Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak calls his contribution to the Mac “small” and doesn’t see any earthshaking changes in the computer industry in the next decade, according to the second and final installment of his interview in the Baltimore Sun.
Woz said that his Mac contribution was simply working with the team involved in making the computer, “tossing around what ideas made sense about what belonged in a computer and how to do it at low cost.” He told the Baltimore Sun that the only technical contribution he made was working on a bit-slice processor design, “but the [Motorola] 68000 came out, and the Lisa and Macintosh that day had to switch.”
Woz said in the article that he doesn’t feel his current computer is a quantum leap from the one he was using 10 years ago, and doesn’t see any life-changing technology advances in computers over the next decade.
“What are we waiting for that’s going to change the world right now?” he asked the Baltimore Sun. “Something equivalent to the Macintosh operating system? It may be out there and I don’t see it — but I sure don’t feel it.”
The Apple co-founder doesn’t seem to worry that Windows dominates the operating system world. If Apple were in Microsoft’s place and as huge a company, Woz speculates that it might be “lousy” as a mainstream product.
“I just wonder if it’s harder to keep peace in that big family than in our small family,” he added. Besides, he feels that with Windows’ increasingly Mac-like graphical user interface “every computer in the world’s a Macintosh.”
Woz has high praise for Apple’s digital hub strategy and collection of integrated “i-apps.” As for wheels of Zeus — a company he helped found in 2002 with the goal of designing and building “new consumer electronics wireless products to help everyday people track everyday things” — he told the Baltimore Sun that they have a “great product.” It hasn’t shipped yet and he wouldn’t elaborate.
“If I were to talk about what it is, I’d be stepping on some other big company’s toes. It’s not time yet,” he teased. “Maybe July. It’s looking like September to December.”