When Steve Jobs cruises into the airy reception area on the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, California, on a recent morning, nobody pays much attention to him, even though he"s the company"s CEO. He"s wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Tall and a little gawky, Jobs has a fast, loping walk, like a wolf in a hurry. These days Jobs seems eager to distance himself from his barefoot youth -- who was that crazy kid who once called the computer "a bicycle for the mind"?-- and driven to prove himself as a clear-thinking Silicon Valley capitalist. Jobs punches the elevator button to the fourth floor, where his small office is located. For a man who is as responsible as anyone for the wonder and chaos of Silicon Valley, Jobs" view of it all is surprisingly modest: shrubby treetops extending out toward San Francisco Bay, the distant whoosh of the freeway below.
Do you see any parallel between the music revolution today and the PC revolution in 1984?
Obviously, the biggest difference is that this time we"re on Windows. Other than that, I"m not so sure. It"s still very early in the music revolution. Remember, there are 10 billion songs that are distributed in the U.S. every year -- legally -- on CDs. So far on iTunes, we"ve distributed about 16 million [as of October]. So we"re at the very beginning of this.