Steve Wozniak on Reforming College Education, Fusion-io, and More

What do I think about college education? How should it be reformed? I think in terms of all education, it's more like daycare. It's like places you go through to learn how to have life. Whether it's high school or university, what I learned in the university, even in my engineering courses, rarely got applied to my work. Rarely. It's like you learn how to go through the hoops. Every problem had to be unique, but in university, you've learned how to go through large problems or large learning phases. You've learned how to learn. And when you get to the corporation, you have a job now, you know how to learn and how to complete a large project and a large goal. What I like especially about universities is some of the graduate-level courses will give you a goal, and over two years, you can take all of these courses and read all these books and get the information you'll need to solve the end goal. And that's how I think is the most important thing: to give goals that are far out. And here's, you can go on your own. As a matter of fact, you don't even need the school. Go on your own. You can find the pieces and you create it. And if you're done in one month, you don't have to stay in school the whole nine months. That would excite a lot of people. But even universities don't do that very much because most of the courses you take, even the first four years, are still kind of regimented on a schedule. And it's the same schedule as everyone else, and the same answer is the same answer everyone else gives, or you're not called intelligent if you somehow come up with different ideas and different thinking. So we discourage creative thinking a lot, even in the university. And we should really, I think, be open to it. It's really the greatest future of the world to change the wealth that we create. It's from startup companies and new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Could I explain to the crowd why storage is actually sexy? I actually, honest to God, don't think storage is sexy. To me, great engineering, clever ideas, a different way that everybody else is going that actually works better, cheaper, faster. It's like Moore's Law. Every year, Moore's Law says the parts that we have in our computer products are going to cost less, use less power, and run faster. Unbelievable. You get all three benefits at once. And I saw that in the thinking at Fusion-io. It turns out that everything we've talked about, we've got a more powerful computer in our pocket than ever existed in the world. A million times more powerful in existence than when I was in high school. But it's not really used as a computer unless you're playing a game. It's used as a display to things that are going out there on the internet, in the cloud, on the web. And those are the computers, and you're just seeing their results here. And it's very important because they're dealing with all the information in the world. Huge amounts of information that's on the internet is available to an app to do its research and return its answers. So storage, those big hard disks, it's so expensive and they're so slow. You got Facebook, for example. All the major social websites are using Fusion-io. You know, companies like Apple and Siri, they use Fusion-io because it gives you tremendous speed-ups of what you're doing. Sometimes you can get your work done a thousand times faster, ten thousand times faster in some cases. But basically, you can get ten times as much done with one computer. Think about that. That means you only need one-tenth as many computers. Smaller space, less power. Huge benefits all in one when you use our type of product. And we have a lot of competitors now. A lot of people said we were wrong at first, and now three years later, all those companies are coming and doing what we're doing. And it's a huge change. At least we're being more efficient with the world's resources. The data centers are smaller. That doesn't mean there's fewer of them. And Fusion-io, I'm sure, is the key to—I don't know this firsthand, but I can guess from all of sniffing the wind—data centers in Utah. It's probably the heart of the NSA snooping. Makes it possible. Makes it more possible.