Damn, Was Steve Jobs Prescient or What?

Re: the aforementioned slide 24 from Mary Meeker’s 2012 Internet Trends deck, I’m reminded of this quote from Steve Jobs in his interview with Wired in 1996:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

“10 years” pretty much coincides with Wintel’s breaking point on Meeker’s chart.

There’s also this quote, from the mid-’80s, presumably while Jobs was still at Apple:

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.

His only mistake was ignoring the threat posed by Microsoft, worrying only about IBM instead.

★ Tuesday, 4 December 2012