Notes for the Lost Interview of Steve Jobs

Today, I watched the interview called The Lost Interview of Steve Jobs which was filmed in 1995 directed by Paul Sen and interviewed by Robert Cringely. Here are my notes.

1. Working experience in HP when Jobs was 12 years old helped him understand the meaning of a company.
2. For a routine guy or practitioner belongs to some industry, they might not know why they have to do something to complete a job, the answer you inevitably get might be ” oh, that’s just the way it’s done”.
3. Business is not rocketscience.
4. For companies like Xerox who fell down from climax, the structure of the management may be the trigger leads to the decline, different kind of company needs different structure of the management, for ones like Pepsi Co, sales and marketing persons are the very vital resources of a company, but for product/technology oriented companies like Xerox or IBM, the Pepsi Co composition of the Management would edged out genius who has great product sensibility, the company would “crash and burn”.
5. For an enterprise, when they started getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, they might believe some magic lies in the process or success is created from process, but this is not true.
6. The best people you know are the ones who really understand the content.
7. There is tremendous amount of craftsmanships between brilliant ideas and great product.
8. Unlike quality level differences between Best and Average in some fields like taxi driving or some home appliances, the differences of quanlity level in IT products could be as high as 100 times.
9. When realized the cognition is wrong, fix it immediately.
10. Vision for the next 10 years (in the view of 1995): the Internet and the Web, the computer would no longer be just used to be calculating, but communication, the e-commerce would be promising.
11. Taste determines the direction.
12. Brilliant colleagues are not working for computers, they regard computers as the capable medium to transmit some kind of feelings you want to share.