Woz's Words of Wisdom

Woz is not impressed with the way the software industry has evolved and I love the way that he expressed his dissatisfaction.

Fox Business did an interview with personal computing pioneer Steve Wozniak in March discussing his contribution to the personal computer era and the rise of AI as part of Apple’s 50th Anniversary celebration. There were many pearls of wisdom in the interview - Woz is one of the most charming and affable folks to ever work in Silicon Valley IMO - but this one at the 10:40 mark hit the hardest:

For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way, and it solved your problems, and let you make presentations of financial data to your managers.

It was yours, but now you have to subscribe to services and pay some per month, and they’ll make changes in how things work, and even your muscle memory of where to tap, goes away and changes, and they’ll take things away. Features that you were using and you can’t count on anything.

They’ll even take your data away sometimes. Oh, just because, I don’t know, you made a mistake and didn’t pay a bill one month or something. Uh, no, I don’t I don’t like the business models of today where you don’t own it. You are owned. Whoever the, whoever the suppliers are.

You have to go through them on the cloud up to the internet, and they own it. So the internet came and things for beautiful, beautiful looking at first and they changed in all the business models. So I’m not a super fan of when I don’t feel like I own something.

I mean, I like a couple of a tiny little, small, simple games because they’re on my iPhone, they’re on my computer and they can’t, they don’t use the internet. So they actually always work the same.

Steve Wozniak is calling out the entire last half-century of computer commercial development for failing to keep customers satisfied. Of course, it’s not all customers’ fault.

Customers have been conditioned to accept digital products that are typically free-to-use, funded by VC startup money, but that they don’t own, highjack their attention, sell their data, and may eventually force an endlessly-escalating subscription fee. We’ve become so accustomed to these models that it has become difficult to imagine an alternative or even an earlier more classic one.

Woz is expressing something that has been lost in the time it took Apple to grow from a California garage to one of the largest companies on the planet. Woz and I both remember a time when the priority was to satisfy customers rather than shareholders to have your business succeed. It is this spirit that inspired me to leave my corporate job to build sistnt to create tools that users can afford, use and keep.