This is the second part of the interview, which was included in the anthology of The Playboy Interview: Moguls, in which there are also talks with Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, David Geffen and many others.
The first part .
Playboy : You are making a big bet on the Macintosh. They say that the fate of Apple depends on its success or failure. After the release of Lisa and Apple III, Apple's stocks plummeted, and they say that Apple may not survive.
Jobs : Yes, we had a hard time. We knew that with the Macintosh we needed to do a miracle, otherwise our dreams for products or the company itself would never come true.
Playboy : How serious were your problems? Did Apple Bankrupt?
Jobs : No, no, and no. In fact, 1983, when all these predictions sounded, turned out to be phenomenally successful for Apple. In 1983, we, in fact, doubled our revenue - from 583 to 980 million dollars. Almost all sales were Apple II, and we wanted more. If the Macintosh did not become popular, then we would still remain at the level of a billion a year, selling Apple II and its variations.
Playboy : Then what caused the talk about your crash?
Jobs : IBM stepped up and began to seize the initiative. Software developers began to switch to IBM. Merchants talked more about IBM. It was clear to us that the Macintosh should defeat everyone on the spot, change the whole industry. That was his mission. If the Macintosh did not succeed, then I would give 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 Apple II, but failed. You recalled the first 14 thousand computers from the sale, and even the revised version did not become successful. How much have you lost due to Apple III?
Jobs : Incredibly, infinitely many. I think if Apple III were to succeed, it would be harder for IBM to hit the market. But such is life. I think that this experience has made us much stronger.
Playboy : However, Lisa has also become a relative failure. Something went wrong?
Jobs : First of all, the computer was too expensive and cost about ten thousand. We moved away from our roots, forgot that we should sell goods to people, and made a bet on huge corporations from the Fortune 500 list. There were other problems - delivery was too long, the software did not work the way we wanted, so we lost the pace. The offensive by IBM, 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 - on our part, it was terrible stupidity, which cost us dearly. We hired people who were considered marketing and management experts. It would seem like a good idea, but our industry is so young that the views of these professionals are outdated and interfere with the success of the project.
Playboy : Wasn't that a hesitation on your part? “We have gone so far, and the matter has taken a serious turn. We need reinforcements. ”
Jobs : Don't forget, we were 23-25 years old. We had no such experience, so the idea seemed reasonable.
Playboy : Most of the decisions, good or bad, were yours?
Jobs : We tried to ensure that decisions were never made by anybody. At that time, the company was run by three - Mike Scott, Mike Markkula and me. Today, two are at the helm - Apple President John Scully and me. When we started, I often consulted with more experienced colleagues. As a rule, they were right. In some important matters, it was worth doing in my opinion, and it would be better for the company.
Playboy : You wanted to lead the Lisa division. Markkula and Scott (in fact, your bosses, although you participated in their appointment) did not find you worthy, right?
Jobs : After defining the basic concepts, selecting key executives and planning technical directions, Scotty decided that I did not have enough experience for such a project. It hurt me - you can't say otherwise.
Playboy : Didn't you think you were losing Apple?
Jobs : Partly. But the most annoying was that a lot of people called in to the Lisa project, who did not share our original look. There was a serious conflict in 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 in ideas for big cars and corporate sales. I decided that for Macintosh development I would need to take a small group of people and step back - in fact, return to the garage. Then we were not taken seriously. I think Scotty just wanted to console or pamper me.
Playboy : But you founded this company. Were there any bitterness in you?
Jobs : It's impossible to get mad at your own child.
Playboy : Even if this kid sends you to hell?
Jobs : I did not feel anger. Only deep sadness and frustration. But I got the best Apple employees - if this did not happen, then the company would be in big trouble. Of course, it is these people who are responsible for creating the Macintosh. [ shrugs ] Just take a look at the Mac.
Playboy : There is no unanimous opinion yet. The Macs were presented with the same noise as Lisa, but the previous project did not take off at first.
Jobs : That's true. We had high hopes for Lisa, which in the end did not materialize. The most difficult thing was that we knew that the Macintosh was on the way, and almost all of Lisa's problems were fixed in it. Its development was a return to the roots - we are again selling computers to people, not corporations. We fired - and created an insanely cool computer, the best in history.
Playboy : Does one 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 rejecting old ideas. But yes, the creators of the Mac are a little touched.
Playboy : What distinguishes those who have insanely cool ideas and those who are able to implement them?
Jobs : Take IBM as an example. How did it turn out that the Mac team released the Mac and IBM the PCjr? We think the Mac will be sold in incredibly large runs, but we didn’t create it for anyone. We created it for ourselves. The team and I wanted to decide for ourselves whether he is good or not. We were not going to do market analysis. We just wanted to create as good a computer as possible. Imagine you are a carpenter creating a beautiful wardrobe. You will not make its back wall 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 tree. Aesthetics and quality should be at the highest level, otherwise you will not be able to sleep at night.
Playboy : You want to say that the creators of PCjr are not so proud of their brainchild?
Jobs : If that were the case, they would not have let him out. It’s obvious to me that they developed it on the basis of researching a certain market segment for a certain type of customers 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 Mac team wanted to create the greatest computer in human history.
Playboy : Why are mainly young people working in the computer industry? The average Apple employee is 29 years old.
Jobs : This trend applies to any fresh, revolutionary areas. People become stiff with age. Our brain is like an electrochemical computer. Your thoughts create patterns similar to scaffolding. Most people get stuck in familiar patterns and continue to move only along them, as the player’s needle moves along the grooves of the plate. Few people can abandon the usual view of things and lay new routes. It is very rare to see an artist over thirty or forty years old, creating truly amazing works. 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 - the company, not the computer. It evokes the same feeling of messianism in you, right?
Jobs : I feel that we are changing society not only with computers. I think Apple has the potential to become a Fortune 500 company by the late eighties or early nineties. Ten to fifteen years ago, when compiling a list of the five most impressive US companies, the vast majority would include Polaroid and Xerox. Where are they today? What happened to them? By becoming multi-billion-dollar giants, companies are losing their gaze. They begin to form the links between leaders and those who truly work. They cease to have a passion for their products. Real creators, those who care, have to overcome five levels of managers to just do what they think is right.
Most companies cannot retain brilliant professionals in an environment where individual achievement is not encouraged or even condemned. These specialists are leaving, the dullness remains. I know this because Apple was built that way. We, as Ellis Island, received 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 this 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 most stupid decisions of all that I know. 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 such people are not set as an example. Such people are much cooler than astronauts and football stars, cooler than them there is no one.
In general, one of the main tasks by which John Scully and I can 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 she keep today's spirit? We are developing a new territory for ourselves. There are no other examples on which to rely - neither in terms of growth, nor in terms of the freshness of managerial decisions. So we have to go our own way.
Playboy : If Apple is really so peculiar, why does it need this twentyfold growth? Why not stay a relatively small company?
Jobs : Our field is designed so that in order to remain one of the main players, we will have to become a ten billionth company. Growth is needed to remain competitive. This is what worries us, the monetary bar in 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 their sake. Those who really 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 path 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 create our clothes, we do not grow our own food, we speak a language coined by someone else and use the 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 don’t know where she will lead us - but we know that we are part of something more important than ourselves.
Playboy : You said it’s important for you to capture the enterprise market with the Macintosh. Can you beat IBM in this field?
Jobs : Yes. This market is divided into several sectors. I like to think that there is not only Fortune 500, but Fortune 5,000,000 or Fortune 14,000,000. There are 14 million small businesses operating 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 in the next, 1985.
Playboy : What?
Jobs : Our approach is to look not at enterprises, but at teams. We want to make qualitative changes in their workflow. It’s not enough for us to help them with a set of words or speed up the addition of numbers. We want to change the way they interact with each other. Five-page memos are compressed to one, because you can use a picture 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 completely wrong. If we can bring this free spirit to the serious world of business, this will be a valuable contribution. It’s hard to imagine how far this will go.
Playboy : But in the business segment, even the name IBM is confronting you. IBM is associated with efficiency and stability in people. Another new player in the computer industry, AT&T, is also grinding a tooth at you. Apple is a fairly young company that may seem unverified to potential customers, large corporations.
Jobs : Macintosh will help us get into the business segment. IBM works with enterprises on a top-down basis. To succeed, we must go the opposite way, starting from the lower links. I’ll explain using networking as an example — we should not connect entire companies at once, as IBM does, but focus on small work teams.
Playboy : One expert stated that there must be a single standard for the industry to flourish and the end user to benefit.
Jobs : This is a complete lie. To say that one standard is needed today is the same as saying in 1920 that one type of car is needed. In this case, we would not see an automatic transmission, power steering and independent suspension. Technology freezing 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 with a reluctance to submit to a competitor? Another critic believes that the only reason for your ambition is that Steve Jobs allegedly sends IBM to hell.
Jobs : No, with the help of personality, we did not try to prove our manhood.
Playboy : Then what is the reason?
Jobs : The main argument is that the technology we developed is too good. She wouldn’t be so good if she was compatible with IBM. Of course, we do not want IBM to dominate our industry, that’s true. It seemed to many that doing an incompatible computer with IBM was sheer madness. Our company took this step for two key reasons. The first - and it seems that life proves our point - that it is easier for IBM to "cover", destroy companies that produce compatible computers.
The second and most important one is that our company is driven by a special look at the manufactured product. We believe that computers are the most impressive tools of all invented by man, and people, in fact, are users of tools. This means that providing many, many people with computers, we will make qualitative changes in the world. As Apple employees, we want to make the computer an ordinary household appliance and introduce tens of millions of people to it. That is what we want. We could not have achieved this goal with IBM technologies, which means that we had to create something of our own. That's how the Macintosh came about.
Playboy : In 1981-1983, your share of the personal computer market fell from 29 to 23 percent. IBM's share in the same period increased from 3 to 29 percent. How do you answer the numbers?
Jobs : The numbers never bothered us. Apple focuses on products because the product is the most important thing. IBM focuses on service, support, security, mainframes, and near-mother care. Three years ago, Apple noticed that it is impossible to provide a mother with each of the ten million computers sold per year - even IBM does not have as many mothers. So motherhood should be built into the computer itself. Much of the essence of the Macintosh is in that.
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 that the next 20 years for computers will be a gloomy Middle Ages. As IBM captures a market segment, innovation ceases. IBM is hindering innovation.
Playboy : Why?
Jobs : Take for example an interesting company like Frito-Lay. She serves more than five hundred thousand orders a week. There is a Frito-Lay rack in every store, and in large ones there are even several. The main problem of Frito-Lay is the missing product, roughly speaking, tasteless chips. They have, say, ten thousand employees who run back and forth and replace bad chips with good ones. They communicate with managers and make sure everything is in order. Such services and support provide them with an 80% share in each segment of the chipset market. No one can resist them. As long as they continue to do this job well, no one will take 80 percent of the market from them - they do not have enough salespeople and technical workers. They cannot hire them because they don’t have the means to do so. They do not have funds because they do not have 80 percent of the market. This is such a trick-22. No one can shake such a giant.
Frito-Lay does not need much innovation. She just watches the news of small chip manufacturers, studies these new products for a year, and a year or two later releases a similar product, provides him with perfect support, and gets the same 80 percent of the new market.
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