Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview, 2003

CNet points us to an interview that Steve Jobs gave to Rolling Stone in 2003.  It is almost eerie how spot on Apple’s viewpoint was on music six years later.  Jobs goes into detail on how much thinking is done by a lot of Apple’s PhDs who "know this stuff cold".

I don’t know what hand-wringing is. We did a lot of thinking about it. The biggest risk, obviously, was that we saw people buying Macs just to get their hands on iPods. So taking iPods to Windows was really the choice. That was the big decision. We knew once we did that that we were going to go all the way. I’m sure we’re losing some Mac sales, but half our sales of iPods are to the Windows world already.

He also went out of his way to show his understanding of the music business.  A lot of people have asked why Apple doesn’t become a record label.  Jobs knows this isn’t Apple’s core competency.

Well, there’s a lot of smart people at the music companies. The problem is, they’re not technology people. The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that’s gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there’s not enough information to do that — it’s an intuitive process. And the best music companies know how to do that with a reasonably high success rate.

Great article.