That 10 second pause before he responds — 25 seconds if you don't count the reference to the famous quote, which buys him a bit more time — is amazing.

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

One thing that's interesting here is how Jobs doesn't answer the specific technical question: How does Java address the ideas embodied in OpenDoc?

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.

I can't believe people compare Jobs with Musk. Jobs was so much better put together in public and seems like he can still be very coherent and persuasive even when angry (likely in this video) and insulted in public.

Everyone is cheering this on... But as far as I can tell Apple did not win the Document Editor and business computing war vs MS.

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.

Such a great clip.

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.

...if you think about it, it's the phrase "sell 8 billion dollars of product a year" that does the heavylifting, where he sets up the overall tone as "Me: Successful business tycoon. You: Angry nobody."

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).

My favorite part is when audience clap to “some mistakes will be made and that’s good because that means decisions will be made “. As a guy who just quit 18 year career at multi billion dollar corporation, that was the biggest reasons for my quitting.

Other comments rightfully address Jobs' extraordinary talent in presentation and persuasion. He was certainly right in the diagnosis about what ailed Apple at the time, and where it needed to get to (or get back to).

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.

> “some people who don’t know what they’re talking about”

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.

Here’s the high quality copy of the whole video:

https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

Jobs was a flawed man in many ways, but the way he handled and addressed that is a succinct glimpse into why he is rightfully seen as a titan in the computing industry.

Who asked the question? Curious for their response, even if years later.

Another great one from the same day is on the Newton. Spot on.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=3665

When he stood up, he had everything he was going to say figured out. Pretty cool to watch. This was a common question he knew was coming then though, so some of it is showmanship.

Some context, all from wikipedia:

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.*

The Apple then and Apple now.

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.

Steve Jobs anticipated what was coming, and handled that very maturely.

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.

That is... so much nicer than I expected.

I mean if you listen closely Jobs straight up contradicts himself.

Could someone mention the context for the question? I have seen this clip before and it always escapes me.

Here it comes...

staged, I assume

That last bit about making mistakes but at least decisions are being made is important. Also connects well with what we have seen in the first 6 weeks of Elon Twitter.

Salesmen gonna sell. Not sure what the value of this video is.