Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Some juicy information about an interview Steve Jobs did with Fortune.

- That deal where Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting Apple stock is now worth well over $1 billion.

- Schlender describes Mac OS X as “the software equivalent of a cross between a Porsche and an Abrams tank: an operating system with sleek, animated graphics and an abundance of useful and novel features built on top of industrial-strength code.”

- Adobe blew it: “In a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. ‘They said flat-out no,’ Jobs recalls. ‘We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, ‘Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we’re just going to have to do this ourselves,’” Schlender reports.

- That started Apple’s Applications Software Division which is now a 1,000-engineer-strong group.

- Schlender writes, “Jobs sees applications like iLife as the centerpiece of his marketing strategy, which is to differentiate the Macintosh from Windows PCs by positioning it as a complete multimedia machine. Right out of the box, the Mac with iLife gives users (especially the creative types) everything they need for creating, editing, managing, and playing digital content. While comparable applications are available for Windows machines, matching what Apple initially throws in free costs hundreds of dollars, and the various Windows programs don’t interact easily with one another. “Everyone in every corner of the software business could learn a lot from iLife,” says Bill Joy, the legendary computer scientist, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.”

- “‘I felt like a dope,’ says Jobs, thinking back to summer 2000, when his fixation on perfecting video editing on the Mac distracted him from noticing that millions of kids were using computers and CD burners to make audio CDs and to download digital songs called MP3s from illegal online services like Napster. Yes, even Jobs, the technological visionary of his generation, occasionally gets caught looking in the wrong direction. ‘I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up,’” Schlender writes. Apple did more than catch up, as we all know.

There’s so much information in the full article – it’s an embarrassment of riches. There are the stories of how iTunes came to be (started from scratch and pounded out in less than four months), how the iPod was born in November 2001 (another crash project that yielded the iPod in just nine months), and the enormous challenge of creating the iTunes Music Store.

Darn, I wish I was a subscriber to Fortune so I could read the whole thing. I will have to check it out on the newstand I guess. Lots of good information in it.

It’s kind of funny that Apple missed the impact of MP3s, etc. Boy they sure did a great job in capitalizing on it! And I’m very glad to hear that they are “casting a shadow” over Microsoft. They deserve to and it’s much better for consumers if they do.

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