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**Steve Jobs:** One of the hardest things when you're trying to affect change is how does that fit into a cohesive, larger vision that's going to allow you to sell $8 billion, $10 billion a product a year? |
And one of the things I've always found is, you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I've got the sca... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I also believe that it all starts with a vision, the Why as captured by Simon Sinek. But how do you discover that? What does it even look like? |
**Steve Jobs:** I think every good product that I've ever seen in this industry and pretty much anywhere is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They want to use it themselves, and that's how the Apple I came about, that's how the Apple II came abou... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So people that cared deeply about making something wonderful, that everyone they know, including themselves, want to use. So this is a great idea. And if it was that simple, everyone would do it. I'm pretty sure that there is more to it. In my experience, one of the things that people with great... |
**Steve Jobs:** \[16:07\] Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management, I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions, doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers. Lousy management. And what happened was you look at the farm that's... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I understand what you mean. I also find myself saying yes to too many things. Adam keeps repeating to trick myself and go slow, and Justin in Episode 16 told us about the importance of going smooth. And by that, he meant slow. Because slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. I know that Jocko would hard-ag... |
Okay, so you've mentioned management and engineering, and I too have seen far too many disconnects in my career to know what bad looks like. So what does good engineering management look like to you? |
**Steve Jobs:** I've never believed in the theory that if we're on the same management team and a decision has to be made, and I decide in a way that you don't like, and I say, “Come on, buy into the decision. Buy into it. Like we're all on the same team, you don't agree, but buy into it. Let's go make it happen.” Beca... |
So I've always felt the best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through, until you agree. Now, that's not everybody in the company, but that's everybody involved in that decision that needs to execute... Because we're paying people to tell us what to do. I don't view that we pay people to do things. That's e... |
And so when you when that's your attitude, you shouldn't run off and do things if people don't all feel good about them. And the key to making that work is to realize there's not that many things that any one team really has to decide. And we might have 25 really important things we have to decide on a year. Not a lot. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that what you have described is a good leader, and I think that good ones are few and far between. Even few in the last 10 years. It's mostly company politics, personal agendas, and bottom of my list, regarding people as resources, which serve the primary function of contributing the status an... |
**Steve Jobs:** You’re developers, you know that... It's all about managing complexity. It's like scaffolding, right? You erect some scaffolding, and if you keep going up and up and up, eventually, the scaffolding collapses of its own weight. That's what building software is. It's how much scaffolding can you erect bef... |
\[20:06\] You've read The Mythical Man-Month, right? The basic premise of this is “A software development project gets to a certain size where if you add one more person, the amount of energy to communicate with that person is actually greater than their net contribution to the project, so it slows down.” So you have l... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's funny, because that's exactly how I think about Dagger, Kubernetes and Fly, as well as all the other great tooling in my toolbox. I guide myself by the following principles - do I enjoy using this? Does it make sense? Does it make my work simpler? If the answer is no to any of these, I know tha... |
**Steve Jobs:** The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn't work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that's the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn't need maintena... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I've heard many people talk about less code and no code... And the example that I keep going back to is kelseyhightower/nocode repository on GitHub, which I think is a great example of this. Perhaps taken to the extreme to prove the point, but nevertheless, worth checking out. |
Before we dive deeper into code and hardware, are there any other important learnings about people that you want to share? |
**Steve Jobs:** The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it, and they don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision, and that's what leadership is - having a vision, and being able to articulate that so that peo... |
So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of ten great people, that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This resonates with me, as I had a similar experience not that long ago. And knowing you, I know that we are still missing your high-order bit perspective on people. |
**Steve Jobs:** \[23:46\] I now take a longer-term view on people. In other words, when I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. It's to say, "We're building a team here, and we're going to do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year." And so what do I need to do to hel... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I also think that being able to make mistakes and learn from them in a safe environment, where everyone comes together and promotes sharing so that others can learn too, can be one of the most wonderful and rewarding aspects of our profession. Unfortunately, people tend to be afraid of consequences, a... |
**Steve Jobs:** You know, I've actually always found something to be very true, which is most people don't get those experiences because they never ask. I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up -- I called up... This will date me, but I called up Bill Hewlett ... |
And I've never found anyone who said, “No” or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. And when people asked me, I try to be as responsive, and to pay that gratitude back. Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask... And that's what separate sometimes the people that do things from the p... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is another great story, thank you for sharing it with us. So once you have all these great people that really love what they do, self-manage and make mistakes in order to learn, how do you organize as a company? |
**Steve Jobs:** One of the keys to Apple is Apple's an incredibly collaborative company. Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a startup; one person is in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPho... |
\[28:09\] And so what I do all day is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas,... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that there are too many good ideas out there, but not enough people that stick with them for a few years to see them through. In other words, they never get to benefit from the compound interest of learning from a cluster of mistakes. |
**Steve Jobs:** I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages, and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I have to admit that at the beginning of my career my strategy was to stay with the company for 12 months and then move. I wanted to learn and grow quickly by working with as many people as I could and explore as much as possible... And I do have to say that it worked well. But after about a decade of... |
Okay, I would like us to go back now into the code and hardware topics. Do you think of Apple as a software or a hardware company? |
**Steve Jobs:** We think we should be a software company and a hardware company. The charter of our hardware division is to make the best hardware; it might not be the cheapest, it might not be this, might not be that, but we think all in all we can make the best stuff. So the more innovative the product is, the more r... |
So how does one bring innovation to the marketplace? |
We believe the only way we know how to do it right now is with the direct sales force, out there in front of customers, showing them the products in the environment of their own problems, and discussing how those problems can be made with these solutions. |
A software-only company could never afford to feel the direct sales force. With average selling prices of $500 a software package, you could never afford professionals in the field. With an average selling price of $5,000, you can. And that's why I don't think we're going to see any more system software companies succe... |
\[32:10\] So our strategy has been that we've got to be a hardware company in order to make our software business succeed, and we think we can do really well at both of them. I know that's a long answer, but it's a complex problem, too. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** With that in mind, what would you say is Apple's greatest strength, hardware or software? |
**Steve Jobs:** A lot of times both in people and in organizations, your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness, or your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength. Apple has been highlighted as having an incredibly great weakness of being totally vertically integrated. Well, it doesn't make its own semic... |
The fact that Apple controls the product design from end-to-end, hardware, software, gives Apple an incredibly unique opportunity. It's the only company in the industry that does that... An incredibly unique opportunity to tackle some of these really gnarly, complex problems that could have enormous potential advantage... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, that matches my experience. Because while the font is the thing that hooked me for life, it was the iMac G3 which attracted me to that computer in the first place. And if hardware is your greatest strength, that leaves software as your competitive advantage, right? Because I think that you need t... |
**Steve Jobs:** A lot of times you don't know what your competitive advantage is when you launch a new product. Some really big companies came to us and said, “You don't understand what you've got. The same software that allows Lotus to create their apps 5-10 times faster, is letting us build our in-house mission-criti... |
And it took them about three months before we finally heard it, and in last summer, we changed our whole sales and marketing strategy around to focus on that, and it's taken off like a rocket. We grew about 4x last year and we'll probably grow about 2x this year, and our customer list is now very strong and growing lik... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I have to ask, why not hardware as a competitive advantage? |
**Steve Jobs:** The greatest thing is hardware is really -- hardware churns every 18 months; it's pretty impossible to get a sustainable competitive advantage from hardware. If you're lucky, you can make something 1.5 or 2 times as good as your competitor, which probably isn't enough to be quite a competitive advantage... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[36:02\] Okay, I get it. Even though you do currently have maybe a two times advantage with your new ARM-based architecture, I don't expect it to last long enough to make a meaningful difference. And meanwhile, for 20 years, no one has caught up with your font. So yes, it all makes sense. |
Speaking about hardware, one thing that I started thinking about more and more in recent months is the possibility of doing all my coding on remote hosts. The GitHub Codespaces conversation from Changelog episode 459 is the latest nudge in that direction. And while the experience is not what I imagined - I feel at home... |
**Steve Jobs:** Much of the great leverage of using computers these days is using them not just for computationally intensive tasks, but using them as a window into communication-intensive tasks. And never have I seen something more powerful than this computation combined with this network technology that we now have. ... |
And you know, in the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero. I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself, it goes over the network, finds my home directory o... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I can see the similarity in our thinking, and this makes me wonder about that higher-order bit. Because I think the experiences we have just shared are lower order. |
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