Well, without further ado, we have Eddie Cue in the Reream Living room. Let's bring him in on TV. Eddie, how are you doing?
What's going on? It's great finally to be here. I've wanted to be on this show and I got to tell you, I've gotten more text messages from friends about being on here, including my kids, than probably anything I've ever done. So, it's great for you to have me.
That's amazing. And what a special moment. What an amazing time. I would love to just start with some reflection. I want to hear particularly about your first decade at Apple. What was that like? What led you to the company? What were some of the first projects you worked on? Sort of take us through some of the early history.
Yeah, I was lucky. I was a junior in high school when the Apple II was out and I wanted to be an architect and when I discovered a computer I realized I wanted to be a programmer and engineer. And I said there's two things I want to do. I want to work at Apple and I want to meet Steve Jobs.
And dreams come true. Here I am 38 years later at Apple. I came in as a programmer and was working on HyperCard and sort of the precursor to blue links with lines underneath linking. And I've done so many things here at Apple. I've had an amazing team and continue to have the best. I'm working with the best people in the world at what they do.
Yeah. What was the lore of Steve Jobs like when you first sort of heard about him? Because you know my generation knows like the iPhone keynote. There's videos online, there's interviews, there's whole books, there's multiple books written, but what was your experience learning? What drew you to Steve early on in your career?
I just think it's the innovation of creating these products that let people do amazing things. And I felt that way when I was using the product. The attention to detail of those products, there was a connection that you could just feel. And so it was more than just what you could see. And then it let me do things that I couldn't imagine doing before. And I think that's something that we've continued over our 50 years.
Yeah. Can you talk about the launch of the original Apple online store? I feel like a lot of people assume that this always existed. No, it was a Herculean effort, I'm sure. What was the inspiration? What was the backdrop there? What was the mood like as you entered into that market?
Yeah, it was a crazy time because people forget, but in those times we sold all of our computers through channels like CompUSA and local computer stores. And the idea of building an online store and selling direct, there were a lot of people inside of Apple even that felt like if we did that, the channel's going to walk on us and they're going to stop selling. And Steve and we wanted to move forward and be able to do custom configurations so people could order exactly what they wanted. And we thought it was something that customers, you know, it was just beginning, but it was something that customers really wanted. And Steve and I and a small team worked on it and built it and launched it at the same time that one of our, you know, best products we've ever done was the iMac.
The Bondi blue one with the clear.
And so we launched the store and the Bondi blue iMac at the same time. And I remember at the end of the day we were wondering, you know, Steve, I came by his office and he's like, 'Well, how did we do on the first day?' And we had sold a million dollars worth of iMacs and we were high-fiving each other and going, 'This is amazing.'
How did you drive people to the... Did you just have apple.com? Were people already typing in apple.com? How do you tell people that a website is launching before you can go viral on social media or do live interviews on... you know, how do you promote this?
Yeah, we were lucky and then we had apple.com already and so some people were coming from that. And so that part was a little bit easier. And in those days you relied a lot on press interviews and print. And so we did a lot of, you know, you'd want to be on the cover of a magazine and the front page of the newspaper. And so we had all of that pretty well. And I think our design when we did this, it was called good, better, best. You could buy different configs and change them. But our design for shopping for a computer and a Mac at that time was something no one had ever seen. And it had all of the things that we cared about. The simplicity, really easy to check out, easy to buy, all of the specs and the questions you would have, things that were difficult when you went to other sites. I thought we did a great job and it really resonated with customers.
Yeah. Can you help me understand like the services division of Apple is massive. It's a huge growth engine. There's so many interesting pieces of that. I want to go into a lot of those, but when was the first time in your career that you realized that there was something that you could sell or actually turn into a business line that was not a physical product and would live in this services category? When did services even become like a division or concept or an opportunity at Apple?
Yeah, I think we started as a hobby. You know, there wasn't a lot there. It was very early days of the internet and doing things like email and things like storage and the cloud, but it was very very early. The thing that was a big change for us was really music. And it was iPod plus iTunes. And that was something that truly revolutionized music. And it really gave us a whole different perspective of what services can do. When you take the hardware product in a sense, the operating system and the software and the services and you tie them together, which is something I think we do better than anyone. It really showcased when we did iPod plus iTunes. And so all of a sudden, we did that. Not only did we do it for the Mac, but we also did it for Windows. And so it opened Apple to a whole new ecosystem of customers that had never used our products before, but were using iTunes and iPod for the first time.
That was my first Apple experience was iTunes and iPod on a Windows PC. And now I have 25 Apple products. My first is I was so loyal to Apple products that I refused to get a PC for gaming. And so I probably reffed like 300 soccer games, like some absurd amount to get the maxed out MacBook Pro at the time because I was just so loyal that I was like, if I'm going to play video games I'm going to do it on Mac.
Yeah, it's great. You know when we launched iTunes on Windows I remember we did a poster and Steve called it on the presentation. It was like hell froze over.
Yeah. What was actually getting iTunes off the ground like and how is it different than the other motions that Apple had developed because it's not only a software product but it's deeply linked to rights holders and agencies and musicians and you have to get so many different groups. It feels much more permissioned than just building a computer and selling it. Of course, you need manufacturers and you need a lot of people on board to build a computer, but it's a very different go to market or building motion. Like, how was that different?
Yeah, it was painful because I think there were three pieces. You had us, you had the label, and you had the artist. We were really good with artists. So, which is something we've always been about the creators. And I think when you look at all the things that we've done, the two primary people that we focus on and think about are the customers that are using it and the creators that are creating all these incredible products. So we had a good relationship with musicians at the time, but we really didn't have any relationship with labels and ultimately they did control the environment and at the time they had a different perspective. You know, it was really the beginning of Napster and piracy and instead of thinking about, you know, how to move forward into a future, their view was to lock things down and really stop it. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 99 cents and they kind of told us to go pound sand. They weren't really interested in us at all. And their idea was they were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services and we told them like what you guys are doing is not going to work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. Sometimes you could buy...
So they would like price a hit higher than like some random song on an album.
Yeah. I mean it was all over the map.
