“Steve Jobs made several assessments about the impact that computers and the internet would have on our lives in speeches and interviews from the 1980s and 1990s,” Lisa Eadicicco and Kif Leswing write for Business Insider. “His remarks… were remarkably on-point.”
“In an audio recording from Jobs’ speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen that year, Jobs refers to ‘”an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you that you can learn in five minutes,'” Eadicicco and Leswing write. “‘The next stage is going to be computers as ‘agents,” he said in a 1984 interview with Newsweek’s Access magazine published by The Daily Beast. ‘In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box.'”
“‘I’ve always thought it would be really wonderful to have a little box, a sort of slate that you could carry along with you,’ he also said to Newsweek’s Access magazine in 1984,” Eadicicco and Leswing write. “‘You’d get one of these things maybe when you were 10 years old, and somehow you’d turn it on and it would say, you know, ‘Where am I?’ And you’d somehow tell it you were in California and it would say, ‘Oh, who are you?” he also said during the Access magazine interview. A 2016 study from Influence Central indicates that the average age a child receives their first phone is 10.3 years old.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hence the reason he was often described as a visionary leader.
SJ is the ultimate product visionary, but often a decade in advance of the technology. The danger for tech people who read of Steve and want to do a startup is that they are inspired by a visionary like SJ.
Then they go out to raise funds for a revolutionary product, but they don’t know any significant details about whether the technology available at the time makes it possible.
To have a reasonable chance at success, you have do deal with the technology of today if you are to be able to make a real usable new product.
@Bo:
Your description is right on. I’m thinking about Theranos as an excellent example of what you’re talking about.
Correction: “Steve Jobs nailed a bunch of coeds in the 1980s and ’90s”
Looks like you’ll be the one being nailed when Otis drop his soap.