Geoffrey Cain

If you look at Apple code, there's a little marker in there that says NS, which means next step.

That was his operating system.

So a lot of the stuff that we now use in Apple goes directly back to this time.

And it was only through building excellent software and returning to Apple, which already had the hardware, a combination of the tech catching up, of the tech becoming cheaper for regular consumers.

When everything came together, he was able to build this walled garden, but it was not something that happened easily at all.

I think it's exactly that.

I think that he learned to take a longer view of both himself and the projects that he was working on.

When he went into Next Computer, he was planning on a computer that was going to come out in about two to three years and was going to change the world by then.

And then he predicted by the 1990s, he would be riding this new wave of technology and he would be at the head of it.

But he came to realize just how long the long view actually is.

He even talked about this.

He would give presentations and say, I've realized that it takes about one year to hire somebody talented if you want to pull them away from their current job.

It takes so much time.

I mean, next step, the operating system went through so many different iterations before it was actually ready for the public, for software developers.

And so I think that he took a longer view both of...

his products, but also himself.

And I think that the longer view of himself, you can see it in the things he also said during this time.

He actually toned down his rhetoric at one point, and he said that he realized that technology does not change the world, but it can certainly solve some specific problems.

And he would talk about the web, for example, and he said, well, the web will solve one specific problem, and it's selling things.

And that's what led to Amazon.