"Great Prophet" Jobs: What will destroy Apple?

Jobs can become a recognized global innovation leader, not only because of his paranoid personality, but also because of his insight into the industry and the times, which is the ideological basis for his successive development of Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Just like these products that are beyond the times, Jobs often makes amazing remarks, and many of his remarks were once considered too arrogant and unrealistic by the outside world.

However, time has proved that Jobs' arrogance is not completely unreasonable. Many previous predictions have gradually come true, and Jobs has gradually been "deified".

"Flash is the product of the personal computer era"-Flash will fail.

20 10 on April 29th, Jobs officially kicked off the war of encirclement and suppression of Flash with an essay "Reflections on Flash".

In that era when Flash occupied 75% of the video content on the Internet, Jobs scoffed at it. In his view, Flash not only seriously lacks reliability, security and performance, but also does not meet the requirements of mobile devices such as smart phones for low power consumption.

He bluntly said that Flash is the most important reason for Mac computer crash. So he will never let the bad experience of Flash continue to the iPhone and iPad.

"Instead of using Flash, we chose HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, which are all open standards. All Apple's mobile devices are born with good support for these open standards: fast operation and low power consumption. " He believes that HTML5 is a new standard on the World Wide Web, which has been adopted by many companies such as Apple and Google, and it will become the mainstream of the future Internet world.

Jobs' crusade against Flash even led to the death of Adobe, the parent company of Flash. The two sides not only fought in the media, but also tried to unite with other companies to fight.

Seven years after Jobs announced the war with Flash, Adobe announced on July 27th, 20 17 that it would give up Flash, and also stressed that in the next three years, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Will also stop providing technical support for Flash.

As we can see today, Adobe officially terminated its support for Flash on the last day of 2020.

"Users don't have to manage their own storage space"-Cloud service

Although iCloud didn't arrive until 20 1 1, as early as 1996, Jobs had sprouted the idea of cloud services.

In an interview with Wired, he said, "Managing storage space is a very important thing in the desktop world, and this problem may be solved. Users may not need to manage their own storage. "

He added, "I don't store anything anymore. I often use email and the Internet, so I don't need to manage storage space. In fact, my favorite way to remind myself to finish a job is to send myself an email. This is my storage space. "

Although the concept of cloud service was not born at that time, Jobs's remarks and practices were almost exactly the same as today's cloud service, but the products and media involved were different.

After the release of iCloud, it has become the most powerful underlying guarantee for Apple's ecology.

"Capturing Aristotle's Intelligence with Computer" —— Artificial Intelligence

Jobs envied Alexander the Great very much, not because he conquered the world, but because he had the philosopher Aristotle as his personal tutor.

At a meeting of high-tech leaders held in Sweden from 65438 to 0985 to discuss the influence of the personal computer revolution on education, Jobs said, "I hope that in the future, when the next Aristotle appears, we can use computers to capture his basic intelligence. In this way, future generations of students can ask such a wise man questions and get answers. "

According to Jobs, there should be more ways to make wisdom immortal than books and software.

Now it seems that this expectation has gradually become a reality. Now, people can ask questions to online experts at any time through the Internet, and they can also acquire the required knowledge through online courses. Some of these learning methods are also driven by artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, Jobs's words also imply another meaning: if software wants to become some form of artificial intelligence, it must be interactive and need to obtain massive data from life.

Yes, the artificial intelligence voice assistant represented by Siri is the best footnote of this passage.

"What will ruin the apple?"

During Jobs' life, there were many other predictions, such as that personal computers will get smaller and smaller, e-commerce will flourish, and the era of mobile Internet will eventually come.

These predictions are similar to appeals. What we can see is that Jobs is not a visionary, but with Apple's strong innovation and execution, what once seemed like "nonsense" has become a reality.

On the other hand, the realization of these "predictions" is not entirely due to Jobs. For example, the inefficiency and insecurity of Flash have long been recognized by the industry, and it is only a matter of time before it is eliminated.

Therefore, what is more suitable to describe Jobs than a "prophet" is actually a "realist"-turning his words into reality step by step.

Among Jobs' many predictions, one is the most important, but it has not yet come true: "What will destroy Apple?"

That was 1995. The year before Jobs returned to Apple, he was leading Next to compete with Microsoft and Apple again in the PC market.

In this interview called Lost Interview 2, Jobs complained that Apple squeezed profits from Macs, and once it encountered subversive industry changes, its market share plummeted, which would hurt itself.

"It is not growth that destroys Apple, but that they become very greedy," he said. "Apple did not follow the original track of the original vision, that is, to make a product a household name, so that as many people as possible can use it, but to pursue profits. In about four years, they made huge profits, but they also paid a price for it, and that is their future. What they should have done is to strive to achieve reasonable profits and seek to expand market share. "

This is his prediction and suggestion for the Apple company he founded.

At that time, Jobs probably didn't expect that he would lead Apple to the top of innovation again a year later. He may not have thought that today, 26 years later, Apple will become one of the most valuable and profitable companies on the planet.

There has always been little prosperity, and mediocrity is the way for most companies to return. As for whether Apple's future is as Jobs said, it is hard to draw a conclusion at least at present, and everything can only be tested by time.

Produced by ZAKER technology company

Text/Liu Fan