14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Jobs quotes are a dime a dozen, but there are those select few that span across several lines of text and emanate genius. The guy had realized the power of computers long before most of his peers, but even when PCs had become ubiquitous, he was still among the few who were truly able to assess the power of designing good software.
In the 1990s, computers started to get ahead of themselves in terms of software. The hardware was unable to cope with what people wanted to achieve through software, so the programs had to be designed as intelligently as possible to use up every bit of resource that the system had (RAM, storage, CPU power, etc.).
Jobs once said that one of the main advantages Apple had over its competition was software genius. This stemmed from Jobs’ desire to hire only the best people for every task. As far as software was concerned, this was the man’s thinking in 1995, about the time he was still at NeXT.
“The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you’re lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.”
Below is a one-hour interview with Steve Jobs conducted by the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation as part of an oral history project. The recording is from when he churned out the above-mentioned quote. Enjoy!