Failure™ Magazine

Steve Wozniak

The Failure Interview.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History, Science & Technology

Are you still an Apple employee?
Yeah, I am, just out of loyalty. I’d like to always be an Apple employee—just a real small paycheck and a badge. You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that’s one of the biggest honors of my life. Some people wouldn’t be that way. He has a reputation for being nasty, but I think it’s only when he has to run a business. It’s never once come out around me. He never attacks me like you hear about him attacking other people. Even if I do have some flaky thinking.

Do you talk to him at all these days?
Yeah, occasionally. Sometimes there’s a new product and I get onto some of the issues real quickly. I’ll contact him right away and let him know what I find.

What were your thoughts back when Microsoft was declared a monopoly?
I totally agreed with the thinking. I was asked back in the early days of the lawsuit to write an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, but they didn’t print it. I got a letter back from the editor months later saying that maybe they’d run it, but it needed a little fixing. So, [I said] re-write it. I wrote ‘Microsoft’s a monopolist’ and the Times wanted to edit it to say, ‘Microsoft is innovative.’ The funny thing is that I had started out in my own head without having a bias. I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly. I specified the strong penalties they should undergo. Eventually I found out that the New York Times had tight friendship ties with Microsoft and that one of Microsoft’s key people had an editorial column in the Times. They were trying to use me. But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it’s a lie and they’re protected if the person’s famous or it’s a company.

What was Microsoft’s motivation for plugging money into Apple?
They didn’t plug money into Apple. It’s a phony perception that was conveyed that way to get public opinion swaying that way. Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash, and a small little chunk could be invested in Apple for a while. It doesn’t mean, “Oh, yeah, we’re buying into this company.” And it wasn’t their choice to. Basically, Apple accused them of ripping off a lot of software patents—this story has been told—over a billion dollars worth. Microsoft wasn’t going to admit that and they weren’t going to pay a huge billion dollar fine in a settlement, but they were willing to do things that were worth a lot of money to Apple. They were looking for a low cost way out for themselves and this was a logical one. It brought cash into Apple, and it really didn’t cost Microsoft anything. So it’s not like Microsoft came in and said, “Hey, we want to buy into you.” No, no, no. It was the other way around.

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