Complete Apple WWDC | Steve Jobs talk and answer developers questions | 1997

> * Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting. I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations, like the unveiling of the iPhone. Every word he said was meticulously planned and very rehearsed.* Before Apple entered its iPod era, Jobs could do a reasonable job of taking questions from a technical audience ▶ this video

For those that haven't seen it the whole thing is worth it: ▶ this video This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be. Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.

I personally feel there's a big overlap between Jobs and Musk—but none more so than the fact that they had the key combination of sufficient intelligence, clear vision, high self-confidence and (most importantly) strong influence over corporate direction. One of my favourite Steve Jobs quotes is just after he returned to Apple and began dismantling the massive pile of legacy cruft. When asked about a particular (terrible) technology that Apple scrapped, Steve went on a particularly insightful rant that holds numerous insights into what he believes to be key to a successful company. And history proved those insights to be exactly right. The quote— "Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good. Because at least some DECISIONS are being made along the way, and we'll find the mistakes and we'll fix them." ▶ this video In other words, as long as you're right often enough, being decisive is more important than being right every single time. Musk strikes me as sharing that mentality. He's right often enough that it's more efficient to "fix" the mistakes than to suffocate big decisions with big committees. And it's not like any big committee is sure to be right more often than Jobs/Elon anyway. (That YouTube video is fantastic IMHO. Watched with the benefit of hindsight it shows that Apple's success wasn't an accident. Steve really did understand the formula that ultimately led to it.)

If we're going to mine ancient history, lets put up a disclaimer that any company that exists for a 40+ years and is trying to invent new things is going to change their mind about stuff. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't be very good at inventing things. There's context to consider with Apple in the 90s, which was weeks from bankruptcy. Here's SJ's rather famous response at WWDC 97 to why OpenDoc was killed, and a little later on he describes his opinion of Newton [1]. Hard to disagree with the sentiments. Killing OpenDoc and Newton was a way to keep the company alive and prepare for the next big thing. 4 years later, out pops the iPod. 10 years later, the iPhone. [1] ▶ this video

Thanks for linking to the 1997 WDC (only 1 "w"!) Q&A with Jobs. For those hoping to cut to the chase, the timecode for Jobs' prompt and the hapless attendee who asks "What about OpenDoc" is 4:26 [0] The four and a half minutes prior are interesting (thoughtful introduction, Jobs' framing of the session and his brief thoughts about Apple's current position), but what he says in response to the questions following the OpenDoc question is deeply thought-provoking. Many of the ideas Jobs shares show the general shape of recent and current Apple business decisions macOS and iCloud, for example. Especially interesting are his discussions of NIH syndrome, networking, and more. Thanks, twoodfin, for pointing to this session which punctuates Jobs' return to Apple the year previous. [0] ▶ this video

Somewhat famously, the first question Steve Jobs took at his developer Q&A at WWDC ‘97 was about OpenDoc & the bullet he put in its head. ▶ this video Honestly, the “component software model” had at least hundreds of millions of dollars in development thrown at it by all the major players and went essentially nowhere at the application level. It had some nice architectural properties for developers, and COM at least has had a long and prosperous history as a building block. But it’s hard to imagine any possible world where business or consumers spent a significant fraction of their software dollars on components rather than full applications. So Steve was probably right.

I've heard both of those stories from multiple places. I don't know exactly how you'd define "technical," he clearly wasn't a strong engineer, but I have heard multiple examples of him managing technical things. I remember around the same time he was known for memorizing chips and vendors very very well that he could source them very cheaply. I think a good firsthand example is a one hour q&a with developers he did in 1997 soon after returning to Apple: ▶ this video He doesn't necessarily show off deep technical knowledge, but he is able to discuss strategy about technology directly with developers. Managing technology is his competitive advantage.