Our challenge, then, becomes how do we break the pattern. How do we write the change? In the introduction to this class, I asked you to write something on a Post-it note that says what is the one change you must make. I'm sure it's one of the many patterns that must change. But that might be our most important one. That is how we can create the content-- how can we change first and break the patterns of marketing and creating content. That is the function.
So I'm going to play the video here in a minute. And this video is Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs was a really interesting guy and, of course, a visionary in Apple. And this is a really interesting video because it takes place in 1997. And I think it's just a perfect metaphor for where we are in marketing today. Because in 1997, as many you know, many of you who saw the movie, and certainly many of you who have seen the documentaries and all the things about Steve Jobs, Steve was in a world of hurt. He had just come back from his sort of exile for seven years at Apple.
And he's now been coming back as the consultant and ultimately would be the new CEO of the company, again. Now, in this video that I'm going to play for you, he's not even CEO yet.
He's still a consultant with the company. But he's decided that he wants to come to the Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997 and basically do a Reddit-style ask me anything. And so all of these developers spend the next 45 minutes peppering him with questions about his future vision for Apple. He's just about to get a question here that I think is the perfect metaphor for marketing.
We're going to play the video now. Here it comes. It's sad and clear that on several accounts you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say, Java, in any of its incarnations, addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years? You know. You can please some of the people some of the time.
But one of the hardest things, when you're trying to affect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas. I'm sure that there are some things OpenDoc does-- probably even more than I'm not familiar with-- that nothing else out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things.
The hardest thing is how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that's going to allow you to sell $8 billion, $10 billion of product a year. And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.
You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it's the case. And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer, where can we take the customer.
Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take. I remember with the LaserWriter. We built the worlds first small-- Isn't that a great video?
I mean, here's why I like that video so much and what Steve said there. There's a couple of things at play. The first is, how we actually even look at marketing more broadly, where we tend to look at things like, here's the product we want to sell into the marketplace. And how are we going to explain it in ever clever ways to convince people that it's the right product, without even discovering whether or not something that they need or not. That's a different story and for a different class.
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