never shy about much of anything weighs in on the cloud, his old foes, and a new app. plus, lost and found, an interview with steve jobs discovered in the back of a granch. robert princely dusts it off for us. our reporter brent stone of reporters business week and indicatestone this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. scott mcgreeley is known for his sound bites. he called apple technology a

roach motel and microsoft. what he did over the course of 20-plus years. lots of good things that i can do to drive education and security and privacy. >> scott mcneely ran sun microsystems for 22 years, a silicon valley record. by comparison john chambers has been ahead of cisco for 15 years. carol bartzes with the ceo of yahoo! for just under three years. lay hola pot i kerr, ceo of hewlett-packa hewlett-packard, three months. scott mcneilly was in it for the long term. sun was eventually sold off to oracle shortly after mcneilly stepped down leaving the high-energy hockey fan looking for new goals. he's found two, an online effort

to provide free open-source lesson plans to teachers called kuricky and a new social networking app he call s weig in. he tried to convince everyone that the network was the computer and someone else called it the cloud and it came on. i know there's an app you want to talk about. start with sun for just a minute. 20-plus years at sun microsystems. is that a silicon valley record? it's got to be darn close. >> well, i think probably larry's breaking all the records now, but certainly in the hardware business that was probably a record. >> how did you go that long? >> i don't know. you know, it's quite an unknown story, but i didn't want to be ceo. we started -- we argued about who would be the ceo, and i said

vinode, you do it. but i had more business experience thaer the three others combined. i talked him into being ceo and he left and i took over temporarily and i told the board i would help them aggressively find a replacement for me and they never did. so literally by the time i had my fourth kid and he was two years old, i had a 2, 4, 6, and an 8-year-old i said i have to get out of here, i want to spend time with my kinds. that was five years before or oracle bought us. >> was the acquisition ofl sun by oracle bittersweet for you? >> again, i had been out of the saddle. i was so tempted to get back in and try do that ceo thing again, but ceo is not fun anymore of a public company. i admire folks who do that. it's all about governance, not stewardship. it's quite different these days. i had done that.

i have four boys at home. i didn't want to get back in the saddle. >> expand on that for a minute. ceo's not fun anymore. >> the. >> the requirements put on a ceo. >> absolutely. the regulations. i mean you get the drivo drive occupy oakland on the way to work. this country doesn't get capitalism. we don't think of taxpayers as nationally economic heroes. they're greedy. it's different things. i like being chairman. it's sort of like being a grandfather. when the kids have got a mess, you can hand it off to the ceo. >> you dodged brad's questions. what do you think of the acquisition and what do you think oracle's done with a lot of great tech followgy you produced at sun? >> i'm glad it made it. there was 100% overlap and i was worried every employee would

get, you know, 86'd out of there. whereas oracle they didn't have a chip business and hardware businesses and products and services that they had. so there was a better chance for the employees to maintain their careers. >> but because of that there was a lot of speculation when the acquisition happened that they would dump the hardware business, right? did you expect they would go into it in a big way because apparently it's bun done. >> aaron doesn't check in with me. >> that was one of my questions. >> no. he's quite capable. it makes actual sense. i don't think it makes sense to separate the hardware from the software. you don't buy the car and then buy the hardware. you don't buy the phone and buy the operating system separately or even the database for your phone. it makes sense to have it all integrated. later in the show we'll talk a lot about apple and larry ellison compared to what they're doing and what apple has done with phones and other consumer

devices. do you see that? does that analogy play out? >> yeah. my only regret is sun was the one major r & d company that had share in its middle name. everybody else is gone. even microsoft is more open now than oracle or apple and it seems the more proprietary you are the more you can lock your customer into the roach motel and the more successful you are. but that doesn't necessarily move it forward. all the rest of it, those all created enormous explosions of innovation, of sharing, integration, and customer ease of use. >> you were easy to quote as being angry at microsoft often. it was a -- >> it was all theater. it was all theater. >> was it all theater? scott mcneilly said it was all

theater. >> i admitted that to the press people but they didn't -- >> is oracal and hp in it as well? larry doesn't have a grudge against anybody. i think they're all about -- they're all great capitalists. they're all about advantaging. i think every shot he takes is theater and it's not a personal shot. it just turns out you guys like personal thoughts. >> that was my original question. does every -- for some reason apple had ibm as its arch enemy and then microsoft. does anybody have microsoft as anarch enemy anymore? >> microsoft desperately wants to have everyone be anarch enemy? >> a long time ago joe roebuck my top sales guy gave me a little clue.

pick a three-person fight, take the top two and yourself and call it a dog fight because you're lifting yourself up. we couldn't afford an ad or markets budget. so all i could do was try to get in a dog fight with hp and ibm -- or it was deck and ibm. we tried to ignore apollo. they went away. we ignored them and took on the big guys and got into a fight. >> let's take a quick commercial break and come back and talk about why you came here. "press: here" will be back in just a moment. look, every day we're using more and more energy. the world needs more energy. where's it going to come from? ♪ that's why right here, in australia, chevron is building one of the biggest natural gas projects in the world. enough power for a city the size of singapore for 50 years.

what's it going to do to the planet? natural gas is the cleanest conventional fuel there is. we've got to be smart about this. it's a smart way to go. ♪ welcome back to "press: here." we're talking with scott mcnealy about a new app called weigh in.

i'm going to ask this as gently as i can. aren't you a bit old to be creating a social app? >> yeah. i know. it's fun. it might take $4 billion or $5 billion of cash. you don't need that. we also think there's a hole in the space that we can step in. there's no app or service out there built for enterprises to really add value. twitter, facebook, they all have -- some of them talking about it have millions of things on their facebook page. they don't know what to do with it. it's a way to create a conversation with your client, with your client, consumer, employee, shareholder, or a citizen or an alumnus or whatever. you have abilities to go out and create a conversation by asking them questions. if they are evoked by a provocative question or down the

road we'll add more media contents, but you have a wonderful picture, media question. tiger woods, caddie, did he say the wrong thing at the caddie dinner, thumbs up, thumbs down, you can have right answers, wrong answers, leaderboards, the whole deal. >> southwest could ask its employee at the end of the davie ya an iphone were all your flights on time. >> imagine going walmart and asking them -- of the 2.2 million places, you had a great, good, i want to quit workweek and friday night you give a heat map to the management at walmart and show every store in orange or red going in the wrong direction. if you have bad morale, you're going to have a bad store. >> how did this come about. >> you know, i was out of

oracle. he said i have a game show idea. let's go to l.a., meet your buddies down there. we tried to sell the show. we liked the client engagement service better. it's mobile, realtime scored, user content, zero vote fatigue, because you vote, siee the result, swipe, vote, see the result, swipe. >> people respond to surveys as well. it's basically a two-question survey. >> the beauty of it is you get to see the answer right away. >> how many times do you take a survey and have no idea -- >> i hate taking surveys. i like voting. >> and voting's hard because you've got to text or go to a website or survey monkey or one of those other things. >> we just had an election in the bay area where fewer than

40% citizens voted. what do you think of the prospect for these types of engagements? >> verification and assuring only one vote for person and other things through electronic methods. i think that's far more audible and manageable. >> is that ever going to happen? >> i don't know. people don't trust electronics. >> they've had a bad history. >> we're see. >> as far as the ad hoc voting, clearly there's an appeal to people or a good number of people. does that stick around? is that something people do? >> it's a game of life as opposed to zynga birds. i'm over angry birds. you can only do that for so long. would i like to buy a farm tractor or attract the san jose sharks or the l.a. kings. we went on the pga tour website for the president's cup.

these are my passions. i'm not going to wear out of them. and be able to weigh in and stay current and build a community around that is very important. >> your board has entertainment moguls on it. it has sports moguls on it. that's intentional. >> absolutely. they did 3,000 game shows. his wife is mary hart of "entertainment tonight." that's pretty cool. he's been in professional sports forever. he knows every owner here. we have larry sensini on our board. >> in case you get thrown in jail. >> that keeps me out of jail. he understands all what we're doing. it's kind of funny. we were talking to a venture capital list, and he said, you don't need us. >> there's a low cost entry. there's some expense but an app is a low cost entry. >> we have the ability. we announced to at&t we're in

set boxes. when we walk in the room our app talking to at&t set box so now when you channel surf on the set top box your second screen channel suv suv -- surfs with y >> we have to take a commercial break. scott mcnealy, thank you for being with us here this morning. up next on "press: here," previously lost footage with an interview of steve jobs turns up in the back of a dusty garage. up next.

even with that it was still remarkable, especially for a 10-year-old that you could write a program in basic or fortran, and actually this machine would take your idea and it would sort

of execute your idea and give you back some results. a clip from the 1996 documentary. robert cringely made a film off that. bob is going to show the rest of it next week. this is the famous lost steve jobs interview. >> even better it's the found steve jobs interview. >> found in a garage in britain. >> yeah, yeah. what happened was we made triumph of the nerds in 1995, '96, and i interviewed 125 most important people. we lost every bit of it after we finished the show from london to the u.s. that we. >> you had done it for television. >> london and pbs. they disappeared in shipping, and it turned out 16 years later

steve jobs dice and the director paul send in london says, well, you know, i think i kept a tape of just the jobs interview. he went in his garage and found it, called him up, i found this tape, what do you think show uld do with it. i asked how many others did you keep. i thought they were all lost. i hadn't known at all about this. >> and it was just the one. >> just jobs. >> had you realized at the time -- obviously he was the central part of your film. did you realize he was going to be that important? you said you interviewed 120. >> 125. >> and you used a few minutes of job. >> about nine minutes? in retrospect did you realize what an influence he was going to be on american culture? >> no. i certainly did. we painted him in the series and was in decline. he left apple, was not doing well and microsoft was the decedent at the time, that's the

way we played it. we did this interview, spent 69 minutes talk to steve, and at the end of it the sound man who doesn't speak up very much about these things said, i think we just watched history. >> and the director kept that over all the others. >> 1 out of 125. >> because steve was on. you know, we're not used to seeing -- either it's steve the huks ter when he's in his salesman mode or steve the cranky geek and this was -- at the beginning he's a little cranky and he warms up and we talk about things in his past and he was a kid. and it was great. >> you go way back with him. >> i started with him at apple in '77. >> employee number 12. where did you first meet him? >>. >> at a home computer club setting. i took him and steve woz and got to know him. >> had you spoken to him since

that interview. >> the way it goes with steve, you don't speak to him but he speaks to you a lot. so, you know, i would go for months and not hear from him and then i'd hear from him seven times in one day. the last time i heard from him was in august. >> it's amazing to me this is going into movie theaters, in "tower heist." what does it say about people? >> people are interested. that people are interested in this interview right now. >> they are. and, you know, it was found -- paul send said maybe you can put it on your blog for your readers to watch. >> well, that would be very 2011. movie theaters are very -- >> very new media, but i'm a very old media guy. i asked and they said give it away. i said, this is crazy. i have three kids i have to put through college. i thought, well, why not a movie, why not a theater.

so i sent a letter to mark cuban who owns theater, in the middle of the night. >> it helps if you know mark cuban. >> in five minutes heard back from him. we had a deal. >> clearly the perception of jobs changed since that 1985 interview? was he still the same person? >> i heard from 30 years steve has changed which means steve is nicer than he used to be. and then you get to know him and you find, no, steve hasn't changed. but steve changed over time in certain ways. next taught him how to spend his own money instead of someone else's money. he learned houd to run a tight ship. early apple compared to late apple. >> completely different companies. >> there's no comparison. early apple was just wild. he learned how to make a profit and then he got mair and learned about families and having a family.

at home he was a completely different guy. i used to live in his neighborhood, palo alto, and you could see in his kitchen window and he's be doing the dishes. >> it got to the point apple was run like a cult and he was a cult leader. where did that come from? >> he would have liked to have run it like a cult in 1977, absolutely. you know, he was the same guy, the same no internal critic. he would say whatever he felt like saying and do whatever he felt like doing. you know, scully's success after jobs left in 1985 was based solely on canceling the projects that steesh was doing that were never going to see the market. it was waste ing $200 million a year. >> let me jump in.

he fired jobs. >> that's right. steve brought him in and scully betrayed him. >> fair enough. do you break new ground? walter isaacson has got this enormous book. i don't know if if you know this or not. do you break new ground with this or is this a trip down memory lane? >> i'll tell you about walter's book. it's very interesting. i'll tell you about this. he said, you know, you helped me a lot. so when it came out, i looked for my name. it's nowhere to be found. it's like that milton burrell joke where i said what, and he said you will. you know, walter's not an insider. walter was hired by steve or brought in by steve to do the job and i think steve chose him because of his gra va as the. >> you were there. >> i was there for a lot of it.

still, i know, i think steve sort of pulled it over on him a little bit. >> i'm about two-thirds through the book now. >> are you mentioned in it? >> i'm in the footnotes. >> i didn't look in the footnotes. >> i'm sure you're in. how much of a role did his intuition play into it. >> what's your per sengs of the future of the even company without steve guiding it? >> we have four or five yeerps of timetables and roadmaps available and we're fine. you know what? they are. everybody has that. you've got plan for that. mora's law is going to take effect and you've got to expect that that's going to happen. they say, we have a bunch of categories and we haven't seen them and then the next week they

drop itv. >> he was making changes every step of the way. >> they were. >> they're not going to have in anymore. >> there are people at apple that nobody knows about that steve worked with and groomed for 25 years that will be little steves. they're still there. you'll nerve hear about them but i'm sure they're speaking up in loud voices at meetings. >> i was at a meeting and ran into someone who was a fairly high level apple employee and i asked questions about the company and i felt guilty and acknowledged i was a reporter. not only did he stop answering but he acted like there were no questions being asked. >> does that continue now that he's gone? >> you're the reporter. you tell me. i expect it will. >> secrecy has been very good to

apple. >> it has. >> they turned it into a marketing tool. >> we have about a minute left. we come back to the film for just a minute. i saw the screen. >> i have a movie. >> you have a movie. >> i have a screener of it. the thing that struck me, he's less guard. he talks about a tele-type and makes a tele-type noise. he talks about the blue box that gets into at&t computers that he and woz built. it was a less guard, less polished steve jobs. >> and thank you. i did that. >> with the skills of your ininterview. >> how did you get steve jobs to sing? >> we had 69 minutes. we had ten here. if we went 59 more minutes you would start thinking. >> you would know the brand of underwear i want. >> we're going to protect the viewer and go to commercial. "press: here" will be back in a

minute.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to scott mcnealy and bob cringely. steve's a scott's app is in the store. bob's movie is will be coming soon. i'm scott mcgrew. thanks for making us part of journd morning.