Apple's World Wide Developers Conference 1997 with Steve Jobs

My favorite Jobs masterclass is his talk at Apple's developer conference in 1997 [1]. He had just returned to the company, and a lot of people were unhappy with him and/or Apple at the time. He decided to do an hour long off-the-cuff Q&A session with the developers. Famously, one of the questioners was harsh and insulting, and he handled it with grace. I honestly can't think of another tech CEO that could have pulled off this performance. Maybe Bill Gates? I get the sense that the reality distortion field was very real because he was so clear and eloquent about his mission, it never needed to be scripted or rehearsed, it just came out of him at all times. [1] ▶ this video

Apple was in a terrible situation around the end of the 90's. Steve Jobs just became CEO and had to manage the crisis, both internally as well as externally (developers for Apple's platform). This talk at WWDC 97 shows how Steve Jobs dealt with the crisis. There are some parallels with the article. Steve Jobs @ WWDC 97: ▶ this video

That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. link >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo [LIN

It is tough to find a business case for a technologic innovation. It is easier to start with a business case and then derive the technology necessary for that. Steve Jobs: ▶ this video That said, there are companies like TypeSafe and Cognitect that found a way to sell solutions and services (often in a consultancy/agency/training model) and through that business model they can invest in fundamental longer-term building blocks (like languages, runtimes, libraries, databases). It's not easy but might be a possible angle to deliver tangible value now & still drive long-term vision and innovation.

> at Amazon the drone program would start with a description of what the customer experience is when they receive a drone delivery and you'd work backwards to the technology solution "work backwards to the technology" is a quote from Steve Jobs: > One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. — ▶ this video That a quote like that should be attributed to Amazon shows how much Jeff is trying to emulate Steve.

He was not a hacker and that's precisely why he could lead the creation of great end-user products. He certainly did know a whole lot about programming : check his WWDC 97 address, in particular this sequence at 22' : ▶ this video he knew that coding isn't measured by the number of lines you write, and that providing a good environment to developers is absolutely essential. I don't know too many managers or CEOs who really grasp that.

> Apple also had the Newton, a tablet-like device... Apple created the Newton when Jobs was gone. In the series of questions/answers after the WWDC 1997, right as Jobs was about to make his comeback, he admitted that he didn't like the Newton, and that he did not wish for Apple to continue developing it. EDIT: Here you go, I found it: ▶ this video