Continuing our coverage of the Steve Job interview at D8, we have come to the juiciest part of the interview, where Steve Jobs dropped the biggest bomb of them all. When asked if his vision was for a finger operated tablet, why did the Apple OS make an appearance on a phone first? Jobs revealed: “I’ll tell you a secret. It started on a tablet first.” When Jobs asked his team to build a prototype of his idea of having a multitouch display that could be operated with fingers. And when inertial scrolling was demonstrated on it, it was so good that Jobs realized, “My god, we can build a phone out of this.” The more important market at that time was phone, and so the iPhone was released. And the rest, as we all know, is history.
Knight in shining aluminium
We all know what the internet, bloggers and Google News have done to traditional journalism. Many publishing houses are on the verge of extinction. At this juncture, iPad has provided a platform to these publishers for delivering their publications to the market. It’s a vision of the Apple CEO: “One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.” He believes that even prominent publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others “are in real trouble” and that he doesn’t “want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers, I think we need editorial now more than ever.” Now here is where Jobs goes very subjective, trashing the very people who follow his every word and blog about it. “I don’t…”, this is the kind of starting to a sentence that Mr. Jobs should seriously avoid, whether it concerns Flash or “a nation of bloggers”.
He also said that “publishers should charge less than print. The biggest lesson Apple has learned is price it aggressively and go for volume.” And in volumes you have sold sir, in volumes.
You can check out the other parts of the interview here