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How Steve Jobs handles trolls (WWDC 1997)

An audience member at WWDC in 1997 trolls Steve Jobs in front of everyone, but Steve responds with grace. (Bold emphasis mine.)

Question: I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say java, in any of it’s incarnations, addresses the idea (inaudible). And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years. 

Steve: You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but…. One of the hardest things when you’re trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas.

...

The hardest thing is: how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that’s going to allow you to sell 8 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology”. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case. 

...

And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take. 

Hat tip Dharmesh Shah at onstartups.com and Vic Gundotra's Google Plus

Posted over 1 year ago

20 responses

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tlrobinson said
FYI, the inaudible word was "OpenDoc", which Steve had recently killed off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
matthewdl said
More specifically, he says "addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc".
coldnebo said
er, actually, in the complete video, you see that Jobs' took the first shot by rather unprofessionally dismissing the OpenDoc team as "some brilliant people" who had "essentially been doing nothing for 7 years" and Apple had decided to stop that line of development because Java pretty much did everything that OpenDoc did anyway. Jobs has every right to determine the direction of his company, and sometimes that means changing direction and abandoning years of hard effort. But that's no reason to dismiss that effort as a waste of time. This "troll" was actually responding to Jobs' unprofessional and public slander of those efforts. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY around 4:30 for Jobs' initial attack on OpenDoc. Your clip comes much later at 50:00.
Spinchange said
As coldnebo pointing out, it's worth watching the entire keynote to get the full impact of context & Steve's thinking on being in a tight spot management-wise, in general. This is actually probably the best time frame to see it because Apple still had the hardest work to do in front of them. It's remarkable how basic his business ideas and principles are and yet, who other than he and Apple follow them with such consistency?
Tru Dillon said
I really hope steve can get better and overcome his illness. I think he has alot of great ideas still in his brain.
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