Steve Jobs

video from one device to another. Japanese camcorder makers adopted it, and Jobs decided to include it on the updated versions of the iMac that came out in October 1999. He began to see that FireWire could be part of a system that moved video from cameras onto a computer, where it could be edited and distributed.
    To make this work, the iMac needed to have great video editing software. So Jobs went to his old friends at Adobe, the digital graphics company, and asked them to make a new Mac version of Adobe Premiere, which was popular on Windows computers. Adobe’s executives stunned Jobs by flatly turning him down. The Macintosh, they said, had too few users to make it worthwhile. Jobs was furious and felt betrayed. “I put Adobe on the map, and they screwed me,” he later claimed. Adobe made matters even worse when it also didn’t write its other popular programs, such as Photoshop, for the Mac OSX, even though the Macintosh was popular among designers and other creative people who used those applications.
    Jobs never forgave Adobe, and a decade later he got into a public war with the company by not permitting Adobe Flash to run on the iPad. He took away a valuable lesson that reinforced his desire for end-to-end control of all key elements of a system: “My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us.”
    So starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac, with a focus on people at the intersection of art and technology. These included Final Cut Pro, for editing digital video; iMovie, which was a simpler consumer version; iDVD, for burning video or music onto a disc; iPhoto, to compete with Adobe Photoshop; GarageBand, for creating and mixing music; iTunes, for managing your songs; and the iTunes Store, for buying songs.
    The idea of the digital hub quickly came into focus. “I first understood this with the camcorder,” Jobs said. “Using iMovie makes your camcorder ten times more valuable.” Instead of having hundreds of hours of raw footage you would never really sit through, you could edit it on your computer, make elegant dissolves, add music, and roll credits, listing yourself as executive producer. It allowed people to be creative, to express themselves, to make something emotional. “That’s when it hit me that the personal computer was going to morph into something else.”
    Jobs had another insight: If the computer served as the hub, it would allow the portable devices to become simpler. A lot of the functions that the devices tried to do, such as editing the video or pictures, they did poorly because they had small screens and could not easily accommodate menus filled with lots of functions. Computers could handle that more easily.
    And one more thing . . . What Jobs also saw was that this worked best when everything—the device, computer, software, applications, FireWire—was all tightly integrated. “I became even more of a believer in providing end-to-end solutions,” he recalled.
    The beauty of this realization was that there was only one company that was well-positioned to provide such an integrated approach. Microsoft wrote software, Dell and Compaq made hardware, Sony produced a lot of digital devices, Adobe developed a lot of applications. But only Apple did all of these things. “We’re the only company that owns the whole widget—the hardware, the software and the operating system,” he explained to
Time.
“We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guys can’t do.”
    Apple’s first integrated foray into the digital hub strategy was video. With FireWire, you could get your video onto your Mac, and with iMovie you could edit it into a masterpiece. Then what? You’d want to burn some DVDs so you and your friends could watch it on a TV. “So we spent a lot of time working with the drive manufacturers to get a consumer drive that could burn a DVD,” he said. “We were the first to ever ship that.” As usual Jobs focused on making the product as simple as possible for the user, and this was the key to its success. Mike Evangelist, who worked at Apple on software design, recalleddemonstrating to Jobs an early version of the interface. After looking at a bunch of screenshots, Jobs jumped up, grabbed a marker, and drew a simple rectangle on a