A newly surfaced internal 1999 Apple campus video of Steve Jobs provides a rare, unfiltered look at the company's post-turnaround strategy.
The video is a recording of a July 27, 1999 employee gathering at Apple's Cupertino campus, uploaded by former Apple software engineer Akira Nonaka, who worked at Apple from 1991 to 2000. The 15-minute talk appears to have been recorded informally, likely by an employee present at the event, and has apparently not previously been shared online.
The remarks come just two years after Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, when the company was struggling financially and had a fragmented product lineup. The speech directly followed Apple's Macworld New York 1999 appearance, where it unveiled the iBook G3, its first consumer laptop in years. Jobs said the event drew nearly 50,000 attendees and received extensive media coverage, and he credited teams across the company for delivering the product.
We introduced our iBook and everybody loved it and the show was amazing. It was the biggest New York Macworld ever... you should be really proud of this. Everybody's just going nuts over it, including our competitors.
The talk outlines Apple's product strategy at the time, centered on its four-quadrant lineup of consumer and professional desktops and portables. With the iBook, Jobs said the matrix was complete alongside the iMac, Power Mac G3, and PowerBook G3, and noted that several of these products were already on their second or third iterations.
A significant part of the talk focuses on AirPort, Apple's then-new wireless networking system developed with Lucent. Jobs described it as a long-awaited breakthrough, especially for education, and emphasized Apple's role in making it affordable and easy to use through integration with its other products.
This is something that people have been dreaming about for over a decade... we were able to work with Lucent... to make it a very low-cost product... and do all of the software work to make it all transparent... it just works.
Jobs said Apple could bring technologies like wireless networking and FireWire to market more effectively because it controlled the whole product, unlike competitors such as Dell and Compaq that had to coordinate across multiple companies.
And the reason now, the strategic reason that we have that shot is because we're the last company in this business to make the whole widget... let's go for it and align behind that and bring innovation to the marketplace in a way that when you have to convince five companies, it's very hard.[...]
We can break through those things and bring innovation to customers because we control enough.
[...]
... we're the last people in this business who give a shit about making great computers.
The talk also includes commentary on Apple's financial performance and internal transformation, but he rejected the idea that the company's primary goal had been financial recovery.
The reason I came back here had nothing to do with turning Apple around... what we love even more is putting these great products out into the world and seeing people use them... the reason I came back... is to make Apple great again, right?
This reflects a broader shift at Apple during the period, as the company moved beyond crisis management and began focusing on long-term product development and growth.
Jobs said the previous two years had been spent rebuilding key capabilities across the business, from operations to engineering and design, adding that Apple had achieved "the best operational excellence in the business now, even better than Dell." Jobs' successor, Tim Cook, joined Apple just a year earlier as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations.
The video also shows Jobs deliberately avoiding direct competition in enterprise markets, which were dominated by Windows systems and large corporate IT deployments, with Jobs instead reaffirming the company's focus on creative professionals, education, and consumers.
We're not going to go make a frontal assault on the enterprise... we're going to go and sell to creative professionals... regain our leadership position in education... and come back in the consumer market with a vengeance.
He also expressed confidence in Apple's future product pipeline, stating that the company had multiple upcoming releases that he described as "the best stuff I've ever seen in my life." This likely alluded to the introduction of Mac OS X and the iPod just two years later.
