A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.Douglas Adams, famed author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was an avid fan of the early Macintosh computers. In an essay he penned for MacUser magazine in 1989, 8 years before even the iMac, Adams characterized the Apple model as "there is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way." That sentence is an accurate way to describe those who were trying to break into computing in the 1980's. Computers, even after the Mac II, were clunky to use, requiring a fairly advanced knowledge of scripts and programming to do even simple things, like running a word processor. Computers were, essentially, a puzzle. Much like Morse code, the learning curve of the early personal computer hurdled them from outgrowing the office and becoming what Jobs envisioned they would be (namely, home appliances).
The above quote from Jobs, taken out of a Playboy interview in February 1985, was in response to a question about why, exactly, American families should invest in a $3,000 television that would, for most people, perform the functions of a Speak-n-Spell. The above quote shows that, even then, before, the iMac, before the iPhone, Steve Jobs' aim was the same of many great innovators: bringing their most advanced and significant products to the masses. Jobs was prescient to what was to come, something boldly titled "the Internet", and he knew that 99% of the people who this could be useful for were not going to bother to learn the complex mechanisms it takes to make it work. It doesn't take much intuition to realize how your air conditioner works, or even how a land line phone works, but a computer is an outstandingly complex device, and they grow more complex every year. The Internet, which has grown far from anything like a telephone into an amorphous, multifunctional universe all its own, is even more complex than the computer I'm using to talk to it.
What Jobs knew wasn't so much what they wanted, but what they didn't. The iMac's setup in 3 steps in an era when most computers came with small novellas about their inner workings is a famous example. When most digital music players resembled TI-83's, Jobs released the iPod, a music player with four buttons. When most smart phones had plastic QWERTY's and a hideous design (both inside and out), Jobs gave us the single-button iPhone, with it's wide glossy touchscreen and smooth-as-silk OS. Like Bell's relationship with the aged telegraph, Jobs allowed himself to rise above the competition, survey their losses, and build off off their mistakes. His adversaries were his own R&D department. This model of domination and elitism led him to be the most productive futurist in history.
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