Anish Moonka@AnishA_Moonka
Spring 1992. Steve Jobs stands in front of a room of MBA students at MIT, pitching a computer that almost nobody bought. The company was called NeXT. It sold about 50,000 machines in its entire existence. By every measure, it was a failure. The software inside it became the foundation of every Apple product ever made, and the platform on which the World Wide Web was invented.
He's 37. He's been fired from Apple, the company he co-founded.
He spends 70 minutes talking.
He tells a room full of future consultants that consulting is a waste of talent. "Without owning something over an extended period of time, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, one learns a fraction of what one can." He compares consulting to looking at a picture of a banana. "You might have a lot of pictures on your wall. You can say, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes. But you never really taste it."
He says, "I think everybody lost" about being pushed out of Apple. "I think I lost. And I wanted to spend my life there. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost." Then: "Having said all that, so what? You go on. It's not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm."
He says hardware can never be a lasting competitive advantage. "Hardware churns every 18 months. You can make something one and a half or two times as good as your competitor, and it only lasts six months." But software, he says, is a different game. "You can make something five or even ten times as good as your competitors in software. And it's very, very hard to copy. I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac."
Then he makes a claim that almost nobody in the room would have believed: "Object-oriented technology is the biggest technical breakthrough I have seen since the early 80s with graphical user interfaces. And I think it's bigger actually."
He was describing NeXTSTEP, the software his "failed" company had built. Object-oriented programming, in plain terms, means building software from reusable building blocks rather than writing everything from scratch. Jobs said developers could build apps on NeXTSTEP in about a third to a quarter of the time it took on other systems.
Almost nobody cared. By industry standards, NeXT was a flop.
But four years after this talk, Apple was nearly bankrupt. They bought NeXT for $427 million. Jobs came back. NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X in 2001. The same code became iOS when the iPhone launched in 2007. Every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad, every Apple Watch runs on what Jobs was selling while Sun was trying to put him out of business.
One more thing. In 1990, at a physics lab in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee needed a computer to build a prototype for something he called the World Wide Web. He chose a NeXT. He built the first web browser and the first web server. The internet, as you know it, was born on a machine that couldn't find a market.
When asked what he learned from being fired from Apple, Jobs pauses. Then he says, "I now take a longer-term view on people. 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."
He was 37, running a company most people thought was dead, standing in a room full of MBA students. Apple is now worth $3.7 trillion. Every dollar of it runs on the thing he built when nobody was watching.