Jobs D5
0.Singer,
1.once you sit here, closes a year.
2.Well, thank you. Before we get started, I think, you know, there were some pioneers.
3.Of course, we have the pioneers here on stage, but there were some other really important pioneers in the video we just saw, and a couple of them are here in the audience.
4.So Mitch Kapor, who was a regular d could you just stand up and wherever you are, here he is.
5.And Fred Gibbons, who has not come to d before, but is here a night.
6.Fred. Pretty good. They’re spread right there.
7.And I don’t know if he’s in the room.
8.But I do want to recognize our fellow journalist, french Schlender from Fortune, who did the last, to my knowledge, the last joint interview these guys did, it was not on a stage, but it was a Fortune Magazine interview.
9.Brenn, I don’t know if you’re in the room, if you are, kenya stand, maybe he’s over there.
10.So let’s get started. I want to ask there’s been a lot of, like, mano mono, cat fight kind of thing in a lot of the blogs and the press and stuff like that, and we wanted to the 1st one Icon was interested in asking is what you think each has contributed to the computer and technology industry, starting with you, steve, for Bill, and vice versa.
11.In a Bill built the 1st software company in the industry, and I think he built the 1st software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys.
12.And that was huge. That was really huge.
13.And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry.
14.So I think the biggest thing was Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software.
15.That’s what I see. I mean, a lot of other things you could say, but that’s the high order bit.
16.And I think building a company is really hard and and it requires, it requires your greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best people you can and keep them, keep them at your company, and keep them working, you know, doing the best work of their lives, hopefully.
17.And bill’s been able to stay with it for all these years.
18.So they’ll have about the contribution of Steven Apple.
19.Well, 1st I want to clip.
20.I am not fake Steve jobs.
21.What Steves On is quite phenomenal in a view.
22.Back to 1977, that Apple to computer, the idea that it would be a mass market machine, the bet that was made there by Apple.
23.Uniquely. There were other people with products, but the idea that this could be an incredible, empowering phenomena.
24.Apple pursued that dream. Then one of the most fun things we did was the Macintosh.
25.And that was so risky, and people may not remember that Apple really bet the company, LISA hadn’t done that well.
26.And, you know, some people were saying, okay, that general approach wasn’t good, but the team that Steve Bill Eden, within the company to pursue that, even some days it felt a little ahead of its time.
27.I don’t remember that twigy disk drive and 28 K.
28.Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where you talk about, in a certain sense, we build the products that we want to use ourselves.
29.And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry.
30.And his ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal.
31.You know, apple literally was failing when Steve went back and reinfused the innovation and risk taking.
32.That been phenomenal. So the industry’s benefited immensely from his his work.
33.We’ve both been lucky to be part of it, but, you know, I’d say he’s contributed as much as anyone.
34.We have also both been
35.incredibly lucky to have had great partners that we started the companies with, and we’ve attracted great people.
36.I mean, so everything that’s been done at Microsoft ANNADAP has been done by just remarkable people.
37.None of what you’re sitting up
38.here, you know, today, you’re sort of the you’re, in a way, you’re the stand ins for all those other people.
39.In a way, I’m very tangible.
40.So Bill mentioned the Apple Two in 1977, 30 years ago, and there were a couple of other computers with which were aimed at the idea that average people might be able to use them.
41.And looking back on it, and that really average average person might not have been able to use them by today’s standards, but it’s certainly broad in the base of who could use computers.
42.I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978.
43.It was a print ad at Churchill, ancient and it said, thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.
44.Thousands of people. And it also said, you don’t want to buy one of these computers where you put a cartridge in.
45.I think that was a reference to one of the Atari or something.
46.You want a computer you can write your own programs on.
47.And so the world, and obviously we had some very strange ads back then.
48.We had one where it was in a kitchen, and there was a woman that looked like the wife, and she was typing a recipes on the computer, with the husband looking on approvingly in the back.
49.Yeah, stuff like that. How did that work for you?
50.I don’t think well so. But just think back to I know that you started Microsoft prior to 1977.
51.I think Apple started a year before, and six Microsoft, tell me more, was empty.
52.Started right at any base. And then, yeah, then we did the bait ship, the basic in 75.
53.OK, most people, some people here, but I don’t think most people know that there was actually some Microsoft software in that Apple two computer.
54.Do you want to talk about what happened there, how that, how that occurred?
55.Yeah, the there had been the Altar and a few other companies, actually, about 24, that had done various machines, but there are 77 group included, the PET tier C-D, amateur and the commoter, PET tier C-D, and the Apple Two, the original Apple two, basic energy, basic.
56.We had nothing to do with.
57.But then there was a floating point where, and I mostly worked with walls on that I made.
58.Let me tell this story. It was my partner.
59.We start out with this guy named Steve Waaznek.
60.Brilliant, brilliant guy. He writes this basic.
61.It is like the best basic on the planet.
62.It does stuff that no other basics ever done.
63.You don’t have to run it to find your air messages.
64.It finds them when you type it in stuff.
65.It’s perfect in everyone, except for one thing, which is it’s just fixed point, right?
66.It’s not floating point. And so getting a lot of input that people want this basic to be floating point.
67.And like, what? Begging laws, please, please make this floating push we How many people are in app Well, me?
68.Yeah. Well, begging Laws to make this floating point.
69.And he just never does it, you know?
70.And he wrote it by hand on paper.
71.He didn’t have an assembler or anything to write with.
72.It was all just written on paper.
73.He type it in. He just never got around to making a fighting point.
74.Well, this is one of the mysteries of life, I don’t know, but he never did.
75.And so Microsoft had this very popular, really good floating point, basic that we ended up going to them and saying, help.
76.And how much was the I think you were telling sir, 31000 that Apple paid you for the floating point basic.
77.And I flew out to Apple.
78.I spent two days there getting the cassette.
79.Cassette tapes are the main ways that people stored things at the time, right?
80.And that was fun. I think the most fun is later, when we worked together.
81.What was the most fun? Tell the story about the most fun that was later, and maybe later, not the most fun.
82.Let them talk, please. Empty Well, steve can probably started better the the team that was assembled there to do the Macintosh was a very committed team, and there was an equivalent team on our side that just got totally focused on this activity.
83.Jeff harbors a lot of incredible people, and we really about our future, because we, on the man can possibly be successful, and then hopefully graphics interface in general being successful.
84.But the 1st, and foremost, the thing would popularized that being the Macintosh.
85.And so we were working together.
86.The schedules run certain The quality was uncertain.
87.The price, when the Steve 1st came up, it was going to be a lot cheaper computer than it ended up being.
88.That was fine. You worked in both places.
89.In both we were in Seattle,
90.and we fly down Microsoft, if I remember correcting from what I read, wasn’t Microsoft one of the few companies that were allowed to even have a prototype in the back at the time?
91.Well, it’s interesting. What’s
92.hard to remember now is that Microsoft wasn’t in the applications business then they took a big bet on the Mac, because this is how they got into the apps business.
93.We lotus dominated the apps business on the PC back then, right?
94.We had done just multiplown. It was a hit on the Apple two.
95.And then Mitch did an incredible job betting on the IBMPC, and one, two, three came in and ruled that part of the business.
96.So the question was, what was the next paradigm shift that would allow for an entry?
97.We’re perfect, we had word, but word perfect was by far the strongest word processing d base and database, and word was that was a kind of a DOS text.
98.All of these products, I’m saying, were DOS based, right products, because Windows wasn’t in the picture of the time.
99.That’s more in the early nineties that that we get to that.
100.And so we made this bet that the paren’tine shift would be graphics interface.
101.In particular, that the Mac and POSH would make that happen with 120, eightk of memory, 20 TWOK, which was for the screen buffer.
102.Fourteenk was for the operating system.
103.So it was FOURTEENK, yeah, original Mac opera system was fourteenk.
104.FOURTEENK that we had to have loaded when our software ran.
105.So when the shell would come up, it had all 120 EIGHTK The os was bigger than FOURTEENK.
106.It was in the twentys somewhere, I see.
107.So we ship these now. We ship these computers now with, you know, gigabyte, 2 gb of memory.
108.And nobody remembers 128 K-I remember that.
109.I remember, I remember paying a lot of money for computers with a hundred and 80 k in those days.
110.So the two companies worked closely on on the Mac project, because you were maybe not the only, but the principal, or one of the principal software creators for it, right?
111.Is that right? Well, apple did the Mac itself, but we got Bill and his team involved to write these applications, and we were doing a few apps ourselves.
112.We did Mac Paint and Macaron stuff like that.
113.But Bill and his team did some great work now in terms of going moving forward, after you left, and your company grew more and more strong, how did you, what did you think was going to happen to Apple after sort of the disasters that occur after Steve left?
114.Well, apples date hung in the balance.
115.We continue to do Macintosh software, and, you know, excel, which Steven I introduced together in New York City, that was kind of a fun event that went on and did very well.
116.But then, you know, apple just wasn’t differentiating itself well enough from the higher volume platform.
117.And meeting Windows, right? I mean, awesome Windows, OK, but especially Windows in the ninetys began to take off.
118.By 1995, windows became popular. The big debate wasn’t sort of, mac versus Windows.
119.The big debate was character mode in her face versus graphics mode interface.
120.And when the three 86 came and we got more memory and the speed was adequate and some development tools came along.
121.That paradigm bet on gooey paid off for everybody who got in early and said, you know, this is the way that’s going to go.
122.And but Apple wasn’t even to leverage it.
123.They weren’t you? Right after the five pump came back was done, the chronic line just didn’t evolve as fast.
124.At least he wasn’t there as it needed to.
125.And we were actually negotiating deal to invest and make some commends and things with Gill Amelio.
126.And No, seriously, and we will mean govern me to him.
127.I’m sorry to say the word bill Amelia, you can see it.
128.So I was calling him up on the weekend and all this stuff, and next thing I knew, steve called me up and said, don’t worry about that negotiation with Gil a meal ago.
129.You can just talk to me now.
130.And I said, wow, gil was a nice guy, but he had a sing.
131.He said, apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
132.So And meanwhile, through all this, I mean, I want to get back to the thing we saw in the 1997 at Mac World there, but Windows was just going great guns.
133.I mean, windows 95 to whatever extent, earlier versions of Windows had not had all the features, all the goose stuff that the Mac had.
134.Winners 95 really was an enormous, enormous leap.
135.Yeah. 95, when graphics center pace became mainstream and went
136.the software industry realized, wow, this is the way applications are going to be done.
137.And it was amazing that it was ridiculed, sort of in 9394, was not mainstream.
138.And then in 95, the debate was over.
139.It was kind of just a common sense thing.
140.And it was a combination of hardware and software maturity getting to a point that people could see it.
141.So I don’t want to go through every detail, the whole history of how you came back, but thank you.
142.But you in that video, we also you said you had decided to that it was destructive to have this competition with Microsoft.
143.Now, obviously Apple wasn’t a lot of trouble, and I presume that there was some tactical or strategic reason for that as well as just wanted to be a nice guy, right?
144.I mean, you know, apple was in in very serious trouble, and what was really clear was that if the game was a zero sum game, where for Apple to win, microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose.
145.But that’s a lot of people’s heads were still in that place.
146.That’s near perspective. A lot of people’s heads were in that place at Apple, and even in the customer base, because, you know, apple had invented a lot of this stuff, and Microsoft was being successful, and Apple wasn’t.
147.And there was jealousy in this, and that there was just a lot of reasons for it that don’t matter.
148.But the net result of it was was there were too many people at Apple and in the Apple ecosystem playing the game of for Apple to win, microsoft test to lose.
149.And it was clear that you didn’t have to play that game, because Apple wasn’t going to be Microsoft Apple.
150.Didn’t have to beat Microsoft Apple.
151.Had to remember who Apple was, because it forgot you Apple was.
152.And to me, it was pretty essential to break that paradigm.
153.And it was also important that, you know, microsoft was the biggest software developer outside of Apple, developing for the Mac.
154.And so, you know, that was just crazy, what was happening at that time.
155.And Apple was very weak. And so I called Bill up and we tried to patch things up.
156.And since that time, we’ve had a team that’s fairly dedicated to doing the Mac applications, and they’ve always been treated kind of in unique ways so that they can have a pretty special relationship with Apple, and that’s worked out very well.
157.In fact, every couple years or so, there’s been something new that we’ve been able to do on the Mac, and great, great business for us.
158.And it’s actually the relationship between the Mac development at Microsoft and Apple is a great relationship.
159.It’s one of our best developer relationships.
160.Do you look at yourself as rivals now today, as the landscape has evolved, and we’ll talk about the Internet landscape and everything else, and other companies that have come for But how do you look at yourselves in this landscape today?
161.You are competitors in certain ways.
162.We watch the American way, right?
163.The commercials, and you get annoyed at each other.
164.From China, I have to confess.
165.I like PC guys. Yeah, he’s great.
166.The art of those commercials is not to be mean, but it’s actually for the guys to like each other.
167.Thanks. PC guys. PC guys Great.
168.I like, not a big heart, his mother loves him.
169.His mother. I like PC guy tofu.
170.And wow, hes endearing the other guy.
171.You see, guys, what makes it all work?
172.Actually, its worth thinking about. Let me just ask you, bill.
173.Obviously, microsoft is a much larger company here in many more markets, many more types of products, than than Apple is.
174.You know, when you were running the company, or when Steve Bomber is running the company?
175.You think, obviously, about Google. You think about, I don’t know, linux in the enterprise.
176.You think about lots of, I mean, sony, in the game area.
177.How often is Apple on your radar screen at Microsoft?
178.In a business sense? Well, they’re only a radar screen.
179.It’s an opportunity. And in a few cases, like the Zoom, that if you go over to that group, they think of Apple as a competitor.
180.They love the fact that Apples created a gigantic market, and they’re going to try and come in and contribute something to that.
181.And we love them, because they’re all customers.
182.I have to tell you, I was actually told by j
183.Allard, I’m serious, that because of
184.the nature of the processor, the development platform they used to develop a lot of the software for the Xbox Three 60 was Max.
185.And he claimed that at one point they had, like, placed the biggest order for whatever the Mac tower was at the time of anybody, and it was Microsoft.
186.I don’t know if it was the biggest, but yeah, we had the same processor, essentially,
187.that the Mac had. This is one of those great ironies, they were switching away from that process, or while the Xbox Three 60 was adopting it, but for good reasons, actually, in both cases, because we’re not inopportable application.
188.And that was one of the things that that processor road map didn’t have.
189.But yes, we did. It shows pragmatism that we we try and do things that way.
190.So that was the development system for it.
191.The early people getting their software ready for the introduction of, I’m x Box 360.
192.And we never ran an ad on that.
193.I see, admirable restraint. There were hundreds of them.
194.Steve is so known for his restraint.
195.How do you look at that Microsoft from an Apple perspective?
196.I mean, you compete in computers.
197.I mean, you could say you don’t compute, you know, the Arab destructive, whatever, whatever you said in 1997, you think you’re cautiously aware of what they’re doing with, you know, you follow this too closely.
198.I think what’s really interesting is, and we talked about this earlier today, if you, if you look at the reason that the ipod exists and that apples in that marketplace, it’s because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies, who kind of own the portable music market for a long, long invented it and owned it.
199.Couldn’t write, couldn’t do the appropriate software, couldn’t conceive of and implement the appropriate software.
200.Because an ipod is really just software.
201.It’s software in the ipod itself.
202.It’s software on the PC of the Mac, and it’s software in the cloud for the store, and it’s in a beautiful box, but it’s software.
203.If you look at what a Mac is, it’s, it’s os TEN.
204.It’s in a beautiful box, but it’s os ten.
205.And if you look at what an iphone will hopefully be, its software.
206.And so the big secret about Apple, of course, not so big secret maybe, is that Apple views itself as a software company, and there aren’t very many software companies left, and Microsoft is a software company.
207.And so, you know, we look at what they do, and and we think some it’s really great.
208.We think some of its little bit of its competitive, and most of it’s not, you know, we we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80% of the PC market.
209.We we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point, and we love that.
210.We work real hard at it.
211.But apple’s fundamentally a software company, and there’s not a lot of us left in Microsoft.
212.But you may be fundamentally software company, but you’ve been known, at least to your customers and to most journalists, company that kind of pays a lot of attention integrating software and hardware.
213.You know, alan, microsoft has made some recent moves to be a little more like that, obviously not in your core biggest businesses, but with Xbox in zone.
214.And, you know, the surface computing device we saw today is another example.
215.These aren’t markets that hold up in size to Windows or Office.
216.But there are some of your more recent initiatives.
217.Are companies approaches to this. Allen K had urging a little Or Allen k had a great quote back in the seventies, I think.
218.He said, people that love software want to do their own hardware.
219.You know what bill of software I can resist that.
220.The questions are their market square.
221.The innovation and variety you get is a net positive.
222.The negative is that in the early stage, you really want to do the two together.
223.So you want to do prototyping and things like that, you know, really is one thing.
224.And then just take the phone market.
225.We think we are 140 different kinds of hardware.
226.We think it’s beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn’t give us what we have through those partnerships.
227.Likewise, if you take the robotics market, very undeveloped, we have over 140 all tiny volume robots using Microsoft software.
228.And the creativity building toys, security things, medical things.
229.We love the innovation and the ecosystem that’s going to grow up.
230.Who knows when we’re patient around that.
231.And we’ll have a great asset with this robotic software platform.
232.So there are things like PC phone and robot, where I the Microsoft choice is to go for the variety.
233.It’s apples. It’s great. They’re, you know, for them.
234.They do what works super well for them.
235.And there’s a few markets, like Xbox Three, 60 Zone, and this year we have two new ones, the surface thing, and this round table, which is the meeting room thing, where we’ll actually through subcontractors, but it’s our the PM on the risk and all that.
236.For the hardware, the design is completely a Microsoft thing.
237.The round table, is that something you announced, or were you just we’ve shown prototypes
238.of it. That’s the thing where it’s got the 300 and SIXCD.
239.All right, and all those. It’s like Cisco has something in that market.
240.And HP, right? HP has a very high end thing.
241.That’s tiny bit like But anyway, all right, you know, you ever regret, was there something you might have wanted to do differently?
242.And maybe this all you feel like this happened after you left Apple, something you might have done differently, that where where you could have had a much bigger market share for the Mac.
243.Well, before I answer that, let me make a comment on bill’s answer there, which is it’s very interesting in the consumer market and the enterprise market, they are very different spaces.
244.And in the consumer market, at least, I think one can make a pretty strong case that, outside of Windows on pcs, it’s hard to see other examples of of of the software and hardware being decoupled working super well.
245.Yet it might in the phone space.
246.Over time, it might, but it’s not clear.
247.It’s not clear. You can see a lot more examples of the hardware software coupling working well.
248.And so I think this is one of the reasons we all come to work every day, is because nobody knows the answer to some of these questions, and we’ll find out over the coming years.
249.Maybe both will work fine. Yeah, maybe they Yeah.
250.It’s good. And it’s good to try both approaches.
251.And some product categories. Take music players.
252.The solo design worked better. And the PC market, the variety of designs this stage, has a higher share and has a higher share.
253.Yeah, there’s a lot of it’s not that much different music players the other way around.
254.Is there some moment you feel like, I should have done this, or Apple should have done that, and we could have had, oh, it’s not this idea of these hardware software integration, and it’s working very well.
255.There’s a lot of things that happens that I’m sure I could have done better when I was at Apple the 1st time, and a lot of things that happened after I left that I thought were wrong turns, but it doesn’t matter, really doesn’t matter.
256.And you kind of got to let go of that stuff.
257.And, you know, we are where we are, so we tend to look forward.
258.And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple ten years ago was I-I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines, and kind of cleared out the cob web and said, let’s stop looking backwards here.
259.It’s all about what happens tomorrow.
260.And because you can’t look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t gotten fired.
261.I wish I was there. I wish this, I wish that.
262.It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow.
263.Rather than worrying about what happened yesterday, let’s talk about, we’re going to talk a little bit tomorrow, but this time about today, the landscape of how you see the different players in the market, and how you you look at what’s developing now.
264.What is surprised both of you?
265.Since having been around for so long and still very active and everything?
266.I mean, your companies are still critically peak companies, but there are many, many companies that are becoming quite powerful.
267.How do you look at the landscape at this moment and what’s happening, especially in the Internet space?
268.I think it’s super healthy, right?
269.I think there’s a lot of, a lot of young people out there building some great companies, who want to build companies, who aren’t just interested in starting something and selling it to one of the big guys, who want to build companies.
270.And I think there are some really exciting companies getting built out there, some next generation of stuff that, you know, some of us play catch up with, and, you know, some of us find ways to partner with and things like that.
271.But there’s a lot of activity out there now, wouldn’t you say?
272.Yeah, I’d say it’s a healthy period.
273.The the notion of one the new form factors look like, what natural interface can do, the ability to use the cloud, the Internet, to do part of the task in a complimentary way, to the the local experience.
274.There’s a lot of invention that the whole approach of startups, the existing companies who do research it, will look back at this as one of the the great courage of invention.
275.I think there’s a lot of things that that are risky right now, which is always a good sign, you know.
276.And you can see through them.
277.You can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge, but there’s a period of risk that, you know, nobody’s ever done it before.
278.And I do what I can’t say and so but I can’t say, when you feel like that, that’s a great thing.
279.That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning, and it tells you there’s something exciting around the next corner.
280.OK? But so the two of you have, certainly, you’re involved every day with the Internet.
281.You have Internet products, you have a hole.
282.You know, nobody’s ever done it before.
283.And, E.G., I
284.do, but I can’t say, but I can’t say when you feel like that, that’s a great thing.
285.That’s what keeps you coming to work in the morning, and it tells you there’s something exciting around the
286.next corner. OK? But so the two of you have, certainly, you’re involved every day with the Internet.
287.You have Internet products. You have a whole slew of stuff on the Internet.
288.You have itunes and dot mac and and and all of that.
289.But on another level, you’re the guys who represent the rich client, the personal computer, the, you know, big operating system and all that.
290.And there is a certain school of thought, and I’m sure it’s shared by some people in the room, that this is all migrating to the cloud, and you’ll need a fairly light piece of hardware that won’t have to have all that investment, all the kind of stuff you guys have done throughout your careers.
291.So as much as people, I think of you as rivals.
292.One way to think of you as the two guys dinosaurs.
293.We’re both dinosaurs, or whatever. I can talk about that.
294.No, seriously, is there in five years?
295.In five years, is the personal computer still going to be the lynch pan of all this stuff?
296.Well, you can say that it’ll be predicted that it won’t be.
297.You know, the network computer took us over, about, what, five years ago, we disappeared, remember the single function computer?
298.There was somebody who said that these general purpose things are kind of a dumb idea.
299.So that’s the mainstream is always under attack.
300.The thing that people don’t realize is that you’re going to have rich local functionality.
301.I mean, at least our bet, whereas you get things like speech and vision, as you get more natural form factors, it’s a question of using that local richness together with the richness that’s that’s elsewhere.
302.And if you look at the device, say that’s connecting to the TV or connecting in the car, there are a lighterweight hardware Internet connections, but when you come to the full screen, rich edit the document, create things.
303.And I think we’re nowhere near where we can be making that stronger.
304.I’ll give you a concrete example.
305.I love Google Maps. Use it on my computer in a browser, but when we were doing the iphone, that wouldn’t be great to have maps on the iphone.
306.And so we called up Google, and they had some they’ve done a few client apps in Java on some phones, an api that we worked with them a little on, and we ended up writing a client for those apis.
307.They would provide the back in service.
308.And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client just blows it away.
309.Same set of data coming off the server, that the experience you have using it is unbelievable.
310.Way better than the computer, and just in a completely different league than what they put on phones before.
311.And you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application.
312.So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is.
313.And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.
314.So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser.
315.How do you actually run up locally using, you know, absolute in those technologies?
316.So they can be pretty transparen’t whether you’re connected or not.
317.It’s happening fairly slowly, and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment.
318.At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices.
319.And so there are some pretty cool things you can do with clients.
320.So you’re saying, rich clients still matter.
321.Maybe I misunderstood you, but your example was about a rich client that is not a personal computer as we have thought of a person.
322.What I’m trying to say is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful, and right now can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the clients.
323.Talking about a software company being a software and services company, rather, I’m saying the marriage of these services plus a more sophisticated client is a very powerful marriage architecturally.
324.The question is, do you run just in the cloud and all you have down locally is the browser?
325.And that is the same question for the phone as it is for the full screen device.
326.They’ll always be different screen sizes, because these are, you know, the five in screen does not really compete with the 20th screen.
327.Its not compete with the big living room screen.
328.Those are things that there will be some type of computing behind all of
329.those things, all connected to the Internet.
330.But the idea
331.that locally you have the responsiveness, immediate interaction, without the latency or ban the limitations that you get if you try and do it all behind?
332.What leads to the right balance?
333.What does that device look like in five years?
334.What would you be your principal device?
335.The one, or is it I think you use?
336.I could be wrong. I think you carry a tablet, right?
337.Which has not not early storm the world yet.
338.Yeah, this is like Windows 1992.
339.I think that is un repentant on my belief.
340.OK, but to go back to kerry’s point, what would you each imagine that you would carry?
341.Is your principal, let’s say, thing to do you showed a very light email and all that kind of stuff.
342.Yeah, I don’t know if you have so, but Jeff Hawkins showed up Linux based, a very small, I think he called it a companion to a smartphone.
343.Today, standard little naughty, frankly, it doesn’t matter, weren’t there.
344.But what would you think you got each would be, I assume you carry, you carry tablet.
345.PC. I don’t know what brands it is.
346.Maybe you change them up, I don’t know.
347.You obviously carry a Macro Pro, I would guess.
348.Or a man? Well, in an iphone and an iphone, you have one?
349.I do, right here? Yes, he has, when he took it out for four What last iphone earlier?
350.Anyway, what is your device in five years that you rely on the most?
351.I don’t think you’ll have one device.
352.I think you’ll have a full screen device that you can carry around, and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.
353.Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor.
354.I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink, you’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that.
355.And then you’ll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function, how much functions should you combine in there.
356.There’s navigation, computers, there’s media, there’s phone technology is letting us put more things in there.
357.But then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect.
358.So there’s quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket size device, but I think those are natural form factors.
359.Then it will have the evolution of the portable machine and the evolution of the phone, both the extremely high volume complementary.
360.That is, if you own one, you’re more likely to on the other.
361.And then at home, you to have set up that they all plug into.
362.Well, home, you’ll have your living room, which is your ten foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet.
363.And there you’ll have gaming and entertainment, and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world.
364.And then in your daniel’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work.
365.The view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information.
366.Your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate.
367.Then I please have a room in my house that doesn’t have a screen in a projector in it.
368.Thanks the bathroom. That’s the perfect place for it, actually.
369.So what’s your five year Outlook at the devices.
370.You’ll care. You know, it’s interesting, the PC has proved to be very resilient, because this bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years.
371.When you are saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows pcs, I mean personal computer in general.
372.And there was the age of productivity, if you will, you know, the spreadsheets and word processors, and that’s kind of got the whole industry moving.
373.And it kind of plates hold for a while.
374.Was getting a little stale, and then the Internet came along, and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet.
375.Browsers came along, and it was this whole Internet.
376.And that came along access to the Internet.
377.And then some number years ago, you could start to see that the PC that was taken for granted, things that kind of plateau a little bit, and innovation wise at least.
378.And then I think this whole notion of the PC, we called it the digital Hub.
379.But you call in you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet, and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff.
380.And it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life.
381.And you can sort of see that there’s something starting again.
382.It’s not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC, maybe used a little more tightly, coupled with some back end Internet services and some things like that.
383.And of course, pcs are going mobile in a ever greater degree.
384.So I think the PC is going to continue.
385.This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and more for us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook, or a big, curved desktop that you have at your house, or whatever it might be.
386.So I think that will be something that most people have, at least in this society.
387.You know, theres
388.maybe not, but certainly in this one.
389.But then theres an explosion that’s starting to happen in these what you call post PC devices.
390.You call the ipod one of them.
391.There’s a lot of things that are not getting into trouble for using that term.
392.I want you to know that I’m kidding.
393.Post
394.PC devices. People write letters to the editor, they complain about it anyway.
395.OK, anyway, I think there’s just a category of devices that aren’t as general purpose, that aren’t that they’re really more focused on specific functions, whether they’re phones or ipods or zones or what have you.
396.And I think that category devices is starting is going to continue to to be very innovative, and we’re going to see lots of committing.
397.An example, what would that be?
398.Well, ipod is supposedly as a phone, as a POSTPC device, because the iphone and are some of these other smartphones, and I know you make you believe that the iphone is much better than these other smartphones at the moment, but is the are these things, aren’t they really just computers in a different form factor?
399.I mean, we say we’re getting a phone, it sounds like we’re getting to the point where everything’s computer in a different form factor.
400.So so what? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it?
401.It doesn’t matter. It’s what is it?
402.How do you use it? How does the consumer approach it?
403.And so who cares what’s inside any But what are the core functions of the device?
404.Formerly known as the cell phone, whatever we want to call it, the pocket device?
405.What would you say the core functions looks five years out?
406.What are the core functions of that pocket device?
407.How quickly all these things that have been somewhat specialized, the navigation device, the digital wallet, the phone, the camera, the video camera, how quickly those all come together?
408.It’s hard to chart out, but eventually you’ll be able to think something that has the capability to do every one of those things.
409.And yet, given the small size, you still won’t want to edit your homework or edit a movie on the screen of that size.
410.And so you’ll have something else that let you do the reading and editing and those things.
411.Now, if we could ever get a screen that would just roll out like a school, you know, then you might be able to have the device that did everything, you know, in the very 1st D conference, we had these guys from e INK, you both talked to them, they were talking about that.
412.That was five years ago. It’s always five years out, do you?
413.so we can’t there? There’s some advances in projection technology that are more likely deliver it, I think, than the flexible material guys, but it’s not even on the horizon.
414.No matter which of the two approaches.
415.We have some Microsoft research people work on that, and there’s a lot of investment.
416.But at least in the five year time frame, you five years from now, what’s going to be on that pocket device?
417.I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because I wouldn’t have thought that there would have been maps on it five years ago.
418.But something comes along, gets really popular.
419.People love it. Get used to it.
420.You want it on there. So people are inventing things constantly.
421.And I think the art of it is balancing what’s on there and what’s not on there is the editing function.
422.And clearly, most things you carry with your communications devices, you want to do some entertainment with them as well, but the primarily communications devices, and they’re going to that’s what they’re going to be outside the computing area.
423.What are the exciting areas in the Internet space at all that you’re looking at, that you find that’s interesting to each of your companies and in general, for for you, any kind social networking, any kind of in wikis, those kind of things, things we’ve talked about past.
424.Couple of them today. Essentially we’re working on some things that I can’t talk about again.
425.But there used very beautiful. There used to be a saying, isn’t it that out of blows?
426.There used to be a sang at apple.
427.Isn’t it funny? A ship that leaks from the top.
428.It’s kind of like a sweater without sleezes at vest.
429.I don’t get that that was what they used to say about me when I was in my 20 there’s a zillion interesting things going on on the Internet.
430.The most interesting things to me are these incredible new services that people are bringing up.
431.And many entertainment. There’s a lot of surrounding entertainment, but there’s a lot of them that have to do with just sort of figuring out how to navigate through life a little more efficient.
432.And I think it’s really great when you show somebody something, and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem, that this solves.
433.They know they have a problem.
434.You can show them something, they go, oh my
435.God, I need this. And I think you’re going to see a lot of things like that happen over the next year or two.
436.Do
437.you obviously have a very large Internet business with itunes and and you sell a lot of stuff on the the Apple store, but, you know, you were early with this idea that when you bought a computer from Apple, you had this kind of Internet service back in and it was called dot Mac.
438.And I think a lot of people feel that you haven’t developed it very I couldn’t agree with you more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.
439.And in your case, you obviously have huge things like like Hotmail, for instance, which is, I guess, and Windows messenger, which are both widely used, and I don’t even know how many users Brazilian, huge numbers.
440.But on the other hand, you haven’t, and Steve Bomber was talking about today, you know, you have, other people have much stronger positions and things like search and other parts of the Internet.
441.So are you guys? Because you are the personal computer companies that are best, you know, best associated with that, not as nimble as some of these competitors at this point.
442.Do you worry about not being as nimble, both of you?
443.I mean, obviously microsoft’s a much bigger company, but you’re a big company, steve Apple is.
444.Do you worry about not being as nimble as some we sitting out there with, you know, the kind of ten employees that you guys added 1977?
445.Well, there’s always going to be great and things that come out of other companies, and you want to be in a possession to benefit from those, to have those inventions drive demand for Windows and personal computers, and then some of those upstream things you want to participate in.
446.I hope Steve mentioned we are going to participate in search, hopefully to a higher degree in the future.
447.It mentioned then at present, we’ll see what we can do there.
448.A lot of the applications are more specialize.
449.They’re not areas. We’ll go into, you know, take what can happen with education.
450.That video is mainstream. And all these tools that let you do rich interactions are very mainstream.
451.I’m very excited about that. You know, the I did empowerment goes back to the very beginning of our industry, and some of those dreams that this would be used by students, or the teachers could get better and learn from each other in these new ways, we are just at the threshold where some of those things can happen.
452.And yes, our companies can contribute to that, but as a whole, it’s the ecosystem jumping on and building on each other, where you can finally say, finally technology did something for education.
453.See, I look at this a little bit differently, which is, we’re not trying to do a lot of this stuff, because it’s not what we do.
454.We don’t think one company can do everything.
455.So you’ve got a partner with people that are really good at stuff, like we’re not.
456.I mean, maybe Microsoft is great at search, we’re not.
457.We’re not trying to be great at search.
458.So we partner with people that are great at searching, and we don’t know how to do maps.
459.On the back end. We know how to do a great, the best maps client in the world, but we don’t know how to do the back in.
460.So we partner with people that know how to do the back in.
461.And what we want to do is be that that consumers device and that consumers experience wrapped around all this information and things, we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface, in a coherent product.
462.And so in some cases we have to do more work than others.
463.In the case of of itunes, there wasn’t a music delivery service that was any good, and we had to do one.
464.So we’ll do one. But in other cases, there’s companies doing a way better job, because we’re not as good at this stuff as other people are, and we love to partner with them.
465.And so, you know, we selectively do that.
466.And I think it’s really hard for one company to do everything.
467.It’s kind of interesting you’re both entertaining the entertainment year old entertains important to both your companies for your music right now.
468.And as you get into Apple TV, microsoft is within the Hollywood area.
469.Where do you see that going?
470.In the era of youtube, we’ve had a couple of network people here talking about changes for happening in Hollywood and everything else.
471.What is happening now to entertainment delivery.
472.Where do you all play? You will be the delivery mechanism in one way or the other.
473.For most people. Well, the big milestone is where the delivery platform is the Internet.
474.And so you bring the richness and the interactivity, I think you can get a little bit of a glimpse of the future of TV, more from looking at community type things like Xbox live, where people are talking to each other, finding friends, watching things together, talking about those things.
475.That is, you map that onto genres, like educational shows or
476.sports shows, or watching the Olympics of the elections,
477.that ability to navigate becomes very, very powerful.
478.And
479.we’re not an entertainment company. Yes, we do Halo, which is this big video game that by and large,
480.we’re a platform. And so it’s the, it’s the tough software things, whether it’s the
481.speech or the ink or the deep graphics, that’s where things that teach ten years to get done, the IPTV stuff, the foundation there, you know, it took ten years to get it done.
482.Now it’s finally coming to fruition, and we have people like Att betting their company on putting that together.
483.So we’re just at the start of having a skill entertainment delivery vehicle through both through pcs, unfortunately not connected up to the TV set in most cases, but that’s the point of innovation, and now things like IPTV and Xbox that are connected up in the living room.
484.Steve Youer today, billy weren’t here, but Steve showed a new function of Apple TV that brings youtube directly to the TV.
485.Is there going to be more of that from you?
486.Do you see yourself, the way Bill says, is an enabler of entertainment?
487.Or, well, I mean, putting aside your Disney role, but you are.
488.I think people want to enjoy their entertainment when they want it and how they want it, on the device that they want.
489.So ultimately, that’s going to drive the entertainment companies into all sorts of different business models.
490.And that’s a good thing. I mean, if you’re a content company, that’s a great thing.
491.More people wanting to enjoy your content more often in more different ways.
492.That’s why you’re in business. But the transitions are hard sometimes.
493.And you know, the music industry, it turned out that the Internet got fast enough to download songs pretty easily.
494.There was no legal alternatives. And maybe they made some bad choices and how they reacted to that.
495.But, you know, they’re still trying to make the transition to a very different way of doing business, or ways of doing business while they’re under attack from piracy.
496.And we can all highlight some of the mistakes that have been made, but still, it’s a tough job.
497.And Hollywood, I think, you know, is watched what’s happened in music, learn some things to do, some things not to do.
498.But, you know, they’re still trying to map this out.
499.How do they make some of these transitions, some new business models, different platforms, allowing their customers way more freedom on when they want to watch stuff and how they want to watch it.
500.And I think there’s a tremendous amount of experimentation and thought going on.
501.It’s going to be good. It’s going to be really good.
502.If you’re a content owner, can I ask about the user interface of the personal computer for a minute?
503.Vista has just come out, which is your best version Windows you’ve done, has some UI improvements in it.
504.You are about to do yet another version of the Mac Os, called Leopard in the Fall, which, from what you’ve shown publicly, at least so far, has has some improvements, but fundamentally, these are still the kind of file icon, folder icon, drop them.
505.I know I’m minimizing. There’s a lot of other things.
506.There’s gadgets and widgets and all kinds of other cool things in there now, but you can see that it’s still all built on what you started with, what Xerox did research on, is there in the offing and the next four or five years?
507.Is it possible there’s a new paradigm for organizing the user interface of the personal computer?
508.Let’s leave cell phones and things out for a minute.
509.Just the personal computer bill. One of the things that’s been anticipated for a long time, when 3D comes into that interface.
510.And there was a lot of experimentation sites on the Internet, where you kind of walk around and meet people, but in fact, the richness, the speed, it just didn’t sustain itself.
511.Now we’re starting to see with some of the mapping stuff, a few of the sites, that the quality of that, graphics, the tools and things are getting to the point where 3D can really come in.
512.So I definitely say that when you go to a store, a bookstore, you’ll be able to see the books lying, you know, the way you might be interested in, or lined up the way they are in the real store.
513.So three D is the way of organizing things.
514.Particularly. We’re getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we’ve ever had before.
515.And we can take that into this communications world, where the PC is playing a much more central world, kind of taken over what was the PBX, or one of the last mainframes in the business environment, That will be a big change.
516.That’ll come to it. And as we get Napple input, that will cause a change.
517.And what about this multi touch stuff?
518.It’s really interesting. Obviously, steve showed some of it on the iphone when he introduced the iphone, steve Bomber today showed a bunch of it with the surface computing device.
519.It happens, although it’s not part of our program, that HP, which is a sponsor of this conference, has a multi touch sort of display over here out in the foyer.
520.Is this.
521.Will this make its way? Of minority reward, this kind of thing?
522.Yeah, will this make its way?
523.And so maybe
524.you call it direct manipulation of objects with your hands and your fingers.
525.Will this make its way? It’s a mainstream, let’s say laptop computers as a new YOUI, or an additional part of the YOUI, or is that just a well, on the nationalized device, vision software is doing vision.
526.And so imagine a game machine where you just can pick up the bat and swing it, or the tennis racket and swing it.
527.We have no, no, that’s me.
528.You can’t pick up your teno.
529.You can’t sit there with your friends and do those natural things.
530.That’s a 3D positional device. This is video recognition.
531.This is a camera seeing what’s going on.
532.And, you know, in a meeting, like you’re on a video card, video card, you don’t know who’s speaking, when and their audio only things like that.
533.The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design way that people’s expectations about privacy are handled appropriately.
534.But software can do vision, and it can do it very, very inexpensively, and that means this stuff becomes pervasive.
535.You don’t just talk about it being in the laptop device.
536.You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room or but on the laptop, the way that and, and, you know, maybe im wrong.
537.Maybe this is what we have is great, and we don’t need any new, big, radical change.
538.When I turn on my laptop, whether it’s my Vistal laptop or my Mac laptop, you know, it’s, it’s kind there have been improvements, but it’s a lot like it was ten years ago.
539.It’s much better. The graphics are better.
540.And all that you talked about, that radical.
541.You know, you have the mouse, you have the icons, you move around, you have the And you talked about what a big gamble it was in 84 to do that, and then follow on with windows.
542.We still essentially have that approach.
543.And I’m just wondering, is that going to change?
544.Touch, ink, speech, vision, those things come in, but they don’t come in as a radical substitute.
545.Think you’re also underestimating the degree of evolution, because you’ve lived with the year by year.
546.You know, say, we’ve sent you away for ten years, and you came back and you said, wow, there’s a search paradigm, and that’s more at the center of how you find these things.
547.There’s that’s more at the center how you find these things.
548.There’s, you know, the evolution is a very good thing.
549.In fact, even in that evolution, the stuff we did with the office, there’s this balance you strike, where when you make a change, in that case, the the ribbon, you’re going to have some users who feel like, oh, jeez, I have to spend a little bit of time to be brought along to that, as there has been good evolution, but these natural interface things are the revolutionary change, and they’ll be very revolution that together with the 3D that I talked about, see, I know you’re working on something, it’s going to be beautiful.
550.We’ll see it the office. There’s this balance you strike where when you make a change, in that case, the ribbon, you’re going to have some users who feel like, oh, jeez, I have to spend a little bit of time to be brought along to as there has been good evolution, but these natural interface things are the revolutionary change, and they’ll be very revolutionary.
551.That together with the 3D that I talked about.
552.I know you’re working on something.
553.It’s going to be beautiful. We’ll see.
554.It’s, yeah, you can’t talk about it, but the Bill discusses all his secret plans.
555.You don’t have to does any I know it’s not fair, but it’s, I think the question of the question is a very simple one, which is, how much of the really revolutionary things people are going to do in the next five years are done on the pcs, or how much of it is really focused on the post PC devices?
556.And there’s a real temptation to focus it on the post PC devices, because it’s a clean slate, and because there are more focused devices, and because they don’t have, you know, they don’t have the legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in zillions of markets.
557.And so I think there’s going to be tremendous revolution in the experiences of the post PC devices.
558.And the question is,
559.how much to do in the pieces?
560.And I think, I’m sure Microsoft is.
561.We’re working on some really cool stuff.
562.But some of it has to be tempered a little bit, because you do have, you know, these tens of millions, in our case, or hundreds of millions of bills case, users, that are familiar with something that, you know, they don’t want a car with six wheels.
563.They like the car with four wheels.
564.They don’t want to drive with with a joystick.
565.They like the steering wheel. And so you have to, as Bill was saying, in some cases you have to augment what exists there, and in some cases you can replace things.
566.But I think the radical rethinking of things is going to happen in a lot of these post BC devices.
567.Can I ask you a personal question we have just a minute before we have an open up for questions.
568.This is the greatest I’m not going to call it the Barbara Walters moment and ask you what treat like to be, but what you would love to be do with Walters?
569.Let me just tell you, no, I would not.
570.What’s the greatest misunderstanding thing? Right?
571.Thank you. See about your relationship, I mean, you’re obviously going to go down in history, is history books already said kind of thing.
572.But what’s the greatest misunderstanding between your relationship and about each each other?
573.What would you say would be this idea of cat fight?
574.This idea which one of the many we’ve kept our marriage secret for over a decade.
575.Now. Canada, that trip to Canada, what is that?
576.I don’t think either of us have anything to complain about in general.
577.And I know that the projects, like the Mac projects, it was just an incredible thing, a fun thing, where we were taking a risk.
578.We did look a lot younger in that video.
579.You look 12 h that’s how I try.
580.And one of us well, but no, it’s been fun to work together.
581.I actually kind of MS. Some of the people aren’t around anymore.
582.People come and go in this industry.
583.It’s nice when somebody sticks around and they have some context of all the things that have worked and not worked.
584.The industry gets all all crazy about some new thing, you know, like, you know, the the there’s always this paradigm of the company that successful is going to go away, and stuff like that.
585.It’s nice to have people seeing the waves and waves of that, and yet them only when it counted to take the risk to bring in something new, has it been important.
586.One last question, and then we’ll go to the office.
587.He answers, I don’t answer that secret game carrier.
588.I thought that was your answer.
589.That wasn’t my answer. You know, when Bill and I 1st met each other and worked together in the early days, generally we were both the youngest guys in the room, right?
590.Individually, are together. I’m about six months older than he is, but roughly the same age.
591.And now, when we’re working at our respected companies, I don’t know about you, but I’m the oldest guy in the room most of the time.
592.And that’s why I love being here.
593.So happy to apply, happy to oblige.
594.And, you know, I think of, I think of most things in life, as either a Bob Dylan or Beetle song.
595.But there’s that one line in that one beetle song.
596.You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.
597.And that’s clearly true here. Well, you know what?
598.I think we should end it there.
599.Let’s just stand it there, having no tear right here.
600.Thank you. Thank you very much.
601.I don’t know, standing out. Thanks.
602.Have you ever had a snake?
603.No, no, I don’t know. Toilet?
604.No. The handle is pretty loud and over again.
605.Wow. Okay, so are some audience questions, questions.
606.We have lights. Roger mank Roger from Elevation Partners.
607.Hey, guys. That was incredible. Thank you very much.
608.We’ve got a big election coming up next year.
609.I’m curious if there are any issues that you see in Silicon Valley that we all ought to
610.be focused on communicating effectively to the next potential president of the United States.
611.There is any common ground that we share?
612.Because it’s weird actually hear any issues the people are talking about right now.
613.I’m curious if you guys have any in mind.
614.Yeah, well, certainly education is one I’d put at the top of the list.
615.Is, are there technological solutions right now that they could do something about, or is that just sort of like but now the the technology is going to be helpful and more more, but the way that teachers are measured and made excellent, the way that the high schools are designed, the expectations they have, it’s not just a pure technology thing.
616.It’s more an institutional practice where the opportunity is.
617.And, you know, there should be a lot of debate about the different ways of doing that.
618.Boy, we’ve got some pretty big problems, and I think most of them are much bigger than anything Silicon Valley can contribute right now to solve.
619.So hopefully some of those who get solved.
620.I also think we underestimate how much all of our industry depends on to build.
621.We’ve enjoyed a long period of stability, and we’ve been able to focus on on technology and growing our businesses and stuff.
622.And and I think we take that for granted sometimes.
623.One of the more interesting areas that we all suffer from, of course, is in the area of energy dependence.
624.And there’s a lot of work going on.
625.I know a lot of investing going on in you I don’t know if the results are there, but a lot of investing going in alternative energy, and maybe maybe Silicon Valley can pay a small role in some of that.
626.So you guys investing in that area, personally, some which might be a lot, a billion here there.
627.Are you investing in that area?
628.No, just a prey? Yeah, just appreciating over there.
629.Hi, donna. Played Sony pictures. My question is, really, at what point is there too much diversity?
630.It was talked about a few times in the discussion, the fact that now microprocessors are very low cost memories, low cost software, is a biquitous But you know, my life has been made better by standards like coding standards, network standards.
631.And it seems like we’re reaching a point where diversity is starting to take hold, to a point where we’re not going to be able to have the kinds of convergence devices that I think everyone would really be able to appreciate.
632.And I’m wondering, you know, is this going to be like health care or mass transit, where you just can never put it back in the bottle again?
633.And I’d like to get your perspective on that.
634.If there’s still an opportunity to have some grand convergence devices that can really simplify peoples lives and enrich their lives.
635.Speak. Well, I think Bill and I would agree that we can get it down to two.
636.No, I think there’s, it’s hard to it’s hard to limit imagination and innovation.
637.I think there’s always going to be a bunch of new, great things.
638.But, and I think that’s part of what we put up with to get the innovation, who put up with a little bit of aggravation to get the innovation?
639.And I think the marketplace is awfully good at allowing diversity when it should and then getting rid of it when it shouldn’t.
640.I mean, and I’m letting it come back sometime.
641.Yeah, well, not yeah. I mean, in terms of standards and things, there’s the Internet standards have been incredibly powerful video formats, things like this, and so I-I don’t see things that are going to really hold back a convergence device.
642.You know, sure, there’s a lot wireless approaches, but that’s pretty healthy right now.
643.They each have various merits. A few of them’ll end up overlapping the other ones and kill the other ones out.
644.But, well, I think the industry’s done very well at lapsing on the standards for the things that there were no longer any innovation in, and that focusing on the places where it wasn’t clear which approach was past.
645.Jesse Hi, I’m Jesse cornloth headbother com Because you’re not the youngest guys in the room anymore, it’s perhaps
646.appropriate to ask you a question about legacy.
647.Each of you bill, even your harshest
648.critic, would have to admit that your philanthropy works.
649.Is planet shaking, incredible, and could be, if
650.you make it a 2nd act, so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft.
651.If you had to choose a legacy, what would Steve do?
652.You look at Bill and you think, gee, that guy is so lucky.
653.He had a company so rich with talent, that he didn’t have to personally come in every day and say that, you know, I wish I’d had the opportunity.
654.Thank you. I can answer that little Well, the most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer.
655.That’s what I grew up in my teens, my twenties, my thirties.
656.You know, I even knew not to get married because I was so until later, because I was so obsessed with it.
657.That’s my life’s work. And I it’s lucky for me that some of the skill skills and resources, but I put skills 1st that I was able to develop through those experiences, can be applied to the benefit of the the people who have had technology, including Madison working for them.
658.So it’s an incredible blessing to have two things like that.
659.The thing that all you know, might if you look inside my brain, it’s filled with software, and, you know, the magic of software, and a bleep in software, and that’s not going to change.
660.So your question was about whether I wish I didn’t have to go into Apple every day.
661.No, if you end the bill a bit, this 2nd act that he has, oh, no, I think the world is, I think the world is a better place because his goal isn’t to be the richest guy in the cemetery.
662.That’s a good thing. And so he’s doing a lot of good with the money that he made.
663.You know, I’m sure Bill was was like me in this way.
664.I mean, I grew up fairly middle class, lower middle class, and I never really cared much about money, and Apple was so successful early on in life that I was very lucky that I didn’t have to care about money then.
665.And so I’ve been able to focus on work, and then later on, my family.
666.And I sort of look at us as to the lucky guys on the planet, because we found what we loved to do, and we were at the right place at the right time, and we’ve gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing.
667.And so it’s hard to be happier than that.
668.You know, your family, and what more can you ask for?
669.And so I don’t think about legacy much.
670.I just think about being able to get up every day and go in and hang around these great people and hopefully create something that other people will live as much as we do.
671.And if we can do that, that’s great.
672.I think the middle yeah, I think Steven Bill.
673.Rob Kelly here with my business partner, we’ve got a hundred person Internet media business.
674.I’m wondering what would be the single most valuable piece of advice you’d give us to even attempt to create some of the value that you guys have done in both your very impressive companies?
675.I think actually it may be in both cases, correct me if I’m wrong.
676.The excitement wasn’t really seen the economic value.
677.You know, even when we wrote down at Microsoft in 1975, a computer on every desk and on every home, we didn’t realize, oh, we’ll have to be a big company.
678.Every time I thought, oh God, can we double in size?
679.Jeez, can you manage that many people feel fun still, you know?
680.And so every doubling was like, okay, this is the last one.
681.And so the economic thing wasn’t for at the forefront.
682.The idea being at the forefront and seeing new things and things we wanted to do, and bringing in, being able to bring in different people who are fun to work with, eventually with a pretty broad set of skills, and figuring out how to get those people, those broad skills, to work well together has been one of the greatest challenges, and I’ve made more of my mistakes in that area, maybe than any anyway, but
683.eventually getting some of those teams to work very well together.
684.So I think it’s a lot about the people and the passion, and it’s amazing that the business worked out the the way that it did.
685.Yeah. People say
686.you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing, and it’s totally true.
687.And the reason is is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up.
688.It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time.
689.So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.
690.And that’s what happens to most people, actually.
691.If you really look at at at the ones that ended up being successful, and, quote, in the eyes of society, and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes it’s the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough.
692.And the ones that didn’t love it quit, because they’re saying, who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?
693.So it’s a lot of hard work, and it’s a lot of worrying constantly, and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.
694.So you got to love it.
695.You got to have passion. And I think that’s the high order bit.
696.The 2nd thing is you’ve got to be, you’ve got to be a really good talent scout, because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people.
697.And you’ve got to figure out, had a size people up fairly, quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to to help, you know, build an organization that can eventually just, you know, build itself, because you need great people around.
698.I get busy. Liz Liz Byer question, I guess its historical curiosity.
699.You approach the same opportunity so very differently.
700.What did you learn about running your own business that you wish you had thought of sooner or thought of?
701.1st By watching the other guy, I give a lot to have steams taste.
702.He has natural not a joke at all.
703.I think, in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done, that I do engineering question, you know, and that’s just how my mind works.
704.And I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that it is even hard for me to explain the way he does things.
705.It’s just different. And, you know, I think it’s magical.
706.And in that case, wow, you know, because was and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people.
707.And, you know, actually the funny thing is, microsoft’s one of the few companies we were able to partner with, but actually work for both companies, and we weren’t so good at that, as where as where Bill and Microsoft were really good at it, because they didn’t make the whole thing in the early days, and they they learned how to partner with people really well.
708.And I think if Apple could have had that, a little more of that in his DNA, it would have served it extremely well.
709.And I don’t think I will learn that until, you know, several, a few decades later.
710.Last question, I’m sorry, over here.
711.Yeah, hi, charlie Brenner from Fidelity Investments.
712.In our financial services industry, we are focusing very strongly on aging and retiring baby boomers.
713.A huge demographer, not that old?
714.No, I wasn’t. The question is different from what it sounds like it’s going to be, but most of the innovation that we see coming from computer and Internet companies is kind of youth oriented.
715.And I’m just wondering if there are activities going on in your companies acknowledging what’s going to happening generation?
716.Not true. I give you one example.
717.So we started building in video cameras and almost all our computers a few years ago, and the response by people of all ages, but in particular seniors, has been off the charts.
718.Because they are buying these things now, and they are buying them for their grandkids, their sons and daughters, with their grandkids, so they can stay in touch with their grandkids and their video conferencing more than younger people are, and it’s incredible what this has done.
719.So that’s just one simple example, but there’s like dozens of them that have clicked with seniors that are living independently, that want to stay in touch with extended families and do other things like that.
720.Yeah, I think that it’s a very good point when you look at the size of the market,
721.and that’s partly why it’s great that there are all these companies out there who can see, OK, what would you
722.do for seniors? I think natural user interface is particularly applicable
723.here because the keyboard, you know, we’re sort of warped, and we grew up using the keyboard, and so it’s extremely natural to us.
724.But things like and that’s probably
725.why, when we showed the surface computer, I showed it privately to a bunch of ceos a couple of weeks ago, I was kind of stunned by how blown away they were.
726.But their ease of navigation is just not the same.
727.And when they saw that, the idea that they could organize their photo album to meant more to them than it did to me.
728.I give you another example. We’ve got a little shy of 200 retail stores now, and one of the things the stores are doing is personal training.
729.Now it’s called one to one.
730.And we are up to now a run rate of a million personal training sessions.
731.They last an hour per year, a million per year.
732.You only started a little while ago, right?
733.Yeah. We started about a year ago.
734.And up to a million training sessions a year run right now.
735.And a lot of those folks have some of them anyway.
736.Many of them are seniors. They’re coming in and they’re spending an hour learning how to use office, and they’re spending an hour learning how to video conference.
737.And they can basically come in as much as they want, and they can schedule these things throughout a year.
738.And they paid $99, I think, a year for it, and it’s been great.
739.That last question. Now, the last question We all share our common science fiction experience of the metaverse, or the matrix, where we all could communicate without being in the same place.
740.And by the way, thank you both for providing us the best platform so far to go to chat rooms or to all go to a mice space.
741.It’s a far cry from these things that we c on Star Trek of the Holiday.
742.What kinds of things can you imagine there are part way there?
743.They could be much better than the three window eye check.
744.But we might see in the next five or ten years.
745.I don’t think Steve is going to announce his Transporter.
746.I want Star Trek. Just give me Star Trek now.
747.I think, short of the Transporter, most things you see in science fiction are in the next decade, the kinds of things you’ll see the virtual presence, the virtual world that old represents what’s going on in the real world and represents whatever people are interested in.
748.This in a movement in space, is a way of interacting with the machine.
749.I think the deep investments that have been made at the research level will pay off with these things in the next ten years.
750.I don’t know. And that’s what makes it exciting to go into work every day, because as we talked about earlier, this is an extraordinarily exciting time in the industry, and lots of new stuff happening.
751.So I can’t even begin to think of what it’s going to be like ten years from now.
752.Thank you so much. Thank you.