M.G. Siegler, writing about a closing keynote speech Steve Jobs gave at the 1997 WWDC conference (recalls that Steve Jobs was newly returned to Apple at the time):
It’s almost unbelievable how prescient nearly everything Steve Jobs says here actually is. If not all of it came to pass, nearly all of it did. And he spoke about things in great detail. As Rands notes, Jobs wasn’t underestimating the future, he was writing it, seemingly on the fly in that conversation.
This is one of my favorite Steve Jobs videos. He’s blunt, passionate, and you can feel him pulling this audience along with him.
I like how he essentially predicted “the cloud” with his advocacy of networks and the internet. It also presented a fundamental reason for migrating from local storage and the necessity for customers to do their own backups.
God I miss steve.
I have a hard time imagining this level of clarity and candor from any of Steve’s current counterparts at other tech companies—past or present— perhaps with one exception.
First time I’ve seen this. Let me tell you about my day today. My 7 year old son had a Taekwondo belt promotion. I took some pictures and videos on my iPhone, we got home and I picked up my iPad, posted 3 pics to Facebook then shared all pictures and videos to my mother via iCloud sharing. This took maybe 5mins to do. We live in Hong Kong and my mother in Scotland. She had the pics/video clips around 1min after I shared.
This is what Steve was talking about, and I am thankful he had that vision 19 years ago.