Steve Jobs vs. the Haters

The story behind a viral video from 1997

“I think he just kind of like told people what to invent like he just kind of came in like I want my whole music collection in that phone. Get on it.”

-Bill Burr

The year is 1997. Myth, Fallout, Age of Empires, and Ultima Online are some of the biggest PC games of the year. Microsoft owns 90% of the computer market with a clear focus on commercial use that favored third-party developers and universal integrations. Apple has lost $1 billion over the past four quarters and holds less than 4% of the total computer market, coming in at a cool eighth in the PC market overall.

The obvious path forward for Apple seemed to be a new framework named OpenDoc, which would make it easier for third-party developers to integrate software and systems across the Apple ecosystem. Build the framework, Apple diehards believed, and developers would build compatible software for Apple users and more software would mean more people would want to buy Apple computers.

Instead, Apple laid off 25% of the workforce in March 1997 and discontinued all major support for OpenDoc. As one source explains:

Microsoft had something called OLE. OpenDoc was kind of an alternative from Apple. It could be a huge thing, but required a lot of work. Apple probably also realised they can't convince big devs like Adobe to rewrite their entire software just to be compatible with OpenDoc. So they cancelled the project and encouraged devs to use java to build apps instead. Hundreds of developers were hyped about OpenDoc so this caused a lot of frustration.

The timing seemed suspicious: a month earlier, Apple had acquired Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s NeXt and Jobs had rejoined the company as an adviser. Jobs had originally left Apple in 1985 due to what has been described as an “abrasive and authoritarian approach.” His unwavering belief in a closed system for Apple products doomed the original Macintosh in 1984 to become little more than what many called “a beige toaster” that supported nothing outside of the native Macintosh applications. The thing didn’t even have an internal hard drive.

So, even though Jobs wouldn’t be named Apple CEO until much later, everyone already knew who to blame for the cuts, the closed system, and the killing of OpenDoc: Steve Jobs.

This is what gives us the viral video at the May 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference, where one developer stands up and says what much of the audience is thinking:

“Mr. Jobs, you’re a bright and influential man. It’s sad and clear that on several counts… you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say Java in any of its incarnations, addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc.

And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.”

This sentiment about Steve Jobs has been permanent and persistent ever since Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1970 in their early twenties. Wozniak was the coder, the builder, the revolutionary. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class and obsessed over fonts and, worst of all, refused to believe, after decades of failures, that a closed system for personal computing was the wrong approach. The resentment in the room is palpable, even in the video.

In 1997, no one thought Jobs would save Apple. His philosophy seemed backwards: Microsoft had won with an open system. The future was open. Without OpenDoc, Apple would remain closed. To add insult to injury, the response from Apple to the OpenDoc faithful had been to “just use Java.” In the developer’s question, Jobs is even blamed for this.

This exchange reminds us that, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, most developers, users, and shareholders all believed that he didn’t understand technology.

This context - and the story of OpenDoc - is often stripped when this video is shared between tech workers or shown as an example of leadership. In a lot of cases, articles and summaries use it as a good example of responding to “haters.”

But the real value of this exchange is that it is the best way to understand how Apple today has achieved a $2.74 trillion market cap and what so many people get wrong about our relationships with products today: Technology is not the point of technology. People are the point of technology.

The Tyranny of Simplicity

In his response, Jobs tells the story of bringing the world’s first laser printer to market, which took untold technological ingenuity, and recalls printing out a piece of paper and thinking:

We can sell this. Because you don’t need to know anything about what’s in that box.

This leads him to the heart of his product strategy:

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and figure out where you’re going to sell it. I’ve probably made this mistake more than anyone else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

At a time when most early adopters and developers believed the personal computing revolution meant maximizing freedom by giving infinite possibilities to every user, Jobs recognized that freedom, paradoxically, must begin with a foundation. The foundation, in his mind, would and always had to be, the closed system. Freedom is not free if it isn’t accessible.

Even decades later, co-founder Steve Wozniak professes an apparent discomfort with the victory of Jobs’s vision, saying at a conference in 2015:

I don’t like being in the Apple ecosystem. I don’t like being trapped. I like being independent.

Once a hero to the personal computing revolution, Wozniak’s reaction today is understandable, but not the reaction of the majority of Apple users. It is more in line with the delusional faithful of Web3 or the metaverse, who did not take the time to wonder about the user experience in the rush to make something that they, personally, found compelling - or at least enriching. Ethereum pretending to be a network rather than a Ponzi scheme is a perfect example of developers building technology, bridges on bridges, that lead to nowhere. In fact, if the bridges led to any center, it would counter the very essence of decentralization itself - a developer’s dream, but not humanity’s dream.

Open systems have promises. Closed systems have users.

In 1997, Jobs wanted users, not technology. That meant making things usable. He wanted to sell the experience, not the product. As he often explained:

Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse.' People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Complexity is a curse and Jobs knew that complexity began when customization became too easy - just look at Facebook’s decisive victory over MySpace, which lost 10 million users e in a single month and saw 44% fewer visitors from the year previous as users decided to go with a controlled, convenient user interface not bloated by third-party plug-ins.

Technology is evolution in fast forward: people build the product with their experience it and, unfailingly, the final product is always something that simply works to make life better by solving a common problem clearly and cleanly. The closed system of Apple products was intended to be so integral that it became invisible and powerful and magical.

What is most inspiring about Steve Jobs is really where he got his inspiration in the first place. He viscerally felt the user experience, from what they saw to how the product performed and he wanted to ensure that everyone undersetood just how monumental these accomplishments were: from the overdone conferences and dramatic quotes to Apple stores that, even today, seem like some kind of space cult full of missionaries who cradle each cracked phone as if they are sacred objects.

But there’s no doubt now that Jobs is right: successful products are not products: they become life. When we pass a phone gently, from our hands to some one else, each party handles it as if a life is contained within, precious and fragile and powerful because, really, it is.

We might think of closed systems as biome that, with the right conditions, can grow something beautiful and understandable. Exposed to the wrong environment, everything can wither at once.

If you disagree, it is necessary to watch this 54 minute introduction to the limitless possibilities of OpenDoc:

Convenience begins with the closure of all other possibilities so cleanly that it feels like predestination. Jobs provided that to consumers, offering a simple truth that people not only understood, but felt: from device to destiny.

Was Steve Jobs always right? No. Read “How Steve Jobs Got It Wrong.”