Massive Interview with Steve Jobs from MicroTimes (1992)
An in-depth discussion on NeXT
In early 1992, MicroTimes published a two-part interview with Steve Jobs. John Perry Barlow asked Jobs many questions about his plans for Next. Steve Jobs is at his Steve Jobsesist. Enjoy this interesting look at what could have been.
From the February 3, 1992 issue of MicroTimes magazine
At Last, NexT Sells The Dream...To MIS
The MicroTimes Interview With Steve Jobs, Part One
One does not encounter many published interviews with Steve Jobs. Indeed, I’ve seen his picture on a number of magazine covers, only to find the lead articles within them barren of a single word directly from Himself.
There is a reason for this. While he is not quite yet the Howard Hughes of computing, it is easier to get an audience with the Pope than an interview with Steve Jobs. Nor is there any point in the process when one might feel he’s got it nailed.
I can’t blame him-for being wary of the press. He is a Mick Jagger-class celebrity, and Global Villagers of this magnitude usually go a bit south. You would too if everyone you met focused not on you but on some virtual image, floating vastly above you like a Macy’s parade balloon. (As Bob Dylan sang in “Idiot Wind”: “People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act. Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts.”)
This problem is exacerbated in Jobs’ case by the fact that there really is something compellingly, well, different, about him. For the last decade, the workings of his complex personality have been like an Exploratorium exhibit on monomania; highly visible, well-annotated, and endlessly fascinating to gawking legions who have never actually met the guy.
Of course, Jobs would prefer these people look upon his works rather than whatever personal demons might drive him, and those around him, to produce them. After all, no one sits around psychoanalyzing SPARCstations for insights into Bill Joy’s mind, nor have I ever heard a portentous word spoken about Ken Olsen’s childhood.
But unfortunately for all concerned, it has become difficult to discuss either his companies or their products without talking about Jobs on a fairly personal level. In the past, this was not such a bad thing. What separated Apple from its many early competitors was largely a mystique based on the showier of its Steves. Both the Macintosh and the NeXT originally became objects of obscure desire due to something not unlike a personality cult.
But the mystique which once served him has lately been his principal liability. NeXT appears dominated by true believers whose devotion takes the form of creating products, the greatness of which may be literally a bit insane. But in the process, they devote to, the cult a lot of the attention which would better be directed at customers. Dale Carnegie would not dig this. And neither has the marketplace.
Which is a damned shame. In my opinion, the NeXT is simply the most powerful, versatile, and deep digital engine you can put on a desk. It is years ahead of its competitors in every area where they are devoting so many of their R&D resources: object-orientation, operating system, ease of programming, graphical interface design, interoperability, connectivity, and stability. It is unbelievably cool.
And that’s the problem. A lot of people haven’t believed it. NeXT, however committed to Steve’s dream, has been unable to reveal it convincingly to the rest of the world. And so it is that the world’s most-elegant computer has only shipped some thirty-six thousand units since 1988.
Lately, as you will read in the following, this has begun to change. Sales have started to pick up. Corporations have discovered NeXTs and are beginning to use them to write the custom applications they once wrote on mainframes and then on the PC.
The swift spread of such news could make a big difference to NeXT. But Jobs’ cavalier treatment of the press, however understandable, has earned him ill will of the sort they usually reserve for such as Richard Nixon. Most of the journalists who might otherwise carry the new message are too irritated to give him the satisfaction.
By the time the following conversation took place, I was in a pretty dyspeptic mood myself. Nor was Jobs all that happy with me. Frustrated by the apparent absence of any coherent approach to marketing and sales at NeXT, I had electronically circulated several rants on the subject, elevating temperatures inside and outside NeXT.
He emailed me, telling me that I was “all wet” but failing to elucidate further. I told him that the best way to set me (and other similarly wet individuals) straight would be to give me an interview. To my surprise, he agreed.
Two days before the interview, after I had bought a nonrefundable ticket from Wyoming, he cancelled. Then he changed his mind again and I flew to Redwood City. There he kept me and my “second,” MicroTimes editor Mary Eisenhart, waiting for forty minutes before he bounced in and told us that he could only spare us twenty of the ninety minutes we'd been promised. But not to worry. He could “talk real fast.” (Which he most assuredly can.) As it turned out, he stayed put for nearly an hour, but, by this opening gambit of evasive zigs and zags, he managed to put me irretrievably off balance.
So there was little I could do to prevent him from “playing his tapes” at me. This was unfortunate, because much of what he says about changing NeXT fortunes is more plausible than it may sound in the following...or would have sounded if he’d been speaking less automatically.
I think he has rediscovered a huge market: Son of dBASE, custom workstation apps for MIS. Like Jobs, I imagine small groups of networked guerrillas roaming the corporate steppes of Cyberspace, continuously conjuring up new tools of the moment from their NeXTs. While he may be, as usual, dangerously ahead of the curve, Steve Jobs is once again onto something. I’m not surprised.
Whatever his personal wrinkles, I think this guy really is a genius. Difficult and elusive, there remains something quite winsome about Steve Jobs. He can make you nuts, but this is not entirely unpleasant.
The interview is printed in two parts, the second to appear next month. In the first part, we primarily discuss NeXT’s brand-new marketing strategy, arguably the first credible one it has ever had. While there may be some perils to their new approach, I do believe that they are at last about to move a lot of boxes.
Radiating energy, Jobs plants one bobbing knee on a chair across from me and begins:
You want to talk about our marketing strategy? Good. I want to talk about that too, since you’re confused.
I want to start out by telling you that I'm on your side.
Oh, I know that. Even if you’re kicking us in the butt, I know it’s because you want us to win.
But I have questions that I get asked all the time, and rather — than putting myself in the position of trying to second-guess what your answers would be...
The only thing I would say is...since we don’t have the largest marketing budgets in the world to run advertisements, there are a lot of times when we learn something, and we shift our strategy, and it actually will be working in the marketplace, but there’s a lag of several months before people catch on. So sometimes people’s impressions are a little out of date with what’s really going on. We can use this as an opportunity, I can tell you what we think’s going on.
Well, all right, since we’re already there, let’s talk about current marketing strategy at NeXT.
Maybe the best way to explain it is with an analogy I’ve used before that seemed to work: Believe it or not, when we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing. We didn’t. We put the bit-mapped display in place, we put the printer in place, but we never anticipated PageMaker.
We weren’t smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happening nine or twelve months later. We seized that, and we changed our whole business strategy to focus on desktop publishing, even though the Mac was quite good at other things too. Desktop publishing became the Trojan Horse that got Macs into corporate America, and it was successful.
Jump to when we created the NexT computer. When we created our computer, we did not initially view it as a workstation because of the blinders of our history. We viewed it as more of a PC on steroids, if you will, than a workstation. Maybe more important, even—when we created NeXTstep, the goal was to make it be five to ten times faster to create applications on NeXTstep than anything else. [Someone once compared conversing with Steve Jobs to sipping from a fire hose. At this point, I began to see what they meant.]
That was clear at the time.
That was clear, and I think we succeeded at that. But the target customer for NeXTstep, the beneficiary, was the shrink-wrap third-party software developer. The Lotuses, the WordPerfects, the Adobes. And indeed it worked. We have a joke: The good news is we have the third-best suite of productivity apps in the world. The bad news is we have the third-best suite of productivity apps in the world. [laughs]
But we really have an incredible investment in software. And tons of packages shipping, two hundred and something of them now. Much more so than any other workstation. We blow Sun’s productivity software suite away. Even if you compare us to the PC and the Mac, we now actually have best-of-breed apps in most categories. We have the best version of WordPerfect, and yet compatible with all the others. We have the best version of Adobe Illustrator. We have the best version of this and that. With Concurrence we have the best presentation program now. So we're not doing bad.
You have other applications that don’t exist anywhere, like Diagram, which is an extraordinary piece of work.
Or like the Boss Logic stuff.
So, anyway, it basically worked...
But an interesting thing happened. When we started selling a lot of our second-generation product, the NeXTstations, this year, we turned around in June and said, “Who's buying all these?” Because remember last year we were 80% higher education. When we turned around in June, the majority of our customers were large- and medium-sized corporations.
And we said, “Why are they buying it?” We went and asked them, and it was very clear. They'd discovered NeXTstep. And they were using it to write their in-house mission-critical custom apps five to ten times faster.
This was a discovery, not a plan? Really?
Oh yeah, absolutely. It was not a planned thing.
The concept that all big companies have a ton of mission-critical custom apps they want to write—that they’re all downsizing off of mainframes and that they all want to write them on these desktop platforms now—was something that never occurred to us.
Well, gee, there’s been a hell of a dBASE market for a long time now...
Right. Well, when we started thinking about it, within a month it became obvious. People used to write custom apps on their mainframes and their minis. Along came the personal computer, and rather than wait three years for your MIS department to write something, you could write a little bit of it yourself, using 1-2-3 macros and dBASE. The problem was that kind of ran out of gas a few years ago, topped out. And one could ask the question now, “What do you do now to get competitive advantage when all your competitors have PCs on their desk too, and they can buy the same shrink-wrapped stuff you can?”
The answer is to write a mission-critical custom app!
We weren't smart enough to see this. Our customers taught us this. We have redone our entire marketing strategy this summer, the August-September timeframe, to focus on mission-critical custom apps. And that is our Trojan Horse that is getting us into corporate America.
Now when we first explained this to our third-party application developers, their initial reaction was to freak. They thought, “Oh my God, you're abandoning productivity!” Turned out that it couldn’t have been further from the truth. What happens is that we’re now selling NeXT computers in clumps—the smallest clumps are usually like twenty-five, the largest clumps, we just closed our first order for over a thousand systems. And we have a lot of clumps that we sold for hundreds of systems, one to five hundred. We get orders for one to five hundred systems now, routinely.
Well, guess what? All these customers want a bag of productivity apps to go on those several hundred systems, which can interoperate with their custom apps. We’ve got one customer down in LA who’s buying a thousand copies of about six or seven apps. You should see all the developers lining up—” What do you need to do to make mine one of them?” So our app developers have been more successful in the last six months than they’ve ever been. Jumping out of this Trojan Horse, if you will, once we get it in there.
What we’ve seen is that even though our apps maybe 50%, even 100%, better than what you can get on a PC, you need something that’s even more of a compelling advantage to get people to switch. Being twice as good ain’t good enough.
People are willing to go on dancing with the devil they know for a long time, or DOS would not still be the standard.
Right. And they’re willing to listen to how this other company’s going to have this in two years, why not wait, blah-blah-blah.
So what we found is that with mission-critical custom apps, we’re not 50% or 100% better, we’re like 1000% better. And it’s over that threshold where somebody’s willing to take a gamble on us as a young company, because we're five to ten times better. And that’s what’s getting us into these big accounts, and that’s who’s then buying all the productivity software.
So our business has flip-flopped. We’re only about 25% higher ed now. We’re 75% commercial and government.
Okay, but I guess I still have a couple of concerns here. I agree with you that this is a good way to go, it makes a lot of sense, and it has the advantage of being a Trojan Horse that heads in through the front office rather than the art department.
That’s right. We're getting called in by the ClOs of these companies. Which is a new experience. [laughs]
Right. But I’m trying to figure out where that’s going to leave the individual customer. There are a lot of people who are disaffected with IBM’s latest Macintosh, and are really anxious to try something else. I feel that this is a market that is not being addressed at this point.
Welllll...I think you're right.
We saw Apple start off with individuals and then pound on the door of corporate America and gradually get in a little bit through the back door. They’re not even in that far now. But they got in through the back door.
We saw IBM walk in the front door of corporate America and not pay any attention to individuals, and gradually over time grab the dominant share of individual use.
So our path, for good or bad, is going to be more like IBM’s. We’re going to get our company very successful by selling to corporations. And then hopefully as we can drive the prices of our products down over time, we can become more desirable for individuals.
We still do have a very strong commitment to higher education, however, and we still do sell our products at a pretty deep discount to higher ed. We’re doing very well there.
The other thing that’s happened is that in our industry we’ve seen radical changes in the distribution channel. What happened was that the dealers...
Which are a moribund species, I think.
It’s over. What happened, though, if you go back and analyze it, was that corporate America needed the dealers five or six years ago. They didn’t know much about PCs, they didn’t know much about networking. The dealers helped them a lot, and the dealers, you know, charged for that. And there were some companies like Businessland that even built their whole business just focusing on that.
They didn’t actually add much value.
Oh, I think they did, five or six years ago. I think they did. What happened was, the MIS departments started hiring really smart people. I used to joke about how bad they were. You go to them now— they’re full of really bright people.
These people had the advantage that they were paid a little more than the dealers, so they didn’t turn over much. They knew a lot about the internal workings of the companies, and the dealers didn’t, and they were generally quite smart. So one day the purchasing manager at a big company woke up for the first time and said, “Why are we paying for support twice? We’re paying our internal group, and we're paying this dealer.” And they changed their priorities for purchasing PCs to price, price, price.
And all of the margin got driven out of the dealer channel, which meant that all the people who knew how to create demand—like go give a good demo, tell you how to make it work when you had a problem—these people left, because the channel-couldn’t afford them. The channel became demand fulfillment, versus demand creation and fulfillment.
What’s happened now is, since the channel’s become just fulfillment, somebody woke up one day and said “Why can’t we do this over the phone with Federal Express?” And in my opinion, all of the demand fulfillment is headed towards mail order.
So why can’t NexT do that?
Well, let me keep going.
All the demand fulfillment is going to be in the Dell model. Telebusiness. In my opinion, superstores are just a pit stop on the way to telemarketing. I don’t even see a reason to have a superstore. Why get in my car and drive somewhere and pick it up when I can have it delivered to my house tomorrow?
So I think that the channel has been cetera and that all commodity products will be fulfilled through telebusiness.
Now the big question is, what about innovative new products, where demand still needs to be created? You can’t create demand through telemarketing. You can’t create demand in a superstore. You can’t even create demand much in the existing few dealers that are left.
Especially for a product like yours, which is an environment. You have to actually experience that environment.
You have to have somebody show you.
And you have to be there for a while.
Right. Yes. I agree. And you have to have a little hand-holding while you make the transition.
The learning curve has a cliff right at the bottom, but it’s actually a pretty smooth climb after that.
Right. I agree. But how do you create demand in a channel that’s purely optimizing for demand fulfillment? We saw Compaq come out with their SystemPros and fall right on their face. Because even their dealers, which were some of the best ones, couldn't create demand anymore.
Well, I think the answer, for good or bad, is a direct sales force. We saw Sun grow a three billion-dollar company in the last five-six years, off a direct sales force creating demand for their products. And our model of selling has changed—we are selling our products primarily with our direct sales force. We have 120 professionals in the field.
So it sounds as if I’ve been trying to get you to do something you're already doing. I’m trying to convince you to sell direct, and you're going to direct sales.
We are. We have fifty reps, fifty SEs, and twenty management people and support people in the field. And that’s how we are selling most of our products today.
Now the direct sales people don’t all have to work for us, so we’re signing on VARs, who have direct sales forces, to augment our direct sales forces. And we then have some high-énd dealers, almost VADs more than VARs.
We did a really smart thing. We commission our direct salespeople for any product that lands in their territory, no matter what channel it came through. So they can sell it themselves, a VAR can sell it, or a dealer can sell it. They make the same amount of money. So when they get an order for ten, twenty systems, they call up the dealer and give it to them. Because they don’t want to take their expensive time, they’d rather go focus on a hundred-unit order.
So it’s actually working pretty well between the dealers and the VARs and our direct sales people, because we eliminated channel conflict.
Okay, but what happens if somebody calls me up—as they do like every other day—and says, “Where do I buy a NeXT?” And they’re calling from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know if there’s a dealer in Pittsburgh, and chances are if there is, he doesn’t know what the NeXT he’s selling really is...
I guess the corollary to this question is: What does somebody who is a devout NeXT user and advocate do to help NeXT? I see a great deal of frustration and disaffection in the NeXT user community, which is about as rabidly devoted as anything I’ve seen outside a religious group, and they just don’t feel like there’s anything they can do.
Well, to make NeXT successful, we’ve got to make NeXT successful in corporate America.
You’re probably quite right about that, but I have one caveat. As Mitch Kapor [founder of Lotus] learned, eventually a company resembles its market more than its maker.
[Long pause. He smiles thoughtfully.]
We'll see.
We'll see.
And I guess I’ve met a lot of people in corporate America that I wouldn’t mind NeXT resembling. There’s a lot of good people out there. As an example, there’s a company called O’Connor that has hundreds of our machines; they’re in Chicago. These are a bunch of young bright kids who have gone and out performed almost every old-line firm in the financial services industry. They are great. They look like us, they talk like us, they live in Chicago, they started this commodities trading firm, and they cleaned up in their industry by bringing technology into that.
Well, look, I’m a Republican. I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to business, but there are elements of the corporate environment that... You actually led a revolution that empowered individuals in corporate America...
Mm-hm.
...And I keep worrying about the possibility that the network is the mainframe’s revenge. That you’re going to be leading the counter-revolution whether you want to or not.
No, I don’t see it that way. We make computers that you can disconnect from the network any time you want.
But I guess I view the network as so important now, that it’s just becoming ubiquitous. And the reason is because computers are being used more and more to communicate than they are to compute. Just like we burned a ton of CPU cycles to make the user interface great on Macintosh, we’re burning a ton of CPU cycles now to help people communicate: That’s profound to me, and I don’t think it’s bad.
I mean, I subscribe to a lot of your ideas. [Referring to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.] It's got to be open, it’s got to be pervasive, and there can’t be economic barriers to people hooking onto this network. But] think the network, the concept of the network to connect us all together with the right tools, is definitely the next big step in our industry.
Well, I agree. I suppose my main mission is to connect everything to everything else.
Right.
So I don’t see that as the mainframe’s revenge. I don’t.
But there remains a sort of totalitarian potential in networked computing that concerns me...
Well, I view it as very important that you always ought to be able to go off under a tree by yourself with your computer and do something. But I don’t think it’s going to be very long before your computer’s got to have some radio net or something in it, because it’s going to be impossible to do anything without being hooked to that net. Sort of like having a telephone that’s not plugged in, that’s not a cellular phone, and going out and sitting under that tree. It’s just not going to be too useful.
Another aspect of your marketing strategy which concerns me is that I wouldn’t want to see the SIGGRAPH bunch left out. Or the music types. There’s a wonderful hybridization that takes place between the nerds and the artists—more juice there than any place else in this culture.
Well, look at our actions, and I think you'll see we’re not leaving any of that stuff behind. I think Wall Street’s going to love [Pixar’s] RenderMan; but we’re doing it for a lot of other reasons than that.
Still, 1 wouldn’t want to see this elegant thing become the faithful servant of MIS and nothing else.
Right. But you should see the people buying these things. Let me give you an example that’s kind of not too traditional.
Bozell Jacobs is about the tenth-largest ad agency in the country; their biggest customers are Chrysler and American Airlines. They bought several hundred of our computers, and we figured they were just using them for productivity until we met the art director down there, who was one of the key people that made the decision to go with NeXT.
He said, “Well, that’s one of the things, but that’s not why we bought them.” We said, “Why did you buy them?” He said, “Well, did you ever see these ads for American Airlines in the newspaper that list all the flights and the prices for the next day?”
“Yean... "
“Well, there’s 150 of those that run every night around the country, and they’re all different because of different cities. You know how we make those? We get onto the SABRE system manually every night, we typeset them all manually. We’re writing a custom NeXTstep app that logs onto the SABRE system automatically, grabs the data, typesets it automatically into the app, sends them onto the network around the country, and prints them locally at the local cities.”
There’s an art director writing this app. This is because of PostScript and because of your database stuff. We used to think about art directors getting competitive advantage by getting a Macintosh and some page layout program. The world’s moving beyond that.
So I think we’ve got to be careful when we say, “Let’s not lose traditional multifaceted markets.” Those multifaceted markets tomorrow are not what they were yesterday. And that’s why we think we are able to give some of them what they need to take the next step.
This is especially true in multimedia, where a lot of people who have never given the Mac much thought are suddenly going to find themselves trying to send video postcards.
Hey, I’ll give you an example of multimedia. You know, one of our most multimedia-intensive customers is the Canadian Mounted Police in Toronto. [laughs] They’re using NeXT systems to manage their whole police department. Multimedia out the wazoo.
This is another one of these areas where I worry about the maker and the market.
Yeah, I know. [laughs] I know. It’s funny, though.
Actually, the Mounted Police don’t bother me anything like as much as my recent discovery that the CIA is one of your biggest customers.
I can’t comment on that.
From the March 2, 1992 issue of MicroTimes magazine
NeXT In The Real World
Part II Of The MicroTimes Interview With Steve JOBS - By John Perry Barlow
EVERYTHING IS CHANGING ALL THE TIME.
At that point in early December when I had the following conversation with Steve Jobs (the first half of which was published in MicroTimes last month), the world around NeXT looked different to me in a lot of subtle ways.
For one thing, I was still somewhat unpersuaded that their bold, new marketing plan—selling NeXTstep as an environment for developing custom applications—wasn’t yet another way to shovel smoke. After all, NeXT has had, depending on how you count ‘em, at least five bold, new marketing plans over its existence, each touted with equal fervor, and each more ineffectual than the last.
Then there was Jobs himself, who, in his actions leading up to this conversation, seemed as compulsively elusive and manipulative as he is sometimes reputed to be.
But I’m writing these words toward the end of January, in the immediate afterglow of NeXTworld Expo. During the course of this event, a couple of things became clear to me.
NeXT is going to make it, and possibly make it big
Their perceived new market actually does exist, and, more to the point, it knows that they exist. NeXTworld was crawling with sober, suited individuals who gave no appearance of being there on some kind of cyber-cultural lark. In evidence were all the warning signs of MIS. While my own personal enthusiasm for their arrival was restrained by my blind prejudice against suits, they’re like the 7th Cavalry as far as NeXT is concerned.
Furthermore, assuming that their port of NeXTstep to the Intel architecture really does work as seamlessly as it appears to, they may be able to grab a commanding lead in the Operating System of the Future contest before the systems heretofore regarded as the Real Contenders—Big Pink, Windows NT, and Solaris—have condensed out of their current vapors.
In general, NeXTworld, and the product announcements it showcased, made NeXT seem like a much more credible and mature company than the kind of company which might, for example, actually expect to sell computers without floppy disk drives.
There is, once again, a New Steve Jobs
Over the course of his career, this shape-changer has gone through more metamorphic revisions than one generally achieves outside the insect kingdom, but he has finally entered one in which he is starting to look comfortable.
His two-and-a-half-hour presentation at NeXTworld still contained some auto-Barnumizing. At one point, the respected Mac pundit in the seat next to mine muttered, “If this guy had been born in Alabama, he would have been bigger than Swaggart.” And I didn’t have to ask him what he meant by that.
“And yet... And yet what amounted to the third NeXT product introduction contained little of the Wagnernian theatricality which caused the first two to feel less like a computer intro than Albert Speer’s staging for the Rally at Nuremburg. This time, there was a lot more steak than sizzle. Jobs was calm, relaxed, conversational. He didn’t appear to be hiding much behind the glitz of his presentation.
The products themselves were certainly meat and potatoes. There was v3.0 of NeXTstep, which contained advanced abilities for transparent group endeavors over EtherTalk and Novell networks, a highly adaptable database tool kit, 3-D modeling support based on Pixar’s Renderman, and system integrated ISDN so that one’s NeXT at home could feel part of the office network, even though connected to it by nothing but standard copper phone cabling. There were many other incremental improvements too small to detail here, which will nonetheless solidly enhance the already well integrated NeXT working environment.
He also introduced a great and inexpensive ($3500) color printer using PostScript 2 and Pantone colors, a 40% increase in hardware performance (with a 33MHz ’040 CPU) at no additional cost, and a new CD-ROM drive to be used, among other purposes, for loading the new system software. All pretty prosaic stuff by NeXT standards, but, well, grown up.
Which is pretty much how this new Steve Jobs comes across. He is, after all, a brand new father, a condition which usually stimulates the maturity glands. On the second day of NeXTworld, Jobs spent the afternoon wandering the show floor, openly available to anyone who sought his ordinarily hard-gained company. He was amiable and engaged. And obviously very happy with the way things were going.
Though this conversation took place much earlier, some of that genuine confidence is in evidence here.
With the greatest reluctance, I recently ordered a PowerBook 170. I hated to do that, since my Macintosh has been reduced to being sort of a dedicated QuickDex server, but my NexT...
But you need a portable.
Exactly. Can you give me any sense of where we stand there?
I can. Stay tuned. We’re working on some stuff in the lab. There are a few directions we're going in.
What most of our customers tell us is that they don’t need it to run on batteries, they just need it to be really transportable.
Just transportable. That’s how I feel.
That’s pretty much our philosophy right now. There are a lot of things that are the enemy of running on batteries, like a big screen. Like a bigger hard disk that uses more power. Like a faster CPU that uses more power. Things like that.
So what our customers are telling us is that they want to be mobile, but they can live tethered to a 110V outlet.
Let me shift to connectivity and standards for connectivity. I'm concerned that the market doesn’t realize the extent to which you’re already meeting standards.
I agree.
I mean this looks like a good document [referring to a PR document about NeXT and standards], but I get skeptical questions about this every day. For example, I hear things like: “Objective C is a dead language, regardless of its merits. NeXT has bet on Objective C.” Or they'll say, “NeXT Berkeley UNIX is not exactly parallel to Sun Berkeley UNIX.” I haven't run across anything that won’t compile yet, but I hear these things... Is this all just idle slander and gossip, or is there something to it?
The two biggest things you hear in the industry are “which chip are you using?” and “which version of UNIX do you have?” Then there are minor ones beyond that.
And my view is that these are the battlegrounds of five years ago. It really mattered what chip you used five years ago. It really mattered what version of UNIX you had five years ago. Those things are not the battlegrounds of today.
When you write an application for NeXT, 5% of what you see is UNIX. Ninety-five percent of what you see is NeXT step. Open/close, read/write commands are the same in every version of UNIX, and that’s about all you see in NeXTstep. So it doesn’t matter what version of UNIX you're running any more, and it doesn’t matter what chip it’s running on. NeXTstep’s running on several processors right now. What matters is, what does the application developer see? What’s your application development environment?
This is my point of view. You couldn’t even tell me what operating system Macintosh used, right? So I guess to me the people that are worried about these things... well, they don’t seem to be the customers, because we don’t run into these problems with customers at all. And if we do, we have them talk to a technical person for a few hours and their concerns evaporate. It seems to be people on the sidelines who have these five-year-old ideas stuck in their brain. Their light bulb hasn’t gone on, in terms of what’s really important today.
I think you may be fundamentally right about the irrelevance of these distinctions, but as you have seen many times, there’s an amazing willingness in the computer industry to adhere to blind fashion.
But see, that’s not who our customers are going to be. Our customers are going to be early adopter corporate and government workstation customers. And we shouldn't spend our time trying to persuade every last person that we're using the right chip or that we’re using the right version of UNIX. What we should do is go with those early adopter customers who can grow our company to a half-a-billion to a billion-dollar company, and let our success demonstrate that those issues don’t matter any more.
That’s our strategy. Our strategy shouldn’t be to convince the world. It should be to convince the 1% of the world that can grow us to a half-a-billion to a billion-dollar company. And let our success illuminate our strategy for the rest of them.
Corporate customers started buying workstations two or three years ago. They started buying Suns, as did the government. And they bought them to write their mission-critical custom apps on. You don’t buy a Sun to run productivity software on, right? Wall Street was one of the first early adopters. And we’re walking in right now, and 90% of the time we compete against Sun we’re winning.
Why? Because what do you buy a Sun for? To develop custom apps on. NeXT can do it five to ten times better. So we’re winning right and left. Not in the scientific and engineering world—we don’t know anything about that. But in the commercial and government arena, we're winning right and left.
I worry about things like this, though. [Waving a copy of Networking Today at him.] There’s an article in here called something like “Will UNIX ever succeed on the desktop?” They are basically telling their readers in corporate networking to wait for whatever comes out of Big Pink and Solaris, because that’s what you’ve got to have. And they’re touting all the virtues that will be derived from Solaris and Big Pink someday, and not saying anything about NexTstep, which is shipping with them now.
Give me that magazine. We'll call them up. [Grabs magazine and reads the whole thing in about 15 seconds.]
I was alarmed by this. Because this is really your market, in many respects, and they don’t know that you exist.
Well, this magazine doesn’t know that we exist. But our market is starting to hear about us. But we’ll call these guys up. This is wonderful. We’ll fix it.
But to get back to the chip issues, I was on a plane recently with one of Intel’s main men. He said, “You ever see Steve Jobs?” I told him about this interview coming up and he said, “Well, I would be appreciative if he would come around and pay us a visit. We’ve got something that he really ought to be using.”
What is that?
A chip under development.
The 586. Yeah. Sure. Intel’s over here once every month talking to us about that. We knew about the 586 a long time ago.
Well, I knew you knew about it, but apparently he doesn’t realize there’s been this kind of conversation.
[Intel CEO] Andy Grove and I have known each other for fifteen years. And we talk a lot. We’re very aware of that stuff.
I think a lot of people are concerned that CISC chips in general have reached a point where they can’t go much further.
Well, the 586 is a CISC chip, for the most part. It’s sort of a combination. So’s the ’040. They’re all combinations. The RISC/CISC stuff is 90% marketing and 10% reality.
I think we evaluate things on one simple benchmark—how fast is it? I don’t care if it’s a little hamster in there on a treadmill—how fast is it?
So far you’re running faster than most garden-variety SPARCstations.
Well, and you'll see us very shortly catch up with SPARCstation 2’s. Very shortly. So the 040 is a fine chip. It runs as fast as the SPARC stuff. Yes, there are faster chips, and you'll see us do things with other processors in the future. But they’ll all run NeXTstep.
How do you deal with something like the Indigo? I gather that that’s now a sort of orthogonal consideration.
We never see the Indigo out competing in the real world. We’ve never seen the Indigo in one corporate account, competing. I think the Indigo’s selling to [SGI’s] traditional base.
Right. The SIGGRAPH types.
The 3-D modeling types. Yeah.
Which is another question I’ve got. You’ve got a relationship with Pixar—
Right.
And I keep thinking that there’s an obvious tie-in at some point along the line. Not just for professional 3-D graphics. It seems like the interface themselves are getting increasingly three-dimensional.
I agree with you. Our NeXTstep release 3.0—which is going to ship in March or April—is going to come bundled with several things. One is our DBkit, our database kit. Another is Novell client support, so you can hook up to any Novell network and automatically map that right into the UNIX filesystem. Ethertalk, which we’ve written ourselves, so you can just hook it right up to an Ethertalk network and we map that all into UNIX—nobody’s ever done these things before, by the way. That all comes in the box.
Another thing that comes in the box is Renderman. Photorealistic Renderman is bundled.
With an interface?
Well, let me keep going. Photorealistic Renderman is bundled, so that you can use it to do photorealistic rendering, the same thing you pay a lot of money for on other platforms. We’ve got all the printing and everything working with it, so you don’t have to think about that, which is something nobody else has done.
But we did something else that’s quite nice. As you recall, when we did the Mac we had QuickDraw for the screen and PostScript for the printer, and that was a real problem.
It continues to be.
It continues to be. So when we did NeXT, we adopted a unified imaging model for 2-D geometric graphics in PostScript. That solved an enormous number of problems. One of the biggest problems it solved was that it saved developers months of time, because they don’t have to translate between one and the other and read these two big, thick manuals to get something to print.
Well, the same sort of dichotomy exists in the 3-D marketplace. You can have PHIGS for interactive graphics, or GL. But these are very primitive standards. You should be able to do better than those now, but in the future it gets worse. Because ten years from now we'll have the CPU performance to run photorealistic Renderman in real time. So during that ten years we want to incrementally get better.
Well, PHIGS and GL and that stuff will not get better. The architectures are not going to get much better. So you’re going to have to throw them out and get better 3-D packages a few times during the ’90s, and every time you throw the package out you throw all your apps out.
So we thought, what would be the right solution? The right solution would be to have an interactive Renderman, and then as the ’90s progressed, leave a few more of the switches on that can run in real time, until eventually all of the switches are on. So we went to Pixar just like we went to Adobe, and we worked with them to create an interactive Renderman, and it’s bundled with 3.0. It’s wireframe on the 040s, and it gets more interesting on other products.
That’s not modelers. We’re not going to write a modeler, because we don’t want to compete with the third parties. But all the underpinnings are there to do some wonderful things in 3-D in the next few years.
Let me talk to you a little about multimedia. I just interviewed John Sculley. He talked about Kaleida and their intention to develop a set of authoring and architectural standards that anybody could plug into.
Uh-huh. But see, standards are actually developed.
Well, I understand that...
Like fifty million CD players shipped. That’s a pretty compelling standard. MPEG is a pretty compelling standard.
But there are also twenty-four different formats that a multi-media author could choose to publish in at the moment, which divides up a pretty small market.
Oh, I agree with that. But the actual data representations are chosen more by the consumer products industry than they are by the computer industry. MPEG is an example. It’s going to be a pretty compelling video format.
This gets us to something! I wanted to ask you about—I'd still like to see that compression chip on the NeXtdimension board.
Well, as you know, C-Cube conked out. We now have the boards—the hardware boards are done, and they’ve given them to our software group, and as soon as they get some software up on them, you'll see it as a product. But we have some much more exciting stuff than that in the lab. We'll do all of it.
I actually think the QuickTime stuff is not a bad idea, but the, implementation is very poor.
It’s trying to do too much in software on a machine that doesn’t have the juice to do it.
Or they took the wrong software algorithmic approach on it entirely.
That maybe. Well, would you be willing to support something like QuickTime?
QuickTime will never reach the kind of quality that people are going to look for. The algorithms of implementation are fundamentally flawed. The concept of having an open system like that is something we support entirely—as a matter of fact many people have come to us asking us to license some of our existing multimedia technology, and in almost every case we do. Sun’s sound compression formats are the same as our current ones, although we’re rolling in a new one for 3.0. We found a way to compress CD sound to data rates that are Codec data rate. Imperceptibly. You can take stereo CD sound, compress it down to Codec data rates, and you can’t tell the difference. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s never been done before, all in software.
We unified all our sound formats into one format. We don’t need all those different quality level ones now, because our best quality now has the data rate of our lowest quality one. So we’re unifying all that into one format, which is going to simplify our lives enormously. We'll be willing to license that, as we have a lot of others.
I think you’re going to see video over the Net fairly soon, and it’s probably going to be in a QuickTime format, to start out with. I mean, if all you’re trying to do is get a video box to pop — out of your email, you’re willing to suffer some crudity.
Unless you can have something quite a bit better.
Yeah. If you can have something quite a bit better that you can actually communicate with somebody else on...
Well, right now QuickTime only runs on the Mac, so it’s the same problem
Right. But there are a lot of Macs out there.
Sure there are.
Of course, if your vision is achieved, there'll be a lot of NexTs out there.
We're going to be willing to license our stuff in the same way, and my guess is it’ll be substantially higher quality.
Well, it is now, for whatever that’s worth. What I can do with a video camera and a NeXTdimension board, even without the compression chip, is pretty extraordinary.
Just wait.
This relates to a problem I have with NeXTmail. I love NeXTmail, but I constantly feel like I’ve got a great operatic voice in the country of the deaf. I want to be able to communicate with everybody in NeXTmail, but I can’t. For example, I have no ability to communicate with people on Sun workstations...
Well, you do with text.
I do with text, but I want more.
But see, Sun can’t play the music. And Sun can’t open the Improv files. So what else do you hope to do?
If we could change the file format around, let’s say we could instantly change it to whatever you want, what would you do with the information once you got it to your Sun?
Well, I would hope that there would be some joint effort between companies like Sun and NeXT, to find a lingua franca.
We are open to that.
Perhaps something like Carousel, Adobe’s new document description language...
Oh, of course we will support that. That’s just a subset of PostScript, so we'll be the first company to support that, because we already do.
We’ve held out the olive branch to Sun and said we’d love to work together with them on this stuff. So go ask them.
You’re a brand-new father.
Yeah.
When that happened to me, it redefined my whole sense of a purpose in life. What is your mission now, in the broad sense of the word?
What is my mission?
What kind of world do you want to help create for your kid?
I have felt for most of my adult life that I’m a tool-builder. The things I have chosen to build are not things that can be done by a sole artist. That’s a wonderful thing—many times I am envious of people that have chosen those paths, because one can be a perfectionist and have complete control of something yourself.
But what I’ve chosen to do requires the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. So I consider myself the tool-builder that works with a large team of people to build tools.
I’ve been through a few generations of tools in my adult life—the Apple II, the Macintosh, and some in between that didn’t work out so well. This is our third generation of tool.
And unlike a lot of people who think the computer industry’s maturing, I think it’s in its infancy. I think there are technological breakthroughs that happen once every ten years, maybe. Sometimes a little more frequent, but not too much. And that those technological breakthroughs have the force to reshape the tools that we build, and to reshape the industry along with them, as certain companies pay attention to them earlier and certain companies wake up fairly late.
So my mission right now is to try to help seize these new technological breakthroughs that we’ve had, and to steer them right, into some wonderful tools for people to use. Sort of the third generation of tools out there, the first being the character mode PCs, the Apple II, and then the IBM PC. The second being the graphical, pretty much standalone computers, like Macintosh and now Windows. And the third being these highly networked environments where expressing your desire in a custom app is going to be a lot less painful than it’s ever been before. And these things interoperating together.
I don’t even fully understand it yet, just like we didn’t fully understand Mac in 1984. But you get the feeling, and you recognize it after it’s happened a few times, that you’re on to something really big.
And that’s how I feel right now.
So our goal is to try to fashion this stuff into the most wonderful tools we can. And then to listen to the people using them—maybe more than we have in the past—to let them help us.
That’s what we're trying to do. We'll see where it goes.
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