Aveti mai jos doar niste selectii din interviul cu Steve Jobs realizat de Playboy in 1985. Sincer, l-as fi pus pe tot pentru ca este cel mai frumos interviu pe care l-am citit vreodata, dar are 4 pagini. Il gasiti aici in varianta integrala. Chiar merita! Enjoy!
If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company—one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what’s most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old.
PLAYBOY: We were going to say guys like you and Steve Wozniak, working out of a garage only ten years ago. Just what is this revolution you two seem to have started?
JOBS: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront.
PLAYBOY: What will change?
JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.
PLAYBOY: Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s a big change for people used to keyboards. Why the mouse?
JOBS: If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: "There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button." If you have a spot—"There!" [He points]—I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.
PLAYBOY: How long did it take to develop Macintosh?
JOBS: It was more than two years on the computer itself. We had been working on the technology behind it for years before that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
PLAYBOY: Does it take insane people to make insanely great things?
JOBS: Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.
PLAYBOY: Was any of your decision not to become compatible with IBM based on the fact that you didn’t want to knuckle under to IBM? One critic says that the reason Mac isn’t IBM-compatible is mere arrogance—that "Steve Jobs was saying ’Fuck you’ to IBM."
JOBS: It wasn’t that we had to express our manhood by being different, no.
PLAYBOY: Then why were you?
JOBS: The main thing is very simply that the technology we developed is superior. It could not be this good if we became compatible with IBM. Of course, it’s true that we don’t want IBM to dominate this industry. A lot of people thought we were nuts for not being IBM-compatible, for not living under IBM’s umbrella. There were two key reasons we chose to bet our company on not doing that: The first was that we thought—and I think as history is unfolding, we’re being proved correct—that IBM would fold its umbrella on the companies making compatible computers and absolutely crush them.
PLAYBOY: A lot of guys in their 40s are going to be real pleased with you. Let’s move on to the other thing that people talk about when they mention Apple—the company, not the computer. You feel a similar sense of mission about the way things are run at Apple, don’t you?
JOBS: I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.
What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.
PLAYBOY: You went to work for Hewlett-Packard. How did that happen?
JOBS: When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I needed some parts, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett—he was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he was real nice. He chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. He didn’t know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency counters. Assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn’t matter; I was in heaven.
I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To fuck!" [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer.
PLAYBOY: Let’s talk about the money. You were a millionaire at 23——
JOBS: And when I was 24, my net worth was more than $10,000,000; when I was 25, it was more than $100,000,000.
PLAYBOY: What’s the main difference between having $1,000,000 and having several hundred million?
JOBS: Visibility. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $1,000,000 in this country is in the tens of thousands. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $10,000,000 gets down to thousands. And the number who have a net worth of more than $100,000,000 gets down to a few hundred.
Si un citat pe masura: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you."
If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company—one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what’s most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old.
PLAYBOY: We were going to say guys like you and Steve Wozniak, working out of a garage only ten years ago. Just what is this revolution you two seem to have started?
JOBS: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront.
PLAYBOY: What will change?
JOBS: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.
PLAYBOY: Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s a big change for people used to keyboards. Why the mouse?
JOBS: If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: "There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button." If you have a spot—"There!" [He points]—I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.
PLAYBOY: How long did it take to develop Macintosh?
JOBS: It was more than two years on the computer itself. We had been working on the technology behind it for years before that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
PLAYBOY: Does it take insane people to make insanely great things?
JOBS: Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.
PLAYBOY: Was any of your decision not to become compatible with IBM based on the fact that you didn’t want to knuckle under to IBM? One critic says that the reason Mac isn’t IBM-compatible is mere arrogance—that "Steve Jobs was saying ’Fuck you’ to IBM."
JOBS: It wasn’t that we had to express our manhood by being different, no.
PLAYBOY: Then why were you?
JOBS: The main thing is very simply that the technology we developed is superior. It could not be this good if we became compatible with IBM. Of course, it’s true that we don’t want IBM to dominate this industry. A lot of people thought we were nuts for not being IBM-compatible, for not living under IBM’s umbrella. There were two key reasons we chose to bet our company on not doing that: The first was that we thought—and I think as history is unfolding, we’re being proved correct—that IBM would fold its umbrella on the companies making compatible computers and absolutely crush them.
PLAYBOY: A lot of guys in their 40s are going to be real pleased with you. Let’s move on to the other thing that people talk about when they mention Apple—the company, not the computer. You feel a similar sense of mission about the way things are run at Apple, don’t you?
JOBS: I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.
What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.
PLAYBOY: You went to work for Hewlett-Packard. How did that happen?
JOBS: When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I needed some parts, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett—he was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he was real nice. He chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. He didn’t know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency counters. Assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn’t matter; I was in heaven.
I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To fuck!" [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer.
PLAYBOY: Let’s talk about the money. You were a millionaire at 23——
JOBS: And when I was 24, my net worth was more than $10,000,000; when I was 25, it was more than $100,000,000.
PLAYBOY: What’s the main difference between having $1,000,000 and having several hundred million?
JOBS: Visibility. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $1,000,000 in this country is in the tens of thousands. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $10,000,000 gets down to thousands. And the number who have a net worth of more than $100,000,000 gets down to a few hundred.
Si un citat pe masura: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you."
