Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview

History has time and again rewarded men who have lead the revolutions of industries with immortal like status of their names and the ideas those names represented. Even fewer so have managed to do so more than once in their lifetime but perhaps there is only one man in history to have consistently achieved said feat across multiple industries repeatedly, decade after decade. With the Apple II and it’s significantly faster microprocessor and built in memory along with an audio amplifier, a speaker, a jack to connect joysticks for gameplay as well as a cassette tape drive in the 70s, the Macintosh with it’s revolutionary GUI and bitmapping technology running on an exorbitantly priced Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip despite of which it still stood at a retail price of under a thousand dollars not to mention it was the very first microcomputer to be operated by a mouse released in the 80s, the iPod, a piece of hardware that transformed the way music is consumed with it’s storage capabilities, the scroll wheel as well as the iTunes Store in the early 2000s and the IPhone, arguably the greatest consumer product of all time, in the late 2000s, along with other achievements like the iPad in 2010 as well as Toy Story, the first feature length film in history to be made entirely with CGI, that if it were for any other person, could easily be respected as their life’s magnum opus but not in the case of Steve Jobs, a visionary in every sense of the word who constantly set such remarkably high standards for himself and the people around him, placing an unimaginable level of significance and meticulousness to every minuscule detail that many of the people who worked with him over the years have stated that they were traumatized into producing the best work of their lives.  

 

What is most intriguing to me is that the story of Steve Jobs far beyond merely the story of his life. It is a saga of a numerous lives, efforts and anecdotes as well as the culmination of several ideas the overarching epicenter of which is the eccentric character of Steve Jobs. It is the accounts as well as the influence of several people the likes of which include Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and the technical genius that produced the Apple I and II,  Ronald Wayne, the third unheard partner of Apple’s early days that backed out early,  Mike Markkula, one of Steve’s early mentors and the first major venture capitalist to invest in Apple, Michael Scott, Apple’s first CEO, John Sculley, the executive Steve poached from Pepsico to be CEO who would later convince the board to kick out Steve from his very own company. Jean Louis Gassee, the replacement John Sculley brought in place of Steve,  Jef Raskin, the project head for the Mac, a position which Steve eventually took from him,  Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar along with Steve, John Lasseter, the cartoonist that made CGI possible at Pixar, Rich Page, Bud Tribble, George Crow, Dan’l Lewin, Susan Barnes, all of whom left Apple to join Steve at NeXT, Bill Gates, who through multiple stages of Steve’s life has been a foe as well as a dear friend, Mike Slade, a close friend of both Jobs and Gates, Tim Cook, Steve’s chosen successor at Apple, Bill Hewlett, the man who has a fundamental role in getting Steve interested in microcomputers, Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the very first place Steve worked, Andy Grove and Robert Noyce, co-founders of Intel who acted as mentors to Steve through out his life, Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid and a hero to Steve, Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony and another hero of Steve, Jony Ives, lead industrial designer at Apple who Steve grew incredibly close with after his return in 1997, Laurene and Lisa Jobs, Steve’s spouse and child who he comes to appreciate in the later stages of his life, Burrell Smith, the man who made the Macintosh possible, Bill Fernandez, the man who introduced Jobs and Wozniak to each other, Robert Freidland, the man who convinced Steve to go to India, Neem Karoli Baba, the man Jobs wished to meet in India but had unfortunately passed away just days prior to Steve arriving, Shunryu Suzuki and countless others intertwining through the solitary node that is Steve Jobs. A product of his time, Jobs’s utter hatred for authority along with appreciation for eastern philosophy and mindful practices can be directly traced back to the counterculture movement he was exposed to, growing up in the sixties. 

 

 

In the interview of Steve Jobs, conducted in 1995 by Robert Cringely for the PBS show; Triumph Of The Nerds, viewers witness an innate glimpse into the complex yet profoundly simple mind behind these revolutionary products, his early life, the beginning of Apple, his vision for NeXT (the company he was running at the time), the ideas and lessons he carries with himself for the rest of his life and the people he admires. 

 

 

The most valuable takeaway, in my opinion, from the entirety of the interview is Job’s description of the innovation killing “disease” that companies and non technical executives catch and the explanation of why great companies die for it is within this intricately worded monologue that lies the principle to create great products. Jobs explains that as companies move closer to being monopolies, it is the sales and marketing people that eventually yet inevitably begin to take control over the product decisions as opposed to the product people solely because incremental improvements in the product itself stops translating to greater market share and so occurs a negative curve between the quality of the product and the company gaining more market share until consumers are abruptly awoken to lack of quality found in the products of these monopolies. It is around this period in the cycle that the company wants to replicate it’s initial success but gets confused into thinking that the “magic” behind their first winning product was the process as opposed to the content itself. Due to this misconception, soon enough, the most talented of individuals within the organization begin to conflate the process with the content leading to the downfall of it’s innovative capability.

 

 

Additionally, Steve mentions this “disease” that was common among executives in the tech industry at the time and that was the presumption that ninety percent of the work was coming up with a great idea and that the execution was the rest of the ten. The predicament with that assumption is that there is a drastic distinction between a great idea and a great product. There are constraints in place and subsequently trade offs to be made that push forward the evolution of the idea that the team molds into a great product and hence it is not the idea that can solitarily guarantee success but the process of crafting it into a great product that does. 

 

 

Steve also elucidates his extremely controversial management style through an analogy. The analogy is that of an old widowed man that used a rock tumbler to refine the jagged rocks in his backyard into beautifully smooth and polished stones. Steve compares the cacophony of the rocks grinding against each other to the arguments and the tension of conflicting ideas in a team of talented individuals working with one another leading to the creation of truly marvelous products.

 

 

It is the eccentricity of his character and strategy that draw so much attention to Steve Jobs and yet despite all of his antics and ostensibly inappropriate behavior, he will always be revered for his victories in the introduction and refining of industry changing technologies from the young  age of 20 all the way to his death in 2011. In more ways than one, all of us live in Steve Jobs world. There is arguably no other man in history to which these many world changing products can be traced back to.