LDS psychology of belief

In 1992, a MIT lecture quietly revealed more about product and sales than most 2-year MBAs ever will. Most people have never seen it. It came from Steve Jobs and instead of teaching theory, he broke down how great products actually win. Watching it today feels unreal. He explained that people don’t buy products they buy meaning. The best products aren’t just functional, they connect with how people see themselves. That’s why some ideas spread effortlessly while others die, even if they’re technically better. He also made it clear that marketing isn’t about features. It’s about clarity. If you can’t explain why your product matters in simple terms, it won’t matter at all. Complexity doesn’t impress it confuses. And his biggest edge? Obsession with experience. Not just what the product does, but how it feels. The small details, the simplicity, the story that’s what separates good from unforgettable. That’s why this MIT lecture still hits hard. Because while most people are building products… Very few understand why people actually buy them.

https://x.com/riyazmd774/status/2040218604717908397

Summary by Grok:

Here’s a concise summary of the main points from Steve Jobs’ 1992 MIT Sloan talk that are most relevant to persuading others — whether pitching ideas, selling products, building teams, influencing stakeholders, or leading change.

1. Focus on Real Customer Problems (Not Just Features)

Successful companies invest in operational productivity (core business processes) rather than just management tools. Persuasion works best when you show how your solution solves a deep, painful problem that people already feel urgently.
Example: NeXTSTEP let companies build mission-critical custom apps 5–10× faster. Jobs reframed the product around competitive advantage (e.g., launching 8 new products while rivals launch 1) rather than raw specs.
Persuasion lesson: Don’t lead with “what it is.” Lead with “what it enables that matters to them.” Tie your offering directly to revenue, speed, or survival.

2. Tell Stories of Unexpected Breakthroughs and Course Corrections

Jobs recounted how Macintosh unexpectedly succeeded via desktop publishing (not originally planned) and how NeXT pivoted from shrink-wrapped apps to enterprise custom development after listening to big customers.
Persuasion lesson: Admit early mistakes or surprises openly. Share the journey of discovery (“We didn’t anticipate this, but when we saw it happening, we realigned everything”). This builds credibility and shows adaptability rather than rigid vision.

3. Use Data and Analogies to Challenge Assumptions

He cited Paul Strassmann’s research showing no correlation between IT spending and success — only how the money is spent.
Compared technology “windows” opening (e.g., GUI in the 80s, object-oriented software in the 90s) that close over time.
Persuasion lesson: Ground your argument in counter-intuitive evidence or historical patterns. Analogies (desktop publishing as a “Trojan horse”) make complex ideas memorable and emotionally resonant.

4. Address Competition Head-On with Clarity and Confidence

Jobs directly compared NeXTSTEP to Sun, Microsoft NT, and upcoming Taligent/IBM efforts, explaining why each fell short for the specific problem (mission-critical apps).
He noted hardware advantages are fleeting (18-month cycles), but deep software advantages last years.
Persuasion lesson: Name competitors without evasion. Explain your edge in simple, specific terms (development speed, object reuse, ecosystem). This projects confidence and helps audiences mentally eliminate alternatives.

5. Emphasize Ownership and Long-Term Thinking for People and Ideas

On consultants: Real insight comes from owning outcomes over years, accumulating “scar tissue” from mistakes. Advice without implementation or accountability teaches far less.
On management/hiring: Take a decade-long view of people. Instead of instantly fixing others’ errors, ask “What do I need to do so this person learns?” Build teams where key decisions reach genuine agreement through discussion, not top-down decree.
Persuasion lesson: When influencing teams or partners, stress shared ownership and long-term vision. People commit more deeply when they feel they’re building something enduring together, not just executing orders.

6. Align Strategy with Execution Realities (Especially Distribution and Scale)

Innovative products need direct sales forces to create demand (not just fulfill it). Software-only plays struggle because low ASPs can’t fund education of the market.
Manufacturing and engineering must integrate tightly (JIT, software-driven robots, early involvement) to deliver speed and quality.
Persuasion lesson: When pitching big ideas, show you’ve thought through the full chain — from product to go-to-market to operations. Audiences (investors, executives, teams) are persuaded by coherence, not isolated brilliance.

7. Project Calm Confidence and Patience

Jobs demonstrated thoughtful pauses before answering deep questions and persistence in hiring the right people (sometimes taking over a year).
Persuasion lesson: Silence and deliberate reflection signal strength. Rushing to answer or forcing quick buy-in can undermine trust. Patience in building the right team or market understanding pays off.

Overall Takeaway for Persuasion Efforts

Jobs’ style combined deep customer empathy, honest storytelling, clear competitive differentiation, and long-term people focus. He persuaded by making audiences see the world through a new lens — where technology windows open briefly, operational pain is acute, and success comes from owning the full journey rather than giving superficial advice.

These principles apply broadly: selling software, pitching startups, leading organizational change, or convincing stakeholders. The most effective persuasion isn’t hype — it’s helping people connect your solution to their most important problems while demonstrating you’ve thought deeply about execution and human realities.

Transcript by Grok:

Here's a cleaned-up, readable version of the transcript from Steve Jobs' 1992 MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series talk (NeXT era). I've corrected the run-on words, fixed obvious transcription errors from the auto-generated subtitles, improved punctuation and paragraph breaks for natural flow, while staying faithful to the original spoken content. Minor filler words and repetitions common in live speech have been smoothed slightly for readability without changing meaning.

I guess we get to spend an hour or so together today. Most of the time, I want to spend just talking about what you want to talk about and answering questions. But I thought, if you’d like, I’d take about 10 or 15 minutes up front and tell you why we’re doing NeXT and why the world might need another computer company.

Is that something you guys think about? Okay.

I thought I’d tell you about some of our mistakes. Maybe that would be more useful. We have a lot of scars.

There’s a really interesting book written by Paul Strassmann. He has one of the more interesting jobs on the planet — he’s the CIO of the Pentagon. I had a conversation with him not too long ago, and he said the lesson from the Gulf War was that the best software will win the war. So they’re trying to do a lot of work in the software area.

He wrote a book before he got this job called The Business Value of Computers. It’s rather thick, but there’s some incredible stuff in it. One thing he did was survey companies from not very successful all the way to really successful. He asked how much they spent on information technology as a percentage of revenues.

You’d think the really successful companies would either spend more or less than the not-so-successful ones. But it was exactly the same — they all spent about 2% of revenue on information technology.

So he asked another question: how do they spend their money? He found that the not-so-successful ones spent the majority of their money on management productivity applications. As success increases, the more successful companies spend the majority of their money on operational productivity applications.

This was not pleasant for me to read, because I spent the first 10 years of my life working on management productivity — which was PCs and Macs. PCs and Macs never really attacked operational productivity; they just attacked management productivity.

Why is that? Because you can’t go down to your local computer store and buy an app that will help you do stock trading or run a hospital — whatever the operational part of your business is. Unless you’re a very small business and can run some accounting packages. Other than that, if you’re a medium or large business, these things never attacked operational productivity.

So we zoom out and say: how have people attacked operational productivity with information technology?

In the ’60s, they bought a mainframe, got terminals and COBOL programmers, and wrote apps. It sort of worked for the few that could afford to do this. In the ’70s, they did the same thing, and a few minicomputers, trying to do it cheaper. In the ’80s, nothing changed — mainframes and terminals, minis.

Until maybe about two or three years ago. What happened was that companies needed operational apps so badly that they couldn’t depend on the MIS folks anymore. They started taking life into their own hands. They started downsizing, getting some servers like Sybase or Oracle, making a local area network, getting maybe some Sun workstations, and spending about two years writing mission-critical operational applications — like trading apps for Wall Street. Perfect example.

It kind of worked. The reason they needed to do this is because they’re discovering more and more that their products require a custom operational application. For example, if it’s a custom app to bang on databases to make the product real — to do mortgage swaps or whatever you want — without the app, you don’t have a product.

So there has been an increasing build-up of demand from the front parts of corporations to create more and more of these operational applications. I think this is going to be the top attack on operational productivity. As we start to re-engineer things with custom applications, it sounds a lot like what desktop publishing did in 1985. Nobody knew what it was, but my guess is it’s pretty horizontal, and we are attacking vertical markets now that know they want this. And it’s going extremely well.

Sun is the only company that’s really using software called NeXTSTEP, which lets you build apps five to ten times faster than anything anyone has ever seen. After you build them, they are deployable by mere mortals because it’s really easy to use this computer. And you can interoperate your custom app seamlessly with a bunch of off-the-shelf productivity apps.

So we go to these companies that take two years to write their apps, and they do it in about 90 days on NeXT. Now, if you’re on Wall Street and you can create a new product in 90 days versus your competitor in two years, that’s eight new products for every one. You can start to see the competitive advantage created this way.

We had no idea when we started NeXT. A lot of times you don’t know what your competitive advantage is. Many of you have seen a NeXT: “Oh, that’s not so bad.” We would like to change the ratio.

When we started with Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing. When we created it — sounds funny because that turned out to be the Mac’s compelling advantage, right? The thing did not. One or two times we anticipated bitmap displays, laser printers, but we never thought about PageMaker or a whole industry coming down to desktop publishing. Maybe we weren’t smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it start to happen nine to twelve months later, and we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing. And it became the Trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America, where it could show its owners all the other wonderful things you can do.

Likewise, when we created NeXTSTEP — this revolutionary object-oriented software that we have — our target customer coming from the PC world, where shrink-wrapped apps were king (Lotus and Adobe and WordPerfect and all of the shrink-wrapped app developers), the purpose was to let them create their apps five or ten times faster. And it worked. We have a ton of shrink-wrapped apps now, best-of-breed in almost every category.

But it wasn’t till early in ’91 — a little over a year ago — that some really big companies came to us and said, “You don’t understand what you’ve got. The same software that allows Lotus to create their apps five or ten times faster is letting us build our in-house mission-critical apps five to ten times faster. And this is the biggest problem we have had.” It was a huge problem for every big company, almost all medium-size companies.

You have a solution in your hands, dummy — you don’t know it.

It took about three months before we finally heard. Last summer we changed our sales and marketing strategy around to focus on that. It has taken off like a rocket. We grew about 4x last year and will probably grow 2x this year. Our customer list is now very strong and growing like crazy. I just got back from spending a few days in D.C. and New York, and we were talking to customers that we only dreamed of talking to a year ago.

So that’s what we do. And our arch-enemy is Sun. They want to kill us, which is good — they should try to do that as soon as possible, because the sooner they do it, the cheaper it will be for them. But I think it’s gone past where it is possible.

Hardware churns every 18 months. It’s pretty impossible to get a sustainable competitive advantage from hardware. If you’re lucky, you can make something one-and-a-half or two times as good, which probably isn’t enough to be quite a competitive advantage. And it only lasts for six months.

But software seems to take a lot longer for people to catch up with. I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac. It’s arguable whether they even caught up. We think the soonest we are going to have a true competitor is probably four or five years. So we’ve got that amount of time to grow, and the next three to four years to run really fast, so that by the time they even get close to having a competitive product, we are at a large enough scale where we can start to compete with them.

And that’s what we’re doing with our lives right now — spending a lot of time with customers, making NeXTSTEP better. And so that’s the strategic basis.

Does that make any sense? Do you run across the concept of these operational custom applications? I mean, you guys — most of you come from companies where you had work experience, right? And we’ve all done that. So do you have this problem in the company you come from? A lot of pressure to write these operational custom applications, hardly anything coming out of the spigot to satisfy the thirst.

How many are from Wall Street? Good. How many from consulting? Oh, that’s bad. Mine is too important to waste. You should do something.

The only consultants I’ve seen that I think are truly useful are the ones who help us sell our computers. But other than that — no, seriously, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something over an extended period of time — like a few years, where one has the chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, or one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue from mistakes, pick yourself up off the ground, dust yourself off — one learns a fraction of what one can coming in, making a recommendation, and not owning the results.

I think it’s a loss of value and an opportunity to learn better. So what you do is get a broad cut at companies, but it is very thin. Like a picture of a banana might be an accurate picture, but with only two dimensions. Without experience in doing this, it never gets three dimensions. So a lot of pictures on your walls to show off to friends. Or other way: work in bananas or peaches. I have worked with grapes. But you never really taste it. And I think that some of that is the way to do this. Also a variable expense — hard times, find yourself variables, right?

Yes, very good question. I mean, to generalize your question: why don’t we just become a software company? Write software.

Very good question. Subtle question. Try to go through several things.

Sorry if you don’t — we got a lot of requests from customers last year that they would love to see NeXTSTEP on other platforms, and primarily Intel-based platforms like the 486. So we decided to do just that. We have ported NeXTSTEP to the 486. We’re finishing it now, in the September/October time frame. And it’s exactly the same stuff we run on our own computer — same apps, same user interface, same training, same development environment.

We are going to sell it for $995, OEM it to a bunch of companies whose names you will recognize quite easily, at a much cheaper price. Everybody is coming out of the woodwork to help us. We’re getting help from Novell, we’re getting help from all the developers, Intel is really helping us. They want us to succeed. Why? They see NeXTSTEP as the only thing on the horizon that can challenge Microsoft in system software for the next several years. So we are enjoying a lot of help. Boy, we need it. So that’s good.

Now, we have also had requests from companies to port NeXTSTEP to other platforms, and we’re talking to some of those companies right now.

On Sun, we got a lot of requests from Sun customers to port NeXTSTEP to Sun. So a lot of them are saying, “We already bought 500 and don’t want to throw them in the bay. So can you put your software on?” Because Sun is falling behind in software. Now, Sun says they would rather stick needles in their eyes than help us do this. That’s a quote. And so we’re evaluating right now which will be worse for Sun — if we port it or don’t port it. And since we’re fairly customer-driven, we’ll probably end up doing what the customers ask us to do, because we want to make them happy.

Now, this leads one into the question: should we be a software company? And we think the answer is no. In making the decision to put NeXTSTEP on more than our own platforms, we clearly decided that we will sell less than 100% of the NeXTSTEP hardware. However, we think that the marketplace will grow and we will sell more absolute hardware.

Secondly, our charter is to make the best NeXTSTEP hardware. It might not be the cheapest, but all in all, we can make the best stuff. I would love it if nothing better — if someday we sold 20 or 25 percent of the NeXTSTEP hardware. But I still think this is a billion-dollar business in addition to that.

If you look at how we sell our computers right now, we have a sales force in the U.S. of about 130 professionals in the field out selling NeXT computers. They spend 90% of their time selling NeXTSTEP software and then 10% of their time selling hardware. There was — if they can get the customer to buy into NeXTSTEP, then they are going to sell the hardware, because right now we have only hardware it runs on. So they are out there selling NeXTSTEP right now. And this is what is required to launch a new innovative product.

The current distribution channels for the computer industry over the last several years have lost their ability to create demand. They can fulfill demand, but they can’t create it. If a new product comes out in a market, there are more efficient channels to fulfill demand, like the telephone and Federal Express. So we see that channel becomes condensed on its way. I think just tele-business — how does one bring innovation into the marketplace? We believe the only way is with a direct sales force out in front of customers, showing products in their environment, of their own problems discussed, and those problems can be mated with these solutions.

A software-only company could never afford to field a direct sales force with average selling prices of $500 a software package. You could never afford 130 professionals in the field. With an average selling price at five thousand dollars, you can. And that’s why I don’t think we’re going to see any more system software companies succeed. I don’t think it’s possible to fund the effort to educate the market about a revolutionary product with ASPs that low. And if it’s not a revolutionary product, I don’t think the company can succeed.

So our strategy has been: we’ve got to be a hardware company in order to make our software business succeed. And we think we could do really well at both of them.

But it is — one is Sun’s Solaris software, the other is Microsoft, and the third is Taligent. Let’s take them in that order.

Sun, for a while, had a software value-added because they have the best Unix in the marketplace. But the market’s moved way beyond that, unfortunately. Sun has not. So their software’s falling further and further behind. We will be taken very seriously. We don’t think Solaris is going to be much of a competition. It doesn’t have an object [orientation] in it, and pretty much what they have today.

Microsoft is doing NT, which is their second attempt at a Unix wannabe. That is great. I think it will be better than the last one, which was OS/2. But fundamentally, it’s just an operating system. It’s better plumbing for Windows. Unfortunately, you’re still stuck with Windows, including the worst development environment that’s ever been invented. And so we don’t think that this is really going to present a challenge to what we’re going after, which are these mission-critical custom apps, because the development environment is horrendous. It’s not object-oriented. Even with better plumbing, it will be widely rejected for what we do.

In terms of Taligent — Taligent represents the first true competitor they could have. They’re gonna ship a product around 1995 if they execute to their plans. And I think that if they do execute the plan and work really hard, by about mid-nineties they will have roughly what we have today. It is not a joke. But still means we have to run very hard, because there are a lot of resources at their disposal.

I think there is a lot of questions as to whether they will ever ship a product. They are very serious about it, because they have helped us enormously in product programming. Right now we are the only folks that will be for the next three or four years. So if you can’t compete with Taligent, it’s probably because we shot ourselves in the foot. You couldn’t ask for something better.

[IBM question/response abbreviated in flow]

Well, let’s get our terminology straight. We look at NeXTSTEP as an operating environment much more than an operating system. The Unix, which is our operating system, is 10% of NeXTSTEP. So in these modern operating environments, when you develop a custom app in NeXTSTEP, it doesn’t run on Mac or Windows. You need all the objects that come with NeXTSTEP to make it work.

And let me go into a little detail there. How many of you are technical here? A lot. Okay, great.

Well, we’ve discovered something. You don’t write code any faster in NeXTSTEP than you do with other operating development environments that we know of. However, to do a particular app, on average you write about 20% of the code that you would do in any other development environment we know how to code. That is easiest to maintain and never breaks.

So that’s our strategy: write a lot less code. One of the ways we do this is enable the developer to use a lot of objects others have written. We ship six years’ worth of objects with NeXTSTEP. You can create your own objects for your company, then reuse them around. Developers — there are now independent third-parties starting, and I think it’s going to be a very big thing.

So in order to deliver these apps that are created on NeXTSTEP, you have to have NeXTSTEP so they can run on top and take advantage of this rich community of objects. And that’s why we’re porting NeXTSTEP to the 486. That is what you’ll see — NeXTSTEP running on several hardware platforms. And will there be a fracturing, if you will? Sure, to some extent there. And I tend to look at it as a transition.

Was there a fracturing when the Mac came out? Yes. And there has been more of the transition as people either move to Mac or, in the case of Windows, adopt what’s good about the Mac. Same thing is going to happen here.

We believe very strongly that the benefits from these object-oriented environments are not only just rapid development but a much richer user environment. If you use NeXT, it’s a lot nicer than Mac or PC, even if you never developed an app. Other environments will absorb some of those breakthroughs, and more and more people will use NeXTSTEP. Things tend to balance themselves out over time. There is a transition. Our goal is to make sure we are part of this change.

Your business account is our custom application development ability. Then our growth will be paced, among other things, by the development community available to these companies that develop apps. Now, even though we have shrunk the development time down to a fraction of what it was, still, without developers out there, we are not going to win.

Fortunately, most companies have really increased the staff of good people in their I.S. departments dramatically — really bright people who know something about computer science in I.S. departments. And most of the industries we talk to, whether they are health care, financial services, even law enforcement, places like that, have on-site developers in their IS teams. If not, they’re starting to. There are a lot of VARs and people out there. We were using in L.A. or New York where there were probably 10 independent third-party companies helping, but now that industry is consolidating down to very few companies. And there are a lot of excess people out here, I think, that are starting to get channeled into some of these other areas. So far it has been a problem. If you want to do that, please call us. Tell us, because we always need more.

What are you all going to do when you go back to your company? Set how many can — and you guys are getting a great business education here. Yeah, we love to talk about it.

[Additional Q&A sections follow on topics like Apple, management style, hiring, manufacturing, etc.]

Yes sir, go ahead. Well, these are deep questions, I tell ya. I have obviously thought about this a lot, and I don’t get into too much, but I will say that I think everybody lost. I think I lost. Now I want to spend my life there. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost. Having said all that — so what? You go on. It’s not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm. People go on. Companies go on.

I think Apple is very happy every time Apple ships a Mac. It makes me very, very happy. PowerBooks are decent products; I like them. But Apple has been struggling the last few years. They have been having a real struggle with who they want to be. And this is nothing new. We always had that as part of what kept Apple alive.

I think there were two camps within Apple. One wanted to be the next serious computer company. Camp two wanted it to sort of be a Sony of computers. And that struggling was somewhat tearing Apple apart. Fortunately, the Sony guys have won. So PowerBooks are pretty good, but Quadras suck wind right now — the high-end stuff. And they are abdicating. They’re basically not putting a lot of resources onto power users on desktops. Most of their best people are put on portables or consumer products that will be coming out. I think it would do very well at that.

If you look at the consumer products that sell over 1 million per year, you can count them on a few hands. It turns out there aren’t many consumer electronics products like toothbrushes, but electronics. And so let’s assume they have one of those, right? Or two of those. Let’s say the product sells 2 million a year at $500 ASP to them. So it sells to consumers, you know, $795 something. I think that’s 1 billion dollars, right? 2 million a year, 500 bucks a piece — it’s 1 billion dollars. They still have to get the other 7 billions of revenue somewhere. It’s going to be an interesting transition as the ASPs get lower. The volumes have to get much, much higher. And you run into some scale issues when you look out at the consumer electronics industry. Not that it’s not possible. I think it’s really interesting to watch.

We also see a lot of things possible in the market. And we power from the 7 on Mac was supposed to be an incremental improvement. OS/2 is supposed to take us into new dimensions. It turned out to be a complete failure. They will throw another 100 million dollars after it — just make sure you all know about it.

So there is 1/3 of desktops out there that the users and people who want to deploy more sophisticated apps are in a desert wanting something to drink. I think it is a tremendous opportunity to give them some solutions.

Now, this doesn’t mean Apple will not be successful. It just means they will go off in another direction. Who knows what would have happened, you know, had all this not happened.

Sure. Yeah, we’ve done a lot in the last year. The most significant things were: one, this guy right here — Mike Slade is our VP of Marketing. He spent — and he’s cheap too — and Mike spent seven or eight years at Microsoft. I originally met him as product manager for Excel when it first came out. So Mike runs all the marketing at NeXT. And Mike came into NeXT just about the time when we were finally hearing what these big companies are saying about mission-critical custom apps. And so we worked very closely together to redefine the marketing strategy of the company. Mike has done a superb job at that.

The second thing was, three months ago, we consolidated our hardware design, engineering, manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and hardware service all into one chunk called the Hardware Division. So from cradle to grave, they have hardware responsibility. And we are in process of forming a Software Division right now, so that we’re all still under the same roof, but we have clarity about the fact that we’ve got to make two businesses successful.

Third thing that we did was — and with a really great person running it: Rich Page is one of the founders of NeXT. He’s doing a great job. He ran all of finance for Europe and internal audit for the board and manufacturing planning/scheduling for a while. Pretty good guy. Went to Cyprus for a year and a half, then came back to NeXT.

Last week I hired a Chief Operating Officer: Peter van Cuylenburg. He is someone that we were looking at as an executive vice president in sales and marketing, turned down from the job, and subsequently decided not to hire that position. And I have been chasing him for the last year and a half almost. He is really good. Spent time at TI, has run Europe. About three years ago went to Mercury Communications in England — they are the MCI of the UK — turned it around, 2 billion dollars. Then was promoted to run half of Cable & Wireless, or half of Mercury’s parent company, Cable & Wireless — about 6 billion dollars. And he went there when he thought that communications and computing were going to come together, but it never happened. Figured out his real love is in the computer business. Very good operationally.

So it just happened last week. Seems like all of the people I really want to hire seem to take me a year to hire him. And it’s always been that way, even at Apple. Some of the best technical people or whoever — it always seemed to take me like a year to pry them out at HP or wherever. And it took me over a year to hire Mike. Has the award — about a year and a half. They are all worth what happens is I usually meet somebody that is really good, very, very good. You can’t get them. Then try to find other people — nobody measures up. Keep chipping away. So I think we are doing quite a bit. Feels like we’re running the company better now than ever have. Definitely made our share of mistakes.

Give you a global answer, then send in some details. I believe that you use the concept of technology windows opening and eventually closing. What I mean by that is enough technology — usually from fairly diverse places — comes together and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. If you poke around the labs or you hang around the Media Lab here at MIT or other places, you can kind of get a feel for some of those things. Usually they are not quite possible, but all of a sudden you start to sense things coming together. The planets are lining up where this is now possible or barely possible. And a window opens.

Of the Mac, with the Lisa along the way — $100 million. It takes a while to push those windows open. And in our case, you know, our first product failed. We came out with this Cube and sold 10,000 of them. Why? Because we weren’t quite there yet and made some mistakes along the way and had course corrections. Macintosh was a course correction off the Lisa. So with Apple II and III, we did it in reverse.

But it takes around five years or some number of years like that to realize that window opening. Then it seems about another five years to exploit it in the marketplace. Let me give you examples from my life. Apple II lasted 15 years. 15 years — hardware churn basically was the same for 15 years. DOS just passed 10 years. I don’t think anyone would disagree that it’s going to easily last another five, right? Unfortunately. And Mac, you know, Mac is 8 years old, right? No question it’s gonna last another four or five years. These things are hard. They don’t last because it’s convenient or even because it’s economic. They last ’cause they’re really this hard stuff to do.

So when we are pushing that window open, I think with our current generation of products we finally got the window open after six years. It’s open, and we have five years to exploit it in the marketplace. And when you know we’ll peak in five years, okay, it’s time to get started on the next thing — maybe four years from now. But we have a lot of work ahead just to move this thing out, educate the market, everything.

I know about technology we’re working on in the labs, and these things generally don’t come along independently. They kind of come in clumps. It’s been my experience. So the things that are not there right now — I can talk about some video stuff that is really interesting, but most of the core technology in this thing is well known. We have a lot of it running at speeds that I find hard to believe, and I have been doing this for a while. So the window is open, and object-oriented technology is the biggest technical breakthrough since the early ’80s with graphical user interfaces. It is bigger, actually.

Yes. If you are a software company — Microsoft made it easy in the software industry. You are a software company. Should develop apps or objects and tools. And see the software industry with Microsoft and Lotus made it real easy — unless you have $20 or $30 million dollars burning a hole in your pocket so you can hire people to develop what it takes — one of these polished shrink-wrapped apps on Mac or Windows. Then there is not an opportunity. Assuming you have the best spreadsheet today, you could easily spend $50 million dollars marketing it before breaking even because of how expensive it is to market a product today, right? Well, assume that you have a breakthrough spreadsheet again on mainstream platforms — will take 50 million dollars just to rise above the noise level and market it.

So what the brightest people I know are doing is writing objects. They write hunks of things that other developers are going to use to build apps. And they’re going where everybody isn’t. And I think it will be the next new thing.

Based on your view, what is the next view? How to market self-academic? I think your question is: what is our philosophy in marketing products to higher education?

Well, we started off selling only to higher education, which arguably was a mistake. But we have done really well there. In our hearts we are there. And we sold a lot of Macintoshes when Apple — I think it is no brainer. You take your products and discount them as heavily as you can selling into higher education.

Higher education is a wonderful place to give you great feedback about how to make your products better, what is wrong with them. And it’s a great place to educate bright people that you can hire and your customers can hire when they graduate. So we do exactly that.

I think we’re sold on about 350 campuses in the United States. We are clearly the number one selling workstation across the U.S. And we’re the number two selling computer of any type at campuses like here, MIT, or Stanford — right behind Macintosh. We sell more computers at MIT than PCs through the institutional resale engines. We do as much as we can, and I think it has been pretty effective.

What do you think, right? Well, what’s happening is a project like Athena didn’t succeed for a reason. They did not succeed because they had good ideas, but the people necessary to commercialize them and make them into real products aren’t necessarily the same people that are going to pioneer ideas at a university like MIT. So those projects never quite get baked. They have recipes kind of developed in there. You make a few samples — it’s pretty good. But the computer industry is advanced. Other people pick up these ideas and leave the research project in the dust.

If researchers drop research and commercialize stuff — and I can point to 100 examples of that in higher education. So it is probably good Project Athena has a beginning, middle, end. Those people don’t get stuck trying to do commercial software in an academic environment — kind of a mismatch as far as we are concerned.

As far as we are concerned, what we’re doing there — a lot of labs being put in higher education and winning almost every one of those. We really go hard after the labs so people can afford their computers, have public access. And most universities now have fairly elaborate campus-wide networks. It’s no longer a new cutting-edge thing. We plug right into those.

I think life moved beyond where it was a few years ago when projects were important. And knowledge to do that exists widespread. Good question.

I’m not sure I learned this when I was at Apple, but I learned it based on the data when I was at Apple. And that is: now take a longer-term view of people. In other words, when you see something not being done right, my first reaction isn’t to go fix it. It’s to say, we’re building a team here and do great stuff for the next decade. So what do I need to help so that person says, “How do I fix the problem?” And that’s painful sometimes on my end. I still have that first instinct to go fix the problem. But that’s taking a longer-term view on people is probably the biggest thing that has changed.

And then I don’t know — maybe part of biological management. What are managed style had we resolved conflict? I’ve never believed in the theory that if we’re on the same management team, a decision has to be made, and I decide in a way that you don’t like — come on, buy into the decision. Buy into it. We are all on the same team. You don’t agree, but let’s go make it happen. Because what happens is sooner or later you’re paying somebody to do what they think is right. Then you try to get them to do what isn’t right. And sooner it outs, and you end up having that conflict.

So I have always felt the best way is to get everybody in a room, talk through until you agree. Now, not everyone in the company, but those that are really involved in that decision that needs executed. And so that’s how we try at NeXT.

The way we run NeXT is we have a team at the top. There are eight people. Mike is on it. I am on it. We have six other people on it. And the key to this way of two things to try to do: one is to differentiate between really important decisions and the ones that don’t have to be made. And the really important ones — work until all agree. Because we’re paying people to tell us what to do. There was a view that we pay people to do things. That is easy to find people to do things. What is harder is to tell you what should be done right. We pay a lot of money and expect them to tell us what to do.

When it is your attitude, you shouldn’t run off if they don’t all feel good about the key in making this work. Is realize there are not many things that any one team has to decide on a year. Not a lot. That is how we try it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes we are still working on it.

I can’t think of once — maybe there is one or twice — but I can even recall the time when I said, “Damn it, I’m CEO and we’re doing it this way.” I have had to say that once or twice over a prolonged period of time when you are working and has not wanted to go in the same direction we have wanted as a team. My job every once in a while is to say you want this way, but when people are on the team, then work it out.

Yeah, I want to come back to your premium product characterization, because our products actually cost half of what Sun’s do. And the reason they do is that we have the most automated factory in the industry and a great VLSI design group which designs stuff. Do you guys in manufacturing care about that? We should talk about that in a minute.

The industry’s bifurcating right now. What is happening is that Macs and PCs are all going to be just like this — lighter and smaller before very long. They are taking the technology today, not particularly changing it, and getting off the desktop in portable forms. They are giving up a few things for that, but nothing terribly profound.

However, we were getting all sorts of signals from certain parts of the markets that they want things to do. The enemy of that? Well, what are they? Speed is the enemy of portability because speed takes power. So the kind of speed our customers want would run for 3.5 minutes on batteries. That is useless.

The second thing they want is a lot more storage and memory. Again, the enemy of portability for power and size reasons. Another thing: really high-speed networking. Radio LANs at best will go 19 to kilobits per second. Our customers want 100 megabit per second or higher. You are not going to do that with a radio LAN any time in the next five years.

Another thing they want: big one, because once you have multitasking and run a bunch of things, when using your computer for two or three hours a day, don’t be looking through blinders this big. So these are all the enemy of that today. We are working on smaller products, but it’s really tough to get both. And we are optimizing for power because we see a giant hole there — running these mission-critical custom apps and what people are doing needs more power. So that’s what we’re optimizing for.

Let’s talk about manufacturing. How many of you have a manufacturing background? Oh, that’s great. I love manufacturing. And what kinds of things? What kinds of companies? Pharmaceutical? Any auto people here? Auto? Electronics? Which? TI? Motorola? I heard the rumor. To know it couldn’t be further from the truth. We love manufacturing at NeXT.

And when I was at Apple, I had the good fortune to lead the effort to build the Mac factory and design, build, operate that factory. It is a real breakthrough — best factory in the industry. So we built one at NeXT.

As an example, walking through it — one of the things you learn when you start building factories: warehouses are really bad. Warehouses are bad because you don’t find out about a problem for a while and correct the problem until they have made a zillion of them. What you want to do is find the first one that comes in the door and stop from making more. So warehouses also cost money because if you put all this stuff into the bank or use money that could be used on a product purpose — warehouses are bad. And you want to go JIT. I’m sure that this all is an example of the factory.

When they did two big pieces of automation we put in were a giant small-part storage retrieval system and the second was a giant burn-in system at the end. And a few tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment. And I realized, unfortunately too late, both are warehouses. They are just high-tech warehouses.

And so when we looked at NeXT, we said no warehouses of any kind. We have a true JIT factory. Stuff comes in, delivered right to the point of use on the factory floor. There was no warehouse. Delivery made daily, sometimes more frequently than that. There is no outgoing warehouse. Everything is visible.

And the reason that we were able to do what we have done is because when we were learning about manufacturing at Mac, we hired a Stanford Business School professor who Harvard has since stolen away, I think. And he did the neat thing that drew on the board first time in man — you can view all companies from a manufacturer perspective this way. There are five stages: one, two, three, four, five. Right here I’ll — and all the way up through stage five, which is companies that view manufacturing as a competitive opportunity for competitive advantage. We get better time to market, getting products out fast. We can lower cost with higher quality. In general, you know, you can sort of put the American flag here and put the Japanese one here. And that’s changing. However, that is changing, and it changes people like you who are going into manufacturing companies are starting to realize that we were great at this one time and then we took it for granted. People are paying good salaries now, so we want to be one of these.

By the way, just going back to software — I often apply the scale to computer companies in how they look at software. Most computer companies are stage 1. They wish software had never been invented. I put Compaq in that category. And IBM is maybe stage 2. Things like that. Then there are only three companies here: us, Apple, and Microsoft in stage 5. We start everything with the software and work back.

But anyway, going back to manufacturing — we started looking at the factory as a software problem. And the first people hired in the factory were some software engineers. We convinced them to move from R&D into manufacturing, which was not easy. We had to give them bonuses. We had to cajole them, promises they could come back if they hated it. And went over there and said, this is really just a software problem with interesting I/O devices called robots. That’s all it is.

So we started building the software first. In our first robot that we got, we spec’d them out and we bought them completely turnkey with the robot arms on them, all of the electronics and software to control it. And we spec’d that out but didn’t write it. They worked okay. Some are still in use, but weren’t great. Being software folks, we weren’t happy or elegant. We couldn’t do what we wanted with robots.

So the second generation was spec’ing up hardware for the software and wrote all of it on our own computers. So we started writing robot objects, quality objects to control this factory. And found that our computer was great for it. And so our whole factory now runs an object-oriented factory and quality system.

The last generation of our latest generations of robots, which were deployed this year — I have been to Japan maybe a lot of times, maybe 30 or 40 times, and I loved to tour factories over there. They always amaze me because they built everything themselves. They weren’t afraid of anything. You needed a robot? Try to buy one. But if it couldn’t, they actually engineered and built it. I think this was really expensive. We found out it is pretty cheap. Um, it’s actually cheaper than buying them.

So we have now designed our spec data on robots. We don’t mill the metal or anything. We get that all made, put them together, and do software top to bottom. And have now some extraordinarily advanced robots in the factory. Our computers are built start to finish on key components completely untouched by human hands. So we’re pretty convinced we’re the low-cost producer. We do it in Fremont, California, right under our nose. And we export. We are directly shipped to stock with them, and they say we’re a very high-quality supplier.

So here’s how it works. One of the things that we do is when you want to build an engineering prototype, what happens in most — one of the key things that manufacturing can contribute to competitive advantage is time to market. Why is that? Because the way most things work is you design, sorting out a bunch of things that maybe weren’t done right here, fix in and changing them, then completing the process design what you want to do is ship it while your competitors are still here.

We suck data out of our CAD systems in engineering. We zing it around over local networks at T1, about 15 minutes away. And in our own computers, we compute all of the robot placement programs, fully optimized path. We compute all the vision system program, check it against the bill of materials in the IS system, and download to the robots ready to build a board — lot size of one. Between two production CPU boards on line, full surface mount with automation technology.

Now, the key is that manufacturing did so well for engineering that we haven’t built a prototype in engineering for two years. We haven’t built a wire wrap or any other kind of prototype in engineering for two years. Everything has been built in the factory.

Now, what does that mean? What that means is manufacturing gets involved from day one. Because the fact that the engineering guys call it manufacture and go, “Hey, we want to build a prototype. Uh, we’re going these special parts. This thing — take a look at this. Tell us what you think. We like to do it tomorrow. Let us know if that’s okay. Blah blah blah.” They get involved from day one.

And what it also means is — so we get these parallels of secondly, a lot of times when you build prototypes, it’s not quite the same technology as you’re going to use in production. And all the accumulated knowledge you get for building prototypes, you throw away when you change technology to go into production and start over in that accumulation process. Because we don’t change technology, we don’t throw anything away. We don’t waste time. It has led to one of the healthiest relationships between engineering and manufacturing group I have ever seen in my life. They are all working off the same database. They are working on the same processes. There are — and it took us a while to convince them that we were really serious. Uh, until for about the first few years, because we had more PhDs in manufacturing than we did in design engineering — until design engineering stole a few of them away. So it’s uh, it’s really paid off for us. And I think it’s one of our real opportunities for competitive advantage.

Yeah, I think one or two more and we’ve got to run. Probably you do too.

Yes, up there. Ty, how are we getting our raw materials? You mean like what truck line brings them in? Um, see, the key thing is that’s not our problem. That’s our suppliers’ problems. So we agree with our supplier when this stuff is going to arrive on our factory floor. And if they can — if they’re together enough to ship it by truck, that’s fine. If they have to ship it by air, that’s too bad. Uh, if they want a warehouse next to ours because they’re good enough — well then, have to do that.

Now we’re not giant, so we can’t go command people to do things. But what happened is we have a fairly narrow supplier base. We don’t have three billion suppliers. And they see tremendous advantages in working with us. We’re pushing our quality information systems back to them. As an example, Motorola is one of our key suppliers. Almost every key supplier has NeXT computers, and we send them statistical quality information sometimes daily. Daily, offer automated quality information system on their parts. And those kinds of things are extremely valuable to them.

So while we’re not — we’re not Goliath, we’re a very valuable David to work with. And so they really bend over backwards to work with us. And we try to push the problems where they belong. If it’s our problem, take full responsibility for them. We own our process. But they — it is their job to get zero-defect material on time per agreements. And our philosophy as our money doesn’t break after we give it to them. So their part shouldn’t break.

Our segments are going to continue to grow. I think certain segments are not going to be targeted for future growth. And Macs are good computers. Do certain things. But to do the things that people like you want to do in a few years, I don’t think you can do that. But think the same way with a Mac. And we have to head off into the sunset.

Back in California. Thanks for being here, you all, for some time.

_____

Applied in an LDS missionary context:

Here’s how the key persuasion principles from Steve Jobs’ 1992 talk can be thoughtfully adapted by an LDS missionary seeking to help people come unto Christ. These ideas align well with Preach My Gospel principles—such as teaching by the Spirit, focusing on converting doctrines centered in Jesus Christ, listening to investigators’ needs, inviting commitments, and building faith through personal testimony and scripture.

The goal isn’t manipulation but genuine invitation: helping people recognize their spiritual “operational pain” (e.g., lack of purpose, family challenges, uncertainty about eternal truths) and experience the transformative power of the restored gospel.

1. Focus on Real Personal Problems (Operational Productivity → Spiritual Productivity)

Jobs emphasized solving deep operational pains that directly impact success and daily life, rather than superficial management tools.

Application for missionaries: Don’t lead primarily with church programs, rules, or historical facts. Instead, listen carefully to people’s real-life struggles—family discord, feelings of emptiness, moral confusion, or questions about life after death—and show how the gospel of Jesus Christ addresses those pains at the root. For example: “Many people feel overwhelmed by daily pressures and wonder if there’s more to life than this. The restored gospel teaches us how to find lasting peace through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and strengthen our families eternally.” This mirrors Preach My Gospel’s focus on helping investigators identify how gospel principles solve their specific needs, then inviting them to act (e.g., pray, read the Book of Mormon, attend church).

Persuasion tip: Ask questions like “What’s one challenge your family is facing right now?” or “What do you hope for most in life?” Then connect doctrine directly to their answers.

2. Tell Honest Stories of Unexpected Breakthroughs and Course Corrections

Jobs openly shared how Macintosh and NeXT succeeded through pivots they didn’t initially anticipate (desktop publishing, mission-critical apps), building credibility by admitting early missteps.

Application for missionaries: Share your own conversion story or others’ experiences humbly and authentically—including doubts, struggles, or how the gospel surprised you with unexpected blessings. Talk about how the Restoration was a “course correction” for humanity after the Apostasy, restoring truths that bring joy in ways people don’t expect. Example: “I didn’t plan on serving a mission, but when I prayed and read the Book of Mormon, I felt something I couldn’t deny. Many people we meet start skeptical but later say the gospel changed their family in ways they never imagined.”

This builds trust and shows the gospel as a living, adaptive power guided by the Spirit, not a rigid sales pitch.

3. Use Clear Analogies, Evidence, and Counter-Intuitive Insights

Jobs used data (Strassmann’s research) and analogies (technology “windows,” Trojan horse of desktop publishing) to challenge assumptions.

Application for missionaries: Use simple, relatable analogies from everyday life or scripture. Compare the Apostasy and Restoration to losing and then rediscovering a precious family heirloom. Or liken faith to planting a seed (Alma 32) that grows into something far greater than expected. Share simple evidence: personal testimony, the fruits of living the gospel (stronger families, peace amid trials), or the Book of Mormon’s witness of Christ. Challenge common assumptions gently: “Many think religion is just about rules, but the Savior’s doctrine is really about becoming more like Him and finding joy.”

Teach with clarity and conviction, relying on the Spirit to make truths resonate.

4. Address Objections and Alternatives with Confidence and Clarity

Jobs directly compared NeXTSTEP to competitors (Sun, Microsoft, Taligent), explaining why his solution was superior for the specific problem without evasion.

Application for missionaries: When people raise concerns (e.g., “I’m happy in my current faith,” “The Book of Mormon seems strange,” or “I don’t have time”), acknowledge them honestly and kindly. Then explain, with love and scriptures, why the restored gospel offers something uniquely complete—the fulness of Christ’s doctrine, priesthood authority, and modern revelation. Example: “I respect your beliefs deeply. What we share is additional light and truth that builds on the good you already have, just as the Savior restored clarity in His day.”

This projects quiet confidence rooted in testimony, not debate. Focus on inviting the Spirit rather than “winning” an argument.

5. Emphasize Long-Term Ownership, Scar Tissue, and Team Commitment

Jobs stressed learning through ownership and mistakes, long-term views of people, and reaching genuine agreement in teams rather than top-down control.

Application for missionaries: Encourage investigators to own their progress—pray personally, study scriptures daily, and keep commitments—so conversion becomes their own experience, not just something the missionaries “sell.” Share that true growth often comes with “scar tissue” (overcoming trials through faith). With your companion: Work as a unified team, discussing and agreeing on how to best help each person, relying on the Spirit. Long-term view: Plant seeds patiently. Not everyone progresses immediately, but consistent, loving follow-up (with members) shows you care about their eternal journey, not just a quick baptism.

This fosters deeper, lasting conversion.

6. Align Invitation with Full Execution (Not Just the Message)

Jobs argued that revolutionary products need direct engagement and supporting systems (sales force, manufacturing integration) to succeed.

Application for missionaries: The “product” is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Deliver it through personal, Spirit-led teaching rather than rote scripts. Involve members early (fellowshipping, home gospel sharing) so investigators see the gospel lived in a supportive community. Follow through on invitations: Help people attend church, meet with the bishop, or prepare for baptism with clear, step-by-step support. The full chain—finding, teaching, inviting, fellowshipping, retaining—must work together.

7. Project Patient Confidence and Rely on a Higher Power

Jobs showed deliberate reflection and persistence (e.g., in hiring). Missionaries can embody calm, positive demeanor while depending on the Spirit.

Application for missionaries: Stay positive and courteous, as LDS training emphasizes. Speak with earnest testimony and certainty of belief, while remaining humble. Be patient—conversion is a process guided by the Holy Ghost, not force. Persist in prayer, fasting, and diligent work, trusting the Lord’s timing.

Overall Takeaway for LDS Missionaries Jobs persuaded by deeply understanding problems, telling honest stories, differentiating clearly, and committing to long-term execution. For missionaries, the ultimate “persuader” is the Holy Ghost, who carries truth to hearts (see Preach My Gospel, Chapter 4). Your role is to prepare yourself worthily, listen with love, teach doctrine centered on Christ, invite action, and trust the Spirit to convert.

Combine these with core missionary principles: love people genuinely, study and teach from the scriptures (especially the Book of Mormon), share your testimony powerfully, and invite specific commitments. When done with humility and the Spirit, this approach can help people see the restored gospel not as another option, but as the fulfilling answer to their deepest spiritual needs.