Fascinating to see how much more technical vocabulary he uses when speaking in '97. I don't remember any recent keynotes where he used so much tech jargon onstage.<p>I guess this is because now, every word he says is analysed and reported by mainstream media. He has to communicate to the entire world because of Apple's popularity, and not just a room full of WWDC developers.
Funny when he corrected himself after saying "Apple controls the marketing and distribution... I mean the marketing" - perhaps Apple stores were on his mind back then?
There's also one choice moment before this point where a developer is asking what Apple can do about getting beat up in the press and the stockmarket.<p>For emphasis, in December of 1997 AAPL hit an 11-year low of $3.53 (split adjusted). Today, mainstream media eats out of Steve Jobs' hand and their stock price is, as I type this, $332.
A coworker of mine worked with Eric Schmidt when he was at Novell. He was talking about the cloud back then. Now his vision is coming alive with Chrome OS.
What's especially interesting in this video is when he's insulted by someone during the Q&A. How differently he handled that than what stars, politicians, and many business people would do and do!<p>Amelio was also still in charge of Apple, yet it seems Jobs already had his plans worked out for what he would do with Apple if he was in charge.
The experience he's talking about is the same experience domain based Microsoft networks have had available for a long time, and it was an awful experience as it relied on network connectivity for your files. It was nothing revolutionary.<p>What's happened in the last decade+ is the infrastructure to support all these devices, and their network connectivity, has increased so we can finally have a good user experience doing it.<p>Without the infrastructure to support it, the product would end up instilling a sense of hate in people who use it. And we all know Apple is about creating the most seamless and easy to use experience for the user.
At the time, Larry Ellison was on Apple's board, and Oracle was pushing the "Network Computer" concept: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer</a>
Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients, eg. the iPhone and the iPad.<p>I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.
Steve Jobs describes the iPhone experience at WWDC 1997 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=youtu.be&t=1h3m17s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=youtu...</a>
This could be a description of the iPhone: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=youtu.be&t=1h3m14s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=youtu...</a>
Fundamentally, the idea is the same to the end user, but this is true about a lot of ideas that started on the desktop, then were recreated in the web, and are now being recreated in mobile.<p>Like anything, ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is everything. Building network storage for tethered devices on reliable connections and building network storage for untethered devices on unreliable connections are two different problems.<p>The way this post is titled gives him credit for the idea, which is a silly thing. If iCloud works as advertised, kudos for the execution.<p>But I have no doubt in my mind that the architecture under the hood would be very different if it were 1997 and Apple was building cloud storage in the pc era.