{"id":62024,"date":"2012-10-13T11:59:12","date_gmt":"2012-10-13T09:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=62024"},"modified":"2012-10-13T12:01:07","modified_gmt":"2012-10-13T10:01:07","slug":"steve-wozniak-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/62024-steve-wozniak-interview.html","title":{"rendered":"Steve Wozniak interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALEC HOGG:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s Thursday October 11 2012 and in this Boardroom Talk special podcast, Steve Wozniak, Woz, as he\u2019s better known, the co-founder of Apple, is having a chat with us on a visit to Johannesburg. Have you been to South Africa before, Woz?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>I have been here before, I\u2019ve been to Darwin a year or two ago to speak for the government and I was here on a couple of vacations 20 years ago, back in the Apartheid days.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>So I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve seen lots of changes?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, I couldn\u2019t get around hugely this time, one time I actually got to ride the Blue Train to Cape Town and saw Cape Town. So I can\u2019t really compare it that well, it just seems like everything that I\u2019ve encountered here seems to be working, getting fairly modernised.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>It will be lovely to see you back some time in the future. But really just to go into the meat of this conversation, many people in South Africa have read Walter Isaacson\u2019s biography on Steve Jobs, your partner, your school friend, one-time best friend, how do you interpret it? Some people think that maybe he was a little rough on Steve but from your perspective?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, I didn\u2019t read it because I kind of was there. Steve always gave that impression in many different ways around the company and it\u2019s actually well known, it\u2019s like historic but this book was written with a very sense of deep honesty, in other words Steve. I know Walter, I\u00a0[UNCLEAR 1:25]\u00a0very closely and Steve really made it a point that he wanted people to talk about him in the real terms and he didn\u2019t want to get in and edit it and fine tune it and explain things. He really wanted to come out rough reality and I appreciate that, I like things when they\u2019re genuine, so it\u2019s a high sense of honesty. Steve just had this way of (a) being very bright but always wanting to see himself as the brightest one in the room and everybody else\u2026it was easy to discredit others but he liked people who stood up to him too.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>And you did?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>No, I was really peaceful, I just did my engineering great, so I didn\u2019t go into running the company, I didn\u2019t want to from day one, we actually had discussions about it, we defined our roles. But I\u2019m not that happy Steve did it, I think we could have had the great, great products that make my life wonderful that some of which I was responsible for starting the company with a great culture. But Steve Jobs was so deeply responsible for some of today\u2019s great products and I\u2019m very thankful for them but I don\u2019t think he had to be that rough and rude with people, he could have been a nice guy and accomplished just as much. If you have a brain you can get the right things done regardless of how you do them.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>Perhaps he had different influences, again looking over the book ahead of this discussion, your father, Jerry, who himself was a brilliant engineer, must have had a big influence on your life?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>My father had the biggest influence on me of anyone, not only in terms of electronics, which he taught me some when I needed, had questions, how does a transistor perform a decision-making function and he would go on a whiteboard and show me that stuff. But more in terms of values of life, everything for how do you consider different things and his method was more as a teacher. I became a teacher secretly for eight years, no press or anything because I\u2019d always wanted to, I believe so highly in teachers. But his approach was present all the sides of an issue educational and let a person think for themselves to come to their final decisions. In other words, don\u2019t enforce your values on others and I\u2019m very, very thankful for that, everything that I am in life I can think back to discussions and words that I heard from my father that fit the way I think.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>One of those values, according to Isaacson anyway, is never lie, be extremely honest.<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Yes, he was like that to all the kids in our family and to the neighbourhood. He wasn\u2019t like a super hard demanding tyrant or a dictator, he just explained that that\u2019s who you are and that\u2019s the most important thing in life. I wound up really weird thinking out life for myself at a later point in time, coming from a different point of reasoning to the same conclusion that honesty was the apex of all that is good and that\u2019s how you should judge good by. Now, later in life, past when I was 20 years old, sometimes it\u2019s very, very hard to get to what is the real truth.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>They were an amazing generation, weren\u2019t they, that group. Again, another biography that gives us an insight into that is Warren Buffett, who speaks about his father in a similar tone.<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Yeah, my father worked at Lockheed, which was a very important thing during (a) the Cold War with Russia and the need to be able to launch nuclear weapons from submarines and somebody had to design these kinds of missiles. Then we got into the Space Race with the Soviet Union and everything that went into rockets. So Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California was a real big place but it was the type of thing going on. Now, an awful lot of the engineers there developed characteristics of just being\u2026they had to be very secretive about what they did at work, my father could never really tell us what he was doing, it was very common for them to become drinkers and alcoholics and be a little rough and mean on occasion around the home.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>The other thing that he taught you, again according to the biography, was an aversion to extreme ambition. Do you think if you\u2019d been brought up differently you might have played a different role at Apple?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>I don\u2019t really think that my father taught me an aversion to extreme ambition, he did teach me things about, well, it was better to do things on your own and not have to have a lot of credit, pay for things with the money you have, kind of a little bit of a conservative financial thinking that way. As far as ambition, oh my gosh, no, he was a great engineer, he\u2019d moved up, he was very highly respected and well paid at Lockheed. I came to my own conclusion and it was really sort of inspired by I grew up in the counter culture movement days and the Vietnam War and thinking out right and wrong became very much a pacifist and became very much against politics as a result but it was very independent thinking. So I didn\u2019t see politics as really the best solutions to life. For example, do I think that the president of the United States is the most powerful person in the world? No, I think the CEO of Apple Computer is because the president will do something and nobody agrees whether it was good or bad for the world and history hundreds of years later you can\u2019t really agree it was good or bad for the world but every single thing Apple does is good and takes people to a better place in life and moves steps forward.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>Was that what you decided, maybe go back a bit because often those who start companies remember the early days as the best, as the most fun, most adventure and indeed the ones they\u2019d like to recapture.<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>I remember not only those early days of Apple but I remember my entire electronics history, coming up and building little projects on the side that had no reason other than to satisfy my own desire to have certain things and to show off to others, very shy. Steve Jobs found many ways to turn my designs into money, one after another after another. The Apple II, which really built Apple Computer into the great company it is that really was the sixth time that I just developed something because I felt I wanted some joy in my life and wanted to build something neat. I never wanted to pursue it in the sense of a business and figuring out how to charge people money for it. I was so shy, I could never in my life – partly my ethical upbringing from my father \u2013 I could never be accused of taking advantage of somebody for money. So I really didn\u2019t want to sell things and if I wanted to sell them I\u2019d rather give them away or sell it at a very, very low price. So I\u2019m not the businessman, I\u2019m the engineer, the inventor, who wants to go in the laboratory and create the things.<\/p>\n

\"Steve<\/a>

Steve Wozniak<\/p><\/div>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>And Jobs was awed by your engineering ability and you on your side, as you\u2019ve just I guess reiterated, awed by Jobs\u2019 business acumen?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>His business acumen was not really\u2026he was like a young 20 year old when he started Apple, we were in our young 20s, we had no business experience but Steve had this personality where he would try to involve himself in every key major decision going on in every part of the company, every discipline, every department. He just wanted to be there up at the top, even if he didn\u2019t have a title of CEO he wanted to treat himself as that way, the founder was that important. Me, on the other hand, I felt it was better to not pretend I know how to do parts of a company that people have been doing for 20, 30 years, they know how to do it so well, why am I going to open my mouth and say let\u2019s paint the box red instead of green. I decided to keep my mouth shut and be thought a fool rather than open it and leave no doubt because if I did the engineering I knew that I was so skilled, nobody could beat me at it and I was essential and I could accomplish what I set out to do, I was really goal-oriented. So I could never fail being in engineering and I just decided\u2026actually when we started Apple we had those discussions, I would remain in engineering only, I did not want to go up the org chart, I did not want to run a company and it was really I didn\u2019t like the politics of having to tell people bad things and fire them. So thank God for Steve Jobs and I\u2019m very thankful in my life, especially when he got the maturity when he came back, in those early days of Apple he was just floating around trying to be like in charge of things but we had failure after failure after failure after failure except for the Apple II. Really we didn\u2019t have a huge success to now grow the company and the capitalisation beyond the Apple II days until his return when he came back very mature about how to run a business, how to organise and deal with all the different departments and to hire good people and watch inventory and all the things you have to do to make a business successful. That\u2019s really what led\u2026plus he still had that brilliance and that eye for what is good in life, what products are good, luckily he wasn\u2019t an engineer. It was lucky he was around me because I was so good an engineer he would never try to be one, he would never try to write any code after that. But he always looked at the world and the products from the point of view of somebody who is not technical and is afraid of not being as good as others at it and that\u2019s 90% of us.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>Woz, it was interesting reading about your early days and how you loved practical jokes and there are a whole bunch of them in the book that I\u2019m sure when you looked at them again you had a quiet chuckle. Did you ever do that to Steve Jobs, particularly at the time just before you left in 1985, it sounds like Apple at that time with Sculley around and Jobs just about to leave himself was not a terribly nice place to work?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>I\u2019m not sure what the question is?<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>You seem to be a guy with lots of fun in your life and in \u201985 at Apple maybe it wasn\u2019t that much fun.<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>At Hewlett Packard and Apple, oh no, no, having fun, playing jokes every day, thinking up practical joke ideas, talking about them, laughing, whether you did them or not that was a huge part of my life. Engineering is tough work, you sit there for 16 hours straight just thinking deep, deep complex thoughts, you have to have a break, you have to have a release and it\u2019s in jokes. Now, I picked certain targets for jokes or practical jokes that liked them and get along with them and laugh and Steve, after we started Apple, wasn\u2019t so much as a laughing, joking guy, so he was not the one that I would really target with jokes. Although when we introduced the Apple II computer I did a huge joke with thousands of give-aways of a fake product that compared itself to Apple and it was only 12 years later at a birthday party I gave Steve a gift and it was a framed copy of that, he\u2019d never known I did it because I didn\u2019t talk when I did pranks. So it sort of had gotten him too and he laughed and laughed and I hadn\u2019t seen him laugh like that in a while.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>When he came back you say he had clearly a lot more maturity for his second stint at Apple, did you see much of him then?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>I didn\u2019t see a lot of him, I saw him just occasionally at Apple and when he left and before he was leaving and while he was gone. When he came yeah he would talk to me and what he said always made sense to me and he really had good insight as to where Apple was losing its money that a lot of the executives just really didn\u2019t know, they just really weren\u2019t on top of the company like it was a whole thing under their responsibility. He was very critical of Gil Amelio and yet aside from not having the Jobs charisma Gil Amelio really had taken a lot of great steps to get the financing in order and save Apple financially and he even hired people like Johnny Ive, the great designer.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>Something just while we finish off with the Steve Jobs side of the discussion, his sister, Mona Simpson, wrote in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0when he died and I\u2019d love to get someone who knows him close, like yourself, to give an opinion on this. She said his last words were wow, oh wow, as though there\u2019s something really great on the other side.<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Oh, I read that, I don\u2019t know how to interpret oh wow, oh wow. I have no idea what that meant and I wasn\u2019t there\u2026<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:<\/strong>\u00a0Was it typical of him?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>\u2026Mona was and I can\u2019t really fill in any blanks there.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>But is it typical of him to do something like that, maybe go out with a statement that we all think about?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Oh, I don\u2019t know, it sounds like he was becoming very, very like personal person, some emotional thing that was in him coming out emotionally rather than intellectually but I couldn\u2019t really tell you if that was like him, if it was unusual, if it was special, what it might have meant, I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>You\u2019re 62 years old now and looking back on your life and perhaps looking ahead are there still mountains for you to climb or are you just having fun?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>There are some mountains and there are always goals that you have from your past that sometimes stretch out, some of them are short-term goals and some are long-term goals. I\u2019ve had some goals that have lasted 35 years and I don\u2019t know how to do them, the science, the mathematics, the quantum physics isn\u2019t there yet but we\u2019re getting closer and I keep my eye on them. I might like to run some research projects in the future in those areas. Right now I\u2019m actually extremely busy because of all the positive press about Apple and with Steve\u2019s demise there was more of that and his book, so I\u2019m very much in demand on a speaking tour and I\u2019m hardly home these days. So it\u2019s kind of like a touring rock star, except I don\u2019t get to pick my cities. So I can\u2019t really be functioning, working on those kinds of like new products or projects or pieces of software. People approach me, every day I get about five people with their ideas, they want me to see. I\u2019m one human being, I don\u2019t have time to see very many of them. Once in a while I go out to lunch and I get turned on, wow, here\u2019s a new little area of software somebody\u2019s working on or whatever. I was met up by this company Fusion-io, which had hit on a very unique way of thinking different than everyone else\u2019s, different than the logical person, even myself probably, would have thought of and it was the way I used to think about making a product. They found the right way to replace hard disks with chips, hard disks in the servers, in the data centres, which are really doing the majority of the computation today, it\u2019s not being done on your mobile projects, it\u2019s being done at the other end.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>Fascinating. Woz, before we let you go, for young people in South Africa and there are many hungry minds and many hungry brains here in this country looking at technology, looking at the explosion of the internet, how do you advise someone who asks you what\u2019s the way ahead for me?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, the internet has brought the world closer in a lot of different ways but as I travel around I\u2019ll find a little group\u2026you know what, every single great project, well, some of them, I\u2019m not going to say every single one because to try and get into the computer market it takes dozens and hundreds of people to make, it\u2019s kind of like making a movie. There are a few independents out there and they have some huge financial successes with some little independent movies that cost very little to make, sometimes they\u2019re blockbusters even. Well, there\u2019s room for that all over the world and everywhere I travel to small little outposts that aren\u2019t known for being a centre of technology they\u2019ll be so proud of a couple of people that developed some hardware product or some piece of software or did some research. The thing is it can be done anywhere in the world because we\u2019re all small groups of people doing that sort of thing. It doesn\u2019t matter where you live in the world it\u2019s all based on intelligence and in the books and the books are the same here in South Africa as they are in the United States.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>It sounds to me like some advice perhaps would be to find somebody else who\u2019s as good as you are at things that maybe you are not as good at, like yourself and Steve Jobs?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>[Laughing] Yes, always be aware if you\u2019re an engineer, oh my gosh, all my talents and my abilities to think out and make things like I\u2019m a doctor with circuit materials or I\u2019m a doctor with the code that I write, the programmes I write, the trouble is you have to realise it has to be used by somebody to have value. It has to have value to an end user, a buyer, that\u2019s marketing and the marketing importance is so critical. Don\u2019t think something\u2019s good just because it took a lot of work to do it. It\u2019s good if it really is the right product that people want, it\u2019s the right time and the right price.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>And perhaps you also have to sell your HP-65 calculator or equivalent thereof to start a business?<\/p>\n

STEVE WOZNIAK:\u00a0<\/strong>We started out so poor and had no money, we had to get our computers built by getting the parts on 30 days credit to pay for them and then building the computers so fast we could get paid cash. When you\u2019re starting and you have something great and you really believe in it take every little step you can with the little bit of money you have and do take some risks and do take some loans. Just do that little bit you can because if you earn some more money now you can develop \u00a0a better product and eventually you\u2019ll hit a home run.<\/p>\n

ALEC HOGG:\u00a0<\/strong>And perhaps even be the founder of the biggest most valuable company in the world. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was brought to South Africa by First National Bank. What a delight to have him here in our country, we look forward to welcoming him back soon.<\/p>\n

Source: Moneyweb<\/a><\/p>\n

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