Wizardry of Woz
Peter JUDD ONE day, the Wizard of Woz, Steve Wozniak, had a truly excellent idea.
“What if you could edit video on an Apple computer?” Wozniak said.
The engineer who singlehandedly built the Apple I, who designed the immensely popular Apple II, who counted Steve Jobs as his best friend, was on to something B.I.G.
But no matter how hard he tried, no one wanted to listen. His credentials did not matter. The legendary “Woz” could not even land a new idea inside his own company.
“I could see our computers were getting near enough memory to put a video on your computer,” the Woz says in the doco Transcendent Man Live.
“You could now start editing video like you used to do with the old hand-held, mechanical machines.
“I came from that background and I tried to talk Apple into the future where computers are going to be video editing machines.
“No one was interested in talking about it.
“What mattered was, ‘what you can sell today and what you know today’.”
“Just extend what you have,” he was told. Then, chomp! “And, oh, my gosh, it comes on by surprise. It hits you and you didn’t know it,” he said.
Apple had been bitten by the cold most big businesses have — a laser focus on near-term priorities and a lazy eye to imminent forces of disruption.
It is a problem that goes to the heart of business survival.
How do you balance two competing priorities — what matters now and what matters next?
How do you put food on the table and still find time to innovate, to put your skin in the future game of survival?
Do you jump on the swings? Or the roundabout?
Start-ups, Wozniak says, do not have the baggage success brings, so they can take the risks needed to be transformative.
As an investor (and the chief scientist of cloud data start-up Primary Data), he does not keep a close eye on the big guys any more.
It is the little guys who will change the world.
“The change in our life is going to come from a lot of start-up ideas,” he told 321 Start-Up.
“You don’t need to have academic credentials. You just need to be a builder.
“Be a builder. Have ideas in your life and say, ‘I want to go out and make something’.
“I want to show it off with my friends, not with money.”
The money comes later as bright ideas become concrete.
In December, Pivot Summit, Australia’s bright ideas technology event that last year hosted VR guru Robert Scoble in Geelong, has secured the Woz to be this year’s keynote speaker.
If you own an Apple phone, you probably want to meet Apple’s wizard, who has become something of a latter-day philosopher.
“Don’t be bothered when things don’t go your way,” the Woz says,
“Just think out how to be constructive. What can I do?
“Your car got scratched or dented.
“Be constructive. It’s going to be fixed.
“Don’t waste your time blaming people and being all upset.
“Those feelings destroy your psychology.”
He lives by his own formula for happiness — “smiles minus frowns” — has been on both sides of the armageddon debate raging about artificial intelligence and remains a disciple and prophet for Apple on earth.
His favourite two technologies are the new Chevy Bolt electric car challenging Tesla (because it is affordable) and his beloved Apple watch.
“It’s so much a convenience in my life,” he says.
“I judge companies by products, how much I like them and how much they enhance my life, give me a better life.
“All the big companies, we’re forced to acknowledge them and be aware of them, but I’m not one of these people who tries to follow them every day.
“Real innovation is the things that change your life and lead your life.
“I look at the things that make life easy.”