My original selections from the video:
- [9:50] - We had no idea that we were any good at this when we started NeXT. A lot of time you don’t know what your competitive advantage is when you launch a new product. […] When we did the Mac, we never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds funny, because that was the thing that it did not 2x but 4-5x better than anything else, where you had to have one... We never anticipated it. We never thought about Page Maker - that whole industry - coming down to the desktop. Maybe we weren’t smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it happening 12-14 months later and we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing and it became the trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America, where it could show off all the other amazing things it could do.
- [13:55] Today we can’t compete on scale […] so we’ve gotta have a better product.
- [16:00] - I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something over an extended period of time (like a few years), where one has a chance to take responsibility for ones recommendations, where one has to see ones recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissues for the mistakes, and where one has to pick oneself up off the ground and dusting off, one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in and making recommendations, but not owning the results, not owning the implementation; I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. You do get a broad cut at companies, but it’s very thin. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only 2 dimensional… without the experience of actually doing it, you never get 3 dimensional….
- [21:33] If you look at how we sell our computers right now, we have a sales force in the US of 130 professionals. They spend 90% of their time selling NeXTSTEP software, and 10% of their time selling the hardware. In other words, if they can get the customer to buy into NeXTSTEP, they they’re going to sell the hardware, because right now we have the only hardware it runs on. This is what is required to launch a new innovative product. The current distribution channels for the computer industry - over the last several years - have lost the ability to generate demand. They can fulfill demand, but they can’t create it. You’re lucky if you can find someone at the computer store who can demo it […] The more innovative the product is the more, the more revolutionary it is and not just an incremental improvement, the more that you are stuck. Because the existing channel is only fulfilling demand. […] So how does one bring innovation to the marketplace? The only way we know how to do it right now is with a direct sales force, out in front of customers, showing them the products, in the environment of their own problems, and discussing how these problems can be married with these solutions. A software-only company could never afford to field a direct sales force. […] If it’s not a revolutionary product, I don’t think the company can succeed. Our strategy has been that we’ve got to be a hardware company, so that we can make our software company succeed.
- [28:40] The code that’s the fastest to write, the code that’s the easiest to maintain, and the code that never breaks is the code you don’t write. So that’s our strategy, write a lot less code… The way we do this is we enable the developer to use a lot of objects others have written. We shipped 6 years worth of objects with NeXTSTEP, you can write your own objects for your own company… and there are companies not selling software, not selling products, but selling objects….
- [41:52] I believe that you can use the concept of technology windows opening, and then eventually closing. And what I mean by that is, enough technology, usually from fairly diverse places, comes together and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. If you poke around the labs and you had around the Media Lab here at MIT and other places and you can get a feel for those things. And usually, they’re not quite possible. But, all of a sudden you start to sense things coming together, and the planets lining up, to where this is now possible, or barely possible. And a window opens up, and it usually takes around, in my experience, it takes around 5 years to create a commercial product that takes advantage of that technical window opening up. Sometimes you get started a bit before that window is quite open and it takes a lot of work to open it up…. […] and then it seems to take another 5 years or so to exploit it in the marketplace.
- [44:38] I think with our current generation of products we finally got the window open. After six years, it’s open. We got an extremely elegant implementation and we’ve got five years of work to do to exploit it in the marketplace. You know, we’ll peak in five years. Five years, we’ll all sit around and say ok, it’s time to get started on the next thing. It’s time to get going on the next thing — maybe four years from now. But we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us just to move this thing out and educate the market, and continue to refine it based on market feedback. So everything that I know about technology windows that are open or just about to open, is in NeXTSTEP or we’re working on it in the labs. And these things generally don’t come along independently. They kind of — clumps of them come together has been my experience.
- [51:52] I now take a longer-term view on people. In other words, 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, and so what do I need to do to help so that the person that’s screwing up learns versus how do I fix the problem? and that’s painful sometimes. And I still have that first instinct to go fix the problem.
- [53:00] I’ve never believed in the theory that if we’re on the same management team and a decision has to be made and I decide in a way that you don’t like and I say come on, buy into the decision. We’re all on the same team, buy into it and let’s go make it happen. Because what happens is sooner or later, you’re paying somebody to do what they think is right, but then you’re trying to get them to do what they think isn’t right. And sooner or later, it outs and you end up having that conflict. So I’ve always felt that the best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through until you agree. Now that’s not everybody in the company, but that’s everybody that’s really involved in that decision, that needs to execute it. And that’s how we try to run NeXT. We have a policy team with 8 people […] and the key — we have two things we try to do. One is we try to differentiate between the really important decisions and the ones that we don’t have to make. And the really important ones, we work on it until we all agree because we’re paying people to tell us what to do. In other words, I don’t view that we pay people to do things. That’s easy to find people to do things. What’s harder is to find people to tell you what should be done, right? That’s what we look for. So we pay people a lot of money and we expect them them to tell us what to do. And so when that’s your attitude you shouldn’t run off and do things if people don’t all feel good about them. And the key to making that work is to realize there’s not that many things that any one team really has to decide. We might have 25 really important things we have to decide on a year, really not a lot. So that’s how we try to run it. Sometimes it works. And sometimes we’re still working on it. I can’t think of once - maybe there’s once or twice - but I can’t even recall a time when I’ve said ‘Dammit, I’m the CEO and we’re doing it this way’, you know? I can recall a time when I’ve said, ‘we don’t see eye-to-eye, and you’re off the team’ [..] over a prolonged period of time when a person has not wanted to go in the same direction we’ve wanted to go in as a team. It’s my job, every once in a while to say ‘hey, you want to go this way? We want to go this way. It’s not working.’ But when people are on the team, then we work it out.
- [1:07:50] Secondly, a lot of times when you build prototypes, it’s not quite the same technology as you’re going to use in production. And so all the accumulated knowledge you get from building your prototypes, you throw away when you change technology to go into production. And you start over in that accumulation process. Because we don’t change technology, we don’t throw anything away. We don’t waste time. […] The key to it all though is we didn’t go out and hire manufacturing people. We went out and we hired engineers and we convinced them that we were going to be different. We were going to pay them exactly the same as R&D, no different. There’s migration in both direction (manufacturing <> R&D) and they are not second class citizens. They have the same offices…
