Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting guests of Malt Mossberg at his All Things Digital D8 Conference. There is a summary of his Q&A session available, but the most interesting parts are the videos they posted. I compiled them into one overview here so that you don’t have to search for them and provided a summary for each.
iPhone
Steve had the idea for a tablet without keyboard first and ordered his engineers to develop a glass multi-touch display. When they came back to him and showed him the inertial scrolling and rubberbanding he got the inspiration to do a phone first. So they shelved the iPad and later “when they got their wind back” returned to it and used what they learned on the iPhone.
AT&T
Competent people that Steve tends to believe are reassuring him that AT&T’s network (especially voice) will much improve before the end of summer.
TV
There is no single standard like GSM and the cable networks are “balkanized”. While Apple sees no viable “Go To Market” strategy AppleTV will stay a “Hobby”.
The Lost/Stolen Prototype
Steve thinks that this story has everything that a great movie would have, theft, extortion, “I’m sure there is even Sex in there somewhere.” But it’s against Apple’s core values to “let it slide”.
Metrics Gathering Restrictions
Apple was naive. When Flurry trumpeted out that there are new devices on Apple’s campus Steve went through the roof. They still permit other ad agencies on their platform, but they simply don’t want them to be able to sell information about Apple’s existing and future devices.
Apple did not consider them to be in a platform war with Microsoft, that might be why they lost it. But Apple’s mantra is always just trying to “build the best computers they knew how to build”. “Google decided to compete with us, so they are.”
They did an interesting thing for Apple, they open-sourced Webkit. Now it’s number one on mobile devices. “Just because we’re competing with somebody doesn’t mean we have to be rude.”
Flash and other Things left behind
Apple is always just picking the technologies that appear to be on their way up. Flash has peaked and is going down. To this date Adobe was not able to demonstrate to Apple that Flash could run sensibly on iPhone OS. And they sell an iPad every 3 seconds since it launched, so people seem to like it, even without Flash.
Generally it boils down to conserving resources. Rather than doing everything Apple’s strength is in it’s focus.
Categories: Apple
