Today in 1988, Steve Jobs introduced the NeXT Computer at Symphony Hall in San Francisco, telling the audience that they are witnessing an event “that occurs only once or twice in a decade—a time when a new architecture is rolled out that is going to change the face of computing.”
Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs:
One of Job’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and then, to roll the dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology. At the NeXT launch, he boasted of an example that, as it turned out, would not be a wise gamble: having a high-capacity (but slow) optical read/write disk and no floppy disk as a backup. “Two years ago we made a decision,” he said. “We saw some new technology and made a decision to risk our company.”
A day or two after the San Francisco launch, I was among a standing-room only crowd at Boston’s Symphony Hall admiring the all-black, beautifully-designed “workstation” with a brand-new optical drive that played a duet with a human violinist.
That night I sent a gushing memo to my colleagues at DEC, telling them that the future has arrived and that Jobs education-sector-first marketing strategy was brilliant. Indeed, CERN was one of the early adopters and Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser/editor on the NeXT workstation.
NeXT Computer, Inc. went on to sell only 50,000 beautifully-designed “cubes,” getting out of the hardware business altogether in 1993. For many years, I have kept in my office the “Computing advances to the NeXT level” poster I got at the NeXT launch as a reminder that forecasting the next big thing in technology is tough, even impossible.
And yet, many people believe that technology marches according to some “laws” or pre-defined trajectory and that all we have to do is decipher the “evolutionary” path technology (or the economy or society) is destined to follow.
Jobs went on to introduce the iPod and the iPad, industry-changing devices whose invention was made possible, among other things, by a tiny disk drive. The possibility of a significant boost to the simultaneous shrinking (of size) and enlarging (of capacity) of disk drives was known since the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance effect in the very same year, 1988, the NeXT Computer was introduced.
Still, no one predicted the iPod. Similarly, no one predicted in the early 1990s how the Web will change the myriad ways by which we consume and create information or in the early 2000s, how server virtualization will change the cost and availability of cloud computing, although both technologies existed at the time.
We cannot predict the future, but a few can invent it. Steve Jobs did.