Posts filed under 'Updates/Announcements'
Introducing video transcripts
I’m proud to share an exciting update that I’ve been working on for a while. Have you ever found yourself wondering: I swear I heard Steve Jobs say this in a keynote, or an interview, or was it a speech? One of those in the early 2000s, but… which one was it?
Well, you need not worry about this anymore — as some of the videos in our collection now feature transcripts! You’ll identify them thanks to the small CC ( ) icon next to their name in the video galleries, as per below. You’ll notice we also include timestamps at each speaker change or narrative breaks, so you can easily jump to the right point in the video.
The vision is to eventually have ALL of Steve Jobs’s recorded words transcribed, so they can all be searched and found in a few seconds. I am planning to adding search to the “Watch” section of the website to that effect (and of course, Google is still your friend in the meantime).
It will take a while to get to that end state though, and I’m starting with a small collection of some of my favourites videos, as well as the most recent additions:
- 1983 Macintosh introduction at the Boston Computer Society
- 1988 NeXT Cube introduction
- 1990 NeXTstation introduction
- 1990 Library of Congress video
- 1991 internal NeXT strategy
- 1991 “Ten Years of the PC” interview
- 1992 NeXTSTEP 3.0 demo
- 1995 Triumph of the Nerds interview (aka “The Lost Interview”)
- 1997 WWDC closing chat
- 1998 iMac introduction
- Of course, the 2007 Macworld (iPhone introduction)
- 2007 D5 Interview by Walt Mossberg
- And last but not least, the Joint interview with Bill Gates from that same conference.
I’ve added these new transcripts I made to the couple ones that have already been done — right now this only includes the Stanford commencement speech, the Smithsonian 1995 interview and another 1990 interview.
I hope you’re as excited as I am! Please share your feedback in the comments or on Twitter.
PS: while working on this, I discovered a great website called NotesKey, which references all speakers, demos, videos, memorable moments or jokes, for almost all Apple events (I noticed a couple Apple Expo keynotes are missing) from 1997 to 2018. It also lets you search for a particular speaker or demo across all of them. This is something I had thought of building originally, but there is no need as the site does it perfectly (here’s Macworld 2007 as an example) — make sure to check it out!
Happy 2013! a.k.a the End of 2012 Steve Jobs News Roundup
Dear reader,
The new year starts as it should, with the continuation of one of my worst habits: the posting of news roundups that gather the equivalent of what should have been five or six separate, timely posts. Still, I will write such an article, because it does contain some interesting trivia that you might have missed.
Let’s start with the one-year anniversary of Steve’s passing. Although I did post on that sad day, it was only later that I found out the following anecdote: The favicon was at half mast during the anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death (from a great site, Little Big Details, which I recommend you check out).
That’s right, on October 11 2012, the favicon of apple.com was “flying at half mast”. Nice touch, and a reminder that the company continues to care about the smallest details (and to delight you when you happen to notice them). Of course, this was only the icing on the cake, and what a cake.
Another piece of news came from Steve Jobs’s “other” company, Pixar. The Disney-owned animation studios had the graciousness to name the newest addition to their campus “The Steve Jobs Building”. The building has a modernist look which SJ would probably not have disapproved of — it’s even possible he was involved in its design, like the rest of the campus, but this is speculation on my part (Source: Pixar Times).
The Steve Jobs Building at Pixar in Emeryville
The day before the anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death came another piece of news that might be of interest to the “Steve Jobs community”: Chris-Ann Brennan, Steve’s high school girlfriend and the mother of Lisa, will be publishing a “memoir”, according to the NY Times blog. I wonder about its quality and content, since Chris-Ann has been known to be unstable and eccentric (this was confirmed in the Isaacson bio). It looks a lot like a get-rich-quick plan, but I won’t make hasty conclusions before I’ve read the book. While waiting for the book, you can still read the article she published in Rolling Stone’s commemorative issue after Steve’s passing: Jobs at 17: Nerd, Poet, Romantic (cached version, the actual article starts about 80% of the way).
This confirms the theory I have long held that Steve’s death would be followed by people untying their tongue, now that their fear of him (encouraged by the occasional threats) is gone. So far it has been mostly the usual suspects talking to the press or writing, but I do see a trend of former colleagues who begin to open up, too. Avie Tevanian in BBC’s documentary, or Tony Fadell, are two examples.
My only confirmed picture of Chris Ann Brennan, from Facebook
I sincerely hope the trend continues, and that one day those who worked really closely with Steve start to speak up. Can you imagine a book about NeXT by former NeXTers, for example? I would be thrilled to see that happen. It would perhaps compensate for the usually negative image of Steve Jobs as a man, relayed by the people who had broken all ties with him and thus did not feel bound to respect him. Not to mention the shallowness of the Isaacson bio.
As far as pictures go, I’ve dug up a few interesting ones in these last weeks of 2012. Starting with this gallery of Apple I photos from Time Magazine’s Harry McCracken. ‘Wait’, you might say, ‘but I know plenty of pictures of the Apple I!’ And you’d be right, dear reader, but these are special. They come from Paul Terrell’s private collection. If that name rings a bell, it means you’ve done your homework: he was the owner of the BYTE SHOP, the electronics store (I daren’t say computer store) which was Apple Computer’s first client, back in 1976, before the garage — it was actually the order of 100 computers from Terrell which made the garage necessary, and made dollar signs flash in front of young-and-not-so-hippie-anymore Steve Jobs’s eyes.
The first picture of the Byte Shop I ever saw, from the TIME gallery
(notice the groovy typeface for the logo)
I will soon add those Apple I pictures to the site, along with a few I already added, from a few years later:
This batch of (too small) pics came from Vectronic’s Apple World (a treasure trove for old advertisement of the fruit company). They show Steve around 1980-81, when he was 25, a.k.a. The Moustache Years. The top left is from a series we’ve seen before, where he is riding his BMW motorcycle. All others are news to me: the top middle and right show him at a “PR agency” (perhaps McKenna’s, where he met his then-girlfriend Barbara Jasinski?) The bottom left and middle ones are probably in his ski destination of choice, Aspen. And the last one, the only large one, is obviously at a school. I will add more very interesting pictures of young Steve soon, so stay tuned!
In echo of my previous post, there was also some more talk of Steve’s famed yacht, Venus, in the last days of December. The talk was really not that interesting, and Philipp Elmer-Dewitt made a great short summary of it (as he does) on his blog: Steve Jobs’ yacht: The anatomy of a news cycle. Basically, French designer Starck was paid a percentage of the cost of the yacht. But the boat ended up costing less than planned (which is noteworthy), and so Starck was paid less than he expected — €3 million short (€6m instead of €9m). Apparently, Laurene quickly settled the case with him and the yacht, which had been temporarily seized by the Dutch authorities, was released a few days later. Big deal.
PED’s analysis is interesting in that it stresses how such small events become hugely inflated by the blogosphere and even mainstream media, just because they give an excuse to have ‘Steve Jobs’ in the headline and attract click$. This is something I have observed as well, and it sometimes really becomes ludicrous. The article on Examiner.com Psychic makes contact with Steve Jobs, says things not well in afterlife certainly takes the palm in that category.
…
I can hear your voice – “But that’s not all! He forgot about the movie! … I mean, the movies!” No, dear reader, I will speak of those movies. But they deserve their own post, and it will come very soon.
Although the blog has been quiet lately, I have been paying close attention to all things Steve Jobs all along, and even updated the site silently. Just last week, I added 22 new anecdotes and 2 new quotes to my growing collection. Rest assured that this will continue: as I’ve written before, I have some great content coming up soon.
Oh, I almost forgot… Happy new year! 🙂
Steve Jobs’s yacht, Venus, now launched
“There’s no yacht in my future,” Steve Jobs declared to NY Times journalist John Markoff in November 1995, to illustrate his goal in life was not to make money. Had he not died last year, this phrase would be filed among the many contradictory statements Jobs made throughout his life —because two weeks ago, the yacht he spent the last years of his life designing finally launched. I just added a dedicated page about this boat under Steve’s Places (where it best fits, with the private jet).
We first heard about the Jobs yacht last year, when the Isaacson biography was published. It remained a mystery to me since then, especially because of my particular interest in ship design (albeit bigger ones) —but I somehow didn’t expect it to ever be revealed. I thought it would remain in the private sphere of the Jobs family, if it was finished at all. But the resolve of Laurene Powell-Jobs and the voyeurism of today’s media got the better of me, as the yacht (Hull #684) was launched very publicly on October 28 2012. The Feadship shipyard, where the boat was built, even released a note about it on their website (without mentioning the owner’s identity, though; but the rows of iMacs in the bridge leave little doubt about that).
The press release on Feadship’s website
The Venus —as she is named, after the Roman goddess born from the foam of Uranus’s genitals dropped into the sea (Wikipedia confirms)— is indeed very Jobsian in her aesthetics. The very clear-cut lines of her hull, the minimalist superstructure with its right angles and floor to ceiling windows, the lack of any visible mooring or radio equipment… all make for a surprising design that evokes more a floating modernist house than your typical billionaire yacht. Compare and contrast, for example, with Larry Ellison’s latest yacht, Musashi, which is way more traditional —and whose design Jobs supposedly hated (according to Isaacson) which inspired him to create his own, perfect ship.
The Jobses on a cruise in the Corinth Canal, circa 2006
Isaacson writes:
Before his liver transplant, he and his family used to rent a boat for vacations, traveling to Mexico, the South Pacific, or the Mediterranean. On many of these cruises, Jobs got bored or began to hate the design of the boat, so they would cut the trip short and fly to Kona Village. But sometimes the cruise worked well. “The best vacation I’ve ever been on was when we went down the coast of Italy, then to Athens—which is a pit, but the Parthenon is mind-blowing—and then to Ephesus in Turkey, where they have these ancient public lavatories in marble with a place in the middle for musicians to serenade.” […]
After the joy of that cruise, Jobs had amused himself by beginning to design, and then repeatedly redesigning, a boat he said he wanted to build someday. When he got sick again in 2009, he almost canceled the project. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done,” he recalled. “But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.”
After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support.
By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”
The scenes described by Isaacson lets my imagination run wild. Can you imagine being shown models and drawings of the yacht of Steve Jobs’s dreams… by the man himself? It reminds me of the famed models of a hypothetical modern house for Woodside, dating back from the late 1980s, but which never materialized. It seems that the prospect of a nearing death must have pushed the Apple CEO to stop refining (some would say procrastinating) and actually turn his plans into reality. I find it interesting that he chose to spend the limited time he had on the yacht (and the Apple Spaceship) rather than his family home. Perhaps it is because of the greater liberty and challenge that is peculiar to naval architecture; a ship is its own universe, it must be self-sufficient when on water. Not so with a house. Or perhaps it was only because he could see the Woodside teardown taking too long to happen, who knows.
This first, exciting yet mysterious reveal was in October 2011, just two weeks after Steve’s passing. But another one came some six months later, when my fellow countryman designer Philippe Starck announced in a radio interview he was working on a “revolutionary” project with Apple that would come out “in eight months”. I assumed he was drunk or suicidal —the former option was probably the most likely, because after Apple denied his claims, he admitted he was in fact working on a personal project with the Jobs family: “I’ve come to visit him once a month for seven years in Palo Alto, and I’m actually going there next Monday, because now that he’s dead, I’m working with his wife. We enjoyed exchanging about interesting things” (translated from the French by yours truly).
French designer Philippe Starck who partook in the Venus design
The anecdote aside, I thought it was another Jobsian move to use the services of Starck. This is because I’ve come to believe the theory laid out by Alan Deutschman in The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, according to which Jobs was insecure about his taste in his personal life (not so much in his work, obviously) and liked to take advice from renown taste makers to shape his own. It’s possible he couldn’t decide when you know he spent the better part of his youth living in empty houses. And it’s also true that he used world-famous architect I. M. Pei’s services to design not only the staircase of the NeXT offices, but also the remodeling of his Manhattan apartment (not that he ever lived there) and supposedly some early projects for Woodside, too. That he would call on Starck for the design of his yacht fits well within this trend.
The last Jobsian touch was actually from the Jobs family —maybe Steve had planned, or maybe Laurene did something she thought he would have done. They sent a thank you note to all the workers of the Feadship yard stating “Thank you for your hard work and craftsmanship – from the Jobs family” with a stylized silhouette of the Venus at the bottom. (The note came with an iPod shuffle which, to be honest, did remind me of one of the earliest Fake Steve Jobs pieces…)
And so it is one year after her reveal, and apparently eight years since her inception, that the Venus starts sailing the seven seas. I really wonder what she will be used for. Will the Jobses actually use it and sail across the globe? Or did Laurene insist on finishing one his husband’s late projects? This might stay secret as it is part of the Jobses private life. But my appetite for more details is really not about that. Indeed, many more questions have sprung in my mind from these first photos of the yacht: what is it like inside? Where and how is the equipment hidden? How does the superstructure hold? How are the navigation computer systems designed? What’s the engine room look like? (I imagine it’s neat knowing Steve’s love for machines)… The mystery of Steve Jobs goes on.
One year without Steve
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs.
I can distinctly remember October 5, 2011. Just like most people remember what they were doing when they heard about 9/11, just like Steve remembered “the exact moment [he] heard [Kennedy] had been shot”, I will probably remember when I heard about my hero’s death for the rest of my life. I was half awake, as the radio had been playing for 5 minutes, just like every morning, to wake me up. As I was slowly opening my eyes, I heard the anchorman’s dreaded words: “Steve Jobs est mort”. I literally jumped out of surprise. It was probably the fastest I ever woke up in my life. I quickly grabbed my iPad and slowly started discovering the sad truth, replaying in my head the words that Steve had used when he resigned from Apple some 42 days before: “Unfortunately, that day has come”.
The iPhone 4S had been introduced one day earlier, yet everybody quickly started to forget about it. Apple’s own homepage had been replaced by a huge black and white portrait of Steve, the one he had picked for his only authorized biography. In the following weeks, people around the globe paid homage to one of the greatest geniuses of our time, half-Edison, half-Disney. He was celebrated by everyone, friends and foes alike (apart from that jackass Richard Stallman).
I have to say that period left a strange taste for me. I remembered how I had been made fun of for using a Mac in junior high. How Apple was heralded as a business counter-example by industry pundits in the 1990s. And how Jobs was decried as a tyrant, obsessing over unnecessary details, prioritizing form over function in beautiful but overpriced, underpowered machines. However, as years went by, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad had changed that. Apple was now the king of the hill, and Jobs a genius heralded as the ultimate model entrepreneur. Yes, it felt good to say we —Mac people— had been right all these years. But I started wondering how would Steve’s death have been received had Apple stayed the same as it was in 2000.
Then Isaacson’s biography came out. It was almost too much. Steve dies, a myriad of articles, tributes, anecdotes, “lost” pictures and videos come out, and then that huge book that we had been hearing about for the past two years is on the promoted shelf of every bookstore around the world. I don’t remember where I read this, but someone compared it to an Apple launch: a beautifully packaged mass market product that takes the world by storm. The book had even been rushed out to market, to capitalize on the media attention that Steve Jobs’s death had received. This, also, kind of left me with a weird sentiment. Especially since the bio was disappointing a read —my review of it is yet to come, but I essentially agree with John Siracusa’s excellent argument: Walter Isaacson was the wrong guy. A unique opportunity to look into the mind of Steve was wasted.
Then the world moved on. I, of course, continued to look back at Steve’s life, and soon redesigned and enriched the website to make it an even better place to help others learn about it too. But the tech industry, which is not fond of history (not enough anyway), started focusing on the present again. The homages became rarer. Apple released new products. Tim Cook became an increasingly recognized figure. Apple’s stock kept rising. Steve’s name was only invoked as a ridiculous hypothetical benchmark to judge Cook’s Apple: what would Steve have done? Exactly the opposite of Steve’s independent thinking, one of his biggest strengths.
Yet I have to say that my vision of the tech industry —and, yes, the world— has changed. It’s like something is missing. Not the actual Steve Jobs human being, whom we had painfully learned to accept was not eternal. But what he meant. For me, it was the promise of a better, magical future. However stupid Dan Lyons’s writings have become, there was some genius in a few of his catch phrases when he run his former parody blog, Fake Steve Jobs. One of them was how he phrased Steve’s mission: “Restoring a sense of childlike wonder” to our lives. And this rang true to me. This is how I had felt watching every one of his keynotes (OK, except that iPod hifi one). I distinctly remember the thrill of the announcement of the G4 Cube in 2000. Of the iMac G4 in 2002. Of the Power Mac G3 in 2003. The MacBook Air. The iPad. And of course, the bewildered amazement experienced when the iPhone came out. “Is this even possible they built such a thing?”, I thought at the time.
Those years of successive stunners —not necessarily commercial successes, mind you— had built in me a certainty that I did not have to worry about the future. As long as there was a Steve Jobs, I was certain that a great and inspiring product was sure to delight me some time in the future. Something exciting and unexpected was surely around the corner. I would lie if I didn’t say that certainty has faded.
Looking back, I feel like a spoiled child. I was lucky enough to live the great saga of Steve Jobs. I saw this man realize his vision of computing. With the launch of the iPad in 2010, he achieved his thirty-year-old desire to build a simple, smart, beautiful and yes, magical computer —at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, as he often liked to say. It’s almost as if he was taken away after his mission on Earth was accomplished. This was not obvious, this could have not happened. We should all feel lucky that there was a man forceful and genius enough to put our industry in that direction. It is now our job to keep the flame going.
Thanks Steve. We are forever in your debt.
New Movies collection added to the site
I added a new section to the site last week. While I was trying to decide where to host the new videos that I recently discovered, I realized that the current sub sections of the Movies section were not appropriate to categorize the growing collection of the website.
So I created a new one: it’s called Misc Movies & Recordings. I wish I had found a better title, but it’s really what it is: a pot pourri of all videos (and sound recordings, which are new) that do not belong either in Keynotes, Best Moments, or Steve-isms.
So, a recap:
– Steve Jobs Keynotes is unchanged and will present you with the most complete online collection of keynotes performed by Steve Jobs known to man. By “Keynotes” I mean product announcements and press conferences that Steve gave as the head of Apple or NeXT.
– Steve-isms is also unchanged, and is still a collection of montages of Steve Jobs’s favorite expressions, stage tricks and gimmicks that give some perspective to his long career as a showman.
– Best Onstage Moments has been reconfigured to be what it was meant to be: a real collection of cool moments to remember from Steve’s career, either because they were historic, dramatic, or just plain funny.
To perfect that, I removed the video Tour of the first retail store as well as the Stanford commencement speech, and added a few that belonged in this section yet were glaringly missing. Those new videos are:
- Introducing Macintosh, the famous moment from the January 24, 1984 introduction
- Peace with Microsoft, the short sentence that followed the talk from Bill Gates at Macworld Boston 1997
- G4 Cube unveiling, when Steve first showed off the Cube at Macworld NY 2000
- iMac G4 unveiling, complete with the design thinking lowdown, from Macworld 2002
- The death of Mac OS 9, an astonishing show performed by SJ at WWDC 2002
- iPod nano unveiling, one of Steve Jobs’s most creative product introduction, in September 2005
- and the hyper famous (and deservedly so) iPhone unveiling at Macworld 2007
I hope you enjoy re-watching those videos as much as I do.
– The brand new section is Misc Movies & Recordings, and is home to a number of videos I had long hoped to put on the site. You can find over there short clips, such as a nervous Steve Jobs on a TV set in 1981; promotional videos, such as the first retail store video, or the heart-breaking Think Different ad with Steve as narrator; but also product demos, homages, occasional speeches… and also sound recordings, which I host on SoundCloud. There are three of them so far, but I expect that collection to grow. I have included the recent find of an hour-long speech and Q&A given by Steve at the International Design Conference in 1983 (more on that in a later post).
Finally, as indicated on the new page, I do have a number of videos (30 at the time of this writing) in the Interviews section of the site: click on the “video” filter to only see them. I decided to keep them on that page, because I did not want to encumber the Movies section with too many videos, and because I think they fit in with the rest of the interviews. Some of these video interviews even have transcripts, that best belong with their written counterparts. By the way, I also added a new interview recently, basically a mashup of extracts from Triumph of the Nerds.
Happy birthday!
As many of you probably know, Steve Jobs was born on February 24. He would have turned 57 today.
What you may not know, and shame on you for that, is that, coincidentally, I —perhaps the greatest Jobs-fanboy that ever lived— was also born on that day, some 32 years later. And, less coincidentally, I launched the first iteration of this website on my 19th birthday (Steve’s 51st, follow please!), on 24 February 2006.
I had set a deadline for myself to launch the new all about Steve Jobs.com no later than today, its 6th birthday. I’m glad I could meet it.
We’ve come a long way, baby!
Status report
Three weeks have passed since Steve has left us.
Never before in my life have I felt that time is our most precious resource.
Right now I am facing several time constraints. As most of you know, all my work related to Steve Jobs is done in my so-called ‘spare time’, time that is not blocked by professional or social imperatives. I am striving to use that time as best as I can to achieve two things:
- first, keep up with the continuous influx of new information, new pictures, new stories about Steve that have come out since his death. Right now this includes reading and analyzing the much-anticipated biography by Walter Isaacson.
- also keep working on the next version of all about Steve Jobs.com which has been in the works for the past two months. Obviously the two are linked, because that version will integrate, in one form or another, the aforementioned content.
The idea of a completely refurbished and much more complete website came to me this summer. It was reinforced and re-thought out in the wake of Steve’s resignation as Apple CEO. Then I understood his career ‘as we knew it’ was over. The website had to reflect that. Mind you, I never expected him to leave us so soon. But the outpouring of emotions from all over the world that followed his passing, which translated to record-breaking traffic to all about Steve Jobs.com, was only more evidence to me that I was on the right track. The world can’t get enough of Steve Jobs — and that’s a good sign.
I like to think that my work on the website is similar to Apple’s approach of designing a product. This is why for this new version I am rewriting the code and redesigning the visual elements from scratch. That’s also why I will not speak up on a release date, as I don’t want to be constrained by my own promises. I will only release it when I am proud of the result. Let me just say that I think you will all enjoy the enhancements, both in terms of content (some of it badly needed an update) and of form.
Obviously, I do not have time to update the current website and this blog in addition. It will likely stay in this current form until the new website is ready. If you are eager to keep up with the latest news on Steve Jobs — and boy, there sure are things not to miss — I suggest you follow me on Twitter. This is the main medium through which I will communicate both SJ news and news on the website. You can also easily reach out to me through that service.
About blogs, biographies and apricot orchards
I have been thinking about the next version of the website for some time, and it’s time for Phase I to roll out.
I have moved the website to a new host last week. It should now be faster and more reliable. And today, I moved the blog to that same host. It is now really 100% under all about Steve Jobs.com, since all things Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to be catching on, and is just too confusing. Even though I am keeping the URL allthingsstevejobs.com, it will now point to localhost:8888/sqltest/blog. You might have noticed the better cosmetic integration with the rest of the website too.
I don’t think any of you has missed the two big pieces of Steve Jobs news from the past two weeks:
- the city of Cupertino has published the plans for the upcoming Apple ‘spaceship’ campus. It’s not bigger than the Pentagon — but close. If you’ve had a thorough look at the plans, Steve’s favored apricot orchards are showing up in the north east garden of the campus (see picture below).
- the biggest news is of course the release date of the Isaacson biography (the authorized one, not that fake Chinese one) which has been advanced to November 21. That’s right, it’s just three months away! Get the whole story from Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Fortune 2.0.
Batch of 11 new vintage Steve Jobs pictures
With the thousands of pictures of Steve Jobs that are already present on the website, you might think that it’s impossible for me to find new ones apart from new Apple events and iAppearances of iSteve.
But no (and frankly it continues to amaze me) — I sometimes stumble across never-seen-(by-me)-before pictures of Steve’s past, and it’s always refreshing.
Today is one of those occasions:
- the first two pics are from the very early days of Apple, 1976. They’re of very fine quality, for once.
- the following two from 1980 and 1981
- the following pic with John Sculley and Woz, is from the Apple IIc introduction event in February 1984. It is not new but of better quality than the previous version, and it’s corrected, as I had (like many) misattributed it to the Mac introduction of January 24
- the following two are from the April 24 1984 Apple event (anyone knows what that one was?)
- the following is from Apple’s Annual Shareholders Meeting of 1985
- the following from 1988
- the second to last is very interesting. I only had a cropped version of it. This is the only pic I’ve found of Steve with Peter Van Cuylenburg, who was brought in as COO of NeXT by investor Canon in 1992. He only stayed one year, as he betrayed Steve (even worse than Sculley) by calling up Sun’s Scott McNealy to have him buy NeXT and install him as CEO. It was a professionally fatal blow to Steve.
- the last pic is from Steve’s ‘wildest wilderness year’, 1994. He is posing with Morgan Stanley execs for a NYT article about NeXTSTEP. I have found the article in the NYT archive, have a look at it, it’s pretty telling that Steve is barely mentioned in there…
Our website featured in the San Jose Mercury News
This happened… whew, two weeks ago already.
On March 11, I got an email from Mike Cassidy, columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. He said he wanted to speak with me about the website. We talked using Skype (on iPhone, on my part) a couple of days later. The conversation itself lasted for almost an hour. I was surprised by Mike’s interest, especially since I thought he wanted the story to feature in a larger piece about Apple or Steve Jobs in general.
The following week, the article was published on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the San Jose Mercury News. For those of you that don’t know, the Mercury News is the local newspaper of San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley. It’s basically Steve Jobs’ local newspaper! Gasp. Pictured right is a scanned version of that first page.
The online version of the article is here: Cassidy: Romain Moisescot makes Steve Jobs a full-time job
For those of you wondering — Mike was very polite and courteous during the interview. All that is mentioned in the article we talked about, including the sentence ‘Yes, the site can feel a little creepy’ which he mentioned as an echo of Fake Steve’s 2006 post (which I am very proud of). My stance on the ‘creepiness’ of all bout Steve Jobs.com is that I want to cover really *all* about Steve Jobs. However I have the greatest respect for Steve Jobs, so I never cross certain lines on the website or the blog (if you see what I mean — especially after the recent health episodes…). But for example since anyone can find Steve’s home address simply by typing it into Google Maps, why not have it properly and neatly presented on my website? That’s why I decided to cover more of Steve’s private life on the website for the past two years. But I don’t think that there’s anything borderline on the website.
Anyway, to come back to the article, my fear of course was what would come out of it. My conversation with Mike was pretty long and I knew he would have to select what he would write about. He did choose some aspects of our conversation that were anecdotal, and distorted them a bit; I’m referring to the anecdote with the “Contact” button, the truth being that I put it back because I am more often than not amused by the emails I get from people who think I am/know Steve Jobs. But overall the article is very close to the truth and I am very happy with its portrayal of the website.
Ha, and the picture — no, it wasn’t a professional photographer who flew from San Jose to my home in Paris to take a picture of me. It’s actually by one of my best friends who is also a pretty good amateur photographer at his lost hours.
Anyway, an interesting remark to close this narcissistic piece. Here are two screenshots of my Analytics stats: (more…)