Creating Great Products with

Apple's Steve Wozniak, Inventor

of the Personal Computer

Professor Allan Cohen and Professor Jay Rao

September 2007

2007 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the
introduction of the Apple II, the first true personal
computer. Because of his belief that everyone
should be able to afford and use a computer, its
creator, Steve Wozniak, pioneered an ingenious low-
cost design that combined ease-of-use with valuable
functionality. With its own monitor, a cassette for
storing data and loading programs, and eventually
much more, this new computer for the first time
allowed non-techies to use a real computer.

Babson Insight recently interviewed the Woz,
as he is known, and asked him to go beyond
the tale of the invention of the first user-friendly
personal computer and tell us how the lessons he
has learned can be applied today. He spoke on a
range of subjects, including how to foster user-
focused innovations and how to identify people who
have the potential to produce
great breakthroughs. He also shared his thoughts on
the future of computing and several new
technologies that may reshape our everyday life.











Interview

I. Mastering the Art of Innovation

Babson: Very early on you were convinced that
people without any
technical ability
should be able to
use computers.
This was a very big
change and
meant that almost
everything you
designed had to be
based on
understanding a
customer that did
not yet exist. How did you do this?

SW: In my mind I thought about younger people,
those who have not been influenced by the world
and how they approach problems and learn to solve
things. They have not yet learned how things are
supposed to work. When given something new
theyre going to try to adapt by finding the easiest,
most understandable set of steps to get things done.
So test your products on young people, people who
havent used these sorts of things before and find
out what works best.




Babson: How do you know when you have created a
great new product?

SW: The key to creating great products is that they
have to be easy to use. I look at the manual; the
shorter your manual is, the fewer things you have to
explain and the better youve done your job. That
has been partly subverted today by the fact that
many products have small manuals. But its largely a
trick; we sort of say its alright to assume you know
it all, or that you can figure it out. And if that doesnt
work, you can go to the bookstore and buy a 700-
page book written by someone else.
Reaching that point of greatness is very, very hard. I
would say to people, Heres a list of all the things
the product has to do in the end, or heres a list of
all the methods it has to have. Then you have to
think through all the functions, the user steps and
the possible solutions. Then ask, How can we
combine things to make it easier with fewer steps?
It takes an awful long time to think that out and do it
well.
Weve done that at Apple and in those few periods
we really made things easy and changed the world.

Babson: Lets talk about the innovation process. In
your book, iWoz, you describe being methodical and
logical, working your way through a problem step by
step. You also talk about seeing a complete solution
in a flash, without going through all those steps. Are
those two very separate processes or do they
sometimes go hand in hand in helping you innovate?

SW: Its hard to say. Those flashes seem to occur at
points when youre forcing the mind to focus strictly
on the end goal, allowing nothing else to distract
you and being motivated to do it better than other
people have done it.

Youll fall asleep thinking, How can I shorten the
code, is there a way that I can make it run faster; is
there a way that I can design it with fewer
components, a way to make it easier? For me
during my early high school days and on through


Apple a lot of the solutions came to me while I was
dreaming. Id wake up with a solution in my head.

Babson: There seems to be a common theme in all
your product development and design where you
have an insight that causes you to make choices that
create not just a technical advance, but also a
product that is much easier for the user. Where does
this focus on the user come from? Is it a conscious
choice?

SW: Yes, I think design and development should
always be done from a point of view that believes
the human being is worth more than the technology.
You just have to have it in your head that you will
apply a lot of effort to bend your hardware and
create your software design so that the user has a
nice easy flow in using this product. In this way it fits
their life as they live it now. The opposite way is
where someone decides to put in all the
functionality in a way that causes the user to modify
the way they do things. This difference is where the
huge value is, at least for Apple.

Babson: Do you think that happened in you
naturally, or was there something that caused you to
crystallize on that approach?

SW I think it was just luck. In my own case, I believe
it is well known that when Jeff Raskin sat down with
Steve Jobs and I in our garage in the early Apple I
days, he explained a lot of the thinking about making
products simple. I admired him so much because he
was saying, This is what the academics are thinking
in colleges, the professors who are thinking so far
ahead on how this technology interacts with human
beings. That influenced me so much. But, in my
own work, I was thinking, Im building a product for
myself that has to be so good. It had to be the best
in the world, very simple, straightforward. I had this
very good idea about architecture and components.
Whether its the architecture of a house or the
architecture of a computer, you should look at the
pieces that are available and build it in a way that
with very minimal steps and parts you wind up with

just as good a solution as if you had many more
parts.

Its like building a house. You could build it out of
southern yellow pine, which is wood that is a natural
air conditioner. It can be 51 degrees hotter outside
the house than in. The inside of the house will
always be around 71 degrees, and the wood now is
the frame of the house, so you dont need
insulation. It is also your air conditioner and your
heater. Why build a house and then add the air
conditioner and heater? Think it out from the start.
Thats the way to be broad with engineering
covering multiple disciplines. You know the
materials that are available, you know the end
solution that you want, and you just design it to be
the most efficient way to get there. Thats the way I
think about engineering.

Babson: You have said in your book and elsewhere
that a lack of money and resources forced you to
think differently. Because of this you had to find a
better way of doing things than if you had been at a
big company with a large budget. You built a
prototype of a computer using a television set and
store-bought components. Is having limited
resources one of the keys to creating original
designs?

SW: It doesnt mean being too sparse on resources,
but it forced me to be a lot more efficient and
absolutely led me to think of ways of building things
that used very few parts. For example, when I was
starting out, I could have never afforded an output
device for a computer.

I was thinking about that output problem and, well,
we have these TVs, but TVs didnt even have video
inputs back then. Nobody would build a device to
talk to their own television, but I wanted to be able
to see the instructions I was putting into the
computer and have it show me the response, the
output. So you know what I had to get? A Pong
game. The game had input through the hand-held
controller and you would see the output on the TV
screen. I saw one and had to have it. It could work
for my computer problem. So it forced me to think,
Is there any way I could I do this with my limited
resources? And basically, I had to build it.

Working this way I hit on a lot of good approaches
and I was able to start from scratch fresh.
Everything I did, all the early Apple stuff, was on
things I had never done before in my life. I studied
the data sheets to see how they worked, figured out
a real good solution, and my real good solution
tended to be better than anyone had ever done
before.

Companies can also foster thinking like this by
creating challenges for their people. Before Apple, I
worked at another company and a manager there
would sometimes give us a little problem, such as,
Can you program this in the fewest steps? It was a
challenge to look for solutions that other people
might not see. Some companies think we educate
people only by sending them to Stanford. But they
can foster inside learning with these little challenges
by saying, Hey, well sponsor you with some
resources, parts and tools, and well challenge you
to do this better.

The education that led me to writing great software
and making great hardware was not in schools. It
was largely just little challenges throughout my life.
In high school when I designed all those mini-
computers over and over on paper, I had a rule of
trying to beat myself and design it with fewer chips
than last time.

Babson: You mentioned the word luck. Even where
there are great people and processes, the element
of luck also seems to come into play. What is your
view on that?

SW: My view on that is that markets cant be
predicted precisely. In my case, a lot of the time I
worked at something I was very interested in
working on and all of a sudden it became very
valuable to the universe, such as the personal
computer. It was just something I was going to be
building that year in my life no matter what, and Id

been working toward that from the time I was 10-
years-old. So it just turns out to be that valuable.
Thats what I was going to do. Sometimes, you could
build a device that is so incredible, but it doesnt
solve a need for the masses, and you dont get
recognized. Some products hit it bigger than others.

You know, there were a lot of people looking for the
formula, too, for a personal computer. I guess ours
just turned out to be the right one.

II. Managing and Leading Invention

Babson: How do you know when you have a great
innovative engineer, particularly if its early on?

SW: Sometimes you can spot people who are going
to be productive in an extremely creative way
because they have some strong internal goal. When
you watch and listen it is just so obvious they are
passionate to solve something that nobody else has
solved before, they want to find a better way to do
it, but they dont have the resources yet. These are
the people that are just thinking very differently.
They are usually excited and continually spouting a
whole bunch of stuff about their subject and this
intensity and energy tells you right away that theyre
gifted in some sense.

Babson: How can you tell the difference between
the people who are simply creative and those who
are creative and able to produce something of great
value?

SW: I think you can tell the difference pretty quickly,
but maybe not instantly. Some are just creative, like
an artist doing things in a lot of new and different
ways, but not all will come back to something real.
The problem is that you cant instantly separate the
creative and productive from those who are merely
creative, because sometimes the value of what
theyve done is not immediately seen. Every once in
awhile they may stumble onto something that isnt
useful for their project, but can be built on by
others, or used for an entirely different purpose.

Babson: In your book you talk about good engineers
being creative and approaching work like sole
practitioners, doing it all themselves like an artist.
We deal a lot with corporate situations where the
complexity of a problem requires the collaboration
of several people. Do you see a way to foster

collaboration for creativity and innovation?

SW: I dont think of it so much in terms of managing
the people as how the company inspires them. One
way to do this is to give people time to work on the
things that interest them the most. Google does this
formally. In my time at Hewlett-Packard they offered
resources, such as parts from the stock room for
your own designs, figuring that you are going to
work hardest on the things you design yourself and
these are the things that youll learn the most from,
making you a better employee.

The trouble with creating innovation in larger
corporations is the culture. There is a message that
goes along with the companys products that causes
engineers to design and develop new products in a
way that fits the existing products. This limits
peoples thinking, yet the big breakthroughs come
from people doing incredible things that dont fit the
culture.

Babson: Research and design has in many cases
become too complex for one person. How do you
get these inward-looking engineers to work with
others who may have different skills?

SW: The people who have specialized knowledge
may simply understand how it has been done
before. But someone who is very goal oriented and
extremely skillful, (sort of like me), will take on a
task they have never done before by just reading
examples, or thinking through how people actually
use the product. Working in this way they may write
the new textbook on how to do it. When given the
most modern tools, techniques and components,
people like this are going to come out with probably
a better solution than others do using the standard
well-known way.


Some people might see this as breaking the rules,
but good engineers dont have to break the rules.
They can use the same processes and by being very
motivated and goal oriented, they are going to solve
that problem no matter what it takes. So if they
have to grab another person to do something they
cant, maybe write a piece of code, theyll do it.

Babson: Youre saying that you can create
ownership of a project by giving someone
responsibility for both the detailed tasks and the
broader project result, creating a passion that
overcomes ego and makes people reach out to draw
in others and their skills when needed?

SW: Yes. The most important thing from the
management point of view is to not tell people what
they should be doing, or how they are going to do it,
but instead to communicate a passion for the goal
and its benefits. All the plans, facts and figures in the
world that you may provide an engineer wont result
in anything if you cant motivate them to want to get
this thing done well. Then give them some freedom
in the work to think up great ideas along the way.

Babson: You mentioned finding the right people;
how do you find the right people, bring them along
and encourage them?

SW: The people you want for great innovative
engineering are the young people, some of them
may not have even attended college yet. Theyre out
there building a bunch of stuff on their own. Theyve
looked at many examples and have taught
themselves which parts to use to be more efficient,
how to wire things, make their own PC boards and
write their own software. So you have to look
beyond just the campuses.

Often, they are not the sort of person who wants a
corporate job; you know 9-5 jobs, they want a lot of
freedom. They work best when the ideas are
flowing, whether thats dinner time or two in the
morning. So freedom in their work is the key to


drawing them in and allowing flexible hours is a big
part of that.

Encouraging them is really just a matter of giving
them important work and the resources to do it,
along with the freedom to solve things in new ways.

Babson: Are you saying that we have to find people
who are already involved in creating new solutions
and then set up an environment that is encouraging
and not too restricting?

SW: Yes. One problem with this is that people who
are already recognized for being creative have
probably developed something that became a big
success. So theyre already established and theyll
come at a high price. You have to find very creative
people at lower levels. These are usually young
people and they may be difficult to manage. So you
have to give them responsibility and take some risks.

Babson: You just started a new business with some
former Apple people. Are there specific
characteristics that you look for when you are trying
to find great technical people?

SW: I look for someone who will explain what they
have done before in terms of why it was so much
better than what others had done. They should
sound like they cant live without solving these
problems. Its just whats inside them; its their
passion. You can hear it in the words they use and
the excitement in their voice. They have trouble
falling asleep because their mind is still on the
problem. And when they do sleep, they dream about
solutions, sometimes waking with new ideas they
have to rush off and try. I remember that happened
to me with the Apple I and II and other early Apple
products. Id fall asleep and wake up with a better
way to make something work.

Babson: It sounds like you want people to describe
more than just technology; you want to hear about
the benefits to the user.


SW: More than that. I want to hear whats the
greatness? Whats the excellence? And why is it
important? You dont even have to be able to
understand the excellence they are describing, but
you can feel how important it is to them. Its this
passion that made them do things that other people
did not think of.

Babson: You mentioned passion and compared
engineers to artists. Do those characteristics help
you identify the people you would want on your
projects?

SW: You really can only spot that kind of excellence
after the fact. You can look at their work and talk to
them and understand exactly why they use a certain
code sequence instead of some other method. No
one else did it that way because no one else drove
themselves that deep into the problem. The fact
that they care about the excellence so deeply is, in a
sense, what makes them an artist.

Babson: Is that why you say they work best when
theyre alone?

SW: The best part of working alone is that you have
one mind, one mentality that will make a product
extremely good. That one mind doesnt have to be
limited to a small part of the project and spend time
interfacing with everyone else. They dont have to
be a strong personality because they are totally
insulated and protected. That person can have skills
in many disciplines and then reach out to others for
additional knowledge on particular things.

Babson: At several points in your book you hint at
being apprehensive toward marketing and
marketing people. What problems do you see in the
marketing function that collides with invention and
innovation?

SW: Engineers, marketers and managers all
contribute in some way to the problem.

Many engineers are inside people. They do their jobs
with a mental intensity that means they pretty much
work alone. Some engineers have a difficult time
communicating and are also wary of marketing
people. But they would be a lot more effective if
they had a better understanding of the process; such
as the trade-offs that have to be made in design and
the selection of features based on their value.
Often a products greatness comes from the little
ideas that engineers come up with as they are
working through the design problems. But
management creates a problem with this because
they make the important decisions without leaving
room for this.

Marketers like to work in a way that is opposite to
this discovery process. They want to have a product
completely defined with 50 pages covering every
little detail before the engineering work starts. This
doesnt leave you any flexibility for new ideas that
come up along the way. So marketing is also not
very understanding of the critical engineering
process.

Babson: One hallmark of your career is that youve
created simply for the challenge, for the sake of
making things better. You shared everything you
created and didnt seem concerned about patents.
Do you see that things have changed today because
of all the money in initial public offerings, stock
options and venture capital? Do you think it has
changed the craft or the process for the engineer
inventors?

SW: I do not. I do think that sometimes things have
to be structured so that the engineer is allowed to
be an engineer. You have to allow them to be the
creative problem solver and get recognition for that.
An engineer should not have to sacrifice their desire
to do good things for the world. That doesnt mean
that youre working for free. Being in a money-
making operation is okay. Its just that it shouldnt
change the sort of person you are, or the quality of
your product and designs.

Babson: One of the challenges in business today is
to retain great players. How do you keep good

engineers and innovators? How do you compensate
them, reward them and give them visibility?

SW: I would have a policy like Hewlett-Packard had
when I worked there, before starting Apple. They
encouraged you to work on little inventions of your
own, and you would get some financial support from
the company to build them. The company benefits in
two ways. Youre becoming better at designing
things for the company because youll force yourself
to learn ways to solve your own problems and youll
carry the quality of this design work over to your
work for the company. But also, if you come up with
something that is worth a lot of money, there may
be a spin-off and the company would get a good
share of this new business. That kind of support
policy can be implemented very openly at some
companies. Stock rooms should be open for
engineers so you can use the parts for your own
designs. If this happens, and your mind can take
flight, youre going to love your company more.


III. A View of the Future

Babson: Whats the future of the personal computer
as we see it today?

SW: Its going to be the primary technology device in
our life for the foreseeable future and the long-term
future. I guess we used a keyboard on a typewriter
long before computers, but we are going to be using
this keyboard-based machine basically forever. Even
our programs, back in the early days of computers,
got typed into something and popped up on a card.
The only example of a program that didnt get typed
into something was the Apple II.

Babson: You mentioned that you think well be
interfacing with computers in the future using
speech recognition.

SW: I see some applications where speech
recognition will work, but keyboards will not
disappear. Theyll be your main storage information
tool.
We talk about this a lot. I havent been too happy
with any speech recognition Ive seen; they all take a
lot of correction steps. Weve never really built a
device that can hear like a human. Its a huge change
and we cant really predict when some technology
or formula may come out that works well. For
example if were all sitting in the same room right
now I could talk and youd understand what I am
saying. We know where to direct our attention, and
we sort of know that the syllables have a regular
rhythm, so we can finish sentences in our head. If I
begin a sentence by saying Tomorrow Im headed
to Florida, youre already thinking that Im going to
say a place and that helps you get the word forward
correct. Computers dont yet know this. There is
research going on for this, but weve never really
combined the technology with the logic to create a
full human ear.

Babson: In your book you describe walking into
Xerox Park Research Lab in 1980 and having a
eureka moment, seeing many gadgets instantly and
realized what the future would be like. Are there any
products, developments or technology you have
come across lately that create those same eureka
views of the future?

SW: Yes, ideas just pop into my head and I think
This would be a fantastic product for the world. Or
Ill see a new technology and maybe all of sudden I
wake up and have an image of a use for it thats
really good. Sometimes Im walking around and see
other peoples technology and say Wow! Thats
really incredible. The iPod is an example of that.
But this doesnt happen now as often as when I was
younger. That is largely because Ive gotten so
occupied with my daily life. My routine is so full right
now.

Babson: Are there any core technologies that youve
been thinking about or seen that you find
interesting?

SW: Yes, absolutely: Photonics. Photonics are
basically photon switching systems that can be
imbedded in silicon. It still needs a lot of

development. You can have extremely fast
processing in the middle of a silicon chip without the
heat issue. You can make chips that actually run 100
times faster than we have now, and then we can
start approaching some of the needs of the future,
such as making computers more like humans. With
technology like this, we could make a computer that
can be a teacher. A real human teacher can sense a
childs feeling by looking at the childs facial
expressions. A real teacher can sense the tone of the
voice, can ask questions about the family, and can
tell if something is on the childs mind. Our
education software to this day doesnt do all of
these human things.

Babson: What new things get you very excited?

SW: I like things that other people largely dont
know about, but are very, very well run, very
intriguing. One of them is from a specialty company
kind of along the lines of Apple. Bang & Olufsen has
a cell phone called the Serene cell phone and it
doesnt look like a phone in any way. Its like a little
fold-up clam shell with an odd shape. Its soft
rubber, with no display and no buttons. You cant
even tell its a camera phone because the camera
lens is built into a hinge. You start to open the phone
and a motor opens it up for you. The dial goes
around in a circle, sort of reminding you of the old
rotary dial phones. In the middle of the circle is the
little scroll wheel on the user interface with the click
buttons to operate through the menu system. The
menu operates very much like the iPod and its just
the most gorgeous phone in the world. It does all
the things that a modern phone does. I love showing
off products that have a lot of unique and different
thinking and yet work so well. Everybody is amazed
by it.

Babson: Here we are 30 years past the start of the
PC revolution; if you were 20 again what would you
do, how would you change computing?

SW: I honestly dont have the answer. Computing is
pretty much in the right place, but I sure like
portability and computers need to keep getting
smaller.

Ive got this little device that displays a little laser-
created keyboard on any table surface. It doesnt
work well enough to use now, but what if eventually
those three lasers were able to produce a full color
display? I could carry this thing that is the size of a
salt shaker in my pocket and it displays a full color
keyboard in front of me on whatever surface I have,
a table, paper, or whatever. Then I can touch-type
using it. Eventually it could be a touch screen. Now
that would be very nice. I could have the full
computer, as full as todays, minus the CD and DVD
and carry it in my pocket. That would be interesting;
having a strong, full computer thats portable and
not be limited to the tiny display of a cell phone.


Babson: What are you working on now? What drives
your passion and enthusiasm? What might we see
out of the Woz in the future?

SW: Ever since my last son graduated from high
school Ive been really busy. I wrote a book. Im on
an exploration drive to the South Pole with a group
of people including former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
And we have this new starter company where my
role is not clear yet. Its a chip-making company. I
wont be deciding what chips to make; I want a role
that sort of defines what the technology will be.