The Entrepreneur of the Decade

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INC.: It's got to be equally dangerous to focus too much on the technology.

JOBS: Oh, sure. You can get into just as much trouble by going into the technology lab and asking your engineers, "OK, what can you do for me today?" That rarely leads to a product that customers want or to one that you're very proud of building when you get done. You have to merge these points of view, and you have to do it in an interactive way over a period of time—which doesn't mean a week. It takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.

INC.: What do you mean?

JOBS: It's hard to explain. Sometimes the technology just doesn't want to show you what it can do. You have to keep pushing on it and asking the engineers over and over again to explain why we can't do this or that—until you truly understand it. A lot of times, something you ask for will add too much cost to the final product. Then an engineer might say casually, "Well, it's too bad you want A, which costs $1,000, instead of B, which is kind of related to A. Because I can do B for just 50¢." And B is just as good as A. It takes time to work through that process—to find breakthroughs but not wind up with a computer no one can afford.

INC.: And that's how you developed the NeXT machine?

JOBS: Right. I mean, we had the idea of doing a machine for higher education in the fall of 1985, but our original concept was about a third as good as the computer turned out to be. The improvement came from a lot of interaction between people in higher education and those of us at NeXT.

INC.: Give us an example.

JOBS: I have a friend at Stanford, a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. He was showing me what some of his students were doing to understand how proteins fold. He asked, "Couldn't you model this stuff on a computer if you had something more powerful than a PC?" It really got me thinking. What if you came up with something that was as easy to use as a Mac, or even easier, and had the power of a workstation? What if you unleashed that machine in higher education? The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.

INC.: But there are a lot of workstations around and computers far more powerful than workstations. What's so exciting about a souped-up microcomputer?

JOBS: Well, that gets back to something I've said before. You see, I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we've ever built. The big insight a lot of us had in the 1970s had to do with the importance of putting that tool in the hands of individuals. Let's say that—for the same amount of money it takes to build the most powerful computer in the world—you could make 1,000 computers with one-thousandth the power and put them in the hands of 1,000 creative people. You'll get more out of doing that than out of having one person use the most powerful computer in the world. Because people are inherently creative. They will use tools in ways the toolmakers never thought possible. And once a person figures out how to do something with that tool, he or she can share it with the other 999.

INC.: That's a big idea.

JOBS: It's an extremely powerful paradigm. It's what has driven a bunch of us since this whole thing began to happen, and it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed for me since 1975. That's almost 15 years now. I believe this is one of the most important things that's going to happen in our generation. It would be easy to step back and say, "Well, it's pretty much over now." But if you look carefully, it's not over by any stretch of the imagination. The technological advances are coming at a rate that is far more ferocious than ever. To me, it's staggering to contemplate the tools we're going to be able to put in people's hands in the next few years—and I don't get impressed by this stuff so easily anymore.

So what we're doing here is driven by a fairly strong faith that people are going to continue to be as creative and as ingenious and as sharing with their results as they have been over the past 15 years. That sharing gives us a kind of leverage. For every improvement we can make in the tools we give people, we can improve the ultimate results even more, thanks to this leverage. That's what gets us so excited.

INC.: Let's go back to the process of creating these tools. How different was it back in the '70s, when you and Steve Wozniak were developing the Apple I and the Apple II?

JOBS: It was basically the same, although we were a lot less sophisticated. The customers for the Apple I were Woz and me and our friends in the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was really the first computer to address the needs of the hobbyist who wanted to play with software but could not build his or her own hardware. It came with a digital circuit board, but you still had to go get your own keyboard, power supply, and television monitor. If you were a techie, the Apple I seemed to go 90 percent of the way. Of course, if you weren't a techie, it only went 10 percent of the way. We sold almost 200 of the Apple I. I think they're all collector's items now.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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