WWDC '97 Closing Speech

This is how it was before Apple became “magical, wonderful Apple” and started talking at WWDC events about how many billions of something they have sold. This was exciting and inspiring. Here you can witness how truly energetic and passionate Steve Jobs was about his ideas. How the answers that he presented to questions from the audience were incredibly well thought out and honest. Notice how he never dodged a single question, no matter how difficult, uncomfortable, or plain insulting they were. A freeze-frame of this video should be in Merriam-Webster, next to the definition of “visionary”.

That's not to say that Steve Jobs was never wrong about any of these decisions. Clearly, licensing Mac OS to 3rd parties to run on their own hardware turned out to be a bad idea, and was abandoned. Rhapsody itself was eventually cancelled due to its numerous problems with platform compatibility. It would be wrong to call it a failure though, since Rhapsody eventually served as the foundation for Mac OS X, which to me was the single greatest leap in technology Apple ever realized.