Last Updated on November 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
Apple obsession continues. See if you can guess who said the following:
The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost.
Ars Technica readers may already know the answer. The answer (drum roll) is, none other than Steve Jobs, in an interview that appeared in the Feb. 1996 issue of Wired. Jobs was, at the time, CEO of NeXT, maker of overstyled and overpriced Unix boxes (though by then they were out of the hardware business and just selling NeXTStep, their Unix variant). Apple, of course, bought NeXT a few months after Jobs said this, and in a strange turn of events, Jobs ended up becoming Apple’s CEO.
It was an interesting interview. In it, Jobs said he didn’t think there was any way Microsoft could seize control of the Web (they’ve tried, and they’ve succeeded far more than Jobs probably anticipated–exhibit the large number of sites that only look right in Internet Explorer), but I found I agreed with a surprisingly large percentage of the things he said–particularly when he talked about things other than computers.
Here’s the link if you’re interested.
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From: Scott Vogt
Subject: Win2k On A Maxtor..
Dave,
I am running Windows 2000 with SP1 on a Maxtor 40gig 7200rpm drive with no troubles at all.
Great site, Glad to see you back!
Scott
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Thanks, both for the answer and the compliment.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.