Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, is at WSJ’s D8 Conference (The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital) with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Here are highlights:
7:01 pm: What does the iPad mean for the publishing industry, Kara asks. Is it the savior that some are touting it as?
“I don’t want us to see us descend into a nation of bloggers,” says Jobs. “I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.”
6:59 pm: Walt asks if Apple knew it would build a tablet before it built the iPhone.
Jobs: “I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. Jobs first charged his staff with developing a tablet, but after seeing their first efforts decided the way to go was a phone. “My God, I said, this would make a great phone … so we shelved the tablet and built the iPhone.”
The conversation moves to talk of tablets. Jobs notes that tablets had to be created from scratch. They couldn’t use a stylus and they couldn’t use a PC OS.
6:44PM Walt: So let’s talk about where things are headed. You spent a lot of your career fighting a platform war with Microsoft. They won though. The Mac is making a comeback, but they dominate. There are new platforms now, you’ve done really well. Smartphones, the beginning of this tablet thing.
6:45PM Walt: Google is building lots of new platforms. Chrome OS, Android. And you’ve got all these social platforms… Facebook is a huge platform. To Kara and I there’s a platform war going on, do you see it like that?
Steve: No.
6:45PM Steve: And I never have. We never saw ourselves in a platform war with MSFT, and maybe that’s why we lost.
(big laughs)