In “unpublished” videos from 1992, Steve Jobs talks about Apple's departure and gives business tips [atualizado: vídeo completo]

Steve Jobs he could be an extremely vain dspota with serious temperament problems, but, among his countless qualities, one that is probably most lacking: his irreproachable portrait and the ability to talk about the most diverse subjects, from the most trivial to the highest, winning his interlocutors immediately and projecting an aura of enchantment on their words.

Therefore, any unspoken record of Jobs saying whatever it is is quite a find and if that record involves interesting statements about his departure from Apple and some good management tips, the material rises to the status of little treasure.

The YouTube channel Deliberate Think has exactly that in hand: videos with excerpts from a “class” by Jobs to a class in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1992 in this case, “class” in quotation marks because the creator of Apple was never a teacher; he was at the university as a guest to chat with some lucky students, who asked him questions about his forced departure from Apple in 1985, and asked Ma's co-creator genius for management and management tips.

The videos have subtitles in English only, but we will highlight some of the most important points of each one (note: some excerpts were edited for clarity, without losing the original meaning).

About the failure of the Apple III and the Lisa

https://www.youtube/watch?v=edyOIwyEhoo

In my experience, it takes you about five years to create a product that takes advantage of any technical window that opens. Sometimes you start before the window is open, then you push it open. Sometimes it took work with the Apple II and the Mac. We had to sacrifice Lisa on the way, $ 100 million. We presented that cube and sold 10,000 of them. Because we weren't there yet and we made some mistakes on the way, we had to correct it. The Macintosh was the way to go. And with the Apple II and Apple III, it was the other way around.

On being fired from Apple and the focus on ordinary users

https://www.youtube/watch?v=D4giQudg9R8

Obviously, I thought about it a lot and I don't want to get into it too much, but I say that everyone missed something. I think I lost, and I wanted to spend my life there. I think Apple lost. I think consumers have lost. But what about? You move on. Not as bad as a lot, like losing your arm. And I'm still happy with every Mac that Apple sells.

Apple decided to be the Sony of computers, so PowerBooks are very good, but Quadras are horrible now, the most expensive products. They are not investing heavily in professional desktop users and have put their best engineers in notebooks and products for ordinary consumers. I think they will do very well in this, but there is the problem that, if you look at products for ordinary consumers, you can count on hands those that sell more than 1 million units a year. If you have two of these products, at a suggested price of $ 795, revenue of $ 2 billion a year. You need to find the other $ 6 billion somewhere. Then it will be an interesting transition.

About “the enemies of portability”

https://www.youtube/watch?v=mHI9krPCPd0

What is happening now with Macs and PCs that many of them will be portable soon. They'll be smaller and lighter in a little while. And they are taking the technology we have today, without changing it significantly, and putting it on laptops and thereby sacrificing some things. Speed ​​is the enemy of portability, because it requires energy; so the speed that consumers demand today would only last three and a half minutes on a battery, which is useless. They also want memory, which is also an enemy of portability, and high-speed networks, and photographic quality screens. So these are today's enemies.

About your hiring philosophy

https://www.youtube/watch?v=5CDk11t-iWA

What happens is that, generally, I know someone who does very well in what he does and you are unable to hire the person. You try to find others and no one compares, so you will always compare others to that person. And you know that you have to be satisfied with the second best if you give in. I always thought it best to give in and keep insisting.

About firing people

https://www.youtube/watch?v=k8u6UTvRang

I think the best way to manage something is to bring everyone together in a room and talk until everyone agrees. Not necessarily everyone in the company, but everyone involved in the decision and who needs to carry it out. as soon as we try to play NeXT. At NeXT, we have a supervisory team, of eight people I am on it and what we do is to separate the important decisions from those we don't need to make. And most importantly, we work until we agree. () And when a person in no way wants to go in the same direction as us, my job, from time to time, to say “you want to go that way, we want to go that way. It's not working ”. But when people are on the team, we resolve.

About programming language and objects

https://www.youtube/watch?v=TlAbcO_Flsk

The code is easier to write, to maintain and it breaks less what you don't write. This is our strategy: write less code. And one way to do this is to allow developers to use objects that others have written. We ship the equivalent of six years of objects with NeXTSTEP. You can create your objects for your company and reuse them with your developers. () We believe in the benefits of these object-based environments, from rapid development to a much richer environment for the user.

About NeXT business strategies

https://www.youtube/watch?v=R9hhiFpbnRY

Our strategy does many things well, but the tip of our wool, our Trojan Horse, our program development environment for companies. So our growth depends, among other things, on the developer community available to these companies. So, even if we have shortened the development time, without developers around, we will not win. Fortunately, I see companies increasing their development teams, so I don't believe this will be an obstacle.

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Fantastic, isn't it?

Update 04/11/2018 s 18:05

For some reason, the videos above have been deleted from YouTube, but the player Leandro Favarin he gave an even nicer tip: there is a record of Jobs’s complete class at MIT!

The video of more than an hour was posted at the end of last year through a channel of the university itself, but it went unnoticed at the time. It is very worth watching, if you have time.