I always love hearing about these great people as they are in personal settings (i.e. real people).
Denise Howell has posted some transcripts of some conversations (Q&A mostly) between Walter Mossberg and Steve Jobs as well as some conversations between Walter Mossberd and Bill Gates.
Steve has some interesting things to say, all you apple people can use these answers to check things off your “Crazy-crap-I’m-expecting-to-see-at-WWDC lists”
Mossberg: A lot of people think given the success you’ve had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a PDA.
Jobs: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, “People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.” “We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail.” Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. “And people accuse us of niche markets.” I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business. What we’ve done instead is we’ve written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.