the Onda

Thanks to the east-to-west coast time shift, I got the pleasure of a 5am run down the Embarcadero today. There was this crazy fog that made it impossible to see more than 50 feet ahead— so thick in fact that if it was a Hannah Barbera cartoon someone would have been cutting circles out of it with a knife.

As I ran I was thinking about how the last time I saw Steve Jobs speak live was in January of 1999. I remember because I had just gone back for my second semester of grad school at Stanford and was wholly disillusioned with the concept of more school. He was announcing the color iMacs and naturally some Apple folks had arranged all of the different colors in a semi-circle behind the speaker's podium. I remember his two messages: 1. that people were ready for simple computers that looked great and just let them do their stuff (which at the time consisted mainly of connecting to the Internet), and 2. that after a year back at Apple, his biggest surprise was not how many bright and motivated people were still there (he expected that), but how much wasted effort was taking place, especially under the auspices of "research," or as he called it at the time "science projects" a term that has stuck with me since.

I also distinctly remember sitting next to some guy who was getting his Phd in something that sounded completely foreign to me, "VLSI modeling" or some such thing, who totally pooh-poohed the entire talk. His two retorts were that "simple" was a marketing slogan and not a strategy and that cutting R&D was death for any real tech company.

Look at things now: $200M dollars of research later, we've got the iPhone, the iPod was a phenomenon, and even on yesterday's flight out here I counted just as many Apple laptops as I did Wintel machines.

He said it best himself in a commencement talk he gave to the Stanford undergrads six years after that talk I saw:

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Now off to the keynote prep...

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