Steve Jobs Interview at D8 Conference, 2010
This is my first story published on Medium. I have been thinking about starting writing down my thoughts, learnings and stories on a regular basis for a long time. I am glad that I finally make up my mind to really start doing this. I hope it could be helpful to others, but the primary goal is to help myself keep track of them so that I can come back to them from time to time to re-immerse myself in those thoughts, re-collect those learnings, and re-experience those stories. So if you come across my posts, please be kind if some of them feel a bit random, out of context, and not articulating, even though I strive to avoid those circumstances.
What led to this post? I woke up this morning, felt really grateful for another amazing day, and a random thought occurred to me as I was browsing short video clips on WeChat, many of which were from an interview done by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher with Steve Jobs at the All Things Digital: D8 Conference in 2010. It was the last public interview done by Steve Jobs before he passed away in 2011. So I took the time to watch this interview on Youtube one more time.
That interview happened a decade ago at a very interesting time. Back then, people love iPhone to such an extent that they were willing to camp out of Apple stores overnight so that they could buy the latest iPhones as they were first being made available to purchase. Steve Jobs openly published a memo to explain why Flash was not supported on iPhone and iPad. Internet Explorer still had the biggest market share, even though Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were trying really hard to overtake it. Eric Schmidt had to resign from Apple’s board because Google was trying to build an alternative mobile OS ecosystem, Android, which they acquired only for about 50M dollars back in 2005, such a bargain in the hindsight. 3G was still on its way to take over the world and AT&T remained the exclusive carrier for all iPhones.
I took some notes as I watched this interview, 95 mins long, because many points raised by Steve Jobs are still so relevant today. It was just such a pleasant coincidence to me, as I noticed there were exactly 12 items in that list. I am an immigrant to US from China. I love 12. It is a magical number to me. How many months are there in a year? 12. How many Chinese zodiac animals are there? 12. How many fingers are there on my hands? 12. 🤣🤣🤣
Now the most important part of this post. 12 points I noted down from the interview:
1. About the war with Adobe on iPhone not supporting Flash: technology has its cycles. spring, summer … going to graveyard. We try to bet on technologies in their springs.
2. What I love about consumer market is that we come up with a product, and every person votes for themselves. As for enterprise market, that is not so simple. People who use the products don’t decide for themselves and the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused.
3. Just because we compete with somebody, we don’t have to be rude.
4. If you have a stylus, you have failed (with tablet PC). Side note: what is up with Apple Pencil?
5. iPhone started from a tablet PC project.
6. Any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.
7. Price aggressively (reasonably) and go for volume.
8. PCs are gonna be like trucks. They are still gonna be around, they are still gonna be valuable, but they are gonna be only used by 1 out of x people.
9. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We are organized like a startup, the biggest startup on the planet. There is one person in charge of each function, and we all meet for three hours once a week, and we talk about everything we are doing, the whole business. There are tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company.
10. The teamwork is dependent upon trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time.
11. If you want to hire great people and have them working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, or otherwise people don’t stay.
12. We have always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. Privacy means people know what they signing up for in plain English and repeatedly.
