“What is the Genius? It is imagination, intuition, decision and speed of execution“: This is the definition of Perozzi from Amici My.
What are the ingredients of the Success? “10% luck, 20% skills, 15% concentrated willpower, 5% pleasure, 50% pain”: This is the formula that Shinoda of Linkin Park sings. Genius and Success. And then there are people who transcend definitions such as those of Perozzi and Shinoda. They are those few people who over the centuries have created history with quantum leaps of scientific / technological progress, transforming our everyday life. Steve Jobs it was one of them, and I touched it 16 years ago.
Anniversaries
Fifteen years of the iPhone, the phone that changed the world
by Bruno Ruffilli
April 2006 – Stanford
At the time, I was studying at Stanford for my Masters in Computer Science. I have so many anecdotes, and this one I’m about to tell is one of those I remember with the greatest intensity.
Among the courses I was following was “EE353 – Business Management for Electrical Engineers and Computer Scientists”: a course not in Computer Science in the strict sense, but still extremely formative. We analyzed the operational functioning of large and small technology companies, their strengths and weaknesses, their sources of income and understand if they were sustainable over time. Fred Gibbons he was the professor of this course, which he still teaches today. During the first lesson he presented himself simply as an investor, and he proudly remembered some of his former students: “a few years ago there was Larry Page (later founder of Google) to take this course and sat there; shortly before I had as a student Jerry Yang (later founder of Yahoo!) and sat there, and before that Sabeer Bhatia (later founder of Hotmail) and sat there”.
The curious story of the first iPhone without “copy and paste”
The course was enlightening. A few chatter and a lot of substance: for example, after having gutted Flextronics (electronics manufacturing company) the professor asked us: “would you invest in this company as it is now? If the answer were no and you were the CEO what would you do?“. There I understood that America had now lost control of hardware components, and that traditional technology companies needed to change to survive (as IBM did for example).
Another 400 graduates at the Apple Academy. Lisa Jackson: “Naples is the Italian capital of developers”
by Bruno Ruffilli
But it was another question that I remember as it was yesterday. It was April 2006. We were studying the case of Apple and how the company had transformed over the previous 10 years. At the end of the lesson the professor asked us: “guys, suppose Apple decides to build a phone. Today it produces iPods to listen to music and iTunes as software to manage it: let’s imagine that Apple continues to use this nomenclature and that you call this phone iPhone. What do you think it will be like?”
A little background note. At that moment the iPhone NON still existed. The iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, and would be released on June 29, 2007.
Software
Apple, Google and the monopoly of operating systems
by Simone Cosimi
In April 2006, in that class of Stanford Electronics and Computer Engineering students, no one suspected the revolution that would take place the following year.
“In your opinion, what will this hypothetical Apple iPhone look like?”: The professor asked again.
I remember well the answers some students gave:
- “It will be a beautiful cell phone with bright colors” (response from a guy influenced by the iconic iMac G3 with which Steve Jobs resurrected Apple)
- “No no, it will be something purely software. There is no profit in hardware, and so Apple will build something like Skype. Indeed, maybe he will buy Skype directly from eBay “
- “I believe instead it will be a niche product. Steve Jobs is no ordinary person, and he will have identified special needs where to break into a crowded market like that of telephones. Maybe he thought of a phone to use in the bathroom, water resistant, that you can use while taking a shower “
Faced with answers like this, I noticed that the professor contained himself, between amused and startled.
I didn’t give an answer, also because I didn’t understand what Apple, at the time a niche computer company with the Mac and leader of music players with the iPod, had to do with phones.
June 2007 – San Francisco
I gave the answer to me the following year, in the summer of 2007, when I saw this iPhone materialize for the first time in San Francisco. And there I realized that Fred Gibbons, my former professor, probably had some news of Steve Jobs’ plans and had done a social experiment with us.
Result: Steve Jobs, an undergraduate with no real technical training, had overtaken an entire class of Stanford’s top students in conceiving the future of technology. But these weren’t the only people Steve Jobs outclassed. To watch and relate to the mocking laugh of Steve Ballmer, at the time CEO of Microsoft as the successor of Bill Gates: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized (by telecom companies)? With telephone plan? I said this is the most expensive phone in the world, and it has no appeal in the business world because it doesn’t have a keyboardwhich makes it a bad way to send emails”.
Statements like these make it clear the difference in height between a manager like Steve Ballmer, unable to understand the future under his eyes, and an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs who builds the future instead.
October 2011
Steve Jobs died a few years later of cancer on October 5, 2011. In those days, many videos about Steve Jobs’ life began to circulate, some from remote archives covering the years of Apple’s first rise.
One in particular struck me: the video of the 1983 Apple conference.
You remember The Pairs Game? It was an American broadcast (original, The Dating Game) famous in the 1980s, made popular also in Italy by Marco Predolin. In the show, a “hunter” (man or woman) asked questions to three people, and in the end he chose one based on the answers given. Simple game, which Steve Jobs jokingly imitated at the 1983 Apple conference.
This was the video, on Repubblica, that I saw the day after Steve Jobs died. I invite you to watch it.
After the initial show, Steve Jobs introduces the three men who aspire to his hand. “Software CEO, introduce yourself”:
- “My name is Bill Gates. I am chairman of Microsoft, and in 1984 Microsoft expects that 50% of the revenues will come from Macintosh software ”.
- “Hi, I am Mitch Kapor, president of Lotus. Let’s make a product called 1-2-3 “(my note: Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet par excellence of the time, then overwhelmed by the next person’s Excel …)
But it was the first of three people called by Steve Jobs who literally made me jump out of my chair.
- “Ciao, Fred Gibbonspresident of Software Publishing Corporation “
Thing??? My professor from a few years ago at Stanford? That quiet, kind person who modestly called himself an investor? There I discovered that he had created the first Apple graphic presentation program for business use, a world leader in the market until the early 90s, later overtaken by PowerPoint by Bill Gates.
Moving forward in the Repubblica video, we see a new rare public meeting of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 2007, in which they greet and applaud Fred Gibbons.
And there I immediately remembered the question that my former professor asked us years before, and I realized that he really knew everything: “suppose Apple decides to build a phone. The iPhone. How will it be in your opinion?”
He must have thought: “I have 25 Master’s and Ph.D. students in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Stanford in front of me, by far the best university in the world in the sector. And none of them have even come close to what the iPhone will be … “
June 2022 – today
Many years have passed, but I periodically hear from Fred Gibbons, my former professor. Certainly not because of the history of Apple, but because he was the person who gave me some of the most valuable life advice he has ever received. In times of difficulty and uncertainty, relying on the experience of a mentor is of great help in resolving doubts and making important decisions.
Between a discussion on the factors on which to work to relaunch Italy and the importance of a modern Public Administration to give a boost to economic growth, I reminded him that exactly 15 years have passed since the launch of the iPhone.
My professor confirmed to me his amazement in the answers given many years earlier in class, but he also added that he had made mistakes in evaluating his life: for example, even though he himself was among the very first investors of Yahoo !, he did not stay instead impressed by that student of his named Larry Page who later ended up creating Google. But he also told me that there was no doubt about a force of nature like Steve Jobs. He was of another category, unique.
What is the genius? What is Success? I don’t know how to define Perozzi or Shinoda before. But I know what a Pioneer who redefines history: that person who opens up boundless prairies of new worlds that no one previously imagined existed, and which now seem simple and indispensable after he has shown them to you. Steve Jobs was THE Pioneer: after the Internet, I find it hard to think of something equally disruptive and which after 15 years is an integral part of our everyday life. And above all that he was conceived and driven by a single person.
Just yesterday I was thinking about this: if in 1997 I was glued to the chair in my first online battles in Diablo, today in the subway I play Diablo Immortal on the palm of my hand. A little thing of fun, nothing compared to more serious activities with which the iPhone and smartphones empower our lives. But it conveys the idea of mega evolution within a single generation.
And it’s an important lesson to remember whenever you come across Pioneers: Steve Ballmer’s mocking laugh echoes even more bitterly today that we hear it on an iPhone.