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Without going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO didn’t see the web, or mobile, or VoIP and other technologies rising.
But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one — it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will be.
Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how things will turn out.
I find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous quotes where basically details were misjudged.
I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different.
This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.
My sibling comments seem to all want to attribute this foresight to Jobs alone. Jobs had an organization of designers and engineers informing him. Not only informing, but collaborating. He’d express a vision, others would help shape and hone based on existing tech, or based on how they could build new tech, and eventually Jobs would present the vision and solution publicly.
And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.
Is this foresight a function of the CEO themselves or more of being in that position (ceo of a technology company). In other words, being in that role you have time and resources to think about "what is next?" also this is somewhat expected from the board and investors.
How much of their insight comes from others (eg. senior staff, acquisition targets, etc.) and how much from their own noggin so to speak?
Or a better way to ask this might be, how would one go about replicating this insight if one is not a CEO of a tech company? What resources would I need to pull in, who should I be talking with?
Sure, these executives have power to drive and make it happens. Especially they are the leads of tech industry, .. and not doubt you could find an exception among executives of big tech companies.
CEOs can get the market very wrong. Boeing developed the 787 to meet a vision of point-to-point long-range flight using smaller aircraft that could fly out of medium-sized airports with high load factors. Airbus bet on hub-and-spoke and developed the A380, which turned out to be a substantial misreading of the future.
I was impressed with this video as well. It's years before soap, rest, JSON, xmlhttprequest, etc. He's describing the end state very well.
What about self driving vehicles? Many "big time CEOs" saw it comming.
They not always "see" it right. It is tough to forecast future in tech.
What do you attribute that to? Pure genius, more access to information, better associates, etc?
Displays with wrong aspect ratio for me. Which makes Steve Jobs look pretty fat.
On YouTube, it has the correct aspect ratio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek
How do we find the car of the uploader?
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1187/
Some perspective on the presentation:
At 13:20 or so, Jobs says "Of course you need a compiler, because a scripting language would be too slow for the server if it is used by a lot of users". Little did he know ... PHP was out for about a year when this presentation was given. Still lives today and powers most of the web.
But Facebook compiles PHP into C++ or something right (I think now they have a newer approach than c++)?
Direct link to the video has better quality and right aspect ratio.
Mp4 https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/6f1b/49417183-9944-40c9-ab1c-5b2d51aa...
Even Higher quality wmv https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/6f1b/49417183-9944-40c9-ab1c-5b2d51aa...
Nothing against your comment, just ... everyone on HN found this nit pick the second most upvoted comment on all of this??
PHP was a C front end at first...
change the video quality to High and you get the correct aspect ratio.
WebObjects was very ahead of its time, but unfortunately crippled by its high price tag
That statement also sums up NeXT in a nutshell.
In 1996, pre-NeXT aquisition, I attended a 3 day WO seminar where they did a good job selling us on the product.
But then the cost was revealed and my employer had no interest.
Almost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.
'Not really sure why anyone would wanna do that, but that's what you can do!'
Web technology in a nutshell...
Interesting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week” (3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud.
Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.
Very inspirational to see Jobs being so sure about what is the future of the web. Dynamic Servers.. Server-side rendering.. Almost like Windows, but in the browser....
At the same time, I feel sorry for him and his alikes; it most have been tough to constantly work upstream, trying to inspire people that just don't get it.
The segment from 18m10s onwards -- a demo of making a flight reservation via an application built for OAG -- is pretty wonderful in a tech-nostalgic kind of way. Simpler times!
I was already using the beta of Microsoft Active Server Pages when this presentation was given. ASP 1.0 was released in December 1996 and changed my web development career.
Buried in this video[1] are a couple demo sites built on Internet Database Connector (IDC/IDX). IDC launched with IIS 1.0 in NT 3.51 SP3, late '95 or early '96. Microsoft was iterating incredibly fast -- the famous "Internet Memo" was mid-1995.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keyno...
At the beginning Jobs introduces a few websites: NeXT, Microsoft, Intel. Then, at 1:59 he mentions a fourth one but I can't understand what he says and there are no subtitles. Could anyone understand what website he mentioned?
EDIT: I think it is Toy Story. I thought this was much later but apparently it fits the time frame. Unfortunately Wayback Machine doesn't have: 302 redirecting to Disney:-(
I remember not understanding that talk.
Still my all-time favorite web framework. To date, I still find so many other frameworks lacking the vision that brought about WO.
Looks like it's still kicking
He takes questions from developers at 25:00.
I might have been at this one.
Object remoting via NeXT Smalltalk (Objective C) messages seemed so much easier than CORBA or DCOM. Or Sun RPC. HP was a big supporter of the NeXT approach.
It was a complicated time.
Strange to see a Jobs keynote and you can see audience members getting up and leaving, “like who the eff is this guy?” A couple years later that mentality gets flipped on its head.
There are other meteoric rises. Facebook is only 15 years old. I wonder if it must feel surreal to Zuck.
Still, Steve Jobs has such a unique comeback story of being in 1996 head of two interesting but commercially mostly failing companies, one of which is shortly later being bought by an Apple skirting on going out of business and riddled by intense technical debt. And only a decade later he presents the iPhone and had Pixars stunning success.
It's one thing to talk about it, it's another to build.
When you could buy a car under $10,000.
Do you know how much some enterprise software / specialized SDKs charged then and even today?
Those are not uncommon prices...
You can get into the million territory easily...
Did WebObjects live on?
I wonder if Apple could have positioned Mac OS X server to run that sort of thing
I was a dev when WebObjects was new and absolutely no one ever used it for anything serious. CGI was already the default standard for web servers by 1996 and by 2000 there was a raft of commerical products from Microsoft and Java-based systems that were adopted much more widely.
Instead of Stack Overflow, we had Matt's Script Archive
I was a WebOjects dev from 2007-2009, it was really neat to work with, and although I'd learned about "frameworks" in my Software Engineering degree, it never fully appreciated just how much of the work a framework does for you. So, so much different to just a "library" like everything else I've used before or since.
Apple still use WO internally for a lot of things (apple store, iTunes store), but I think it's slowly dying outside the company. The place I used to develop for slowly moved away from it, interestingly mostly because apple killed the XServe and so it got harder and harder to deploy.
WebObjects starting at version 5 was 100% java so it could run on any system running a Java VM, including Mac OS X.
When Apple was selling Xserve then many Apple on
Une services like iTunes, .Mac (ancestor of iCloud), Apple Online Store were running on WebObjects and Xserve thus on OS X server.
I've seen it in the URL when using App Store Connect, I'm curious as to what other services Apple uses WebObjects for.
I have no experience with it, but Apache Tapestry[0] is supposed to have some commonalities.
The Smalltalk web framework "Seaside" is inspired heavily by WebObjects
They dropped the price but converted it to Java for version 5. Java just isn't suited for anything based on Cocoa. They stopped development so it didn't transition into the JavaScript driven world.
Bring back this JavaScript logo!
https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum
I find it amusing to think that today's equivalent would have been kind of like if Mark Zuckerberg was introducing GraphQL.
I'd say a closer example would be Elon Musk. He definitely is
* the face of the company * drives the products of his companies with a unified vision * works his ass off * is an asshole to people under him * a visionary and a bit eccentric
Jobs has Musk beat on charisma though by a long shot. Musk is kind of Woz and Jobs combined.