Steve Jobs: Apple Almost Went Bankrupt Because It Failed to Innovate

lena · Sep 19, 2011

DESNOS said:
Hate to tell you, but most of us MR readers are. He was describing OOP, which is definitely not for average people. I think it was a decent comment.

So true, I agree! "The interviewer" was Louis Rukeyser, the program "Wall $treet Week" - as far as I know a very well respected man and television program! People need to get the context of the interview.

dimi94941 · Sep 19, 2011

OK, let me ask you right here, right now. I Googled but I couldn't find nothing.

Does anyone know THE REAL reason why Steve Jobs wore the same clothes after 1997?

icibaqu · Sep 19, 2011

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dimi94941 said:
OK, let me ask you right here, right now. I Googled but I couldn't find nothing.

Does anyone know THE REAL reason why Steve Jobs wore the same clothes after 1997?

My guess is branding.

lena · Sep 19, 2011

DrMotownMac said:
Wow. It's amazing how prophetic that was. In 1996, Steve Jobs was basically saying that Apple COULD still be saved if they would only innovate. He was iCEO the next year, and released the iMac the year after that. Then the iPod. Then the iPhone. Then the iPad. And, of course, Mac OS X, iTunes, iLife, iWork, the Apple Retail Stores, and now iCloud. The man THRIVES on innovation. He is the Thomas Edison of the modern age. He recognizes what the people want, and figures out a way to produce it.

Who is John Galt? Answer: He's Steve Jobs.

Let's hope not.

rdowns · Sep 19, 2011

dimi94941 said:
OK, let me ask you right here, right now. I Googled but I couldn't find nothing.

Does anyone know THE REAL reason why Steve Jobs wore the same clothes after 1997?

That's when he started on his $1 annual salary.

mdriftmeyer · Sep 19, 2011

Mad-B-One said:
I wasn't talking about the management. I was referring to the company culture, the being "different" from companies in the same branch. It was more a coaxing comment. In reality, both companies have that kind of integrity and company culture natively, has actually not really something to do with SJ. It might have something to do with his decision to support Pixar financially because he felt that the employees are sincere and have integrity and the company had potential. But I doubt that SJ was bringing this into Pixar nor Apple (when he took over again).

If you have worked there you'd know it had everything to do with Steve Jobs.

Working at NeXT and having the Apple folks come over completely jealous and in awe of our offices was quite hilarious.

We brought the NeXT culture over to Apple.

Quite a bit of the PIXAR culture comes from NeXT and later Apple when Engineering staff and management from NeXT and Apple moved over to PIXAR.

PIXAR didn't have that ``cool'' culture of layout and what not until after Toy Story was a windfall.

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lena said:
Let's hope not.

Considering Jobs cannot stomach Ayn Rand I concur.

Jobs is a big admirer of the likes of Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, Hewlett and Packard and other world visionaries.

kdarling · Sep 19, 2011

k2director said:
So strange to see him in a conventional business suit!

Up until ten years ago, when you were trying to portray yourself and your projects as being successful, you wore a suit... even in Silicon Valley.

Even now it's not a bad idea.

There was an interesting article in USAToday not long ago about how sometimes just wearing a suit on a crowded flight can get you a First Class upgrade. Airlines would prefer such types up front

glyaflya · Sep 19, 2011

I remember that show and interview

That was the interview when Jobs voiced his beef with Microsoft. He said something to the effect that they produced third-rate software.

wovel · Sep 19, 2011

kdarling said:
Up until ten years ago, when you were trying to portray yourself and your projects as being successful, you wore a suit... even in Silicon Valley.

Even now it's not a bad idea.

There was an interesting article in USAToday not long ago about how sometimes just wearing a suit on a crowded flight can get you a First Class upgrade. Airlines would prefer such types up front

Would not work on American. I refuse to dress up to travel anyway. I average 2 flights a week and would never dress up beyond jeans and a t-shirt. Of course I get free upgrades every flight anyway.

American never has a shortage of people requesting upgrades on crowded flights, so they never have a need to pick people.

MacSince1990 · Sep 19, 2011

This is a lie. Apple's problem was not innovation; they had great products in 1996, they were just priced horrifically high and deemed unaffordable by 97% of the population.

Innovation was never an issue at Apple, and anyone who says otherwise, is in my opinion either deluded or simply misinformed. Steve Jobs is far from the only creative mind at work at the company, and words like "innovation" are very often used to distract people from the reality of the situation.

Granted, Scully sucked. Hard. But Jobs was never the sole fertile mind at Apple.

chrono1081 · Sep 19, 2011

Mad-B-One said:
If you are interested in how this all went down with Pixar and how generous Steve Jobs was to keep them running, you should watch The Pixar Story (2007). It shows that the apple concept is basically a Steve Jobs concept - or - Steve copied it very well from Pixar. Either way, Steve proved that he has a nose for where innovation happens and where you can make a load of money with it. The movie was on Netflix, might as well still be available through their streaming service.

For all the ones which want to have the main scope: The people who founded Pixar were thrown out by Disney for trying new things and Disney almost had to close doors for their animation studios and the share switch with SJ basically rescued the Disney animation branch by being incorporated into the new subsidy Pixar. It is a very enjoying documentary.

I don't know what you were watching but its pretty inaccurate.

Pixar was founded by Steve Jobs when he took a group of computer artists from ILM along with Ed Catmull who was the head researcher and founded Pixar. Years later he sold it to Disney and became Disney's largest shareholder.

There are a lot more intricacies to the story but I don't quite remember them off the top of my head but I did a bunch of research on how Pixar was started when I applied for an internship there.

Lesser Evets · Sep 19, 2011

Washing-ton, Washing-ton.
I heard that guy... had... like...

biggreydog · Sep 19, 2011

This is simply further proof Steve Jobs can see the future or at least affect it. I would say about two thirds of what he said has come to pass. I hope Tim Cook is paying attention to this video. I think it should be required viewing in all business schools.

Now about that other one third: I surmise the object-based computing has to do with backward compatibility (just like Atari porting its classic games to the iPad). I would love to run MacPaint on either or both my Mac and iPad. I think I have a copy around here somewhere

One last thought: I hope the US Congressional Debt Reduction Committee will ask him to testify in a hearing. They could use his vision.

Mattsasa · Sep 19, 2011

1996....

Steve Jobs: I think apple has still has a future.

Well, Apple is now the biggest company n the world in terms of market share, so I guess he was right.

SteveW928 · Sep 19, 2011

Bankrupt?????

Umm... maybe I didn't read closely enough, but where did Jobs say Apple almost went bankrupt? Sure, things weren't headed in a good direction, and I suppose they eventually would have gotten there, but if my memory serves correctly, at their worst point, they had more cash in the bank then most companies.

DeepIn2U · Sep 19, 2011

mdriftmeyer said:
In 1996 I was demoing NeXTStep/Openstep in the University IT Department/Store, selling Apple's entire product line, DEC PCs, Gateway PCs, IBM PCs, HP PCs/Routers/Switches/Printers, and much more.

Then I left to work at NeXT during the tail end of my second engineering degree.

We had just released a slew of WOF/EOF/Openstep updates when he gave that interview.

Around 6 months later the merger happened.

----------

How does one copy from PIXAR when it's one's own creation? Steve Jobs handled and modeled every business transaction at PIXAR. Catmull did all the technical management of R&D along with Lassetter running the Movie Creation.

----------

How about they play this 24/7 to the Business leaders of today about Innovation instead of Slash n' Burn? That sounds like a plan.

I have one question for you ... got any NeXT boxen for sale or any other memorabilia?! Please?

Thunderbird · Sep 19, 2011

I think I had a Greenview laptop in 1996 with about 500 mg of HDD.

Even two years later (1998) I remember riding the city bus and talking to someone who thought the internet was a fad and would soon die out. The kicker is: I actually agreed with him

chocolaterabbit · Sep 19, 2011

DESNOS said:
Hate to tell you, but most of us MR readers are. He was describing OOP, which is definitely not for average people. I think it was a decent comment.

It may be true that most of us here are computer nerds, but you don't see an economist being introduced on TV as an "economics nerd", or a doctor being introduced as a "health nerd". Therefore I do think it was a poor choice of words.

That being said, this was 15 years ago, when computers are definitely more niche. there definitely was less understanding of what these guys actually did, and i guess it was a fair call for the time.

Nostromo · Sep 19, 2011

It's amazing to see what one individual can do.

At the time of group think, Steve Jobs' story is proof that all that matters is the individual.

The person is everything, groups are nothing.

It needed a special person like Steve Jobs to get Apple's talented people and ideas, turn it from almost bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world that it is today.

God, I remember these gray monsters that were just as ugly as Windows computers, but cost three times as much...

The G3 tower, blue and white, was the first turn, and then came the G4...

Great how Steve Jobs dealt with the G4 crisis, where Apple computers lagged behind because the G5 appeared too late, and wasn't enough.

The switch to Intel, and the success of the iPod...

We live in a time where specialists seem to rule. But in business, only companies that can serve a wider range of needs can make it to the top. Apple proved it by adding consumer goods like the iPod and the iPhone to its computer and software business, which resulted in the successful take-off.

Winni · Sep 20, 2011

k2director said:
So strange to see him in a conventional business suit!

That was in a time when consumers were not the only audience for his products... Remember, the NeXT platform was exclusively targeted at businesses and academic customers. Since everything from NeXT was prohibitively expensive, it was out of the question that a home user would even think about buying one of those black boxes.

I remember that I wanted to buy a NeXTstation back in the 1990s, but somehow I didn't have the 20,000 DM (around 11,000 Euros today) that it would have cost back in the day. Heck, even today I wouldn't have that kind of money for a computer. One NeXTstation did cost as much as five good PCs with OS/2 or Windows on them -- that's an extremely hard sell even in a business environment. No wonder that NeXT never was remotely successful.

Beautiful hardware, awesome software - but totally unaffordable. And if Steve Jobs were honest to himself, THAT was exactly what also almost killed Apple. Steve's products have always been overpriced, and it was not the Mac or all those "innovations" around Mac OS (X) that saved Apple, it was this little status symbol for young hipsters called iPod and the iTunes supply chain behind it that saved the company. And for some almost obscene reasons, the poor economy helps selling those status symbol: Despite their horrible financial situation, people feel obliged to buy this electronic status symbol. Just like they have to buy perfume or designer clothes.

Apple's innovations are mostly design-oriented. Other platforms also have Unix-compatible kernels, and other platforms have much better business/corporate features than Apple's platform has. And other platforms run mission critical applications at a fraction of the cost. So Apple's success certainly has nothing to do with technological innovation. Their (graphics) design and their marketing machinery are superior to the competition and they produce high-end consumer gadgets that serve as bling jewelry - that's where their success comes from.

thelonelylimo · Sep 20, 2011

DrMotownMac said:
Wow. It's amazing how prophetic that was. In 1996, Steve Jobs was basically saying that Apple COULD still be saved if they would only innovate. He was iCEO the next year, and released the iMac the year after that. Then the iPod. Then the iPhone. Then the iPad. And, of course, Mac OS X, iTunes, iLife, iWork, the Apple Retail Stores, and now iCloud. The man THRIVES on innovation. He is the Thomas Edison of the modern age. He recognizes what the people want, and figures out a way to produce it.

Who is John Galt? Answer: He's Steve Jobs.

couldn't say it any better.

fifthworld · Sep 20, 2011

Winni said:
That was in a time when consumers were not the only audience for his products... Remember, the NeXT platform was exclusively targeted at businesses and academic customers. Since everything from NeXT was prohibitively expensive, it was out of the question that a home user would even think about buying one of those black boxes.

I remember that I wanted to buy a NeXTstation back in the 1990s, but somehow I didn't have the 20,000 DM (around 11,000 Euros today) that it would have cost back in the day. Heck, even today I wouldn't have that kind of money for a computer. One NeXTstation did cost as much as five good PCs with OS/2 or Windows on them -- that's an extremely hard sell even in a business environment. No wonder that NeXT never was remotely successful.

Beautiful hardware, awesome software - but totally unaffordable. And if Steve Jobs were honest to himself, THAT was exactly what also almost killed Apple. Steve's products have always been overpriced, and it was not the Mac or all those "innovations" around Mac OS (X) that saved Apple, it was this little status symbol for young hipsters called iPod and the iTunes supply chain behind it that saved the company. And for some almost obscene reasons, the poor economy helps selling those status symbol: Despite their horrible financial situation, people feel obliged to buy this electronic status symbol. Just like they have to buy perfume or designer clothes.

Apple's innovations are mostly design-oriented. Other platforms also have Unix-compatible kernels, and other platforms have much better business/corporate features than Apple's platform has. And other platforms run mission critical applications at a fraction of the cost. So Apple's success certainly has nothing to do with technological innovation. Their (graphics) design and their marketing machinery are superior to the competition and they produce high-end consumer gadgets that serve as bling jewelry - that's where their success comes from.

I would agree if I could exclude simplification from innovation. But this would be completely arbitrary.

Rafterman · Sep 20, 2011

daxomni said:
Um, you don't think he was already blessed enough?!

He will probably die from Pancreatic cancer in the not too distant future, at still a relatively young age. Money, success and fame aren't everything.

----------

"It took Microsoft ten years to copy Windows."

And you both copied your OS's (including the mouse) from Stanford and Xerox, the developers of the GUI with mouse control.

aziatiklover · Sep 20, 2011

BRLawyer said:
SJ in turtlenecks only appeared after 1997; most of his photos before that time are actually in suits.

yap that's because he doesn't have the time anymore to think on wat to wear! fact and a true story! Or more like he just doesn't want to waste his time.

the8thark · Sep 20, 2011

I think it was a partnership really.

Steve Jobs along with Johnny Ive as one part of the duo.
The innovative part. This is the part everyone is trying to copy. And rightfully so, cause it's one reason Apple are so successful.

Tim Cook along with Ron Johnson is the other part of the Duo.
How they organised the inventory channels and made the products were as the right places at the right time. And also ensuring the inventory channels had no dead stock is genius. Add on Ron Johnson's work on the Apple Stores and understanding why they were needed in the first place is also genius.

It is this 2nd part, the Cook/Johnson duo that the other IT companies still do not get. The still try to scrape the bottom of the barrel. They still believe adoption numbers and total shipped numbers and raw specs ate the most important things. The other IT companies are not even close to understanding this side of Apple.

And it's this 2nd part of the duo that the others need to learn from and copy.

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Rafterman said:
He will probably die from Pancreatic cancer in the not too distant future, at still a relatively young age. Money, success and fame aren't everything.

What's with all the Steve Jobs will die talk?

Steve Jobs: Apple Almost Went Bankrupt Because It Failed to Innovate

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