What happened at Apple, to be honest, over the years was… the goal used to be to make the best computers in the world. And that was goal one. And goal two we got from Hewlett-Packard actually, which was “we have to make a profit.” Because if we don’t make a profit we can’t do goal one.
So, yeah, I mean we enjoyed making a profit, but the purpose of making a profit was so we can make the best computers in the world. Along the way somewhere those two got reversed. ‘The goal is to make a lot of money and well, if we have to make some good computers, well OK we’ll do that because we can make a lot of money doing that.’
And, it’s very subtle. It’s very subtle at first. But it turns out it’s everything. That one little subtle flip takes 5 years to see it, but that one little subtle flip in 5 years means everything. So we’ve put those things in their proper order again.
During the talk, it is very interesting to see how Jobs talks about the future of technology. For instance, he thought that the PC and TV would never merge together. Almost two decades later, Apple is trying to improve the TV experience with the Apple TV.
The full video of Jobs at the CAUSE ’98 conference can be viewed below:
[via BGR]
