One More Thing

see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them about the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So. We're doing a very special episode of tech Stuff, and uh,

it's not something that we would normally do. We've already done two episodes about Steve Jobs, one of them specifically about Steve Jobs about because we were doing a compare and contrast with Bill Gates. In fact, the original concept of those two episodes, if you go back and look

at the history of tech stuff. Originally we were just gonna do one episode where we're just going to compare and contrast the two men, and it became abundantly clear as we were recording the show that that was not going to happen because it was just too much stuff about both of those men. So each one got his own episode. Yeah, they're the thing that struck I think both Jonathan and me if I mean sure, I think I'm doing a little mind reading, but I think I'm right.

The one thing that struck both of us is that these two guys not only influenced tech from a particular point in time, but they are eerily similar in a lot of in a lot of respects. There are a lot of parallels about the same age. They both dropped out of school to found a company, to found a company, uh, and they worked together for a very long time and

against one another, both of them very strong personalities. Our second episode about Steve Jobs was really about what was going to happen to Apple once Steve Jobs stepped down, which he did earlier. Inn Now we're recording this episode the week that we learned of Steve Jobs as death. So, um, it's tough. It's weird to be upset about a CEO whom you've never met. But at the same time, it is impossible to deny Steve jobs as impact on technology

and on us personally and professionally. So we know that you've probably heard multiple memorial and tributes, lots of people have been saying very uh deep things about Steve Jobs. We're not really going to dive into his life or anything like that in this episode because one, we've done it before and to other people are doing that so much right now that there's just not a point. We wanted to talk more about how Steve Jobs work and how Apple's products have affected us, both on a professional

level and on a personal level. And I think we're just gonna kind of share some stories. And again, this is not something we normally do. I mean, usually we like to be friendly, we like to have our our banter, but we don't tend to share a lot about ourselves. Um. In this show, little bits and pieces tend to come out, but this one I think is going to be maybe

a little more um raw. Well, the you know, the point of the show is for us to talk about technology, not about us, and we we like to talk about technology and humanity, you know, how how people use technology, how technology have affects people. Um, And I think for once, uh, we've come across a technology related person who uh he was so larger than life at his company that it

was hard not to follow. And I think the same. Uh. It's true, you know that, I'm sure that we have some people who are who don't particularly like Apple or its products because of the philosophy behind the company. Sure, I think I think we would be having this same kind of conversation about certain other people, including Bill Gates, because we're interested in in these guys. And you can't deny the impact. I mean, even let's say you never have bought an Apple product in your life, that you

have no interest in Apple products whatsoever. The products you do buy, we're influenced by Apple and vice versa. Yeah, so either the products you bought is uh, it may be that that the reason the products you bought looks the way it does because of Apple for one of

two reasons. Either the company wanted to make something that looked sort of like Apple products because Apple products have such a undeniable appeal among a very large portion of the population, or it specifically does not look like an Apple product in order to go a totally different direction. But either way, the decision for that design was at least somewhat based upon what Apple did. Apple did the

same thing. In fact, before we get into our personal stories, one of the things I've said several times this week since his passing is that what Steve Jobs was really a master at was taking a look at existing technology that had not met with much success in the consumer market and find a way to make it work in the consumer market. So it's not necessarily that he invented things, but that he took stuff that just the average consumer either wasn't aware of or wasn't interested in, and turned

that into way must have product. And that is genius. It may not be the sort of genius that you know, you get the light bulb that pops up over your head and you suddenly invent something phenomenal, But it may be that you look at something that no one else has given really a chance because it just doesn't seem like anyone's interested in it. You do your magic, and then suddenly everyone once one and let's here's a quick rundown of some of the stuff that Steve Jobs was

really able to to push out there. First of all, he's one of the geniuses who really did usher in the era of the personal computer. You know, personal computers didn't begin with the Apple Too, but the once the Apple to hit the market, they started to really become popular among consumers. They were still luxury products. They were

very expensive, especially for the time. Um but before the Apple Too, personal computers were really in the realm of hobbyists and early adopters, and beyond that that market, you didn't see a lot of personal computers out there. Apple to change that. Now, other computers came behind the Apple too and even broke through other barriers, but that was one of those early successes. Then you have the Mac, which had the first real graphical user interface and mouse

combination for a personal computer. Right, those those were not new. The mouse and graphical user interface had been displayed as far back as I think the late sixties over at Xerox. Yeah, and um you know that that actually makes this is a good time to point out a couple of things. Um uh. One of course, Steve Jobs couldn't have done all of these things by himself. Um, he knows or

he he knew a lot about it. He knew a lot about how to encourage other smart and talented people to do their best work, sometimes by being aggressive with him. Sometimes he was a jerk. You know what we Steve Jobs had an amazing effect on technology, but he was also he was yeah, definitely abrasive, aggressive, insulting. I mean, we don't want to paint a picture here where we're saying like he he had no faults. That's not the purpose of this podcast either. We're very much aware of them.

But he got results. And and there will be people who say that Apple stole the idea for a gooey from Park Heck. Steve Jobs said at one point that you know, you don't copy ideas, you steal him. He said that, I think in nineties six when he came back to Apple. Yeah, yeah, so, I mean. But on the other hand, Xerox was not in the business of making personal computers for people in the same way that

Apple was. Um, and somebody will also probably point out that, uh, Steve and the Macintosh team at Apple did not necessarily get along all that well, Steve was actually backing the Lisa um where flopped a lot of There are a few reasons, one of which was the price. It was extremely expensive. Um. But you know, Steve also knew when

the Macintosh had one and was supportive of it. Later. Yes, and again the Macintosh, you could you could come up to me and say, hey, Jonathan, but the Macintosh doesn't have it never had the kind of market share that Windows based PCs did. Windows based PCs were by far the majority in the market compared to the Mac. And I would agree with you, except I would also say, yeah, but Windows based machines are using a graphical user interface, and one could argue that the reason for that is

because of the Mac. Specifically that they Microsoft licensed the Mac operating system look and feel for use in the very first version of Windows. So that was what the lawsuit was about, was whether or not they were allowed to continue with that past the first version. Right, So you've got you know that there's there's an example of

Steve Jobs influencing the whole industry. Um. Then not just Steve Jobs, obviously, but he's he's really the driving personality behind a lot of what Apple did the same thing with MP three players. MP three players existed before the iPod came out, but the iPod was arguably the first device that the average consumers saw and said I get it,

I understand what that's about, and I want one. And it really helped once iTunes launched, because once iTunes and iPod were out there, especially if you had a Mac computer, it was a little more of a headache if you used a PC, a Windows based PC, but it just it was an ecosystem that worked great, and it was really easy to synchronize music, to organize music UM and of course the iPod eventually made it very easy to have a podcast. So there's one impact we can talk

about right now. Without Steve Jobs and his work and the work that Apple did, we wouldn't have a show. It's not that podcasts wouldn't exist. They probably would. You would probably still have some people out there who were making audio and video content that you could subscribe through some RSS catcher program, but it would be a much

more niche oriented thing. You wouldn't hit the broad audience that you can with UM podcast today because frankly, iTunes makes it so easy on the user to subscribe to them.

So without iTunes, we would not have the audience that we do have, we'd have a lot of you because a lot of you, I know are using other ways of listening to us, but the vast majority of you are are using iTunes or an app and uh and so chances are we would have never even tried to start a show because we just wouldn't think we'd reach

very many people. So there's an impact right there. Also things like the smartphone, I mean, the iPhone really brought the smartphone to the consumer market in a way that was unprecedented. Yeah, we talked about earlier types of smartphones, um, the Trio from Trio uh and and BlackBerry of course, but those were those were things that business people carried. There wasn't really a lot of reason to use um those devices for a lot of people. They just didn't

They've got features that I don't really need. Why would I want email? I mean, I can do that at home. And you know, if part of it is the technology and part of it is making it look good, and you know that the iPhone really did that. They said, you know, isn't this cool? Don't you think this this would be fun to play with? And people said, yeah, So we've sort of established the tape that Steve Jobs.

You know, has had an enormous impact on technology. Um, whether directly through Apple or indirectly because Apple's products have influenced other other companies to try and either uh outdo Apple or to go a completely different direction because they felt that Apple had sewn up that particular space. Uh. Let's talk about how how Jobs and Apple have affected us personally. Do you want to go first? You want me to go first? I'll tell my I'll tell my

first story. Um. So I've talked about this before in the podcast. Uh. You know, as a kid, when I was growing up, I had access to a couple of different computers, but the first computer that I started to use that I really used extensively was the Apple to E. Now, my father got an Apple to E because my father, among other things, as a professional writer, and he wanted to have a computer so that he could write his books, save things to a diskette five and a quarter inch

disc and uh and and be able. Actually, when I say save his books to a five ocquarter inch disc, I really mean save a couple of chapters to a five and acquarter inch disc. If you go back and look at my dad's bibliography, on the old Apple two E. Uh, you're talking about a couple of m couple of of disc holders full of discs, because I remember those books would take up like twenty discs total. Didn't have a lot of storage space back then. Anyway, that was the

computer that I really started to use frequently. And I really do believe that my love of technology somewhat. I I have to credit that somewhat to Apple into Steve Jobs, because it was those early experiences with the Apple two E that taught me to love tech. And without those experiences, I can't say for sure that I would have developed the same love. Now. I've always been some something of a geek and a doric and all that kind of stuff.

I know, it's shocking, isn't it, um, But I don't know that that would have developed into that interest, right, I might have become a comic book geek and never really looked at computers instead of doing it the other way around. UM. So really, if you think of it that way and you extrapolate from that, because of my love of tech, in no small part, my love of tech is what helped me get my job as a

writer at how Stuff Works dot com. If I didn't love technology, I wouldn't have even thought to apply to be a writer for a website. It's certainly contributed to becoming the writer for the technology channel on how stuff works dot com. When I first started at how Stuff Works, I was not at the tech writer. I was one of two staff writers, and that that's all we had

for staff writers. Uh. Eventually we built up our writing staff so that we would differentiate and and and and specialize in various channels on the site, and it fell to me to be the tech writer, which I embraced because I love technology. And uh. That's also why when it came time to start launching podcasts and we talked about Technology pod us, I was one of the people

talked to about doing the the Tech podcast. So I can say for two reasons now, I would not be on tech stuff if it weren't for Apple and Steve Jobs. Because if I hadn't developed that love, I wouldn't even be here, and I certainly wouldn't have the the desire to talk about technology. But because of that I have. You know, we have the tech Stuff podcast and I'm a happy participant in it. M Um, Well it's um listeners who remember back when we talked about the Amiga.

Remember that the Amiga was my first computer and UM I got that back in which was, of course the year after the UH the Macintosh came out, the Mac Classic, which of course wasn't Classic back then because it was brand new UM. And they both ran on similar processors, the sixty thousand series Motor Role processor UM. And it's it's funny because at the time, UM, those of us who were Amiga people, and there are still a lot of loyal Amigans out there, but a lot of them

are using other operating systems like me UM. You know that at the time it was the Amiga versus the Mac and the Atar E S T. And then there were PCs out there, but those were business machines. Those weren't home computers. Those weren't the machines that people brought home because you couldn't do all the stuff you could. I mean, it's like black, black and amber monitors. You know, they specific protocols and they weren't designed to necessarily run

other kinds of programs. Yeah, so it seemed it seemed to a lot of us that you know, it was a three way race for what was coming in the future, UM, and you would have you know, the the PC and then you know the three of us, and I think there were there was a lot of infighting, at least that was my perception from the the Amiga side. And uh, you know, I had I had a friend who I teased a lot. He had a uh app well to see UM and I teased him about that because he

had a monochrome monitor. And then I had a friend who got a Mac and I was really impressed with all the things. I had a couple of friends actually had Max and I you know, played load Runner on the machines and um, you know, I was really impressed with the typography. And this is actually interesting. I had never watched the two thousand five commencement address that that

Steve Jobs gave at Stanford UM. But he said after he left Read College, UM, he had actually dropped in on some classes and one of which was a calligraphy class, which was really excellent. He said, you know, at the time it was just something he was really interested in. But he learned a lot about how letters look uh,

and and fonts and typefaces uh, things like spacing between letters. UM. And he really wouldn't have necessarily chalked that up to something that he would need, but later typography became one of the core UH differences between the Macintosh and so many other computers. I remember taking my Amiga to college

with me. UM. I started with the Amiga one thousand that I got in high school, and then UM Amiga three thousand, and I remember being frustrated because the campus I went to UM it was a mac uh mac school, so they had of course, you know, Apple has always been, or at least back in the eighties and nineties, was really pushing for the education market. And I've been remember being really frustrated that the fonts in the Amiga just

weren't as when you printed things out. I wanted my papers to look like everyone else's papers, and people who had MAX could do so much more. And then the Amiga gradually, you know, commodore folded and UH it just gradually looked like I was going to be orphaned forever. Um it appears that way now, but just a couple of years ago it looked like, you know, there might

be a home for the Amiga in some context. UM. But I got married and my wife brought her UH mac LC two UM with her and we she had a performer in college and then got an ELC two and that was my first what I would consider my first Mac. UM. And then you know, I just I liked the operating system. The more I used it, the more I liked it. UM. This was probably I guess. UM. So UM. You know, I got to the point where I really really enjoyed working on the operating system. I

got a job where I could do that. I was into a little bit of graphic design type stuff. I worked in a newspaper that was a Mac shop. Um. It's where I needed to use Photoshop to h to work on paper and cork express to do layout. UM. And you know, the more I used it, the more I liked it. And at that point, you know, it was the Mac operating system versus uh Windows three point one,

which I mean Windows three point one was clunky. UM. I think most people would agree to to that, and uh, you know, I just decided that that's what I wanted to do. And uh, you know, I ended up with the very first iMac on the day it came out in August of UM ended up getting several Macs over the years, UM and other devices to my first iPod was an iPod four G black and white scroll wheel. Um.

Then I got an iPod Touch later on. And uh, I got the iPad the week it came out, not the first day it came out, but the first week it came out. I gave you no end of trouble about that. Well, here's here's another thing. I mean. Steve Jobs was famous for his reality distortion field where he could he could talk you into stuff. And I admit I was skeptical that a tablet would break in after

all the years of windows tablets. Um. And this is after you know, several iterations of windows to the point where you know, I've had I've worked at several jobs where I needed windows, and I actually, um, actually don't mind windows, you know. And I've used into and uh, you know a couple other flavors of lenox, and I

like those two. I still prefer the Mac interface. Um. But you know, looking at the windows tablets and when you know the form factors there, and people are just not embracing this outside of certain fields like the medical profession, where it makes a lot of sense to have something like that. And then you know, I picked one up and I said, you know what this is this is different.

And I've heard people say, oh, well, you know, the people who buy iPads, they buy iPads and and they're finding ways to make use of them, but they didn't really need one to begin with. But I would argue that that's true of the personal computer. Um and I think I may have even said that on this podcast before. But um, you know, at the at the point in the nineteen eighties, uh, you know when I got a personal computer. Uh well, your dad had a good reason

to have a personal computer. Uh MoMA wanted to do some finance stuff. To be fair, Dead also played video games about as frequently as I did. So yeah, their main times were Dead was quote unquote working on the novel when he was really playing Sid Meier's Pirates. But yeah, I mean for the most part, you know, people were doing spreadsheets or writing letters on them. They but they weren't. It wasn't a part of our lives because that was

pre uh pre internet in the home. Um. And you know, I think as time has gone on, there have been more complex uh things, you know, more more complex software written for computers, and more types of games and more types of productivity software and all kinds of things that you didn't have before. And I think the iPad is doing the same thing for tablets. UM. Now you have the Android operating system in competition with it, and uh,

you know some of the others too, UM. And they're competing with each other and making each other and making all of the different varieties of hardware and software better. And as it turns out, a lot of people do have a place for a tablet in their daily routine. UM. But it's something that somebody had to convince us well. And and the first iMac was ridiculed for not having a serial or a parallel port or a floppy disk drive. That's that's interesting, you know, that's one of those things.

I've had this discussion with a couple of people recently. UM. And that Steve Jobs one of the things he is he was known for wash not being the most um amicable to compromise. No, he was very He had a very focused way of approaching a project, and anything that was outside of that focus was you needed a darn good reason to be able to have it, have Steve Jobs consider it, and if you weren't able to defend that idea, then it just didn't fly. UM and his approach.

His abrasive approach could carry over into company wide policy. And one of those big ones, one of the ones that still gets people up in arms, is the fact that iOS does not support flash, and uh, you know that.

Here's the issue. HTML four, which is what we're using now, does not support rich Internet experiences, at least not to any big extent, which is why you have to have all these other things added on to your browser in order to be able to experience them, like flash or silver White, those would be the big examples, so to be able to create this rich content experience, which is something that we've grown accustomed to on the web now

because as people have grown proficient in it, they've incorporated into websites in very clever and useful ways, so it's not just pretty, but actually functional. The problem is that again natively, HTML four does not support that, so you have to have these additional things added on to make

it work. So Apple doesn't support that for iOS, and the the official argument from Apple is essentially that flash makes things unstable and it drains battery life, so that the reason why you won't find flash supported on an iPhone or iPad or iPod touch is because it would make the battery life drain much more quickly, and it would be an an experience that the user would not actually like. That's the official word. Um. There are other

things that you can take into consideration. For example, a company probably doesn't want to empower a competitor by incorporating their product directly into the experience. An Apple does compete with Adobe on so flashes from Adobe, and Apple competes with Adobe in certain areas. So if if iOS supported U Flash, then by extension you could argue Apple is somewhat supporting Adobe, and that in business doesn't always make sense. So there's that level playing as well. Of course that's

not the that's not the public message. Um, But that's a frustrate a lot of people, both users who want to go and use websites that are using flash and therefore they know long they can't access that information. This is particularly a pain in the butt if you happen to be looking for a place to eat and the menu is in a Flash application, and happens so frequently. Um. But jobs is other point he was making is that he wanted to push for the development of HTML five.

The development and the rollout of HTML five because HTML five was a solution to the problem of h m L four does not natively support rich Internet applications. HTML five was going to be built with the support built in so that you didn't have to rely on a third party solution to be able to have these experiences on a web page. UM. Personally, I like that lution.

I like an elegant solution where it's across the board. Now, if I were Adobe, I would not like that solution at all because I'm like, well, you know, where's the problem. We we've fixed that problem already. UM. But it's it's the difference between say that you're building a building and you want to patch a hole in the wall versus you want to tear the wall down and build a strong wall from the ground up, right. I mean that's

two different ways of achieving the same thing. Uh. And it's just that Jobs when he would message that out, was not gentle about it. On the other hand, Apple did embrace the portable document format the PDFs um in Mac os ten. It's been the standard, you know. It's that you don't have to have the professional version of Acrobat to save a document as a PDF, and you haven't for years UM. And that was that was one

of the things that they touted. They said, this is a feature of the operating system, UM, which I appreciate, and they having a native PDF you here, And it's no, it's no big deal. It's part of the the mac Ostna operating system, right, So it wasn't something that they applied across the board to every single you know, element and and and I will admit to having problems with flash not only on my Mac, but on occasionally on

PCs as well running windows. UM. Actually I don't think I never had one with the one too, but I don't use it as often. UM. So yeah, I mean it's it's funny because immediately after they made the announcement, everybody, Oh, Apple, what are you doing? You know you can't do that,

And then you started hearing it's kind of got a point. Yeah, It's just that I happen to have a lot of friends who developed for flash, they developed applications and flash or or they they're animators who animate and flash and uh, and they harbor some very strong feelings against that policy, which is understandable, you know, But at the same time, it's I liken this yesterday to UM if the United States a few years ago tried to make a move of to make the dollar coin a popular choice for people,

I'm sure they're more durable and they last longer than dollar bills, right, so in the long run there they cost less. It makes it's economical. But people just seemed reluctant to make the move from paper to coins. And part of the reason is because the United States did not discontinue the paper money. Now, if they had done the the what I would consider the intelligent thing, although painful, because you're gonna have you're gonna have a transitionary period

where people are just gonna complain, like the Dickens. But if they wanted, if they wanted to really make that transition, they had to stop making the paper dollar bills and stop circulating them so that when they got into banks, they would be replaced with the coins, so that you would gradually take the dollar bill out of circulation and you'd have no choice but to use the coins. Now, you definitely have a period where people would grumble and grown, but but you would get to that point that you

wanted to get. You would reach the destination you needed to get to, and you would do it much more quickly and efficiently and without this kind of wishy washy approach. That's what jobs as philosophy was with the flash and HTML five was. You know, you ripped that band aid off and you don't you know, we're not going to support flash, and if our products are popular enough, that's going to push for the development and roll out of

HTML five and it's going to ramp that up. And if we don't do that, we may never get to HTML five because there's not there's not an incentive to do that. So I can definitely see it from jobs as perspective. I can also see it from my friends perspectives, who you know, are actually making their livelihood developing things

using flash, So I can see it both ways. Well, even Adobe has done what I consider the intelligent thing, um, which is, although they still of course are actively developing flash and and moving it forward, they have also come up with a a rich HTML five editor um that they've released a beta of, and um, I'm starting to see HTML five websites become more robust and uh, it's impressive to see the development. And I mean again, this is this is the same kind of thing where HTML

five is a lot less likely to cause problems. UM, but I could see why Adobe would be very upset about that, you know, from a from a developer standpoint of, you know, creating new productivity software. UM. But yeah, I mean you could definitely see. Uh. You know, people say the same kinds of things about the closed environment of iOS and the mac os. Ten. Um, you don't have MATC clones. That's a big part of why the Mac section of the h the the piece of the pie,

if you will, is very small. Um. It's hovered around ten percent, was as low as you know, I think under five at one point. It's been climbing for the last while. Uh, lowly, very very slowly. A lot of people, to um are have multiple computers. I have a Windows computer and a Mac at home. UM, So you know, I think I think it's disproportionate in some ways. And

it's also possible to run Windows on a Mac. And I wonder if people count that too, because we caught talking about copies of Windows and you have you have one on your Mac, then that's counting one on both columns. But anyway, when Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple, um, you know, the the following administrations decided they wanted to allow clones, and they had, They had allowed Motorola and some others to um to come up with clones, and they were licensing copies at the mac os for people

to use on other machines. And some of those other machines were really good, um. In fact, at that point some of them were considerably better than Apples, which the quality was starting to flag at that point on some of the machines, the product lines were confusing, and and uh, when Steve came back to power at at Apple, um, you know, he ended, he ended the cloning. UM. And people complain about you know, well the app store prevents uh,

people from having choice. Um. But it has been argued recently that Android is not completely open, and Google has had to pull things from the Android app Store that have proven embarrassing for them. UM. So I mean there's a trade off to be made either things that actually contained malware or things that were made malware more of a possibility because they introduced vulnerabilities. I mean, yeah, that's

that's the danger that Google runs with their philosophy. Yeah, and I could see an argument again, I could see an argument for both. A closed system is gonna work much more fluid. Each piece is going to work very well with each other piece of the software. So my iPod is going to think very well with my map. And that was the thing is that Steve Jobs had

a very like I said, he had that focus. He he was had a specific experience in mind, not just a product, but the experience that the consumer would have with that product. And that was where all the energy and focus was directed was to achieve that experience. So it wasn't good enough to just design something that was pretty, or that had an interesting user interface, or that would

support and certain percentage of software. It was important to have a product that delivered the this this experience that Steve Jobs had come up with, and anything less was unacceptable and UM and sometimes, you know, sometimes they failed, they didn't always succeed with that, but that was kind of the goal. And when you look at it that way, it it kind of is a it's a very unique

approach to developing technology. You know, a lot of other UH companies are focused on specifications, like, you know, we need to have the fastest processor and the best graphics processing unit and the best battery and all this kind of stuff, and UH and they're looking at it piecemeal like that instead of looking at necessarily the end result, like what is the what is it that you're trying

to achieve with this product? And uh, Steve Jobs took a totally different approach to that, and um, you know, even if you don't like the products that you have to at least admire the the the methodology that he followed, and uh, the level of secrecy that he had even within the own company, within Apple itself, UM, on these these approaches, because you know, if that was part of the thing was that during the process of development, you know, you're gonna have some missteps along the way, and the

product that you come up with may not deliver in the prototype form, may not deliver the experience you want. So you don't want that information to get out into the public because that's not what you're making YEA. Yeah, I want to point out that, uh, you know, I enjoy my Android phone and I like the idea of being open. So you know, I wasn't being uh unequivocal, you know, I think I think there are good reasons

for both. Um. But yeah, that that was one of the other things, you know, Steve Jobs being a showman and being able to deliver an entertaining keynote. Um. You know, I I read accounts from Apple store uh people about uh and that on on the special episode of Buzz Out Loud the other night too, after which is seen that show that that's very popular. Definitely you should check

it out, um over the Yeah. Absolutely, And they did a special show on the night that that Steve jobs passing was announced, and they were talking about how people would customers would come into the store to watch the Apple keynote on the big screen, and uh, you know, he there was a flare. He had a marketing flare about him too. He wasn't just a shrewd business person, um. And and releasing details about the product. You know, the fact that there was so much secrecy surrounding these products

beforehand enabled him to make the big reveal. Yeah, and that's you know, the title of this episode is all about one more thing. I mean that was that Steve made that famous. And I don't know that it was intentional. It was just supposed to be that last the bomb dropping at the end. Oh hey, by the way, I just happened to have this announcement, right, And and it wasn't in every what eventually became known as the Steve Note.

It wasn't. It wasn't in every presentation, but when it when he would include that where you know, you think it's all wound up and you're thinking, wow, that was

a really compelling product that they unveiled. Oh and one more thing, and the one more thing would just be the thing that makes your jaw drop where you said, wow, I was ready to buy one, when when the before he said that, now I want to buy two home, you know, I mean, it was just it was one of those things where it's just it's such a great grasp on marketing and salesmanship. Very I mean you you could look at it the other way. You could say

he was very manipulative. You would not be wrong. But the point is that he was just so good at at conceiving of this this product all the way to the point where he's unveiling it to you and showing you why you should want it. And people would also complain about Steve Jobs approach was to tell you what you wanted, even you know, you know, like he knew you better than you did, over and over again. That's the point of marketing. Yeah, he was the fact that

he did it successfully multiple times. I mean I bring it up over and over. I predicted that the iPad would crash and burn because I could not imagine a world where a tablet computer would work, where it would be successful in consider a marketplace. And I was as wrong as wrong can be. And I just completely underestimated Steve Jobs and what his team did and his marketing ability. You know, all of that together is what helped make the iPad a success. It wasn't just that it was

a very compelling product on its own. It was if you pick up an iPad and no one has ever taught to you about it, and you start playing with it, it's intuitive, it's got a low learning curve, it's fun to use. Um. But if you listen to that presentation that Steve Jobs gave, uh, you know, then you're you Suddenly you hunger for it. And I just underestimated it entirely, um, which you know, not the first time. But and I do have another story of personal story that I'd share.

So I already touched on the fact that the Apple to e kind of inspired my love of technology. Uh, if we if we again extrapolate from that my love of technology born from the apple to E. When I went to high school, I actually took a keyboarding class. It was like type typing, except it was for computers. That was essentially learning to type, so same thing like. Okay,

so kids, those of you who are young. Back in the day, there used to be a class in high school where you would learn how to type on a typewriter. And you would sit in a classroom and every desk would have a typewriter on it, and it would be the loudest room in the in the school, with the possible exception of the shop where people are using you know,

band saws and stuff. People people didn't have typewriters in their homes in a lot of cases, and so people would pay others to type up papers for them for college. For example, um my mom, who could type around a hundred thirty words a minute. Uh my brother would often ask her to type up his papers for him because it would take him a lot longer and he would

make a lot more mistakes than than she would. So the average person typing that just you know, you had business people give stuff to their administrative assistance to type of the business people didn't do it like they do now with computers. Yeah, so different, different world. But but but by the time I was going to high school, there was this slow transition from typing class to keyboarding class.

It's the same thing since you're using a computer and STAMA type different well, and also you had the benefit of being able to hit the backspace button and delete something without necessarily anyone hearing it because it didn't make that weird noise as as corrective liquid is being applied to the paper or the correction slips where you're sitting there trying to hold it in there, right right, So anyway, uh, you know that's in my typing class. The machines we

used were Max. We had MAX for for our type of or keyboarding class. So again in high school, I started to do UM keyboarding, and I eventually went into data processing classes, which was the next level up. And then by the end of data processing I was teaching half the class because I was so familiar with the the the Apple UM platform. And then uh so again my love of technology continues to grow through high school. When I get into college, because of my love of technology,

I adopted the whole online uh approach. Early. I didn't have a whole lot in common with a lot of the kids who were going to the college I started

going to when I was a freshman. So. But the nice thing about the online world, which was just starting to kind of take off in the early nineties, early to mid nineties, which is when I was starting going to college, um, since the online world was starting to take off, that gave me access to people from around the world, many of whom had similar interests in as

I did. And uh, of course the fact that they're on a computer already means we share something in common that we are at least not afraid of computers, and probably we love computers. So on one of these um, I went to U. I used to be a regular on various telnet chat rooms. Kids ask your parents, UM, yeah, they won't know. They won't know either unless they're geeks. But anyway, there were there were chat rooms that you

go in. It's all text based and you you know, created a handle and you could go in and chat with people. I met a certain young lady on a chat room who then we had conversations and we found out we had a lot in common, and we talked for a long time. We started talking on the phone, she came down to visit me. We started dating, we got engaged, and later on I got married to this woman. Fourteen years later, I'm still married to her. Um. So

I met my wife through technology. My love of technology is what led me to adopting this whole online approach. If I had not had the Apple to E and I had not developed that love of tech, I may very well not have ever bothered with the whole online thing. I might have thought that's not for me, that's that's just we. I wouldn't have met the woman who I fell in love with and got married to, and my

life would be very different. So you know, you have to extrapolate, and there's no way to know for sure, obviously because we haven't discovered the parallel worlds yet. But in a way, you could say that because of what Steve Jobs and Apple did, because that I developed my love of tech back when I was a kid, because I was using those machines, That's how I met my wife many years later. I'm gonna do a sitcom about this, is going to be called How I Met My Wife. UM,

I'm hoping to get Alison Hannaghan on board. I think she's occupied. You know, I gotta start watching TV. Yeah anyway, Okay, now I think it could be argued that, you know, of course it's it's not all Steve Jobs world, but because of people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, uh J Minor, Um, Bill Gates, um, Paul Allen. You know, these people made technology accessible to the average person and uh you know all the people that worked on their

teams too. But there, you know, these are the faces that we can identify as having made a difference, uh and and doing that and uh you know there if you don't like one company's product, it's been inspired by the others and has inspired the others to do better. Um. You could say the same thing for for Pixar too. Once picks are uh you know, was was a George Lucas company and uh, Steve Jobs. I think he bought it, didn't he he took it? Yes, he bought it. Steve.

By the way, side, note, very first movie I saw with the woman who would become my wife toy story ha ha. So there you go. There's another one. Well, Pixar, uh, you know, certainly didn't invent animation or computer animation, will they were one of the one of the pioneers. Pioneers certainly, UM, but they weren't the only ones to have the idea,

I'm sure, but they have revolutionized it. And I would say people like DreamWorks, Uh, in competition with them, has worked harder because they have pisar Um Disney's in house people who were there you know, in addition to the Pixar unit before, you know, they had a model to to emulate. UM. And I think you could you could say that Steve Jobs is a catalyst. Uh. He and he inspired other people to work harder, both on his

own team and on the other teams. Uh. And he's just the recognizable face that we could say, you know, he made a difference. He you know, his companies gave us products and and and things that we liked and wanted to see and wanted to hold and use. Um. You know. And it's uh And I think it probably would have been a little different had he not um not passed away so early, you know, at fifty years old.

You know, he he wasn't even you know, in retirement age here in the United States is generally recognized to be around sixty five, although it's harder to retire at that age. You have many CEOs who work on at their companies past that time. You know, he would have been um, had his health not declined, he probably would have been there at least another ten years at Apple and uh, you know, served with Pixar and Disney, you know.

And it's just I think that's probably another reason why his death affects us so deeply, is because we go, well, you know what, I like what Apple is doing right now, I like what Pixars doing. What would have happened? And you know that in he's a person that we kind of identified with and wanted to know more about. And yeah, he was mysterious as well. And I mean he definitely

there's definitely a whole mythology around him. I mean the fact we've we've touched on that with the reality distortion field. You know that that's one of that's a mythical feature to Steve Jobs. And you know, even his competitors have come out and said some pretty remarkable things about him. Um, the people people who both worked with him and competed against him in the world of technology after his passing

have said some pretty phenomenal things. Bill Gates, I'll go ahead and quote Bill Gates, because that's a great example. He said. Steve and I first met nearly thirty years ago and have been colleagues, competitors, and friends over the course of more than half our lives. The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations

to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. And I mean you know that that speaks volumes too, that people who were either actively in a company UM that competed against Apple or in their past had that they they also recognize his his contribution to the technologology industry UM from the earliest days of Google. Whenever Larry and I saught inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed

to look no farther than Coopertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product, including the MacBook. I am writing this on right now. That was Saragey Brin and Larry page two. I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. Um Mark Zuckerberg. Steve, thank you for being a mentor and friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can

change the world. I will miss you, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Incorporated. So today the world lost a visionary leader, the technology industry lost an iconic legend, and I lost a friend and fellow founder. The legacy of Steve Jobs will be remembered for generations to come. I mean, it's that that from the person who said that Apple should have been closed and sold back to the investors. The proceeds given back to the investors. Yeah, there there are

worse that was in the dark days of Apple. Two dozen of these tributes coming from not just industry leaders in technology, but politicians, artists. You know, there there are musicians out there who credit their success in no small part to the fact that iTunes gave them a venue that otherwise they would not have had. Um And you know, you could even argue all iTunes has had a it

has sort of a monopoly effect. But then but then you had other companies like Amazon come in and again because of what Steve Jobs had done that made it possible for other companies to do a similar approach or an approach that was different enough to compete against iTunes Um. But without that pioneering work, we can't say for sure whether or not that would have happened. Maybe it would have happened, but it would have happened later or differently

or differently. I mean, I we there's no way of knowing right now whether or not if Steve Jobs had never come back to Apple, if they had never gone into portable electronics the way they did, would smartphones be a consumer product right now? It's hard to say. I mean, before the iPhone, they really weren't. Uh, there were people who had them, there were early adopters, and there were other folks who had them, but as a widespread thing,

it just didn't. It didn't exist. So maybe it would have happened, but it would have happened on a in a different way, and perhaps perhaps we'd be in a very slow ramp to people adopting smartphones instead of the crazy one we're on now. We are rapidly getting to be the longest Tech Stuff episode ever, and we've done that three times this year. Now. I can't think of I this is certainly a topic that I think it

befits an extra long episode of tech stuff. Yeah, and I'm sure that that many of you will have comments and questions for us. Um you know, it's by the time this will actually publish that the rawness of these passing will we'll have subsided somewhat, will go back to saying the other company stinks. Um. But and it's sad that, you know, takes an event like this to sort of

bring people together for a few days ago. You know what, we're all we're all competitors, but ultimately we're all friends too, and yeah, you know, yeah, our goal each other, right, Our goal is the same as to create compelling products for consumers that are that truly are useful, because you know, if you don't do that, then you get a reputation for making crap. Yea, you know, I mean that's the that's the bottom line. And if you get that reputation,

you don't stay in business long. So um so everyone, you know, Yeah, there was a lot of competition, and not all of it was friendly, but it was definitely that there was definitely a level of respect that we may not have always may not have always translated to the way the words that were used, but it was

definitely underlying it. Well, we're gonna wrap up this episode and uh, if you guys have any specific thoughts about Steve Jobs and Apple and how maybe those the projects that came for that company have affected you, whether even if it's not necessarily like oh, glowing praise, that's not what we're asking for really, just kind of giving context to what see Jobs did, what Apple did, both the good and the bad. It's not all not all positive.

Let us know, though, Send us an email or address as tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or better yet, go on to our Twitter or Facebook account and let us know through their Facebook is a great way for us to have a conversation with a group of people, and um, maybe we won't create too many flame wars this way, but look for us there are handle is text Stuff, hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.

Join How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works. I Find app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand, twelve Camry it's ready. Are you