In his first extended interview since undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer last summer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs talked with Fortune Magazine’s Brent Schlender.
“As we’ll see, software wizardry is how Steve brought Apple back from oblivion and even breathed new life into the Mac, which turned 20 years old the day we sat down to talk. Software, in a word, is the genie in Apple’s multibillion-dollar hardware business… Think back about just how irrelevant Apple seemed even two years ago. Its share of the personal-computing market had shrunk inexorably throughout the 1990s to a tiny 2%… By the late 1990s, Apple was making even its most loyal users doubt the point of sticking with the company. Its operating system was an unstable patchwork, and programmers were growing ever more reluctant to write for Macs or adapt their PC programs to run on the machines. Apple knew it needed help. It turned to a man who had started it all: Steve Jobs.
Some interesting tidbits come to light in Schlender’s article:
– That deal where Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting Apple stock is now worth well over $1 billion.
– Schlender describes Mac OS X as “the software equivalent of a cross between a Porsche and an Abrams tank: an operating system with sleek, animated graphics and an abundance of useful and novel features built on top of industrial-strength code.”
– Adobe blew it: “In a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. ‘They said flat-out no,’ Jobs recalls. ‘We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, ‘Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we’re just going to have to do this ourselves,'” Schlender reports.
– That started Apple’s Applications Software Division which is now a 1,000-engineer-strong group.
– Schlender writes, “Jobs sees applications like iLife as the centerpiece of his marketing strategy, which is to differentiate the Macintosh from Windows PCs by positioning it as a complete multimedia machine. Right out of the box, the Mac with iLife gives users (especially the creative types) everything they need for creating, editing, managing, and playing digital content. While comparable applications are available for Windows machines, matching what Apple initially throws in free costs hundreds of dollars, and the various Windows programs don’t interact easily with one another. “Everyone in every corner of the software business could learn a lot from iLife,” says Bill Joy, the legendary computer scientist, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.”
– “‘I felt like a dope,’ says Jobs, thinking back to summer 2000, when his fixation on perfecting video editing on the Mac distracted him from noticing that millions of kids were using computers and CD burners to make audio CDs and to download digital songs called MP3s from illegal online services like Napster. Yes, even Jobs, the technological visionary of his generation, occasionally gets caught looking in the wrong direction. ‘I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up,'” Schlender writes. Apple did more than catch up, as we all know.
There’s so much information in the full article – it’s an embarrassment of riches. There are the stories of how iTunes came to be (started from scratch and pounded out in less than four months), how the iPod was born in November 2001 (another crash project that yielded the iPod in just nine months), and the enormous challenge of creating the iTunes Music Store.
Schlender reports, “Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich predicts that the iPod business alone will hit $6.2 billion in fiscal 2006, roughly as big as all of Apple when Jobs took over.”
“Apple has cast a shadow over Microsoft too. Jobs likes to say that the upcoming Tiger version of OS X will have everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are promising in Longhorn, the often delayed major upgrade of Windows, now due in mid-2006. ‘They copied the original Mac with Windows 95,’ Jobs gloats, ‘and now they’re going to be copying us again,'” Schlender reports. “Mac OS X is so solid that Apple is beginning to sell Macs into markets that never before would even consider them, like the military and university supercomputer centers. Most tantalizing of all is scuttlebutt that three of the biggest PC makers are wooing Jobs to let them license OS X and adapt it to computers built around standard Intel chips. Why? They want to offer customers, many of whom are sick of the security problems that go with Windows and tired of waiting for Longhorn, an alternative.”
This article just keeps going, a highly-recommended read, (subscription required for full article) here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
iPod success opens door to Mac OS X on Intel – March 04, 2004
Great read…I wonder where we are going next?
Magic Word: Use
For a good laugh, go read what our favorite idiot (Paul) has to say about this.
damn supscriptions
Someone post the whole thing somewhere, please . . .
“Most tantalizing of all is scuttlebutt that three of the biggest PC makers are wooing Jobs to let them license OS X and adapt it to computers built around standard Intel chips.”
Before the Lenovo deal I would say IBM, sure (IBM should be selling OS X and not Linux). HP, definitely (HP should be offering OS X and not HP/UX). Sony Vaio laptops running OS X, absolutely.
Sure the last time that the Mac OS was licensed it was bad, but that was because Apple didn’t license to a player with a built-in base that would give the Mac OS instant credibility.
Do not under any circumstances ever license to Dell. That would be a sure way to cannibalize, rather than grow, sales just like the 90s licensees did.
Stevie is a deal maker; Billy a deal breaker — who would you rather deal with? And when the deals are done and translated into product or service, the man in the black turtleneck will take to the stage and sow shock and awe.
I wonder where are we going next?
Fasten seatbelts.
“scuttlebutt that three of the biggest PC makers are wooing Jobs to let them license OS X” – That would then be IBM, Sony, and HP, don’t you think so?
And the less Apple becomes dependent on its own mac hardware sales (which is where they are going to, selling iPods like nuts), the more likely this option gets. – Time will tell…
num_flux, the beautiful thing about mac hardware is that it’s beautiful. I wouldn’t want to lose that.
License OS X? That might have been on the table (at least for the PC makers) before the Mac mini, but very strong sales of the mini will force a rethink.
The challenge is identifying the markets that a license would be viable. Forget the $399 with KMD – putting out crap computers would only hurt OS X and the Mac when they crapped out in a few months.
The interesting point about Sony is that their new PlayStation 3 is going to use an IBM chip. Apple has invested sufficient millions in the Gx chips to have a say (and receive royalties) from any one who wants to use it.
Lots of “what ifs” to think about, but if anything happens you know Steve J will come up with something we didn’t think of.
Should be fun to follow.
Can anybody please supply the full article
Oh no, Apple should not make the same mistake by liscensing OS X…
I think it would be very interesting if Apple did license OSX.
Imagine how many Windows developers would do a double take!!!
I can see apple licensing to HP and IBM for business level machines such as servers running OS X server, but I don’t see the whole sony consumer market. I think this is something that Steve will want to keep for himself. Sony make a very nice laptop and I think this would cut Powerbook sales.
Laptops are free advertising for apple, That is why they have a glowing apple logo on the back of the screen, when you are walking in the airport or into a coffee shop you can spot the apple users with in seconds.
Letting HP and IBM deal in the heavy metal will open a host of in routes for business who would never think about running a Apple OS on their servers.
Here’s a thought….
What if sony makes laptops with Cell chips? or desktops with it….It’s a powerpc chip at it’s heart, maybe they’d want to run the Mac OS? It’d be a big move for apple, and would help sony…who knows.
Can someone tell me exactly what MS copied from Mac OS ?
Well, thanks for the synopsis MDN. Irritating as hell that i have to pat $10.00 to read the article. I guess I will have to go to Borders and read it off the rack
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
To NoMacForYou…
The entire GUI for starters.
There’s something a’brewing betwixt Sony, IBM, and Apple, methinks.
The licensing situation is getting interesting. A year ago I’d have said no way in hell will it happen, but there are a few differences now. This article is the first time I’ve ever seen so much attention to the fact that, yes, Apple is very much a software company. They’ve always been considered a hardware company that makes software only to sell the hardware, but that may be changing. Those of us in the know realize that it’s always been the software that makes the Mac so great, but along with that is that Apple controls the whole widget, so the experience is better. That’s where the problem with licensing comes in – if they don’t control everything, they could potentially have many of the problems that Windows deals with, like plug and play not working, weird crashes, etc. Perhaps they will do something more like what they do with HP and they iPod, where Apple manufactures it for HP, but HP supports it. There are some really interesting possibilities here.
Apple isn’t going to license os X @ least not the consumer market as someone already stated it makes no sense @ all. OS X running on a computer without the apple logo on it?? u guys are crazie! His Steveness shalt not allowth it to cometh to path! lol
magic word result- as a result of the mac mini we have so called journalists making even more stupid predictions about apple death! osX on x86 omG i think i’m having a heart attack!
Willie: Yeah? Which elements of the UI did they RIP? Contextual menu’s?
Overlapping windows? Comon, tell me how you would have expressed those features? If I remember correctly the courts decided they were features that werent copywritable. And that gui came from Xerox anyways…So what did they copy?
– That deal where Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting Apple stock is now worth well over $1 billion.
The article would have been much more credible, had he never mentioned that. The subject of Microsoft buying $150M of non-voting shares always surfaces again and again, but almost everyone forgot that Microsoft had sold all the stock for profit. Microsoft owns nothing of Apple.
From Wikipedia:
Microsoft bought a $150 million non-voting share of company as a result of a court settlement between themselves and Apple. (Microsoft has since sold all Apple stock holdings.)
To the PC World who laughing now.It’s good to be the King. Nobody believe me from where I live. Now I can show the article and laugh at them. But I wonder why they drool so much at my powerbook. I guess cause It works and theirs don’t. Na It’s a Mac. That for kids. Well let me be a kid for life. Thank you Mr. Jobs
“Think back about just how irrelevant Apple seemed even two years ago. Its share of the personal-computing market had shrunk inexorably throughout the 1990s to a tiny 2%… By the late 1990s, Apple was making even its most loyal users doubt the point of sticking with the company.”
I just want to say, for the record, as a graphic designer, earning a living by using an Apple computer as myu main tool: the company NEVER was ‘irrelevant’ to me two years ago. I NEVER doubted why I was using a Mac or the Mac OS.
I own stock in Apple! Yay!!