the most part, it has. And that's the predicament Apple's in now. And that's why cost-cutting and other things at Apple are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. And there's a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership, which is what's been missing. Some Mac users are afraid that the Mac operating system is in danger of becoming obsolete in the way that beta video became obsolete, because it was outdone by VHS. What do you think? You know, I think with the appropriate leadership at Apple, that's not going to happen. But I think we're going to have to wait and see.

Do you care? I mean, how still involved, invested do you feel in the future of Apple, the company you work for? you co-created? I'm happy every time a Mac gets shipped. I still have people sending me emails telling me how much they love their Macs. And it's sort of, how do you explain it, it's like the first person you were ever in love with. It's like your first love and there will never be another one like it. In my case, we were together for 10 years and that's a long time, but if you move on in your life, you can't always stay in love with your first girlfriend, right?

Do you think that Apple would have been better off if it licensed this operating system to other companies, which it didn't do and it's been criticized for, until recently with Motorola? Yeah. You don't know. Who knows? I have no idea. Stephen Jobs co-founded Apple Computer. He's now the head of the software company, Next, and he's the president of Pixar, the computer animation company that produced Toy Story. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air. What do you think the state of the computer would be if it weren't for Apple? This is a chance, I guess, for a really self-serving answer, but I mean, I'm really curious what you think. I usually believe that if one group of people didn't do something, within a certain number of years, the times would produce another group of people that would accomplish similar things.

We happened to be at the right place at exactly the right time with the right group of people and we did some wonderful work. I'm extraordinarily proud of the work that the team at Apple did when I was there. I think that, personally, our major contribution was a little different than some people might think. I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers. Explain what you mean by that. What I mean by that is that if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for non-traditional things at that time, but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people.

It was to bring graphics to people, not for plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they could see beautiful photographs or pictures or artwork, etc., to help them communicate what they were doing potentially. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience. What made you think that that more liberal arts direction was the direction to head in? My perspective and the way I was raised was that science and computer science is a liberal art.

It's something that everyone should know how to use at least and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5% of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to. Everybody should have a mastery of to some extent. That's how we viewed computation or these computation devices. What made you think that that concept really caught on in the whole industry eventually? That's the seed of Apple, computers for the rest of us, and I think the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple. I'm not so sure that it lives that many other places.

One of the reasons I think Microsoft took ten years to copy the Mac was because they didn't really get it at its core. Do you think the PC as we know it is on the verge of changing? That's a really big question. I think the PC as we know it is going to be around for quite some time, but the heart of the question is, are we entering a time window where we might see the first successful post-PC devices? Personal digital assistants or PDAs attempted to be that and failed, and the next attempt is going to be, I think, these very low-cost consumer internet appliances, which is, can somebody make a $300 box that hooks up to your television on one side and maybe hooks up to ISDN or a cable modem on the other side and allows you for $300 to have a web browser on your TV and to access the entire internet?

I think that's entirely possible, and I think that we're going to see those devices soon and hopefully some innovative marketing and distribution techniques surrounding those devices so that a lot of people can all of a sudden have an internet browser in their living room. I think that's going to be very exciting, and I think that could be the beginning of the first real post-PC market. I know at Apple there was, at least early on, a very informal, non-corporate type of atmosphere. I wonder if there are any lessons you learned about what worked and didn't work in the corporate lifestyle at Apple that you've applied to your current companies, NeXT and Pixar.

I don't know what a corporate lifestyle is. Apple was a corporation. We were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we can continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I'd seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped into the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere, and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense in terms of where the ideas came from.

Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of companies don't do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we're paying them all this money. Their job is to figure out what to do and tell us, and that led to a very different corporate culture and one that's really much more collegial than hierarchical. In spite of this kind of different approach to the corporate hierarchy, it was probably still a very high-stress place.

We were very young, and most of the folks were not married, so they could work 15-hour days. You didn't have a typical situation where you work so that you can support your life. Your work was your life in many cases. Do you feel you've changed from that? Is that still your life? I feel it is still my life, but it's not all my life. It's less of a percentage, but I've never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They're the same thing, but where it used to be 99% of my life, it's maybe 50% of my life now. You've had a very big success with Pixar, your computer animation company, which created Toy Story.

In fact, I think you became a billionaire when it went public last November. What made you think that part of your future would lie in computer animation? I understand the connection with what you've been doing at Apple, but it's still a pretty different application of it. I have spent a lot of my life in computer graphics. The Apple II was the first personal computer that had color graphics on it. The Macintosh's ease of use was obtained through the use of better graphics than had ever been on a computer to date at that time. The LaserWriter was using PostScript and was very graphics intensive, but nothing that I had ever been involved in was as good as what I saw Pixar was doing when I met a man named Ed Catmull in 1986.

He was then running a division of Lucasfilm that was up for sale. Ed and I really hit it off, and he had a dream to make the world's first computer animated feature film, which I bought into both spiritually and financially. We formed Pixar in 1986, buying the division from Lucasfilm and starting to add people with that vision in mind. There's an incredible team of people at Pixar that have worked for ten years to make that dream come true. As the head of Pixar Studios, what was your involvement with the actual creation of Toy Story? What level did you function on? I didn't get to animate one frame. We've got people that are so great at that that they're the best in the world.

Unfortunately, not being a visual artist myself, there were several of us that didn't get to really help make the film per se. What I was able to do was try to make the environment in which the great team that we have that made the film could successfully make the film, so I had to negotiate the deal with Disney and all of the other things in terms of running the company that were more of really just support for the great team that made the film. The most incredible thing to me, though, was Pixar was the first time in my life that I went from worrying about supplying computers to other people to being a consumer of computation. As an example, each frame in Toy Story took, on average, 300 megabytes of data to represent all of the elements in that frame, and there's 114,000 frames in that film.

Each one of those frames took, on average, three hours to draw using the fastest computers around. So, we were a consumer of computers for the first time, and it was really great. When somebody comes out with a faster computer, it used to be, oh, no, and now it's hooray. Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer. He's now the head of the software company, Next, and he's the president of Pixar, the computer animation company that produced Toy Story.