Apple CEO Steve Jobs was as lively as ever at a recent discussion at the D8: All Things Digital conference. One of his first questions was about Apple surpassing Microsoft in market capitalization.

“For those of us who have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal,” Jobs said. “But it doesn’t matter very much; it’s not what’s important. … It’s not why any of our customers buy our products. So I think it’s good for us to keep that in mind.”

Jobs was asked about the decision to exclude Flash from the iPhone, and he stated that HTML5 was on the rise to replace Flash. “Sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy-disc drive in the first iMac, people call us crazy,” Jobs said.

When asked about the platform war with Microsoft, Jobs had an interesting response. “We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Microsoft,” he said. “Maybe that’s why we lost we saw ourselves building the best computers we could build.”

Jobs’ response to why he liked the consumer market over the business-enterprise market apparently amused some. “What I love about the consumer market and I always hated about the enterprise market is we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it and every person votes for it themselves. They vote yes or no,” said Jobs. “The enterprise market, it’s not so simple the people that use the product don’t decide for themselves. The people that make those decisions sometimes are confused.”

The way Jobs tells it, the iPad was actually conceived before the iPhone, when he wanted to make a display he could type on, and seeing it working made him think, “My God, we can build a phone out of this.”

“When we got our wind back and thought we could take on something next, [we] pulled the tablet off the shelf, took everything we learned from the phone and went to work on the tablet,” he said.

Boldly, Jobs predicted that PCs are going to be phased out by other computing devices, but didn’t go so far as to predict what device. “Is it the iPad Who knows Will it happen five years or seven years from now, who knows ” said Jobs. “But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

Source: Seattle Times