Bob Frisch

1996. Steve Jobs is asked on television what went wrong at Apple. He hasn't worked there in over a decade. Within a year, Apple will buy his company NeXT and bring him back. Within 18 months, he'll be running the place. He doesn't know that yet. Nobody does. At this point, he's running NeXT, a small software company, and Pixar, which just released Toy Story. Apple is falling apart. The stock is collapsing. The company has lost over a billion dollars. Its market share has dropped from 18% to around 4%. WIRED will put Apple's logo on its cover, wrapped in barbed wire, with the word "Pray." The interviewer asks Jobs what happened. His answer is one paragraph, and it's basically the entire turnaround strategy he'll execute a year later. He says when he left Apple ten years earlier, they were ten years ahead of everybody else. It took Microsoft a full decade to copy what Apple had built. But Apple stopped. "Even though it invested cumulatively billions in R&D, the output has not been there, and people have caught up with it." He says Apple's advantage over Microsoft has eroded. And then this: "The way out is not to slash and burn. It's to innovate. That's how Apple got to its glory, and I think that's how Apple could return to it." When Apple bought NeXT in December 1996 and brought Jobs back as an advisor, things got worse before they got better. By September 1997, Apple was about 90 days from running out of money. The board made Jobs the interim CEO. He cut 70% of the product line, but not to save money. He cut it so the remaining 30% could be great. He launched Think Different. He built the iMac. Then the iPod. Then iTunes. Then the iPhone. Then the iPad. Every single one of those products was the "innovate, don't slash and burn" philosophy from this interview, applied over and over for 14 years. He also says something in this interview that stands out. He says the most exciting thing in software is the internet, and the reason is "no one owns it. It's a free-for-all. It's much like the early days of the personal computer." He says if any one company gets a dominant position, "the rate of innovation is going to drop precipitously." He's talking about Microsoft. But he could be talking about 2026. Apple is worth about $3.7 trillion today. When this interview was filmed, Apple was worth about $3 billion and falling fast. Jobs walked back into Apple nine months later with no title, no authority, and the same diagnosis he gave on camera in this clip. Video: Steve Jobs Television Interview, 1996. Original broadcast footage.