Steve Jobs in an interview with Wired (prior to his return to Apple) talking about the Web, computing and creativity.
Wired - The Macintosh computer set the tone for 10 years. Do you think the Web may be setting the tone today?
Steve Jobs - The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased… The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it's ubiquitous... and anything that's ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don't think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it. There's going to be a lot more innovation, and that will create a place where there isn't this dark cloud of dominance.
W - If you go back five years, the Web was hardly on anybody's horizon. Maybe even three years ago, it wasn't really being taken seriously by many people. Why is the sudden rise of the Web so surprising?
SJ - Isn't it great? That's exactly what's not happening in the desktop market.
W - Why was everyone, including NeXT, surprised, though?
SJ - It's a little like the telephone. When you have two telephones, it's not very interesting. And three is not very interesting. And four. And, well, a hundred telephones perhaps becomes slightly interesting. A thousand, a little more. It's probably not until you get to around ten thousand telephones that it really gets interesting.
Many people didn't foresee, couldn't imagine, what it would be like to have a million, or a few tens of thousands of Web sites. And when there were only a hundred, or two hundred, or when they were all university ones, it just wasn't very interesting. Eventually, it went beyond this critical mass and got very interesting very fast. You could see it. And people said, "Wow! This is incredible."
The Web reminds me of the early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything. There are no experts. All the experts have been wrong. There's a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. And it hasn't been confined, or defined, in too many ways. That's wonderful.
There's a phrase in Buddhism, "Beginner's mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
You can read the rest of it here.