Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes the next big thing in personal computers is already happening. "The Woz," widely regarded as the engineering genius behind the home computer industry, admits he has hooked into the trend heading toward smaller machines, especially mobile smart phones.
"I'm using them more and more for all my Internet life. I used to ask, 'Why do I want to do this on a small machine? Why don't I just wait till I get home and do it on the big computer where it's more efficient? But I find that's not what I'm doing. I'm really enjoying being able to do it wherever I find myself, any time and anyplace."
Mr. Wozniak says that the Internet experience needs to eventually become the same thing on small devices as on desktop computers.
"I still see too many differences," says Mr. Wozniak, who today is chief scientist and key technical adviser with Fusion-io, a provider of solid state technology, an area the Utah-based company is working to revolutionize.
"Computers are going to change much more with solid state storage becoming so much faster and so much more efficient," he says. "Out of that is going to bloom the applications that we can't predict today."
Surprisingly, one thing he doesn't believe in is encouraging innovation – that's something he feels has to come from within a person.
"A designer is like an artist; they have to have a passion for what they do," he says. "We had a few of those people at Apple. Wow! Those are the ones who are going to make a company go good or make a product that changes the world."
According to Mr. Wozniak, the most important thing to a company isn't its product ideas, it's how good the people are – which are good, which are bad, which you can trust, which you can believe. While technical oversight by the chief executive officer is also important, the Woz says that you'd better have great designing people and great engineers, too.
"The greatest ones of all, in my mind, are very much like I was, (engineers) who care about what they're doing so that it becomes a piece of themselves," he says. "It's almost better if they haven't done it before. Somebody who's done a certain kind of program over and over will write the same program because they know how."
To develop great products, he stresses, designers need to have an open mind and be willing to try a newer approach.
"You want the person who can take starting points and build everything out of that," he says. "I'm very much into 'think different, think out of the box,' but not ever in a way that will cost more money to build or be clumsy to use. Less in, more out."
Mr. Wozniak makes a strong case for simplicity. Streamlining is vital to a product's success whether it's software or hardware.
"Don't confuse the person; give them the right options," he says. "That's one of the places where Apple is so great. They make the right choices as to how to simplify. It takes a strong person at the top who can say no, because every engineer is going to have ideas for more and more things. You have to ask why?"
Apple is also very intent on style, he says. "Style is how you feel about things, whether it's clothes or computers. All the Apple products are recognized for being so well styled that you look at it and just say, 'Ah, I want to have that.'
"You hold it. Does it fit my body, my hand, my human understanding? I grew up in a world that was a human world. Does this new device seem to fit my feelings as a human as to how you would do things? Do I have to figure it out or is it real plain, clear and obvious to me, with very few options to make a mistake? I think that's one of the keys to Apple products."
Other essential elements are that it's got to have value, it's got to do something good in your life, save you time, energy and money by bringing other approaches to a problem. Buying a product is very subjective. Style, how well it works and how it makes you feel are all important.
"I relate to that with Apple products," says Mr. Wozniak. "I'll use other products and wow, they'll work really well, but then I'll go to the Apple product and it just feels nice. Somebody spent a lot of time thinking out the tradeoffs between what's human and what's technology."
He says he has experienced few roadblocks throughout his career with Apple – he left in 1985, though he has stayed on as a shareholder and remains an official employee – and has no regrets about any of his career decisions.
His positive, gung-ho attitude worked in his favour when he did a guest turn last season on Dancing With the Stars, continuing on with the competition even after he'd pulled a hamstring practising the samba.
"I loved the exercise and meeting all the people on the show," says the Woz, whose billionaire entrepreneur friend and previous dancing contestant, Mark Cuban, talked him into doing it.
"Mark warned me that I'd need a lot of Aspirin and pain relief. He was right. But I had so much fun."