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IBM Impact 2012: A Q&A With Steve Jobs’ Biographer Walter Isaacson On Steve Jobs And Innovation, The Renaissance In New Orleans, And His Forthcoming Book On The History Of Computing

The opportunity I had to sit down and interview Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson last week at IBM’s Impact 2012 event in Las Vegas was a kind of career denouement moment for me. Let me explain: In 1994, as I was finishing work on my Master’s degree in Radio/TV/Film (they hadn’t yet added “Internet” to the RTVF degree in 1994) at the University of North Texas, I distinctly remember sending my resume off to the new inner digital sanctum of Time magazine, “Pathfinder,” which had recently been started to put some muscle behind Time’s digital presence. They didn’t hire me, but they did hire Walter Isaacson, who would be asked to run the groundbreaking digital media organization for a short period before he was later promoted to editor of Time and, later, chairman of CNN.

As for me, information technology, and the Internet in particular, would become central to Isaacson’s life, first at Pathfinder, later at Time magazine, and of course as the biographer of great figures ranging from Albert Einstein to Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs, all of whom were unique innovators in and of their own right. What’s not as well known about Isaacson is that he is a Renaissance Man of sorts himself. To read his biography (see below) is to witness the firsthand account of a personal witness to and participant in American life over these past forty years, one whose own accounts will be cherished for many years to come. I hope you enjoy reading the interview as much as I did conducting it!

(Photo by Patrice Gilbert) Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine’s 14th editor in 1996. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. He is the chairman of the board of Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in underserved communities. He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate to serve as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States, a position he held until 2012. He is vice-chair of Partners for a New Beginning, a public-private group tasked with forging ties between the United States and the Muslim world. He is on the board of United Airlines, Tulane University, and the Overseers of Harvard University. From 2005-2007, after Hurricane Katrina, he was the vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.

Turbo: First of all, thank you for taking the time to speak with me, I know you’re very busy. You’ve now written biographies across a range of iconic figures of American life — Einstein, Franklin, Kissinger, and now Steve Jobs — I’m curious across all of these if you start to see some common traits and characteristics?

Walter Isaacson: Yeah, well like I said in the speech today, curiosity, a passion for what you do, an ability to think different, an ability to be imaginative and to think out of the box. You know Steve’s great mantra was “Think Different.” He also loved “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” The fact that Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, even in their final years, were thinking different, being creative, being innovative….to me, that’s the goal of life.

Turbo: Were there other characteristics? Some not so positive?

Walter Isaacson: They were different in some ways. Benjamin Franklin is a nice counterpart to Steve Jobs, because Steve was more of a genius, more creative…but Franklin was more collaborative, kinder to the people around him, and more open to different viewpoints. So, Benjamin Franklin was really great at collaborating with other people. Franklin tells a wonderful story in his autobiography of listing all the virtues you need to have to be good in business: industry, honesty, frugality…and after he has all twelve of the virtues and he practices them, a person in the club he’s formed, called the “Leather Apron” club, says “You’re missing a virtue.” And Franklin says “What’s that?” And the friend says “Humility, you might want to try that one.”

Turbo: (Laughs)

Walter Isaacson: And Franklin says, “I was never very good at the virtue of humility, but I was very good at the pretense of humility…I could fake it very well. And I learned that the pretense of humility was as useful as the reality of humility. Because it made you listen to the person next to you, it made you try to see if you could find common ground.” And that was something that was part of the nature of Benjamin Franklin. It was not part of the nature of Steve Jobs.

But, that’s why biographies are not how-to manuals…they’re tales about real people. And you have to extract the lessons from each character that you think might apply to you. So for me, I’ll never be a genius like Steve Jobs…I’ll never drive to the concept of an iPad, drive into existence an iPad…I’m just not that genius…but I try to think about Steve’s passion for perfection, and I also try to think about Ben Franklin’s ability to bring people together, and be very nice and kind to people of all walks of life.

Turbo: I know you conducted 40-something interviews with Jobs, and I know you spoke with a lot of his friends, his family members and even his rivals…Was there anything that they all consistently said when they talked about Jobs as a person?

Walter Isaacson: I think that they consistently said that he was on the surface, very impatient and petulant. But once you got to know him, the important thing to understand, was that the petulance, that brattiness at times, was connected to a passion for perfection, and that’s what the narrative of the book is about, which is anybody can be a jerk. It wasn’t that Steve was a jerk, it was that he had a passion for perfection and that’s why by the end of the book, you should be admiring him.

Turbo: We got to speak with Steve Wozniak at our IBM Pulse event earlier this year, and I asked him…and I’d like to ask you the same question I asked him, which is what do you think the world lost with him leaving us so soon?

Walter Isaacson: I think Steve was a person who reinvented at least seven industries: Personal computing, the music business, retail stores, digital animation, tablet publishing, journalism, phones…he would have reinvented more industries — digital photography, textbooks, television — we lost with Steve somebody who, because of his ability to think different, was able to transform industries. And that’s what the book is about: Sometimes you have to have a driven, intense personality in order to have the passion it takes to change industries.

Turbo: Okay, thank you for that. I wanted to now take a step back in time to 1995-1996…I don’t know exactly what year it was, but I believe it’s when you took over the Time digital arm, Pathfinder.

Walter Isaacson: Yeah, actually it was a couple of years before that…when I took over Time, the magazine, at the end of 1995…

Turbo: Could you just describe for me that time at Time?

Walter Isaacson: It was very interesting during that period. In the early 1990s, there was a sea change happening. The Internet up until then had been based on community and networking and chat. It had the BBS boards of the original Internet, you’d had the communities like The Well, and you had online services like CompuServe and AOL, where people gathered in chat rooms and on bulletin boards.

In the early 1990s, there was a shift from that type of Internet to a web-based Internet. That had some great advantages, but a few disadvantages. The Web became a place that we could put all of our content up on Web sites, but it was more of a publishing medium than it was a community medium. You know, comments got relegated to the bottom of the page, as opposed to the smart bulletin boards and discussion groups, and Listserves, we used to have before the Web dominated the Internet.

Secondly, the business model for putting up your content online with a service like CompuServe or AOL, you would make money because people paid to be on those services, and people shared the money with you, if you were Time magazine. But once you started to put stuff on the Web, it sort of became free, and it undermined to some extent the business model of having journalists and bureaus around the world.

Of course it had much more of an upside than it had a downside, because it opened up reporting and journalism and commentary to everybody, not just those who owned a magazine.

Turbo: What are your thoughts on the greater impact of not only the commercialization of the Internet, but some of the trends it has enabled. If we look at some of the workforce dislocation, and creating new market opportunities in countries like India and China, because of this wonderful connection via first satellites and later the Internet…When we’re looking back 100 years from now, what do you think historians will be saying about this time?

Walter Isaacson: They will be saying that the Internet was, like every information technology starting with the invention of papyrus and paper and Gutenberg’s movable type, that it empowered individuals. The free flow of information tends, over the course of time, to take power away from authorities and elites and empower individuals. The Internet’s role 100 years from now will be this transformation that not only did it take power away from the elites and mainstream media, but also the people running authoritarian regimes around the world.

Turbo: So, in looking at some of what we’ve seen with the Arab Spring….and China now trying with this recent situation (the social media crackdowns by the Chinese government)…

Walter Isaacson: I don’t think that it’s a simple process where free flow of information automatically leads to democracy. Because you’ll have a lot of back and forth. But, it does bend the arc of history towards empowerment and democracy and, eventually, whether it takes 10 or 50 years, what’s happening with the Arab Spring, what’s happening in China, what’s happening in many places, will be a trend towards more personal freedom and more democracy.

Turbo: You were chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and for people who don’t know them, they oversee Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. What’s the changing role of the Board and the VOA in this increasingly Internet connected world?

Walter Isaacson: I think that if, sixty years ago, when VOA and Radio Free Europe were being created, if they had had the ability to sketch out on the whiteboard what would be the perfect technology to help their cause, they would have invented the Internet. Something that doesn’t respect national boundaries that well, that allows people to find proxy servers to get through to information they need. So there will be a big shift towards digital information. And I hope towards community and discussion, not just handing down information the way Edward R. Murrow would have done when he ran Voice of America but creating communities and discussions that can be facilitated by the Internet.

Turbo: A couple of other quick questions…You have deep roots in New Orleans: You grew up there, you went to school there. And after Hurricane Katrina, Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed you vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. We’re now seven years on — how do you feel New Orleans is doing? Have you been back recently?

Walter Isaacson: I go back all the time. And New Orleans has not only come back, but in most ways, it’s better than before the storm.

Turbo: How so?

Walter Isaacson: We have a better school system. More choice for kids in the schools. More than 70 percent of the kids are in charter schools which allows innovative, entrepreneurial people like KIPP Academy to create schools that stay open until seven in the evening, eleven months a year, which is the way we should have education in our society. Likewise, there’s more entrepreneurship in New Orleans.

I think Forbes magazine called it maybe the best city for startups and entrepreneurship because so many young people are coming in. There’s a brain magnet in New Orleans. Teach for America has almost tripled in size in New Orleans since before the storm, bringing young people in who want to be part of the educational renaissance there. Tim Williamson has created Idea Village, which is an incubator for start-ups right in the heart of New Orleans. Tulane University has three times as many applicants as it did before the storm because eager, adventurous, entrepreneurial people want to be part of a city that’s rebuilding.

Mitch Landrieu is a great mayor — we have a political system that is much better than it was before the storm. There are even more restaurants than there were before the storm, probably more bars. So, for those of us who were worried that New Orleans would never come back, it is a great case study not only in resilience, but in reinvention — to say, if we were to build a school system from scratch, would we build it the same way we had it before the storm? No. Let’s start a more entrepreneurial school system where the schools are open later, they spend more of the year where they compete for students, and you’ve had double-digit test score gains, every year for the past three years.

So, these are the types of things that keep me coming back to New Orleans, but also make me glad that so many young tech and web entrepreneurs have moved to the city to create this vibrant start-up community there.

Turbo: That’s great. My ears perked up in your keynote when you talked about how you’re working on this new book about the information revolution. Any themes you’re starting to see in your research that you can share with us in advance of its publication?

Walter Isaacson: One major theme, which is the theme of the Steve Jobs book and everything else I’ve written, which is innovation comes where there’s an intersection between the arts and the sciences. When there’s an intersection between poetry and microprocessors. Where a great feel for beauty and design is connected with a great feel for technology and engineering. That’s what Steve Jobs is all about, that’s what Ben Franklin was all about, that’s what Einstein was about.

So it starts with Ada Byron Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who becomes a great mathematician, because her mother doesn’t want her to grow up to be like her dad. And, she also has within her the poetry of her genetic code, of her heritage. And so she works in the 1830s with Charles Babbage, who creates the first prototype of a computer, and she helps describe and envision how computers can become universal machines, and not just mathematical calculators.

And then it leaps forward from that chapter to Alan Turing, who also has a great feel for beauty, but helps invent the first computers at Bletchley Park when they’re breaking the German Enigma codes in England. And then to places like IBM, which is doing the Mark I computer at Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania where they’re doing the Eniac, and the University of Iowa where John Atanassof is creating in the basement of the physics building an early version of the computer.

The computer and the Internet are the two most important inventions of the modern era. And yet most people don’t know how poetic, ingenious, and creative the people who invented those things were. In fact, most people don’t even know exactly who invented them.

And so this is a tale of inventiveness that will take us from Ada Lovelace all the way to, I hope, people who are doing social networks, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence today. It starts with Ada Byron Lovelace concluding that machines will never think, they will never originate their own creative ideas, and that’s certainly something that Alan Turing explores, but now it’s something that with Watson at IBM, and with the notion of artificial intelligence, is still something we look at and wonder will it ever happen?

(Blogger’s Note: I wanted to extend, as always, a special thank you to the consummate professionals with Drury Design Dynamics, a family business whose primary focus is nothing less than excellence. In particular, I’d like to thank Chris Drury and Mark Felix — they always keep me on my toes and are integral to making these Q&As happen at IBM customer events.)

Written by turbotodd

May 7, 2012 at 5:20 pm

Posted in 2012, apple, artificial intelligence, conference, education, globalization, hollywood, human geography, ibm, innovation, iPhone, leadership, media, obama, politics, software, thought leaders

Tagged with ada lovelace, albert einstein, benjamin franklin, cnn, computing history, innovation, new orleans, pathfinder, steve jobs, thought leaders, time, turbotodd, walter isaacson

Walter Isaacson: The Stuff Of Great Innovators

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Former CNN head and noted biographer Walter Isaacson captured my attention from the moment he walked on the IBM Impact 2012 stage and announced his next book would be a history of the computer age.

Walter Isaacson takes the stage at IBM Impact 2012’s opening general session, where he explained to the Impact audience what he believes are common characteristics shared by some of our greatest innovators.

Then, Isaacson launched into an explanation of what attributes great innovators shared throughout history — Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs.

Though Isaacson’s keynote at times seemed like an uncoordinated symphony, the words of wisdom and insight, and keen observations into the lives of his subjects, made his talk both compelling and inspirational.

Isaacson paid homage in his opening comments to IBM’s 100-year history of innovation and contributions to the information age, but it was his most recent biographical subject, Steve Jobs, that he let serve as the channel behind the magic of an unwavering and driven innovator.

“Don’t be afraid,” Isaacson said in describing Jobs at his persuasive best. “You can do it.”

Whatever it might be really depended on the situation and circumstance — once, it was Jobs convincing Steve Wozniak to write some game code in four days. Another time, it was convincing Corning CEO Wendell Weeks that he could manufacture his “guerrilla glass — which, at that point, had never actually been manufactured — in time to support the first iPhones.

Jobs, of course, was an exemplar of the great American creation myth, but behind the mythology there were lots of life lessons learned, particularly in childhood, another universal Isaacson observed about his innovators.

“The most important thing is not making a great product,” Jobs explained to Isaacson in one of his nearly 40 interviews, “but rather a company that will continue to make great products.”

Jobs and Wozniak started their empire in their parents’ garage, and went on to change the world and, over the course of his life, Jobs’ changed multiple industries: personal computing, the music business, digital animation…the list goes on.

Childhood curiosities, Isaacson observed, shared by Franklin and Einstein.

That was another unique characteristic that they all shared: The curiousity and persistence to try and solve problems and look for new ways of thinking up until their last breaths.

Smart people are generally a dime a dozen, explained Isaacson, but the innovative people, the imaginative people — they’re the ones who change the world.

But they also shared an ability to quickly get to the heart of the problem, and to encourage others to find their way to simplicity.

Isaacson quotes Einstein this time, but he just as well could have once again been referring to Steve Jobs:

“Any damned fool can make something complicated…it takes a genius to make it simple.”

Perfect case in point, the “on/off” switch for the iPod, which was in one of the original early designs, but which Jobs pointed out was unnecessary when he reviewed a prototype with his designers.

“You don’t need an on/off switch,” he explained. “When you quit using the iPod it just powers down.”

And so it was.

Isaacson shared another revealing anecdote, this time about Benjamin Franklin’s participation in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and, later, the collaboration on the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

The original Declaration read: “We hold these truths to be sacred,” but Franklin, sensitive to the divine implications of such a phrase, and sensitive to the need for church/state clarity, suggested a re-wording: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

And so it was.

Yet years later, benefiting both from experience and having developed a sense of humility along the way, Franklin was more accommodating and facilitated a critical discussion centering on the inequities of power between the big states and little states in the nascent U.S. Union.

His urging to compromise led to the genius that became the U.S. House and Senate, where one body was proportional to the population, and the other was equitable regardless of state size. When a lady later asked him what he had “given them,” Franklin explained “A Republic, madam…if you can keep it.”

Yet despite all of their incredible accomplishments and breakthrough innovations, each of these giant men were, in the end, just that, men, people, humans — filled with the same kind of self-doubts and wonderment at the universe as all the rest of us.

Isaacson reminded us when Jobs returned to the helm of Apple in 1997 that he green-lighted a new ad campaign from Chiat/Day that celebrated the spirt of the great innovators. The slogan went like this:

“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

He was. And he did. Einstein was. And he did. Franklin was, and he did.

Each in their own unique way, but with underneath each a connecting thread of a drive towards perfection, an insatiable amount of unsated curiosity, and always looking for a way forward.

Isaacson closed his talk with a beautiful and reminiscent story of Jobs, who knew he was nearing his last days on earth. He asked Jobs, with all his Zen Buddhism training, what he felt spiritually, and did he feel there was something larger in this world than the moments we spend on this spinning globe?

Jobs explained that he liked to think so, that our spirits live on, and all that accumulated spiritual wisdom somehow benefits us moving forward.

But then, after a pause, he explained that at other times, he felt that death is just like one of those on-off switches.

Like the ones he didn’t want included on the iPod.

BLOGGER’S NOTE: I had occasion to interview Walter Isaacson on the key themes behind his keynote just after he was finished speaking. Among other things, I questioned him about his early work in digital media at Time’s Pathfinder group in 1994-1995, the impact of the Internet on the global economy, his work with the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and his perspective on the renaissance New Orleans is currently enjoying. Stay tuned to the Turbo blog for more on this far-ranging and compelling Q&A.

Written by turbotodd

April 30, 2012 at 5:26 pm

Posted in 2012, apple, impact 2012, innovation

Tagged with albert einstein, apple, benjamin franklin, great innovators, innovation, leadership, steve jobs, walter isaacson

Live From Pulse 2012: Turbo Interviews Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak On Life, Loss, & Android v. iOS

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I had about seven and a half minutes to interview Steve "Woz" Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, here during the IBM Pulse 2012 event. It just so happened it was the very same day, March 7, 2012, that Apple was introducing the iPad HD out in California. Steve indicated he may or may not wait in line all night this time around when the units go on sale next week!

There’s a lot of cool things about my job. But today had to have been one of the cooler opportunities I’ve had, and that was to sit down for a few minutes and chat with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

So many of us of my generation, and those that came after, owe a debt of gratitude to Steve and Steve and the revolution they helped create in computing. What they unleashed upon the world was nothing short of amazing, and it’s easy to take the technologies they and their company created and let it get lost in the fog of history. But I still remember the first Apple II I ever saw, on the campus of my home university. And I can still remember the first time I used an Apple Computer (a Macintosh SE) in 1987 for doing productive work. It was a thing of beauty.

And yet here we are, 25 years later, and I’m writing this blog post introduction on probably my favorite computing device of all time, an 11″ MacBook Air. That’s over a quarter century of innovation! So, after a brilliant keynote discussion between IBM’s Grady Booch and Steve Wozniak on the main stage here at Pulse 2012, I decided I had to take my allotted seven minutes before Woz fled for the airport, and really make them count with the questions I wanted to hear the answers to most. Nothing like the clock of a gun to your head to make the seconds count.

All this, on the very same day that Apple was out in California introducing the new iPad HD…Which is precisely where we started with on my first question for Woz:

Turbo: What in the world are you doing at an IBM event the very same day that Apple is introducing the iPad HD?

Woz: Everyday of my life is full of conflicts. It’s the problem with being popular, and they always want me to come and speak at all these different places. If you saw my calendar, you would die.

Turbo: I can only imagine.

Woz: I don’t know how I keep up with it.

Turbo: So I’m curious when you began this adventure long ago starting Apple, you and Steve, if you had any inkling as to the potential change you were about to unleash on the world.

Woz: We were just gonna try and start a little company just like anybody might, and we didn’t even think we’d make a profit. But we justified it as having a company having two best friends who had done so many things together. And then we thought well maybe we’ll have a company with this Apple II product, and we’ll make a million dollars or something. Well, our investor came in and said this is going to be one of those rare times when a product that’s gonna make a billion dollar company in five years.

I mean, he talked those big numbers, and I just assumed, well, you learn to talk those bigger numbers. But he really knew what he was talking about. And, it’s such an important part of our life…our total life is involved in our computers. Especially our mobile devices today…could we have envisioned that? No! We weren’t even talking about how a computer could have enough memory even for a song! So, where they (computers) went in the world was much greater than we ever thought, but we wanted to have a stake in it and we did.

Turbo: So my friend Noah wanted me to ask you what kind of wood did you use in the Apple I, do you remember?

Woz: No, because I didn’t build the case myself. My friend Randy Binghamton..his father or his brother built the case…but I am gonna say it was mahogany.

Turbo: Mahogany, okay. So flashing forward a bit, what are your thoughts on all these consumer-centric devices making their way into the enterprise? I use my iPad now inside IBM, for example, so Apple’s “disruption” seems to continue on and on.

Woz: Apple is…the technology is there for everyone to do it. But Apple sort of sets the direction so strongly with so many faithful followers because of one good product after another good product after another, that when Apple takes a direction, all of a sudden, all the other companies in the world are gonna go in that mode. And that lets a lot of things happen in our life that wouldn’t if all the companies were struggling to find a formula that would be popular enough. So Apple’s more of a standard setter. Moving to mobile technology coming into the workplace, it’s sooo much a part of our life. It’s like you get used to a certain kind of clothes, you kinda got wear those kinda clothes to work. It’s almost that ingrained.

Turbo: In Helene Armitage’s keynote this morning, that was one of the things she mentioned, that consumer devices are driving the way data centers are going to be.

Woz: Look at personal computers. All of a sudden, when the spreadsheet came out, you went into all these companies that had big huge mainframes and it took them forever to write programs and put them in punchcards into a window, and printouts would come back a day later, and all of a sudden someone had a little computer on their desk and could whip out answers very quickly and instantly, and it was like all of a sudden a little computer could do something a big one couldn’t: The spreadsheet.

And that’s sort of what these mobile devices have got. They’ve really given us a lot of abilities that didn’t make sense in a real computer. Even in my personal life, I still have a lot of apps on my iPhone that let me do things wherever I am. They’re important apps. They could be written on a computer, but they wouldn’t make sense, because when I’m by a computer, these aren’t when I need them. So that’s why the mobile explosion has changed our lives so much, and yet they’ve changed it in ways that we just expect everything in the world to work that way.

Now I finally have a computer in my pocket instead of a phone in my pocket!

Turbo: Speaking of which, you’ve talked about how you’re testing out Android. I’m doing the same thing, by the way. I had an iPhone 4 for a long time, and still do. IOS versus Android: Is it going to be a horse race? Is there a stalking horse we don’t even yet know about being built by some kid in a garage out there somewhere?

Woz: You can even go back and look at Macintosh versus Windows. And there wasn’t one way you could say one did something the other couldn’t do. Maybe certain pieces of software got written due to market share. One thing I’ve learned is you can’t go and say is “Oh my gosh, one platform is superior and the other is bad, and anyone that uses it isn’t very smart.” You can’t say that. They’ve both very good platforms. The guy that brought Android to Google, Andy Rubin, was a very good friend of mine. I served on his board at Danger, where they developed the Sidekick, which was like a smartphone before this era.

Turbo: I remember.

Woz: His thinking is so Apple-like! So much…like Apple DNA and Apple products, and that kind of thinking about human approaches to things that are really trust…in other words, they aren’t in the place that Microsoft was, which was trying to avoid the step toward humanism.

Turbo: You said in your keynote you want “answer engines” not “search engines.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Woz: It turns out that once I had certain abilities on my phone..of course, you’ve always got Google on your phone. You can Google it…you can even speak to it…but I want to just speak in a question and get answers. All day long, my wife and I…like, I think most educated people, that’s how they run their families….An idea comes up…what color is such and such…how high is Mount Everest…You used to look it up in an encyclopedia…now you look it up online with a search, that gets you a link to a site, that tells you the answer.

But I have so many questions that I just want the answer. “What are the five largest lakes in California?” I don’t want links to articles about lakes in California that don’t even have a list. I want my answer! So this is where something like Siri represents answer engines, and to some extent when you use Wolfram Alpha, and Google is more like search engines. So it’s almost like Apple is superior over Google. Except look at Google’s search engine. If I type in “What is Apple” in Spanish, it comes back with a whole bunch of links, but at the top, it gives you the answer: “Manzana” in Spanish. So, actually, Google is partly an answer engine.

Turbo: Okay, one last question, and this is kind of a bittersweet one. You said in the keynote you miss Steve, and I think a lot of us miss him, even those of us who didn’t know him personally but miss him through his communications. I was just wondering what do you miss most about him, and also, how much do you think the world lost by having had him be taken so soon?

Woz: I very much worry about the future of the great products that Steve was in control of and caused to happen. That if we stopped to innovate as much, that would be a bad thing in life. But I have personal things that I miss…just car rides that we took driving him up to college and things like that…and talks we did…and little pranks that we’d work on night after night…and little extreme things and almost being afraid we were going to get caught by the cops for things…those kind of personal stories…you know you’re going to lose every friend you have, too….everyone’s going to die.

Blogger’s Note: A very special thank you to Chris Drury and Mark Felix with the Drury Entertainment Group team. They make the magic happen at IBM events, and they always make the magic appear to make these kinds of interviews possible, even under the most challenging and pressing of circumstances. Thank you, as always.

Written by turbotodd

March 7, 2012 at 10:44 pm

Posted in android, apple, iPhone, mobile internet

Tagged with apple, ipad 3, ipad hd, iphone, pulse 2012, steve jobs, steve wozniak, turbotodd

IBM SmartCamp Global Finals: Guy Kawasaki On Twelve Lessons He Learned From Steve Jobs

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In the last keynote session before Profitero was announced as the “IBM Entrepreneur of the Year,” Garage.com founder, VC, former Machead, and all around tech cheerleader Guy Kawasaki paid a visit to speak to the gathered IBM SmartCamp finalists.

In classic Guy Kawasaki fashion, the renowned tech thought leader, former Apple employee twice-over, and celebrated speaker completely overhauls his presentation to the IBM SmartCamp finals just moments before he went onstage. The audience was certainly NOT disappointed in the change of topic.

Though his talk was entitled “The Art of Enchantment,” Kawasaki, in typical Kawasaki fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants fashion, announced he was supplanting that canned pitch with one more geared towards the gathered entrepreneurial masses, “12 Lessons I Learned Working With Steve Jobs.”

Kawasaki started his pitch by joking that he’d just been in the greenroom where the judges for the competition were gathered, and that there were five bottles of wine in there, so don’t expect a verdict anytime soon!

Then, he got semi-serious and explained he’d worked from Apple on two different occasions, 1983-1987 and again in 1995-1997, so he was uniquely positioned to comment on what all he learned from Jobs.

Before he turned to the lessons, Kawasaki suggested “the world is a lot less interesting without Steve Jobs. Most entrepreneurs would be fortunate to create one standard…Jobs created five or six (the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod, etc.)

Kawasaki went on: “I’m sure right now he’s up there telling God how to run the universe.”

Then, on to the lessons.

Number one. “Experts” are clueless. As entrepreneurs, if you start listening to all the experts, you will be led wrong. Time and time again people told Steve Jobs nobody would buy an (insert Apple product here)…At one point, even Michael Dell told Apple they should dissolve the company and give the money back to shareholders. Ignore the experts. Correlation and causation are not necessarily the same thing.

Rich and famous often equals “lucky.”

Number Two. Customers can’t tell you what they need. If you ask customers they’ll say give us better, faster, cheaper, and status quo. Build the product YOU want to use, and that you think the world can use. Fact: Nobody told Apple to build the Macintosh…iPod…iPad…

Number Three. Jump to the NEXT curve. He then explained a simple but revealing analogy. Ice 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0

Ice 1.0 was when ice harvesters sawed blocks of ice out of the lake when it was frozen and then distributed it.

Ice 2.0 saw the advent of the ice factory, so you could get ice any time of the year, and didn’t have to be in a “cold” city.

Ice 3.0 saw the advent of the “ice box,” better known as the refrigerator.

The ice harvesters did NOT embrace the ice factory, and the ice factories did NOT embrace the refrigerator. Yet, all served the same purpose: Keeping your food fresh.

So, if you want to be successful, put your solution to the problem in terms of the benefits, NOT the process you use to get there.

Number Four. The biggest challenges beget the best work. Ram a big challenge down the throat of your employees. The challenge Steve Jobs gave us was to compete with IBM. Remember the print ad we ran. It’s headline was” “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” IBM was a magnificent competitor, and it was a great challenge for us to take them on.

So, find a mighty opposite for yourself.

Number Five. Design counts. Don’t think it’s all about price. Most people also care about design, and Apple’s premium pricing has proven that over and over again.

Number Six. Use big graphics and big fonts. Consider this slide when Jobs introduced the Windows version of iTunes. It had a massive Windows logo, then underneath the following headline: “The best Windows app ever written.

Number Seven. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence, not a sign of stupidity or lack of conviction. When things change, you have to react and reform. Steve Jobs demonstrated this when he evolved from accepting no independent applications for the iPhone one year, to fully embracing them the next.

He saw which way the wind was about to blow, and he realized to bolster the iPhone app ecosystem, he needed to open it up to outside developers.

Number Eight. Value is NOT equal to price. Nobody ever bought an Apple piece of equipment because it was the cheapest thing.

Number Nine. A players hire A+ players. You should always be hiring someone as good or better than you in your own field.

Number Ten. Real CEOs can demo. They can run the product, show the product, build stuff with the product.

They don’t hand it over to someone else. They DO the demo.

Number Eleven. Real entrepreneurs ship. Don’t worry, be crappy.

Imagine you were the first refrigerator company. The first fridge had to be better than the best ice factory, but it didn’t have to be perfect.

Once you jump curves, that’s when the real excitement begins. When you ship, you’ll learn more in two weeks from your customers than you will sitting in a dark room.

Number Twelve. Marketing equals unique value. Pets.Com was a classic example where that rule did NOT apply.

You have a dog. You have a cow. You kill the cow, put it in the can, and give it to the dog.

That was the Pets.com business model. Shipping dog food. The problem was, it’s dead cows in cans. It weighed a lot. It was less convenient and just as expensive to order it via the Internet. It wasn’t unique. It wasn’t valuable.

And finally, number thirteen. (Never mind Guy said there would only be twelve).

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

But sometimes you also need to believe in things before you will see them.

Written by turbotodd

February 3, 2012 at 6:46 pm

Posted in apple, leadership, macheads, marketing, smartcamp

Tagged with apple, guy kawasaki, ibm, san francisco, smart camp, steve jobs, turbotodd

IBM SmartCamp Finalist Profile: Localytics — Everything You Needed To Know About Your Mobile App, But Were Afraid To Ask

Flash In The Pan

New developerWorks Podcast: Steve Jobs, HP, Motorola, Turbo’s 20th

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This has been a crazy Friday, so I didn’t have much time to blog.

But, Scott Laningham and I were able to cut our first developerWorks “videopodcast,” where we covered some of the major recent IT and tech news, including the announcement of Steve Jobs resignation (I apologize in advance for saying his name both ways!), HP/Autonomy deal, Google/Motorola, and even a few bits on my 20th anniversary with Big Blue.

For those of you in the path of Irene, please be safe and heed all the warnings of your public officials. We’ll be thinking about you all along the East Coast down here in drought-laden Texas. We need some rain, but we prefer it not come in the form of a hurricane (although I’m sure some farmers in South Texas might argue with me about now).

Here in Austin, the forecast has us at around 109 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow. Yikes!

Written by turbotodd

August 26, 2011 at 9:35 pm

Posted in android, anniversary, apple, business analytics, natural disasters

Tagged with apple, autonomy, hp, irene, scott laningham, steve jobs, turbotodd

The Legacy Of Steve Jobs

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Minds greater than mine will write the eloquent and fitting tributes to Steve Jobs’ reign as CEO of Apple, both as co-founder and and Renaissance CEO king who could do no wrong.

Me, I’m simply stunned at the suddenness of the announcement.

We all knew this day would soon arrive, but having watched IBM and Apple be both partner, competitor, and “co-opetor” during my own twenty-year tenure at Big Blue, many of us also perhaps came to think of Steve Jobs as invincible.

While it would be easy to sit back and write plaudits and wonderful things about Jobs as a business leader and innovator, it’s much easier to sit back and reminisce about the impact his tools and technologies have had on me personally.

I first used a Mac during one of my first real office jobs in college, using Pagemaker on a Mac SE to put together technical journals and even an underground newspaper. Back then, a portable computer meant carrying your heavy SE down to the local watering hole by hand.

Later, of course, came the first Mac I bought, the iMac, after having been enslaved on Wintel machines for much of my work experience, and later a range of Apple products, from iPods to MacBooks to the first iPad….

What always distinguished the Mac for me was it that they mostly just worked. If I were to compare the countless hours I spent tuning Microsoft Windows-based machines, going into control panels and registries and heaven knows where else I didn’t belong poking around just trying to get the things to run….well, with Apple machines I just did my work.

And that continues to hold true today.

Either I could focus on the work, or I could focus on the technology.

That fact alone may have been a key contributor to Apple’s now prominent economic position in the industry.

With Jobs leaving as CEO, of course, it raises the question as to whether or not that legacy will continue.

The pipeline of Jobs’ influenced products can only last so long. Can former COO and now CEO Tim Cook lead Apple to the new promised land?

I guess that depends on how much you think Apple has become a cult of personality (of Steve Jobs), or one more traditional in nature.

I’ve had friends who’ve worked at Apple who were pretty convincing that Jobs made a lot of decisions at the company, decisions that in a more hierarchical organization would have been made via a more decentralized structure, with seemingly less critical decisions pushed down into the organization.

No matter your belief, there’s no arguing about Jobs’ impact on not only the tech industry, but the media and entertainment industries, operating systems development, publishing, and others as well.

I don’t know how ill Jobs is or how much time he has left with us – none of us knows that about ourselves, for that matter – but I can say with the time he had, Jobs seems to have found his passion and made the most of it, and changed the world in the process.

And for that, we can all be thankful.

He set a high standard for himself and for everyone around him.

In so doing, he forced the rest of the industries he impacted to up their game, bigtime.

Sometimes they won, sometimes they failed, but they were always better off for having stretched by Apple to try and do their very best, just as Apple had.

That, in the end, may be the most crucial of Steve Job’s legacies: Always reaching to that next precipice to bring things to the world that people didn’t even known they needed, and making them better and easier to use all the while.

Written by turbotodd

August 25, 2011 at 3:32 pm

Posted in announcements, apple

Tagged with apple, macbook, personal computing, steve jobs

The Apple iTablet Podcast

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Scott Laningham and I got together via Skype this afternoon to debrief on the Apple iPad tablet announcement.

As I joked in the podcast, the iPad looks like an iPhone for for the Jolly Green Giant, but don’t mistake the seeming limitations of the razor for the giant opportunity to sell more digital razor blades.

Scott and Turbo Apple iPad Debrief Podcast (12:34, MP3)

Written by turbotodd

January 28, 2010 at 1:26 am

Posted in apple

Tagged with apple, digital media, digitollywood, iPad, jolly green giant, steve jobs, tablet computing

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Posts Tagged ‘steve jobs’

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