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Apple's World Wide Developers Conference 1997 with Steve Jobs

superapple4ever · 445.7K views · 2011-06-06 · 1:11:10

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Overview

Steve Jobs at Apple's 1997 WWDC, shortly after his return, taking developer questions and describing Apple's direction. He discusses the Newton and says to start from the customer experience and work back to technology.

On Hacker News

Held up as a masterclass in handling a crisis and a hostile Q&A, and quoted for starting from customer experience.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2012–2022

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What people said

resu_nimda · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation

My favorite Jobs masterclass is his talk at Apple's developer conference in 1997 [1]. He had just returned to the company, and a lot of people were unhappy with him and/or Apple at the time. He decided to do an hour long off-the-cuff Q&A session with the developers. Famously, one of the questioners was harsh and insulting, and he handled it with grace. I honestly can't think of another tech CEO that could have pulled off this performance. Maybe Bill Gates? I get the sense that the reality distortion field was very real because he was so clear and eloquent about his mission, it never needed to be scripted or rehearsed, it just came out of him at all times. [1] [VIDEO]

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wsc981 · 2012-07 · Recommendation

Apple was in a terrible situation around the end of the 90's. Steve Jobs just became CEO and had to manage the crisis, both internally as well as externally (developers for Apple's platform). This talk at WWDC 97 shows how Steve Jobs dealt with the crisis. There are some parallels with the article. Steve Jobs @ WWDC 97: [VIDEO]

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DonHopkins · 2022-09 · Reference

That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. [LINK] >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo [LIN

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