Steve Jobs: "I was scared. I thought we missed it." Apple's sudden shift from home movies to music.

Exponent 003 excerpt

From the Exponent podcast, episode 003:
http://exponent.fm/episode-003-valiantly-defending-jobs/

I transcribed and edited it lightly for readability.
Ben Thompson is speaking:

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Anyone who hasn’t developed any software is always like
“Why don’t you just build it yourself.” As if it will be ready tomorrow.

Apple has felt itself behind in music before. And that was in 1999.

This was actually dating back to [my time] at Apple University. Like
anyone who’s worked at Apple I’m still scared to talk about it. I focused
on this specific episode for my project for the summer, understanding
Apple’s change and response to this episode. I spent a lot of time on
this and talked to a lot of the relevant people in this.

In 1999 Steve Jobs is on stage introducing a new iMac w/ Firewire and
Quicktime and iMovie. And he said that iMovie was going to be to the
Mac what desktop publishing had been to the Mac ten years previously
or 15 years previously. Meaning it was going to be a reason to own.
And the whole company was aligned around this: the hardware side, the
software side was all about making Macs the best for making home movies.

Fast forward 14 months and Jobs is on stage saying “We have a vision
for the Mac. It’s gonna be the digital hub. And where are we gonna
start? We’re gonna start with music.” It was a complete change.

There were shades of the digital hub in the movie strategy, but it
was a very clear shift in prioritization. And Jobs has been quoted
as been saying – it’s one of my favorite Jobs quotes – he’s like
“I was scared. I thought we missed it. We were making macs, they
didn’t have CD burners. We didn’t have a good music program. And
meanwhile kids are going crazy on Napster.” To him that was one
of the scariest moments of his comeback, realizing “crap, this
ought to be Apple’s domain and we missed it.”

Apple completed changed everything, took all these people off iMovie.
All the “stars” from iMovie got demoted. A ton of internal upheaval.
And they went out and bought SoundJam. They didn’t have time to
build their own. The market need was so pressing they went out and
bought something and adapted it. And in that digital hub speech,
that was the day they released iTunes.

A month later Jon Rubenstein was in Japan visiting Toshiba. They
said “hey we have these tiny hard drives we don’t know what to do
with them.” Then came the iPod. The iPod was developed in six months.

For all the talk about Apple being diligent and waiting until it’s
perfect, Apple had a fire under their ass in 2000 and 2001. Because
they recognized “this is where we need to be, we are missing it,
and we are gonna do whatever it takes — including acquiring
companies, including developing something in six months and releasing
it — because it’s important and that opportunity is now.”

Companies don’t make opportunities.  They don’t make markets. They
*recognize* markets and take advantage of them. I think it’s a very
subtle distinction and it’s something that Jobs always understood.
And he understood it then, and that’s why he did whatever it took
to seize that opportunity.

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