Thank you very much for having me.

This is the first time I've ever spoken at a TED Conference.

So, you know, you guys have the good taste of inviting me.

I had never passed anybody else's standard to be invited.

So, I'm flattered.

And perhaps we can make a little history today, right?

So, a little bit about my background.

I worked for Apple from 1983 to 1987

I was Apple's software evangelist.

My job was to convince people to write Macintosh software.

How many of you use Macs in this audience?

I love to see that. (Laughter)

Yeah.

And the rest of you what? Are you oppressed? I mean what --

(Laughter)

So, I worked for Apple,

I started some software companies,

and I became a writer and a speaker.

I returned to Apple as Apple's chief evangelist.

This is in the 1995 time frame.

And I had a great time with Apple not very long ago,

as we all know, Steve Jobs passed away.

And I worked for him twice.

One of the few people who survived working for him twice.

And he had a monumental effect on my life.

As well as really the Valley and probably the world, truly the world.

I think you'd have to rank him with Walt Disney and Edison and Steve Jobs.

I mean, who are truly visionaries.

You'll hear lots of people throw the "V" word around

and there are I think in my estimation really three people who qualify,

and it would be Edison, Disney and Jobs.

So, I created this presentation right after he passed away

because I wanted to get on paper, get onto PowerPoint, get into the world,

what I personally learned from Steve Jobs.

I'm not sure he intended to teach me this,

but this is what I learned from Steve Jobs.

And so, I would like his memory to live on forever

and forever to influence people.

So, the first thing that I learned from Steve Jobs is that

"Experts pretty much are clueless."

And this is a very important lesson for you

because there's a temptation to default to, shall I say, older people,

people with big titles, people who have declared themselves experts,

and if there's anything that Apple has proven,

is that the experts are often wrong.

And so, as you go through your life,

you start your companies, and you start your careers,

and you try to change the world.

I want you to learn to ignore experts.

This maybe contrary to what you've been taught

but experts usually define things within some established limits

and I think you should break those limits.

So, I view what I call bozosity --

I view bozosity as somewhat like the flu

where it can be something that you can be inoculated to.

So, how do you fight the flu?

You get a little bit of flu, so that when you encounter big flu,

you've already built up resistance.

So, I'm gonna inoculate you to bozosity

so that when you encounter big bozosity,

you will have already built up resistance.

So, let me show you some bozosity of experts.

First thing.

1943, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM says,

"There is a world market for maybe 5 computers."

I have 5 Macintoshes in my house.

(Laughter)

I have all the computers he anticipated in the world.

If you were Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates and you listened to this,

where would we be today? Next example.

"This telephone has too many shortcomings

to be seriously considered as a means of communication.

The device is inherently of no value to us."

(Laughter)

Western Union memo, 1876.

Oops!

You know, Western Union should be PayPal today.

It's not. It's very hard to go from telegraph to Internet,

if you write off telephone in the middle.

You know what I am saying, it's just too big of chasm to cross.

The last example is from our friends at DEC. Ken Olsen, founder of DEC,

great company, great entrepreneur.

"There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home."

(Laughter)

If you wanted to run something at home

you would just have to instead go back to your office and run a DEC minicomputer.

Three examples of bozosity,

and not from, you know, total people that you wouldn't expect.

These are all people you would expect.

Founder of IBM.

Founder of DEC.

You know, Western Union, hugely successful company back then.

You need to learn to ignore experts.

Next thing you need to do is to understand that

"Customers cannot tell you what they need."

They could tell you that "I want bigger, faster, cheaper status quo."

That's what they usually will tell you.

You really can't ask them about a revolution

because they can only define things, they can only describe things

in terms of products or services that they already have.

Bigger, faster, cheaper status quo.

If you truly want to change the world,

you need to ignore your customers.

And you need to jump curves. Let's talk about this.

This is the Macintosh 128K.

I promise you nobody in the world was asking for this computer in 1984.

No one said, "Give us a cheap little graphic toy, 128k of RAM,

no software," thanks to my efforts.

That's what we did.

Totally unexpected.

Nobody was asking for it.

It's because Steve Jobs, using the "V" word,

had a vision for what the future would be.

This is his vision - graphical user interface.

Next thing I learned from Steve Jobs is,

"You need to jump to the next curve,"

rather than duking it out on the same curve

trying to do something 10% better

you need to get to the next curve.

Don't stay on the same curve.

Great example - 1900s, Ice 1.0.

There was an ice harvesting industry in the United States.

This meant that Baba and Junior would go to a frozen lake

or frozen pond and cut a block of ice.

9 million pounds of ice were harvested in 1900.

Ice 2.0.

Ice 2.0 was ice factory.

Now, you froze water, any city, any time of year.

Major breakthrough.

So much better.

They didn't have to be cold city.

They didn't have to be cold time of year.

Ice 3.0. the refrigerator curve.

Now, it wasn't about the ice factory with the iceman delivering ice to your house.

Now, you had your own personal ice factory.

Your own PC, your own "Personal Chiller."

(Laughter)

The great innovation occurs when you are not staying on the same curve.

Don't do a better ice harvester.

Don't add horses to the sleight.

Don't have a bigger sharper saw.

If you are an ice factory,

don’t have more ice factories,

don't build better ice factories,

don't have better icemen delivering ice

you wanna get to the next curve.

If you were a printer company,

although many of you are too young to understand this,

there used to be this thing called daisy wheel printer

and had this little ball in this, ball rotated and struck the paper.

If you were a daisy wheel printer company

and your idea of innovation was,

"Well, let's introduce more typefaces in larger sizes,"

that's not innovation.

Innovation occurs when you go from daisy wheel printer to laser printer.

Jump to the next curve.

Next thing that I learned is,

"The biggest challenges beget the best work in people."

I think one of the reasons why we did such great work at Macintosh division

is because Steve had such great expectations of us.

And, you know, we try to rise to his expectations.

This is an ad that shows some of the --

shall I say, youthful exuberance of Apple.

When IBM entered the computer business, Apple ran this ad

welcoming IBM to the computer business.

We were throwing down the gauntlet.

Welcome IBM, you huge successful East Coast mainframe computer company.

Welcome to the personal computer business.

Welcome to Vietnam.

(Laughter)

Next thing I learned from Steve is that "Design counts."

Many people can say that they appreciate design.

Many companies say that.

But truly, how many companies care about design?

Apple is one of the few, truly cares.

And you know what, not everybody in the customer base

truly cares about design.

To this day, 95% of the world doesn't use a Macintosh, only 5% does.

But they are people who really care about design and they count.

Design counts.

This is a Mac Book Air.

Thin, beautiful, design counts.

You have one?

Thin, beautiful, design counts.

Next thing is, when you make a presentation,

if you did nothing else but this, [Use big graphics and big fonts] (Laughter)

you would be better than 9/10 of the presentations in the world.

Seriously.

Seriously, just do this.

I'll show you a typical Steve Jobs slide.

What a great slide!

Big graphic.

"The best Windows app ever written: iTunes."

It's a typical Steve Jobs slide.

You know, any other CEO, there would be a matrix, right?

There would be a 4 column matrix,

and it would have this like checkboxes,

and it would be an 8 point font

and you couldn't read it.

The person giving the presentation would not be able to explain it.

This is the beauty of Steve Jobs.

The irony of saying that the best Windows app ever is iTunes from Apple.

Showing the logo of Windows.

This is a beautiful slide, this encapsulates the Steve Jobs presentation style.

Big graphics.

Big fonts.

The ideal font-size, just for you to know, maybe a rule of thumb --

The rule of thumb is find out who the oldest person is in the audience,

divide his or her age by two.

(Laughter) OK?

So, if you are talking to people of 60 years old, probably 30 points

50 years old, 25 points.

Someday, you maybe pitching to a really young VC.

Let's say, the VC is sixteen years old.

At that point, God bless you, use the 8 point font.

(Laughter)

But until that time --

big fonts.

Big fonts.

The beauty of a big font is, it makes it so

that you cannot put a lot of text on your presentation.

You don't want a lot of text

because if you put a lot of text, you read the text

and if you read the text, your audience will be lost.

Your audience will be lost because they are going to say to themselves,

"This bozo is reading the slide verbatim.

I can read silently to myself faster than this bozo can read it orally to me.

So I will just read ahead." (Laughter)

And you will lose your audience.

Big font.

Big graphics.

Next thing.

"Changing your mind is truly a sign of intelligence."

You may think that you should formulate this great thought,

you should use these analytical skills,

you should come to this great conclusion

by God, you gotta stick to this conclusion

because you know you are right and you believe.

And I think what Apple has proven time and time again is that

if you change your mind, if you change the way you do things

in response to how customers actually consider you, treat you, or accept you,

it is a sign of intelligence and it will lead to success.

I'll give you an example.

Believe it or not, when the iPhone first came out,

this was the press release that basically set the Apple perspective on apps:

"Our innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards,