I recently had the good fortune to speak with Steve Wozniak. This is Part 2 of our interview. Steve—affectionately known as “The Woz”—is best known as the co-founder of Apple. He was the brains behind the designs of the company’s original line of computer products, the Apple I and ][.
He left full-time employment at Apple in the late 1980s. Since then, he’s been involved with number of technology startups and charitable activities. In 2009, he became the chief scientist at Fusion-io, a NetApp partner that offers technology to accelerate storage performance.
I talked to Woz about his personal experiences and what he learned from his days at Apple. Other topics we discussed included innovation, the cloud, how that’s impacting business, the next evolution of computing, flash storage, and his role at Fusion-io.
Woz On Flash Storage:
When things change quite a bit in the architecture of computers it’s hard to foresee exactly where the benefits will be, long term.
Flash storage will lead to a lot of things that you could kind of propose in the future. Sometimes it takes a lot of years to get there because people don’t like to give up the ways they’re used to. The most important benefit of flash storage is reducing the cost of the computation that you’re doing.
Flash storage in the enterprise—in the data center itself—I think is the most important use. We’re growing towards bigger and bigger data usage, more and more information more and more computation to resolve things out there in the cloud such as voice and video, and actually hunt for things and do some analytics on it. Every time you run an app, the app is really communicating with something out there that’s really doing the heavy-duty computation.
We’re solving some of the bottlenecks that slow storage and flash storage fills a really incredible need. I think flash storage has an awful lot of ways that it can be used. We start by plugging it straight into the server, which gets rid of a lot of hardware middlemen. Flash doesn't have just one wave of implementation, but the smoothest, easiest way is to just build it right into the servers.
One thing that’s great about flash storage is you aren’t stuck with what you bought when you bought it—if it plugs right into the server. Software can change its characteristics. For example, the first board we ever sold at Fusion-io is now four times faster just due to software changes. And that’s not possible when it’s strung out on a cable.
So flash, you know, is going to be an incredibly beneficial architecture in the enterprise.
Everything depends upon the user. The user’s the most important in marketing terms. And what flash in the enterprise does is it makes the experience for the user more pleasurable and, you know, quicker and more responsive. So what the user sees depends on flash in the data center.
Woz On Cubicles, Yahoo’s Telecommuting Policy, And Being A Great Place To Work:
I think there are different kinds of workers. Some of them are better off independent and alone. You know, there are reasons though—if things aren’t working—that you’ve got to bring people in maybe temporarily.
But you should probably identify those that work better when they’re away and those that work worse when they’re away. Also, people like individual time, you know, and maybe a little bit of aloneness.
It’s a hassle but it’s not too bad to drive in. Actually our whole Silicon Valley, San Francisco, San Jose area was rated the worst in the country in terms of the mega commuters, the number of people that have a commute over a certain amount of time.
But here’s what we do at Fusion-io. All the people who were willing to work in cubicles get to be by the windows. And then the offices are centralized so the offices don’t have windows. If you’re the sort of person that needs to be alone and not have people bothering you to get your intense engineering work done, you have that choice.
Try to accommodate all kinds of people, try to accommodate them all. In the end, I think that we’ve had an incredible huge trend towards the number of people who work at home in almost any industry, and if it’s a problem for a company, if they start to lose some kind of control, better to bring them together.
You know, even NetApp’s responsible for a lot of this—but the tools that can let people collaborate, especially in video, from wherever they are, you know, alleviate a huge amount of thinking that, oh my gosh, people are going to be away and not as participatory in meetings. No, we’ve got the tools with the shared whiteboards and everything, a lot of great tools that worked themselves out over the last decade.
I’m all for doing it remotely for people that want to work at home and maybe they save money. Don’t have an office for them. I sort of see that as the future direction that we’re headed towards. But yeah, you’ve got to call it back once in a while, because we’re social animals.
Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of Cesar’s two-part interview with Woz. Check out Part 1, where Woz discusses topics such as the importance of luck, open-door management, and cloud computing.
By Cesar Orosco (@CesarOrosco)
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