My top 10 highlights from this interview:
1. He is on a mission, preaching the Gospel of salvation through the personal computer.
2. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal combustion engine.
3. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.
4. We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world.
5. Companies, as they grow, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products.
6. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the young boy than with the two famous artists (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring).
His answer seemed unrehearsed to me: "Older people sit down and ask, "What is it?" but the boy asks, "What can I do with it?"
7. Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models.
8. Are you saying that the people who made the PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product? If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr. It seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer, and they hoped that if they built this, lots of people would buy them and they’d make lots of money. Those are different motivations. The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.
9. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.
10. We didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
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