This is the second part of The Playboy Interview: Moguls anthology, which also includes interviews with Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, David Geffen and many more.
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Playboy: You are making a serious bet on the Macintosh. It is said that the fate of Apple depends on its success or failure. After the release of the Lisa and Apple III, Apple's stock sank badly, and there is talk that Apple may not survive.
Jobs: Yes, we had a hard time. We knew we had to perform a miracle with the Macintosh or our dreams for products or the company itself would never come true.
Playboy: How serious were your problems? Was Apple facing bankruptcy?
Jobs: No, no and NO. In fact, 1983, when all these predictions were made, turned out to be phenomenally successful for Apple. In 1983, we essentially doubled our revenue from $583 million to $980 million. Almost all of the sales were for the Apple II, and we wanted more. If the Macintosh hadn't become popular, we'd still be at the billion-a-year level selling the Apple II and its variations.
Playboy: Then what caused the talk about your collapse?
Jobs: IBM stepped up and began to seize the initiative. Software developers began to move to IBM. Salespeople were talking about IBM more and more. It was clear to us that the Macintosh was going to blow everyone away, change the entire industry. That was his mission. If the Macintosh had not been successful, I would have given up, because I was deeply mistaken in my vision of the industry.
Playboy: Four years ago, Apple III was supposed to be an improved, tuned version of the Apple II, but failed. You have withdrawn the first 14 computers from sale, and even the corrected version has not been successful. How much have you lost because of the Apple III?
Jobs: Unbelievable, infinitely many. I think if the Apple III was more successful, it would be harder for IBM to get into the market. But such is life. I think this experience has made us much stronger.
PlayboyA: However, Lisa also became a relative failure. Something went wrong?
JobsA: First of all, the computer was too expensive and cost about ten thousand. We moved away from our roots, forgot that we had to sell products to people, and bet on huge corporations from the Fortune 500 list. There were other problems - shipping was too long, the software did not work the way we wanted, so we lost momentum. IBM's offensive, plus our six-month delay, plus too high a price, plus another strategic mistake - the decision to sell Lisa through a limited number of suppliers. There were 150 or so of them - it was a terrible stupidity on our part, which cost us dearly. We hired people who were considered experts in marketing and management. It seemed like a good idea, but our industry is so young that the views of these professionals turned out to be outdated and prevented the success of the project.
Playboy: Was it a lack of confidence on your part? “We have come this far, and things have taken a serious turn. We need reinforcements."
Jobs: Don't forget, we were 23-25 years old. We had no experience with this, so the idea seemed reasonable.
Playboy: Most of the decisions, good or bad, were yours?
Jobs: We tried to make sure that decisions were never made by one person. There were three people running the company at the time — Mike Scott, Mike Markkula, and myself. There are two people at the helm today, Apple President John Scully and myself. When we started, I often consulted with more experienced colleagues. As a rule, they turned out to be right. In some important matters it was worth doing my way, and it would have been better for the company.
Playboy: You wanted to run the Lisa division. Markkula and Scott (your superiors, in fact, even though you were involved in their appointment) did not consider you worthy, right?
Jobs: After defining the main concepts, selecting key performers and planning technical directions, Scotty decided that I did not have enough experience for such a project. I was in pain, there is no other way to say it.
Playboy: Didn't you feel like you were losing Apple?
Jobs: Partly. But the most annoying thing was that a lot of people were called to the Lisa project who did not share our original view. There was a serious conflict within the Lisa team between those who wanted to build something like the Macintosh and those who came from Hewlett-Packard and other companies and brought ideas of big machines and corporate sales from there. I decided that to develop the Macintosh, I would need to take a small group of people and step back - in fact, go back to the garage. Then we were not taken seriously. I think Scotty just wanted to comfort or pamper me.
Playboy: But you founded this company. Was there any anger in you?
Jobs: It is impossible to be angry with your own child.
Playboy: Even if this child sends you to hell?
Jobs: I didn't feel malice. Only deep sadness and frustration. But I got the best employees of Apple - if this did not happen, then the company would be in big trouble. Of course, these people are responsible for the creation of the Macintosh. [shrugs] Just look at the Mac.
Playboy: There is no unanimous opinion yet. Mac was presented with the same noise as Lisa, but the previous project did not take off at first.
Jobs: This is true. We had high hopes for Lisa, which in the end did not come true. The hardest part was that we knew the Macintosh was on the way, and it had almost all of Lisa's issues fixed. Its development was a return to the roots - we are again selling computers to people, not corporations. We shot and created an insanely cool computer, the best in history.
Playboy: Do you have to be crazy to create insanely cool stuff?
Jobs: In fact, the main thing in creating an insanely cool product is the process itself, learning new things, accepting new ones and discarding old ideas. But yes, the Mac creators are a little touched.
Playboy: What distinguishes those who have insanely cool ideas and those who are able to implement them?
Jobs: Let's take IBM as an example. How did the Mac team come out with the Mac and IBM come out with the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell incredibly large numbers, but we didn't build it for anyone. We created it for ourselves. The team and I wanted to decide for ourselves whether it was good or not. We were not going to do market analysis. We just wanted to make the best computer possible. Imagine that you are a carpenter creating a beautiful cabinet. You will not make its back wall out of cheap plywood, although it will rest against the wall, and no one will ever see it. You yourself will know what is there and use the best wood. Aesthetics and quality must be at the highest level, otherwise you will not be able to sleep at night.
Playboy: Are you saying that the creators of the PCjr are not so proud of their brainchild?
JobsA: If that was the case, they wouldn't have released it. It's obvious to me that they developed it based on research into a certain market segment for a certain type of customer and expected that all these customers would run to the store and bring them a lot of money. This is a completely different motivation. The members of the Mac team wanted to build the greatest computer in human history.
Playboy: Why do mostly young people work in the computer field? The average age of an Apple employee is 29.
Jobs: This trend applies to any fresh, revolutionary areas. As people age, they stiffen. Our brain is like an electrochemical computer. Your thoughts create patterns like scaffolding. Most people get stuck in familiar patterns and continue to move only along them, like a turntable stylus moving along the grooves of a record. Few people can abandon the usual view of things and pave new routes. It is very rare to see an artist older than thirty or forty creating truly amazing pieces. Of course, there are people whose natural curiosity allows them to remain children forever, but this is rare.
Playboy: Our forty-year-old readers will appreciate your words. Let's move on to another issue that is often mentioned in connection with Apple - a company, not a computer. She evokes the same sense of messianism in you, right?
Jobs: I feel that we are changing society not only with the help of computers. I think Apple has the potential to be a Fortune 500 company by the late XNUMXs or early XNUMXs. Ten or fifteen years ago, when listing the five most impressive companies in the US, the vast majority would have included Polaroid and Xerox. Where are they today? What happened to them? As companies become multi-billion dollar giants, they lose their own vision. They begin to produce links between leaders and those who really work. They stop having passion for their products. Real creators, those who care, have to go through five levels of management just to do what they want to do.
Most companies cannot retain great talent in an environment where individual achievement is discouraged and even frowned upon. These specialists leave, dullness remains. I know this because Apple was built that way. We, like Ellis Island, accepted refugees from other companies. In other companies, these bright personalities were considered rebels and troublemakers.
You know, Dr. Edwin Land was also a rebel. He left Harvard and founded Polaroid. Land was not just one of the greatest inventors of our time - he saw where art, science, and business intersect, and founded an organization that would reflect that intersection. For a while, Polaroid succeeded, but then Dr. Land, one of the great rebels, was asked to leave his own company - one of the dumbest decisions I've ever made. Then the 75-year-old Land took up real science - until the end of his life he tried to solve the riddle of color vision. This man is our national treasure. I don't understand why they don't put people like this up. Such people are much cooler than astronauts and football stars, there is no one cooler than them.
In general, one of the main tasks on which John Sculley and I will be judged in five to ten years is the transformation of Apple into a huge company with a turnover of ten or twenty billion dollars. Will it keep the spirit of today? We are exploring new territory. There are no foreign examples that can be relied upon, neither in terms of growth, nor in terms of the freshness of management decisions. So we have to go our own way.
Playboy: If Apple is really so distinctive, why does it need this twenty-fold growth? Why not stay a relatively small company?
Jobs: Our industry is designed in such a way that in order to remain one of the main players, we will have to become a ten billion company. Growth is necessary to remain competitive. This is what worries us, the money bar itself does not matter.
Apple employees work 18 hours a day. We gather special people - those who do not want to wait five or ten years for someone to take risks for them. Those who truly want to achieve more and leave a mark on history. We know that we are creating something important and special. We are at the beginning of the journey and we can determine the route ourselves. Each of us feels that we are changing the future right now. People are mostly consumers. Neither you nor I design our own clothes, we do not grow our own food, we speak a language invented by someone else and use mathematics invented long before us. Very rarely do we manage to give the world something of our own. Now we have such an opportunity. And no, we do not know where it will take us - but we know that we are part of something more important than ourselves.
Playboy: You said it was important for you to capture the enterprise market with the Macintosh. Can you beat IBM on this field?
Jobs: Yes. This market is divided into several sectors. I like to think that there is not only a Fortune 500 but also a Fortune 5000000 or Fortune 14000000. There are 14 million small businesses in our country. It seems to me that many employees of medium and small companies need working computers. We are going to provide them with decent solutions next year, 1985.
Playboy: What kind?
Jobs: Our approach is not to consider enterprises, but collectives. We want to make a qualitative change in their workflow. It is not enough for us to help them with a set of words or speed up the addition of numbers. We want to change how they interact with each other. Memos of five pages are compressed to one, since a picture can be used to express the main idea. Less paper, more quality communication. And so much more fun. For some reason, there has always been a stereotype that even the most fun and interesting people at work turn into dense robots. This is absolutely not true. If we can bring this free spirit into the serious world of business, then it will be a valuable contribution. It's hard to even imagine how far it will go.
Playboy: But in the business segment, even the very name of IBM opposes you. IBM is associated in people with efficiency and stability. Another new player in the computing industry, AT&T, has a grudge against you too. Apple is a fairly young company that may seem untested to potential customers, large corporations.
Jobs: The Macintosh will help us penetrate the business segment. IBM works with enterprises on a top-down basis. To be successful, we must work backwards, starting at the bottom. Let me explain using the example of laying networks - we should not connect entire companies at once, as IBM does, but concentrate on small work teams.
Playboy: One expert said that for the prosperity of the industry and the benefit of the end user, there must be a single standard.
Jobs: This is completely untrue. Saying we need one standard today is like saying in 1920 we need one kind of car. In this case, we would not see an automatic transmission, power steering and independent suspension. Freezing technology is the last thing to do. Macintosh is a revolution in the world of computers. There is no doubt that Macintosh technology is superior to IBM technology. IBM needs an alternative.
Playboy: Is your decision not to make your computer compatible with IBM related to your unwillingness to submit to a competitor? Another critic believes that the only reason for your ambition is that Steve Jobs is sending IBM to hell.
Jobs: No, with the help of individuality, we did not try to prove our manhood.
Playboy: Then what is the reason?
Jobs: The main argument is that the technology we have developed is too good. It wouldn't be as good if it was compatible with IBM. Of course, we don't want IBM to dominate our industry, that's true. It seemed to many that making a computer that was not compatible with IBM was pure madness. Our company took this step for two key reasons. The first - and it seems that life proves us right - is that it is easier for IBM to "cover", destroy companies that produce compatible computers.
The second and most important thing is that our company is driven by a special view of the product. We believe that computers are the most impressive tools ever invented by man, and humans are, in essence, tool users. This means that by supplying computers to many, many people, we will make qualitative changes in the world. We at Apple want to make the computer a household appliance and introduce it to tens of millions of people. That's what we want. We could not achieve this goal with IBM technologies, which means that we had to create something of our own. This is how the Macintosh was born.
Playboy: Between 1981 and 1983, your share of the personal computer market dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent. The share of IBM for the same period grew from 3 to 29 percent. How do you answer the numbers?
Jobs: Numbers never bothered us. Apple focuses on products because the product is the most important thing. IBM's emphasis is on service, support, security, mainframes, and near-maternity. Three years ago, Apple noticed that it was impossible to provide a mother with every one of the ten million computers sold in a year—even IBM doesn't have that many mothers. So motherhood must be built into the computer itself. A significant part of the essence of the Macintosh is precisely this.
It all comes down to the confrontation between Apple and IBM. If, for some reason, we make fatal mistakes and IBM wins, then I'm sure the next 20 years will be a dark age for computers. Once IBM captures a market segment, innovation stops. IBM hinders innovation.
Playboy: Why?
Jobs: Let's take for example such an interesting company as Frito-Lay. It serves more than five hundred thousand orders a week. Every store has a Frito-Lay counter, and large ones even have several. The main problem of Frito-Lay is missing goods, roughly speaking, tasteless chips. They have, say, ten thousand employees running around replacing bad chips with good ones. They communicate with managers and make sure everything is in order. This service and support gives them an 80% share in every segment of the chips market. Nobody can resist them. As long as they continue to do this job well, no one is going to take 80 percent of the market away from them—they don't have enough sales and technical people. They can't hire them because they don't have the funds to do so. They don't have the funds because they don't have 80 percent of the market. It's such a catch-22. No one can shake such a giant.
Frito-Lay doesn't need much innovation. It just watches the small chip makers, study these new products for a year, and a year or two later releases a similar product, provides it with perfect support, and still gets the same 80 percent of the new market.
IBM is doing exactly the same thing. Take a look at the mainframe sector—since IBM began dominating the sector 15 years ago, innovation has virtually ceased. The same will happen in all other segments of the computer market if IBM is allowed to lay hands on them. The IBM PC didn't bring any new technology to the industry. It's just a repackaged and slightly modified Apple II, and they want to take over the whole market with it. They definitely want the whole market.
Whether we like it or not, the market depends on only two companies. I don't like it, but it all depends on Apple and IBM.
Playboy: How can you be so sure when the industry is changing so fast? Now the Macintosh is on everyone's lips, but what will happen in two years? Doesn't this contradict your philosophy? You're trying to take the place of IBM, aren't there smaller companies that want to take the place of Apple?
Jobs: Speaking directly about sales of computers, everything is in the hands of Apple and IBM. I do not think that someone will claim the third, fourth, sixth or seventh place. Most of the young, innovative companies are mostly involved in programs. I think we can expect a breakthrough from them in the software area, but not in the hardware one.
Playboy: At IBM, they can say the same about hardware, but you won’t forgive them for that. What is the difference?
Jobs: I think that our business area has grown so much that it will be difficult for anyone to launch something new.
Playboy: Billion-dollar companies will no longer be born in garages?
Jobs: Computer - no, I doubt it very much. This imposes a special responsibility on Apple - if you expect innovation from someone, then only from us. That's the only way we can fight. If we go fast enough, they won't overtake us.
Playboy: When do you think IBM will finally "cover" companies that produce IBM-compatible computers?
Jobs: There may be imitation companies in the $100-200 million range, but that kind of revenue means you're struggling to survive and you're no longer up to innovation. I believe that IBM will eliminate the imitators with software they don't have, and eventually come up with a new standard that's incompatible even with today's - it's too limited.
PlayboyA: But you did the same. If a person has programs for the Apple II, he will not be able to run them on a Macintosh.
Jobs: That's right, Mac is a brand new device. We understood that we could attract those who were interested in existing technologies - Apple II, IBM PC - because they would still sit at the computer day and night trying to master it. But most people will remain inaccessible to us.
To provide computers to tens of millions of people, we needed technology that would radically make the computer easier to use and at the same time make it more powerful. We needed a breakthrough. We wanted to do our best, because the Macintosh could be our last chance to start over. I am very pleased with what we got. The Macintosh will give us a good base for the next decade.
Playboy: Let's go back to the roots, to the predecessors of Lisa and Mac, to the very beginning. How much did your parents influence your interest in computers?
JobsA: They encouraged my interest. My dad was a mechanic and was brilliant with his hands. He can repair any mechanical device. This gave me the first impetus. I started getting interested in electronics and he started bringing me things that I could take apart and put back together. He was transferred to Palo Alto when I was five, and that's how we ended up in the Valley.
Playboy: You were adopted, right? How much has this affected your life?
Jobs: Hard to say. Who knows.
Playboy: Have you ever tried to look for biological parents?
Jobs: I think it is common for adopted children to be interested in their origin - many want to understand where certain traits come from. But I believe that the environment is primary. Your upbringing, values, views on the world come from childhood. But some things cannot be explained by the environment. I think it's natural to have such an interest. He was with me too.
Playboy: Did you manage to find the actual parents?
Jobs: This is the only topic that I am not ready to discuss.
Playboy: The valley you moved to with your parents is known today as Silicon. What was it like growing up there?
Jobs: We lived in the suburbs. It was a typical American suburb - a lot of kids lived next to us. My mom taught me to read before school, so I got bored there and started terrorizing the teachers. You should have seen our third class, we behaved disgustingly - released snakes, detonated bombs. But in the fourth grade everything changed. One of my personal guardian angels is my advanced teacher Imogen Hill. She saw through me and my situation in just a month and ignited my passion for knowledge. I have learned more this school year than any other. At the end of the year, they even wanted to transfer me straight to high school, but my wise parents were against it.
Playboy: Did the place where you lived also affect you? How was Silicon Valley formed?
Jobs: The valley is strategically located between two major universities, Berkeley and Stanford. These universities don't just attract a lot of students - they attract a lot of great students from all over the country. They come, fall in love with these places and stay. It turns out a constant influx of fresh, gifted personnel.
Before World War II, two Stanford graduates, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, founded the Hewlett-Packard innovation campaign. Then in 1948, the bipolar transistor was invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories. One of the three co-authors of the invention, William Shockley, decided to return to his native Palo Alto to found his own small company - Shockley Labs, I think. He took with him about a dozen physicists and chemists, the most prominent figures of his generation. Little by little, they began to break away and found their own enterprises - as the seeds of flowers and weeds scatter in all directions, it is worth blowing on them. Thus the Valley was born.
Playboy: How did you get acquainted with the computer?
Jobs: One of our neighbors was Larry Lang, who worked as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He spent a lot of time with me, taught me everything. The first time I saw a computer was at Hewlett-Packard. Every Tuesday they hosted children's groups and allowed us to work on the computer. I was twelve years old, I remember that day very well. They showed us their new desktop computer and let us play on it. I immediately wanted my own.
PlayboyQ: What interests you about computers? Did you feel perspective in it?
Jobs: Nothing like that, I just thought that the computer is cool. I wanted to have fun with him.
Playboy: Later you even worked at Hewlett-Packard, how did that happen?
Jobs: When I was twelve or thirteen, I needed parts for a project. I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett—his number was in the Palo Alto phone book. He picked up the phone and was very kind. We talked for twenty minutes. He did not know me at all, but he sent me the details and invited me to work in the summer - he put me on the conveyor, where I assembled frequency counters. Perhaps "collected" is too strong a word, I tightened the screws. But it didn't matter, I was in heaven.
I remember how enthusiastic I was all over the first day of work - after all, I was hired by Hewlett-Packard for the whole summer. I passionately told my boss, a guy named Chris, that I love electronics more than anything. When I asked what he loves the most, Chris looked at me and said, "Sex." [laughing] Cognitive summer came out.
Playboy: How did you meet Steve Wozniak?
Jobs: I met Woz at thirteen in a friend's garage. He was eighteen years old. He was the first person I knew who understood electronics better than me. We became great friends thanks to a common interest in computers and a sense of humor. What tricks we did not arrange!
Playboy: For instance?
Jobs: [smirks] Nothing special. For example, they made a huge flag with a giant one like this [showing the middle finger]. We wanted to deploy it in the middle of graduation. On another occasion, Wozniak assembled some kind of ticking bomb-like device and brought it to the school cafeteria. We also made blue boxes together.
Playboy: Are these illegal devices from which it was possible to make remote calls?
Jobs: Exactly. A popular case is connected with them, when Woz called the Vatican and introduced himself as Henry Kissinger. Dad was awakened in the middle of the night and only then realized that this was a prank.
Playboy: Have you been punished for such pranks?
Jobs: I was kicked out of school several times.
Playboy: Can we say that you were "turned" on computers?
Jobs: I did one thing, then another. There were so many things around. After reading Moby Dick for the first time, I re-enrolled in writing classes. By senior year, I was allowed to spend half my time at Stanford listening to lectures.
Playboy: Did Wozniak have periods of obsession?
Jobs: [laughing] Yes, but he was not only obsessed with computers. I think he lived in some kind of his own world that no one understood. No one shared his interests - he was slightly ahead of his time. He used to be very lonely. He is driven primarily by his own internal ideas about the world, and not someone else's expectations, so he did it. Woz and I are different in many ways, but in some ways we are similar and very close. We are like two planets with their own orbits that intersect from time to time. I'm not just talking about computers - Woz and I both loved the poetry of Bob Dylan and thought about it a lot. We lived in California - California is saturated with the spirit of experiment and openness, openness to new opportunities.
In addition to Dylan, I was interested in Eastern spiritual practices, which then only reached our region. When I was a student at Reed College in Oregon, we were constantly visited by different people - Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Gary Snyder. We constantly wondered about the meaning of life. At the time, every student in America was reading Be Here Now, Diet for a Small Planet, and a dozen other similar books. Now on campus you can’t find them in the afternoon with fire. It's not good or bad, it's just different now. Their place was taken by the book In Search of Perfection.
Playboy: How did all this affect you today?
JobsA: This whole period had a huge impact on me. It was obvious that the sixties were left behind, and many idealists did not achieve their goals. Since they had completely abandoned discipline before, they did not find a worthy place. Many of my friends have adopted the idealism of the sixties, but with it the practicality, the unwillingness to work at the checkout of a store at forty-five, as their older comrades often did. It’s not that this is an unworthy occupation, it’s just that it’s very sad to do something other than what you would like.
Playboy: After Reid, you returned to Silicon Valley and responded to the "Make Money While Having Fun" commercial that became famous.
Jobs: Right. I wanted to travel, but I didn't have enough money. I returned to find a job. I was looking through the ads in the newspaper and one of them really said: "Make money while having fun." I called. It turned out to be Atari. I had never worked anywhere before, except as a teenager. By some miracle, they called me for an interview the next day and hired me.
Playboy: This must be the earliest period in Atari's history.
Jobs: Besides me, there were forty people there, the company was very small. They created Pong and two other games. I was assigned to help a guy named Don. He was designing a terrible basketball game. At the same time, someone was developing a hockey simulator. Because of the incredible success of Pong, they tried to model all their games for different sports.
Playboy: At the same time, you never forgot about your motivation - you needed money for traveling.
Jobs: Once Atari sent a batch of games to Europe, and it turned out that they contained engineering defects. I figured out how to fix them, but it had to be done manually - someone had to go to Europe. I volunteered to go and asked for a vacation at my own expense after a business trip. The management didn't mind. I visited Switzerland and from there I went to New Delhi and spent quite a bit of time in India.
Playboy: There you shaved your head.
JobsA: It wasn't quite right. I was walking in the Himalayas and accidentally wandered into some religious festival. There was a baba - a righteous old man, the patron of this festival - and a huge group of his followers. I smelled delicious food. Before that, I had not been able to smell anything tasty for a long time, so I decided to drop by the festival, pay respects and have a bite to eat.
I had a lunch. For some reason, this woman immediately came up to me, sat down next to me and burst into laughter. He hardly spoke English, I spoke a little Hindi, but we still tried to talk. He just chuckled. Then he grabbed my arm and dragged me up the mountain path. It was funny - there were hundreds of Indians around who specially came thousands of kilometers away to spend at least ten seconds with this guy, and I wandered there in search of food, and he immediately took me somewhere in the mountains.
Half an hour later we reached the top. A small stream flowed there - the baba dipped my head into the water, took out a razor and began to shave me. I was amazed. I am 19 years old, I am in a foreign country, somewhere in the Himalayas, and some Indian sage is shaving my head on top of a mountain. I still don't understand why he did it.
Source: habr.com