Image by tsevis via Flickr
In this case, “then” means 1997. In January of that year, the New York Times wrote this profile of Steve Jobs based on an interview with him conducted in November 1996. In that November, he was running Pixar and Next. But he was talking about Apple. In December, 1996, Jobs returned to Apple, although not as CEO or Chairman of the Board. Read the article and consider what has happened since his return.
Excerpt:
The notion of ”taste” — he uses the word frequently — looms large in Jobs’s business philosophy. His is a very specific sensibility, honed by a breadth of experience and by his constant immersion in the popular culture of the time. When he graduated from high school in Los Altos in 1972, he says, ”the very strong scent of the 1960′s was still there.” In his 20′s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th-birthday party. When discussing the Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentions the invention of the microchip and ”The Whole Earth Catalog” in the same breath.
Great products, according to Jobs, are a triumph of taste, of ”trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.” The Macintosh, he has said, turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.
And so Jobs’s return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce certain standards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown ugly. Jobs has never hidden his longstanding objection to Microsoft — not, he says, because of its dominance, or even Bill Gates’s billions. ”The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” he said last year in ”Triumph of the Nerds,” a television documentary about the history of the computer industry. ”I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success — they’ve earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.”
The statement was quintessential Jobs: arrogant, frank, insightful and perhaps more than half right, though brutally overstated. Those same traits were both his strength and his weakness at Apple.
After the documentary was televised, Jobs called Gates to apologize, sort of. ”I told him I believed every word of what I’d said but that I never should have said it in public,” Jobs says. ”I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
And here is a video clip of Jobs making the comment about Microsoft’s taste (or lack thereof):
. It is a series of relatively short stories about the interaction between anthropomorphized animals, a sort of Aesop Fables for the 21st century. And in the printed version (and the ebook version on the iPad) there are wonderful illustrations of each story, created by 
. Can’t wait to get it.
, and it was a very giddy read. You can hear an interview with him about the book 
. And for a similar and startling view, check out Bill McKibbon’s new book 
and his recent 
