Transcriber: Yasushi Aoki Reviewer: Capa Girl
All right.
Thank you very much for having me.
This is the first time I've ever spoken at a TED Conference.
So, you know, you guys have the good taste of inviting me.
I’ve never passed anybody else's standard to be invited.
So, I'm flattered.
And perhaps we can make a little history today, right?
So, a little bit of my background.
I worked for Apple from 1983 to 1987
I was Apple software evangelist.
My job was to convince people to write Macintosh software.
How many of you use Macs in this audience?
I love to see that. (Laughter)
Yeah.
And the rest of you what? Are you oppressed? I mean what --
(Laughter)
So, I worked for Apple,
I started some software companies,
and I became a writer and a speaker.
I returned to Apple as Apple's chief evangelist.
This is in 1995 time frame.
And I had a great time with Apple not very long ago,
as we all know, Steve Jobs passed away.
And I worked for him twice.
One of the few people who survived working for him twice.
And he had a monumental effect on my life.
As well as really the Valley and probably the world, truly the world.
I think you'd have to rank him with Walt Disney and Edison and Steve Jobs.
I mean, who are truly visionaries.
You'll hear lots of people throw the "V" word around
and there are I think in my estimation really three people who qualify,
and it would be Edison, Disney and Jobs.
So, I created this presentation right after he passed away
because I wanted to get on paper, get onto PowerPoint, get into the world,
what I personally learned from Steve Jobs.
I'm not sure he intended to teach me this,
but this is what I learned from Steve Jobs.
And so, I would like his memory to live on forever
and forever to influence people.
So, the first thing that I learned from Steve Jobs is that
"Experts pretty much are clueless."
And this is a very important lesson for you
because there's a temptation to default to, shall I say, older people,
people with big titles, people who have declared themselves experts,
and if there's anything that Apple has proven,
is that the experts are often wrong.
And so, as you go through your life,
you start your companies, and you start your careers,
and you try to change the world.
I want you to learn to ignore experts.
This maybe contrary to what you've been taught
but experts usually define things within some established limits
and I think you should break those limits.
So, I view what I call bozosity --
I view bozosity as somewhat like the flu
where it can be something that you can be inoculated to.
So, how to fight the flu,
you get a little bit of flu, so that when you encounter big flu,
you've already built up resistance.
So, I'm gonna inoculate you to bozosity
so that when you encounter big bozosity,
you will have already built up resistance.
So, let me show you some bozosity of experts.
First thing.
1943, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM says,
"There is a world market for maybe 5 computers."
I have 5 Macintoshes in my house.
(Laughter)
I have all the computers he anticipated in the world.
If you were Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates and you listened to this,
where would we be today? Next example.
"This telephone has too many shortcomings
to be seriously considered as a means of communication.
The device is inherently of no value to us."
(Laughter)
Western Union memo, 1876.
Oops!
You know, Western Union should be PayPal today.
It's not. It's very hard to go from telegraph to Internet,
if you write off telephone in the middle.
You know what I am saying, it's just too big of chasm to cross.
The last example is from our friends at DEC. Ken Olsen, founder of DEC,
great company, great entrepreneur.
"There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home."
(Laughter)
If you would wanted to run something at home
you would just have to instead go back to your office and run a DEC minicomputer.
Three examples of bozosity,
and not from, you know, total people that you wouldn't expect.
These are all people you would expect.
Founder of IBM.
Founder of DEC.
You know, Western Union, hugely successful company back then.
You need to learn to ignore experts.
Next thing you need to do is to understand that
"Customers cannot tell you what they need."
They could tell you that "I want bigger, faster, cheaper status quo."
That's what they usually will tell you.
You really can't ask them about a revolution
because they can only define things, they can only describe things
in terms of products or services that they already have.
Bigger, faster, cheaper status quo.
If you truly want to change the world,
you need to ignore your customers.
And you need to jump curves. Let's talk about this.
This is the Macintosh 128K.
I promise you nobody in the world was asking for this computer in 1984.
No one said, "Give us a cheap little graphic toy, 128k of RAM,
no software," thanks to my efforts.
That's what we did.
Totally unexpected.
Nobody was asking for it.
It's because Steve Jobs, using the "V" word,
had a vision for what the future would be.
This is his vision - graphical user interface.
Next thing I learned from Steve Jobs is,
"You need to jump to the next curve,"
rather than duking it out on the same curve
trying to do something 10% better,
you need to get to the next curve.
Don't stay on the same curve.
Great example - 1900s, Ice 1.0.
There was an ice harvesting industry in the United States.
This meant that Baba and Junior would go to a frozen lake
or frozen pond and cut a block of ice.
9 million pounds of ice were harvested in 1900.
Ice 2.0.
Ice 2.0 was ice factory.
Now, you froze water, any city, any time of year.
Major breakthrough.
So much better.
They didn't have to be cold city.
They didn't have to be cold time of year.
Ice 3.0. the refrigerator curve.
Now, it wasn't about the ice factory with the iceman delivering ice to your house.
Now, you had your own personal ice factory.
Your own PC, your own "Personal Chiller."
(Laughter)
The great innovation occurs when you are not stay on the same curve.
Don't do a better ice harvester.
Don't add horses to the sleigh.
Don't have a bigger sharper saw.
If you are an ice factory,
don’t have more ice factories,
don't build better ice factories,
don't have better icemen delivering ice
you wanna get to the next curve.
If you were a printer company,
although many of you are too young to understand this,
there used to be this thing called daisy wheel printer
and had this little ball in this, ball rotated and struck the paper.
If you were a daisy wheel printer company
and your idea of innovation was,
"Well, let's introduce more typefaces in larger sizes,"
that's not innovation.
Innovation occurs when you go from daisy wheel printer to laser printer.
Jump to the next curve.
Next thing that I learned is,
"The biggest challenges beget the best work in people."
I think one of the reasons why we did such great work at Macintosh division
is because Steve had such great expectations of us.
And, you know, we try to rise to his expectations.
This is an ad that shows some of the --
shall I say, youthful exuberance of Apple.
When IBM entered the computer business, Apple ran this ad
welcoming IBM to the computer business.
We were throwing down the gauntlet.
Welcome IBM, you huge successful East Coast mainframe computer company.
Welcome to the personal computer business.
Welcome to Vietnam.
(Laughter)
Next thing I learned from Steve is that "Design counts."
Many people can say that they appreciate design.
Many companies say that.
But truly, how many companies care about design?
Apple is one of the few, truly cares.
And you know what, not everybody in the customer base
truly cares about design.
To this day, 95% world doesn't use a Macintosh, only 5% does.
But there are people who really care about design and they count.
Design counts.
This is a Mac Book Air.
Thin, beautiful, design counts.
You have one?
Thin, beautiful, design counts.
Next thing is, when you make a presentation,
if you did nothing else but this, [Use big graphics and big fonts] (Laughter)
you would be better than 9/10 of the presentations in the world.
Seriously.
Seriously, just do this.
I'll show you a typical Steve Jobs slide.
What a great slide!
Big graphic.
"The best windows app ever written: iTunes."
It's a typical Steve Jobs slide.
You know, any other CEO, there would be a matrix, right?
There would be a 4 column matrix,
and it would have this like checkboxes,
and it would be an 8 point font
and you couldn't read it.
The person giving the presentation would not be able to explain it.
This is the beauty of Steve Jobs.
The irony of saying that the best Windows app ever is iTunes from Apple.
Showing the logo of Windows.
This is a beautiful slide, this encapsulates the Steve Jobs presentation style.
Big graphics.
Big fonts.
The ideal font-size, just for you to know, maybe a rule of thumb --
The rule of thumb is find out who the oldest person is in the audience,
divide his or her age by two.
(Laughter) OK?
So, if you are talking to people of 60 years old, probably 30 points
50 years old, 25 points.
Someday, you maybe pitching to a really young VC.
Let's say, the VC is sixteen years old.
At that point, God bless you, use the 8 point font.
(Laughter)
But until that time --
big fonts.
Big fonts.
The beauty of a big font is, it makes it so
that you cannot put a lot of text on your presentation.
You don't want a lot of text
because if you put a lot of text, you read the text
and if you read the text, you audience will be lost.
Your audience will be lost because they are going to say to themselves,
"This bozo is reading the slide verbatim.
I can read silently to myself faster than this bozo can read it orally to me.
So I will just read ahead." (Laughter)
And you will lose your audience.
Big font.
Big graphics.
Next thing.
"Changing your mind is truly a sign of intelligence."
You may think that you should formulate this great thought,
you should use these analytical skills,
you should come to this great conclusion
by God, you gotta stick to this conclusion
because you know you are right and you believe.
And I think what Apple is proven time and time again is that
if you change your mind, if you change the way you do things
in response to how customers actually consider you, treat you, or accept you,
it is a sign of intelligence and it will lead to success.
I'll give you an example.
Believe it or not, when the iPhone first came out,
this was the press release that basically set the Apple perspective on apps:
"Our innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards,
lets developers create amazing new applications
while keeping the iPhone secure and reliable."
Steve Jobs said this in June 2007.
Let me translate this for you.
This is Apple speak for,
"There will be no independent apps on the iPhone,
what you have to do is use the Safari engine."
That's what that translates to.
And in the beauty of Steve Jobs is that he was saying,
"We're doing this as a favor to you
because we want you to be secure and reliable."
(Laughter)
OK?
Fast-forward one year.
Headline of the next Apple press release about the iPhone development environment.
"Apple Executives to Showcase Mac OS X Leopard
and OS X iPhone Development Platforms at WWDC 2008 Keynote"
A year later, they were highlighting the fact that
"Now you can develop independent apps for iPhone."
They've gone from a world where "You have to use Safari."
to "We're gonna show you how to use independent apps."
Of course that's the right way. That's what we always intended.
(Laughter)
This is a sign of great intelligence.
They were able to completely flip thought.
And you know what, nobody pointed out this complete reversal.
The press loved it when they said, "Oh, reliable and secure," in 2007.
And then the press loved it in 2008 when it said,
"You can ship any app. You can create any app."
Goes back to point 1: Experts are clueless.
(Laughter)
Next thing I learned from Steve Jobs is
"Value is not the same as price."
I don't think there's anybody who ever bought a piece of Apple equipment
because it had the lowest price.
(Laughter)
Trust me when I tell you that.
Having said that, value is not the same as price
because value incorporates other qualities
such as coolness,
such as ease of use,
ease of training,
ease of translation,
ease of adaptation,
ease of adoption.
But what Apple is shown to me is that
it's not necessarily the case that you have to have the lowest price.
You have to have the best value.
Apple did a great series of ads about this.
Where it said, this is the Mac guy over here.
This is the PC guy over here.
And the PC guy has to hold the bake sale
because he needs to get more money
so that he can fix Vista
because Vista was too hard to use.
So, what's the better value?
The Macintosh that doesn't need to be fixed
or Vista that needed to be fixed
because it was so hard to use,
so difficult to implement for an IT infrastructure company.
Value is not the same as price.
Next thing I learned is that "A players hire A+ players."
Actually Steve’s theory was "A players higher A players"
that is A players hire people as good as them.
I would slightly change his theory.
My theory is that A players hire people better than them,
not just equal to them.
The problem is if you hire B players,
the B players who are insecure,
who don't want to be shown up by people better than they are.
B players higher C players.
And then C players hire D players.
And then D players hire E players.
And pretty soon you have Z players.
(Laughter)
This is what's called the bozo explosion.
(Laughter)
You need to fight the bozo explosion.
A players hire A+ players.
When you are in the position of hiring,
hire people who are better than you.
That's what makes great companies.
This is a picture of the people --
Oh, I’m sorry, but the way the lighting works in this room,
it’s very difficult to see the face.
This is 5 years ago,
the reunion of the Macintosh division.
And I’ll tell you, I consider it an honor to have worked with this group.
It was the most fun, the most stimulating group I've ever worked with.
It was like basically being paid to go to Disneyland everyday.
It was a great time.
A+ players.
Next thing I learned is that real CEOs can do demos.
They don't hand it off to their VP of engineering.
They don't hand it off to their VP of sales.
The CEO can do the demo.
Steve Jobs proved that.
This is a picture of Steve Jobs inserting a Macintosh 128k floppy
into the first Macintosh that was shown publicly
at De Anza College.
Steve Jobs could demo.
Great CEOs can demo
because to be a good demonstrator of your product or service,
you truly have to understand the product or service.
You truly have to understand how it works.
You also have to understand your audience.
So, if you ever start a company, if you ever start tech company, if you are the CEO,
you should be able to demo your software,
demo your website.
You don't abdicate this to other people.
Next thing I leaned is that "Real entrepreneurs ship."
Ship.
You know, don't worry about getting to the state when it's perfect.
As soon as you've jumped curves,
when you've gone from Ice 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0,
it doesn’t have to be perfect.
The first laser printer was not perfect.
The first laser printer was just much better than the best daisy wheel printer.
You don't have to be perfect. You have to ship.
This is a picture of anti-example.
This is a picture of an Alto from Xerox PARC.
Arguably Xerox PARC had many of the concepts for Macintosh,
figured out before Macintosh.
Steve Jobs had a visit there.
He saw a mouse. He saw the graphical user interface.
The difference between Xerox PARC and Apple Computer
is that Apple could ship,
otherwise Xerox PARC would be Apple today.
Ship. Real entrepreneurs ship.
Next thing I learned is that
"Marketing is all about finding unique value."
If you're an engineer, you have to create something that's unique and valuable.
If you're the marketing person, you have to convince the world
that it is unique and valuable.
This is a 2x2 matrix.
You'll encounter 2x2 matrix for the rest of your life.
You need to get used to this.
I will tell you, generally speaking, in every 2x2 matrix,
you want to be in the upper right-hand corner. (Laughter)
That's all you need to know, really.
That's all you need to know.
The nuance is, what you put on the axis
to put yourself in the upper right-hand corner.
Uniqueness on the vertical axis,
value on a horizontal axis.
If you are here, you have created something valuable but not unique,
you have to always fight on price
because you have better sameness.
If you're up there, you have created something only you have done it,
but it is not valuable.
In that corner, you are just plain stupid.
(Laughter)
In this corner, you have created something that's not valuable and not unique.
It's because stupid people like me have funded you to do
the same stupid thing that's not useful.
The upper right-hand corner is where you want to be.
You have a unique product or service that is of great value.
And the last thing that I learned from Steve Jobs is that
"Some things need to be believed to be seen."
Usually you hear this saying the opposite way.
Some things need to be seen to be believed.
But really in life, if you want to change the world,
you have to believe in things before you see them.
You have to believe in Macintosh before you would see it as reality.
And the believe in iPod an iPhone and an iPad and all this technology,
you, your teams, your customers have to believe in it
before they will truly see it.
If you do these things and you take these messages to heart,
these lessons to heart,
you will change the world.
The top 12 lessons of Steve Jobs.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)