Daniel Rouillard

Heureux en classe ou sur deux roues. Enseigne l’histoire du XXe siècle au secondaire. Coauteur de la série Objectif Monde (5e sec.).

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Spring 1992. Steve Jobs stands in front of a room of MBA students at MIT, pitching a computer that almost nobody bought. The company was called NeXT. It sold about 50,000 machines in its entire existence. By every measure, it was a failure. The software inside it became the foundation of every Apple product ever made, and the platform on which the World Wide Web was invented.

He's 37. He's been fired from Apple, the company he co-founded.

He spends 70 minutes talking.

He tells a room full of future consultants that consulting is a waste of talent. "Without owning something over an extended period of time, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, one learns a fraction of what one can." He compares consulting to looking at a picture of a banana. "You might have a lot of pictures on your wall. You can say, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes. But you never really taste it."

He says, "I think everybody lost" about being pushed out of Apple. "I think I lost. And I wanted to spend my life there. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost." Then: "Having said all that, so what? You go on. It's not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm."

He says hardware can never be a lasting competitive advantage. "Hardware churns every 18 months. You can make something one and a half or two times as good as your competitor, and it only lasts six months." But software, he says, is a different game. "You can make something five or even ten times as good as your competitors in software. And it's very, very hard to copy. I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac."

Then he makes a claim that almost nobody in the room would have believed: "Object-oriented technology is the biggest technical breakthrough I have seen since the early 80s with graphical user interfaces. And I think it's bigger actually."

He was describing NeXTSTEP, the software his "failed" company had built. Object-oriented programming, in plain terms, means building software from reusable building blocks rather than writing everything from scratch. Jobs said developers could build apps on NeXTSTEP in about a third to a quarter of the time it took on other systems.

Almost nobody cared. By industry standards, NeXT was a flop.

But four years after this talk, Apple was nearly bankrupt. They bought NeXT for $427 million. Jobs came back. NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X in 2001. The same code became iOS when the iPhone launched in 2007. Every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad, every Apple Watch runs on what Jobs was selling while Sun was trying to put him out of business.

One more thing. In 1990, at a physics lab in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee needed a computer to build a prototype for something he called the World Wide Web. He chose a NeXT. He built the first web browser and the first web server. The internet, as you know it, was born on a machine that couldn't find a market.

When asked what he learned from being fired from Apple, Jobs pauses. Then he says, "I now take a longer-term view on people. When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. It's to say, we're building a team here, and we're going to do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year."

He was 37, running a company most people thought was dead, standing in a room full of MBA students. Apple is now worth $3.7 trillion. Every dollar of it runs on the thing he built when nobody was watching.

[indi.ca @indica]

They actually don't think they're fighting humans and are confused that they need a strategy.

[Alx Letswin @oldpunkmtl]

Tout ce que vous aimez pas est woke osti.

Les gars viennent du Saguenay, ils font probablement du motocross pis du skidoo, chauffent des pickups pis ont pensé à leur concept pendant une brosse ou un trip de mush dans une cabane à pêche.

Vous avez aucune calice d'idée si sont woke ou pas. Osti que vous êtes matantes.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Music legend Bruce Springsteen just released this incredible song that will be sure to piss Trump off beyond belief.

“Streets of Minneapolis”.

He wrote this song about Alex Pretti and Renée Good Saturday and recorded it yesterday.

Share it far and wide and play it as loud as you can

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@SamanthaTaghoy Absolutly rubbished propaganda. No such thing in Canada. There are laws, and up here, the rule of law still exists.

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@JackProphete Bon, d’autre part, le fait que l’accès à des appareils numériques de qualité, autre part que les téléphones personnels des élèves, ne soit pas un enjeu dans ces milieux favorisés permet une panoplie d’activités d’apprentissage…

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

In today’s Vatnik Soup REBREW, I’ll introduce a Russian ultra-nationalist propagandist and “philosopher”, Aleksandr Dugin. He’s best-known for his blueprint on Russia’s geopolitical strategy and for his genocidal rhetoric towards Ukrainians.

1/17

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@jumpjim LOL

[James Shepard @jumpjim]

Boeing 787 pricing is going to be interesting going forwards under Trump’s new tariff regime.. 🤦🏻

[Steven Chase @stevenchase]

Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada https://t.co/9RXp46UBE1

[Le Devoir @LeDevoir]

Opinion | À quel moment l’eau commence-t-elle à bouillir? À quel moment bascule-t-on vers une dictature? https://t.co/2h8Or6JlRy

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@Gnome_Saiyan_12 @CoffeyTimeNews Name one single time the USA has to defend Canada? Juste one…

[Sean Casten @SeanCasten]

Respect to Sugarbush. 2/3

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

ilS oups

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

J’ai publié ceci en 2017. Ça pas trop mal vieilli. Bravo à Sébastien! Les élèves du Québec avaient un cours superbe pour comprendre le monde dans lequel ils vivent. Il en ont soif. Dommage…

[Johann Soufi @jsoufi]

📣 Certains sur ce réseau pensent que Trump est un “Président fort” qui défend les États-Unis en rejetant le droit international. En réalité, saper l’ordre juridique mondial est un pari perdant, même pour une super puissance comme les USA.

🧵Je vous explique pourquoi…👇

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@CombatWombat70 @Acyn

[Daniel Rouillard @DanielRouillard]

@CombatWombat70 @Acyn In Canada, yesterday, Google changed it to « Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) » and in french also: Golfe du Mexique (Golfe d’Amérique)