when it has not been obvious that any of this is a good strategy. Indeed, sometimes it looks as if all that clarity, understanding, quality and new ideas aren’t really the point—and that the winners are those with quite different interests.
So for me—and our company—it has been immensely inspiring to watch Steve Jobs’s—and Apple’s—amazing success in recent years. It validates so many of the principles that I have long believed in. And encourages me to pursue them with even greater vigor.
I think that over the years Steve Jobs appreciated the approach I’ve tried to take with our company. He was certainly always a great supporter. (Just tonight, for example, I was reminded of a terrific video that he sent us for the 10th anniversary Mathematica user conference, that I will have to see if I can get posted.) And he was always keen for us to work first with NeXT, and later with Apple.
I think Mathematica may hold the distinction of having been the only major software system available at launch on every single computer that Steve Jobs created since 1988. Of course, that’s often led to highly secretive emergency Mathematica porting projects—culminating a couple of times in Theo Gray demoing the results in Steve Jobs’s keynote speeches.
When Apple started producing the iPod and iPhone I wasn’t sure how they would relate to anything we did. But after Wolfram|Alpha came out, we started realizing just how powerful it was to have computational knowledge on this new platform that Steve Jobs had created. And when the iPad was coming out, Theo Gray—at Steve Jobs’s urging—insisted that we had to do something significant for it.
The result was the formation last year of Touch Press, the publication of Theo’s Elements iPad ebook, and now a string of other iPad ebooks. A whole new direction made possible by Steve Jobs’s creation of the iPad.
It’s hard to remember tonight all the ways Steve Jobs has supported and encouraged us over the years. Big things and small things. Looking at my archive I realize I’d forgotten just how many detailed problems he jumped in to solve. From the glitches in versions of NEXTSTEP, to the personal phone call not long ago to assure us that if we ported Mathematica and CDF to iOS they wouldn’t be banned.
There is much that I am grateful to Steve Jobs for. But tragically, his greatest contribution to my latest life project—Wolfram|Alpha—happened just yesterday: the announcement that Wolfram|Alpha will be used in Siri on the iPhone 4S.
It is somehow a quintessential Steve Jobs move. To realize that people just want direct access to knowledge and actions on their phones. Without all the extra steps that people would usually assume have to be there.
I’m proud that we are in a position to provide an important component for that vision with Wolfram|Alpha. What’s coming out now is just a beginning, and I look forward to what we will do with Apple in this direction in the future. I’m just sad that Steve Jobs will now not be part of it.
When I first met Steve Jobs nearly 25 years ago I was struck by him explaining to me that NeXT was what he “wanted to do with his thirties”. At the time, I thought it was a bold thing to plan one’s life in decades like that. And—particularly for those us who spend their lives doing large projects—it’s incredibly inspiring to see what Steve Jobs was able to achieve in his small number of decades, so tragically cut short today.
Thank you, Steve, for everything.
[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram’s blog—Eds.]
