This is a lesson Microsoft needs and has never really learned, neither under Gates nor Ballmer. The bizarre approach in Windows 8 that has all kinds of UI doing the same thing with no clarity around development platform sounds exactly like what Jobs talks about with people going in 18 different directions.
It also contains some really great words from Jobs like:
"You think about focusing, you think focusing is about saying "yes?" No. Focusing is about saying no. And you've got to say "no," "no," "no." And you know you're going to piss off people. and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article about you. And it's really a pisser. Because you wanna be nice, you don't wanna to tell the San Jose Mercury the person who is telling you this was just asked to leave, or this or that. So you take the lumps, and Apple's been taking their share of lumps for the last six months. In a very unfair way. And it's been taking them like an adult and I'm proud of that. And there's more to come, I'm sure. There'll be stories like that, they come and go, but focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products. Where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts."
You can also see why the guy questions (in OP video) Jobs: "And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last 7 years." -- Jobs mentions that some of the guys who "tell stories" haven't been doing anything last seven years.
It reminds me both of Microsoft, but even more of Google. Can anybody clearly state where Google is going today? There are so many projects at Google that it is hard to see a coherent vision for the future.
Of course the difference between Google/Microsoft and Apple in 1997 is that Apple didn't have a profitable core business (Windows and Office for Microsoft, Adwords for Google). Google and Microsoft can afford to spread out, but Apple's only chance in 1997 was to focus.
It's also interesting to note that in their early days, both Microsoft and Google were very focussed. They started to spread out when they started earning more money than they could spend. Apple, on the other hand, stayed focused. There is no Apple product that doesn't have a clear purpose.
This thread seems to be more about individual products whereas Jobs here was talking about the direction of the company and its strategy. I don't think they are directly comparable.
But Google at least certainly suffers from a lack of focus as a company. That's what 20% time is, effectively, and while there are some good arguments against it, it seems to work for them. Perhaps the 'no' comes into play when deciding what to throw more resources behind? It might be reasonable to compare loosening the reins on your engineers a bit to pure research where it is hard to get a concrete answer for what technologies something will lead to, but you allocate some funding for it anyway.
As far as I can tell, the goal of Windows 8 is to have 2 kinds of UI: a traditional mouse/keyboard computer interface, and a touch-optimized Metro-derived interface. Since Lion and the iPad have different interfaces, this doesn't seem obviously wrong to me, but perhaps I've misunderstood your point?
The communication about the development platform has been awful. Almost no one seems to understand what they're doing at all, and Microsoft needs to own that problem and fix it. But Peter Bright over at Ars Technica has written several pieces about how everything we know seems to fit together, and it seems to boil down to: (1) C++ isn't going anywhere, (2) there's a huge base of .Net developers, and .Net isn't going anywhere either, (3) there's also a huge base of developers more used to web-standards based tools, and we don't want to make them learn .Net or C++, so there will be tools for them too, (4) there will be a new common UI layer for all of these to improve consistency.
I think the point is that Lion and iOS are two different products specializing in two different UIs, whereas Windows 8 is one product trying to provide both UI styles. This means Windows 8 will have trade offs that are not present in a more specialized OS.
The bizarre approach in Windows 8 that has all kinds of UI doing the same thing with no clarity around development platform sounds exactly like what Jobs talks about with people going in 18 different directions.
Do you mean adding the Ribbon to Windows Explorer and the announcement that you can develop Windows apps in Javascript (respectively)?
Well, more to the point is that the ribbon/Windows apps and the tablet-y Javascript apps look like entirely separate design philosophies crammed together in one product.
This is a lesson Microsoft needs and has never really learned, neither under Gates nor Ballmer. The bizarre approach in Windows 8 that has all kinds of UI doing the same thing with no clarity around development platform sounds exactly like what Jobs talks about with people going in 18 different directions.