Steve Jobs Biography
Searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: (Location 352)
Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. (Location 360)
It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. (Location 467)
“He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.” (Location 468)
Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. (Location 490)
Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. (Location 622)
“The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” (Location 623)
“It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.” (Location 636)
found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. (Location 691)
Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.” (Location 794)
Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks. (Location 871)
“He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” (Location 894)
Be Here Now, (Location 930)
including Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Location 940)
“It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.” (Location 946)
Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on intuition. (Location 947)
intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis,” (Location 948)
read Mucusless Diet Healing System by Arnold Ehret, (Location 963)
Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock—Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era. (Location 970)
“Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field,” said Kottke. (Location 994)
“He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.” (Location 1037)
In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. (Location 1043)
creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” (Location 1056)
The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. (Location 1165)
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. (Location 1166)
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. (Location 1171)
Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. (Location 1175)
Eihei-ji monastery, (Location 1175)
Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and ran the (Location 1178)
primal scream therapy, (Location 1194)
He told me he was deeply angry about the fact that he had been given up.” (Location 1210)
Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others and thus push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible. (Location 1218)
reality distortion field. “If you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.” (Location 1226)
‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’” (Location 1274)
Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. (Location 1292)
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. (Location 1317)
‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” (Location 1322)
“Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” (Location 1323)
whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” (Location 1347)
“anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.” (Location 1357)
“I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak. (Location 1370)
“Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak. (Location 1377)
just come back from the apple farm. (Location 1396)
sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. (Location 1397)
it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” (Location 1397)
There was a whiff of counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. (Location 1400)
Jobs at times seemed to be driven by demons, while Woz seemed a naïf who was toyed with by angels. Jobs (Location 1413)
He could be charismatic, even mesmerizing, but also cold and brutal. Wozniak, in contrast, was shy and socially awkward, which made him seem childishly sweet. (Location 1414)
It helped that Jobs was awed by Wozniak’s engineering wizardry, and Wozniak was awed by Jobs’s business drive. (Location 1416)
The next Apple, he decided, needed to have a great case and a built-in keyboard, and be integrated end to end, from the power supply to the software. (Location 1528)
Wozniak had come up with an ingenious way to goose the machine’s chips into creating color, and he wanted to see if it would work on the type of television that uses a projector to display on a movie-like screen. (Location 1533)
It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box. (Location 1557)
In particular he wanted—as he would his entire career—to provide power in a way that avoided the need for a fan. Fans (Location 1569)
“That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board (Location 1576)
Jobs’s father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring (Location 1579)
about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. (Location 1579)
this was a threat to a seamless end-to-end user experience. (Location 1582)
Don Valentine, a straight-shooting former marketing manager at National Semiconductor who had founded Sequoia Capital, (Location 1592)
Mike Markkula, (Location 1600)
“You could tell that if he could screw you, he wouldn’t. He had a real moral sense to him.” (Location 1610)
Markkula made a wild prediction: “We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years,” (Location 1618)
He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.” (Location 1642)
Markkula (Location 1643)
“The Apple Marketing Philosophy” (Location 1644)
empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: (Location 1644)
“We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” (Location 1645)
focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant (Location 1645)
impute. (Location 1647)
For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of core products, and he would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even the details of packaging. (Location 1650)
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” (Location 1675)
They put on display the only three Apple IIs that had been finished, but empty boxes were piled up to give the impression that there were many more on hand. (Location 1684)
Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues. (Location 1707)
“I was only twenty-two, and I knew I wasn’t ready to run a real company,” he said. “But Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give it up.” (Location 1716)
Bob’s Big Boy hamburgers (Woz’s favorite place) and at the Good Earth restaurant (Jobs’s). (Location 1717)
“His obsession is a passion for the product, a passion for product perfection.” (Location 1732)
“Steve was too tough on people. I wanted our company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever we (Location 1741)
Wozniak deserves the historic credit for the design of its awe-inspiring circuit board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo invention. (Location 1752)
“Woz designed a great machine, but it would be sitting in hobby shops today were it not for Steve Jobs.” (Location 1755)
“I wasn’t sure it was my kid, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one she was sleeping with,” (Location 1798)
There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same age that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs. (Location 1808)
Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor. (Location 1856)
Raskin’s goal was to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that would be like an appliance—a self-contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and software all together—and have a graphical interface. (Location 1899)
Alan Kay, (Location 1905)
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” (Location 1905)
In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays. Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features (Location 1913)
“Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” (Location 1958)
Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.” (Location 1961)
annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. (Location 1963)
Execution is just as important. (Location 1963)
“We knew they hadn’t done it right, and that we could—at a fraction of the price.” (Location 1980)
“Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at assessing people’s (Location 1991)
answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or unsure of themselves.” (Location 1992)
Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” (Location 1999)
Documents should not lurch line by line as you scroll through them, but instead should flow. (Location 2003)
Jobs wanted to build a VolksLisa, a simple and inexpensive product for the masses. (Location 2010)
Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite attitude. Before the shares went public, he decided to sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to each of forty different midlevel employees. Most of his beneficiaries made enough to buy a home. (Location 2042)
He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. (Location 2059)
He had a great love for some material objects, especially those that were finely designed and crafted, such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives and Braun appliances, BMW motorcycles and Ansel Adams prints, Bösendorfer pianos and Bang & Olufsen audio equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter how rich he became, tended not to be ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker to shame. (Location 2061)
Neither then nor later would he travel with an entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have security protection. (Location 2064)
I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life. (Location 2075)
from Robert Friedland. “When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of someone who sees the future and is making sure it works,” (Location 2091)
“Jobs seems to introduce tension, politics, and hassles rather than enjoying a buffer from those distractions,” (Location 2169)
“I thoroughly enjoy talking with him, and I admire his ideas, practical perspective, and energy. (Location 2170)
I just don’t feel that he provides the trusting, supportive, relaxed environment that I need.” But many (Location 2171)
Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. (Location 2213)
“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” (Location 2258)
the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. (Location 2273)
“You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.” (Location 2275)
He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. (Location 2278)
“If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of (Location 2294)
“Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.” (Location 2298)
Note: Thats how open minded he was
He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something. (Location 2308)
Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate (Location 2311)
you and put you on a pedestal and own you.” (Location 2312)
I could understand why Steve would get upset, and he was usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. (Location 2318)
But if you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized you up and decided that you knew what you were doing, he would respect you. (Location 2325)
“We learned to interpret ‘This is shit’ to actually be a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do it.’” (Location 2338)
“He did it better because Steve had challenged him,” (Location 2340)
Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his impatience with those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on budget. (Location 2342)
“Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.” (Location 2353)
“The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. (Location 2356)
“Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” (Location 2362)
design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit. (Location 2392)
He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple. (Location 2401)
Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can leverage this experience people already have.” (Location 2410)
He’s passionate and super-serious about design, but at the same time there’s a sense of play.” (Location 2420)
Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong. (Location 2596)
The goal was to get people who were creative, wickedly smart, and slightly rebellious. (Location 2657)
After tearing people down, he would find ways to lift them up and make them feel that being part of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. (Location 2667)
two-day retreat at a nearby resort. (Location 2668)
“It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.” (Location 2674)
“because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then (Location 2680)
“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” (Location 2699)
they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire (Location 2712)
“Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing.” (Location 2754)
store merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich their life!” (Location 2792)
“He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.” (Location 2827)
I shared with him a passion for ideas.” (Location 2838)
want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.” (Location 2919)
“It’s the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market.” (Location 2924)
Jobs had always been able to draw energy by imagining himself as a rebel pitted against the forces of darkness. (Location 2953)
Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined, and abundant in analytic processing power. (Location 3140)
Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, (Location 3141)
and interfaces friendly. (Location 3141)
Jobs was a perfectionist who craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple became the exemplars of a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware, software, and content into a seamless package. (Location 3153)
Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of business and technology; he was open to licensing Microsoft’s operating system and software to a variety of manufacturers. (Location 3155)
Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future, and that Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had been developed at Xerox PARC. (Location 3225)
“I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.” (Location 3249)
Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant. (Location 3256)
Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what it saw at Xerox PARC, it was inevitable that other companies would develop similar graphical interfaces. (Location 3259)
Apple had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. (Location 3262)
“I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.” (Location 3266)
“The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.” (Location 3380)
“There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.” (Location 3418)
Sculley had painfully craved Jobs’s affection, Jobs had eagerly sought a father figure and mentor, and when the ardor began to cool there was an emotional backwash. (Location 3519)
For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. (Location 3527)
He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for product details. (Location 3529)
He urged Jobs not to resist and to agree instead to work on developing new technologies and products. (Location 3574)
“I don’t believe you’re going to do that,” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to destroy the company.” (Location 3576)
The dream of academic researchers was to have a workstation that was both powerful and personal. (Location 3797)
Jobs could buy a majority of the division and serve as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to run it. (Location 4245)
Silicon Valley folks don’t really respect Hollywood creative types, and the Hollywood folks think that tech folks are people you hire and never have to meet,” (Location 4268)
“My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined,” (Location 4281)
“He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic,” (Location 4448)
“I believe in environment more than heredity in determining your traits, but still you have to wonder a little about your biological roots,” he said. (Location 4482)
Even at a young age Lisa began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which (Location 4581)
asceticism and minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. (Location 4582)
Sitting in his office was a lithe, very blond woman who combined a hippie aura of natural purity with the solid sensibilities of a computer consultant. (Location 4629)
Smart, yet unpretentious. Tough enough to stand up to him, yet Zen-like enough to rise above turmoil. (Location 4694)
Well-educated and independent, yet ready to make accommodations for him and a family. (Location 4695)
My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self-sufficient, but it’s not something that is part of who I am.” (Location 4728)
“He had the power to focus like a laser beam, and when it came across you, you basked in the light of his attention. (Location 4752)
When it moved to another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. (Location 4753)
“He is the luckiest guy to have landed with Laurene, who is smart and can engage him intellectually and can sustain his ups and downs and tempestuous personality,” (Location 4766)
Even when he had his second coming at Apple and was a world-famous billionaire, Jobs had no security guards or live-in servants, and he even kept the back door unlocked during the day. (Location 4851)
“to see any need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people.” (Location 4924)
The lesson Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched (Location 4957)
Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. (Location 5324)
“This company is in shambles, and I don’t have time to wet-nurse the board. So I need all of you to resign. Or else I’m going to resign and not come back on Monday.” (Location 5548)
Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. (Location 5569)
“You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” (Location 5571)
“The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they’re out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.” (Location 5614)
Because a lot of people think they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.” (Location 5617)
It was designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the computers. (Location 5707)
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t (Location 5719)
do is ignore them. Because they change things. (Location 5721)
They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. (Location 5721)
They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way. (Location 5742)
As was often the case, Jobs did not like to be forced to make a decision. (Location 5758)
“Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” (Location 5767)
He was in charge, and he did not rule by consensus. (Location 5780)
that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. (Location 5808)
“I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company,” (Location 5808)
“Deciding what not to do is as important (Location 5841)
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process (Location 5848)
People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” (Location 5850)
The “i,” Jobs later explained, was to emphasize that the devices would be seamlessly integrated with the Internet. (Location 5871)
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” (Location 5941)
You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential. (Location 5949)
He gets to see things in relationship to each other, which is pretty hard to do in a big company. (Location 5995)
“The ideas that come from me and my team would have been completely irrelevant, nowhere, if Steve hadn’t been here to push us, work with us, and drive through all the resistance to turn our ideas into products.” (Location 6022)
“Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” (Location 6040)
Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis. (Location 6058)
Note: Intuition can sometimes help to bypass the unnecessary analysis which can slow things down. Intuition isn't always right but helps tomove quicklyy in somewhaat beetter direction giving enough room too test and iterate later on.
I didn’t explain all the thinking, but he intuitively got it. (Location 6066)
make hit products and promote them with terrific marketing.” (Location 6147)
His management mantra was “Focus.” (Location 6184)
“My intuition told me that joining Apple would be a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius.” (Location 6211)
“Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable.” (Location 6212)
he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. (Location 6243)
The phrases he used were “deep collaboration” and “concurrent engineering.” (Location 6246)
But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. (Location 6256)
When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. (Location 6258)
Secretly build a prototype of the store near the Apple campus, furnish it completely, and then hang out there until you feel comfortable with it. (Location 6385)
this Bauhaus aesthetic and wonderful minimalism, which goes all the way to the checkout process in the stores,” (Location 6396)
Jobs agreed that simplicity and lack of distractions were keys to a great store, as they were to a product. (Location 6400)
“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” (Location 6422)
“Plus, for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. (Location 6482)
(he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) (Location 6493)
“People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them,” (Location 6510)
The beauty of this realization was that there was only one company that was well-positioned to provide such an integrated approach. (Location 6537)
Microsoft wrote software, Dell and Compaq made hardware, Sony produced a lot of digital devices, Adobe developed a lot of applications. But only (Location 6538)
Apple did all of these things. (Location 6539)
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. (Location 6554)
Complex tasks could be handled on the computer, easy ones on the device. (Location 6586)
iPod, the device that would begin the transformation of Apple from being a computer maker into being the world’s most valuable company. (Location 6587)
I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod. In addition, the iPod would position Apple as evoking innovation and youth. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we completely (Location 6717)
dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred. (Location 6719)
More than that, the iPod became the essence of everything Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that’s bold and simple. (Location 6732)
“After all, Apple’s whole history is making both the hardware and the software, with the result that the two work better together.” (Location 6739)
The seamless connection between your iPod, iTunes software, and computer made it easy to manage the music you already owned. But (Location 6751)
the music companies had been able to agree on a standardized encoding method for protecting music files, then multiple online stores could have proliferated. (Location 6764)
If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. (Location 6780)
If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. (Location 6780)
“We believe that 80% of the people stealing stuff don’t want to be, there’s just no legal alternative,” (Location 6784)
Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins, because he gets a better service and doesn’t have to be a thief.” (Location 6785)
“We used our small market share to our advantage by arguing that if the store turned out to be destructive it wouldn’t destroy the entire universe,” he recalled. Jobs’s (Location 6790)
“You couldn’t compete with piracy unless you sold the songs individually.” (Location 6801)
I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline. (Location 6810)
The difference in skill sets between the music folks and technologists is just huge.” (Location 6831)
one of the beauties of Jobs’s end-to-end strategy: (Location 6868)
Sales of songs on iTunes would drive iPod sales, which would drive Macintosh sales. (Location 6868)
“Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things,” (Location 6919)
Gates also found it strange that no one else had created a service that allowed people to buy songs rather than subscribe on a monthly basis. (Location 6922)
Jobs always wanted Apple to create its own unified utopia, a magical walled garden where hardware and software and peripheral devices worked well together to create a great experience, and where the success of one product drove sales of all the companions. (Location 6933)
In the end, you just don’t want someone else to control (Location 6953)
a big part of the user experience. (Location 6954)
We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. (Location 6970)
If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much. (Location 6971)
It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive. (Location 6980)
Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. (Location 6983)
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” (Location 6988)
So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him. (Location 6988)
“Things Have Changed” from the 2000 movie Wonder Boys. (Location 7054)
A Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet the Beatles! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Location 7056)
10,000 Maniacs, Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Dido, Green Day, John Mayer (a friend of both his and Apple), Moby (likewise), U2, Seal, and Talking Heads. (Location 7065)
“Spiritus Domini,” (Location 7074)
Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto and a fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier. (Location 7075)
“Goldberg Variations” that Glenn Gould recorded, the first in 1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and the second in 1981, a year before he died. (Location 7076)
“John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, (Location 7097)
the Beatles,” he answered. “The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles.” (Location 7103)
“One Too Many Mornings.” (Location 7117)
The ad showed the halo effect of the iPod’s marketing: It helped Dylan win a younger audience, just as the iPod had done for Apple computers. Because of the ad, Dylan’s (Location 7153)
We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it’s like, “Wow, how did they do that?!? (Location 7172)
“It’s actually amazing that a CEO cares that much about detail,” (Location 7239)
1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. (Location 7271)
It was at Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. (Location 7287)
“There’s a classic thing in business, which is the second-product syndrome,” (Location 7346)
“Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” (Location 7354)
“The Pixar building was Steve’s own movie,” (Location 7356)
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” (Location 7361)
“That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” (Location 7361)
“So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” (Location 7365)
I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.” (Location 7368)
They both had a passion for making good products, which often meant micromanaging details and not sugarcoating their criticisms. (Location 7395)
“I liked the film because it was about taking risks and learning to let those you love take risks,” (Location 7422)
“We make progress by eliminating things, by removing the superfluous.” (Location 7585)
“He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. (Location 7839)
Note: Devil's advocate
So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.” (Location 7840)
enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. (Location 7843)
centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies. (Location 7843)
Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. (Location 7847)
“That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.” (Location 7848)
“Memento mori”: Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility. (Location 7854)
Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. (Location 7880)
ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. (Location 7968)
“Think of all the innovations we’d be able to adapt if we did the keyboard onscreen with software. Let’s bet on it, and then we’ll find a way to make it work.” (Location 7989)
“Can you shut up,” Weeks interjected, “and let me teach you some science?” Jobs was taken aback and fell silent. (Location 8024)
“Laurene was a beautiful tiger protecting him,” (Location 8233)
Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. (Location 8248)
pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. (Location 8248)
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear (Location 8249)
Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. (Location 8249)
He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. (Location 8251)
He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the prospect of returning. (Location 8269)
We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and (Location 8289)
meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and (Location 8292)
the courage to change. (Location 8294)
And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well. (Location 8295)
It was another example of Jobs’s desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh. (Location 8369)
“The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces.” (Location 8413)
By bundling hardware, software, and services, and controlling them tightly, Apple is consistently able to get the jump on its rivals and roll out polished products.” (Location 8425)
simple, declarative, clean. “We (Location 8490)
But the apps also allowed the platform to be sort of open, in a very controlled way, to outside developers who wanted to create software and content for it—open, that is, like a carefully curated and gated community garden. (Location 8498)
From the outside, the venture capitalist John Doerr argued that permitting apps would spawn a profusion of new entrepreneurs who would create new services. (Location 8506)
He would permit outsiders to write apps, but they would have to meet strict standards, be tested and approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes Store. (Location 8512)
It was a way to reap the advantage of empowering thousands of software developers while retaining enough control to protect the integrity of the iPhone and the simplicity of the customer experience. (Location 8513)
“Well, you can ask them for it, but if they won’t voluntarily give it to you, don’t blame me,” (Location 8577)
Bewkes respected Jobs’s ability to be both a strategic thinker and a master of the tiniest details. (Location 8593)
If someone subscribes to our magazine, we need to know who it is, we need to be able to create online communities of those people, and we need the right to pitch them directly about renewing.” (Location 8605)
great debate of the digital age: closed versus open, or as Jobs framed it, integrated versus fragmented. (Location 8695)
The benefits of a closed platform is control. But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach, because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice.” (Location 8700)
They decided to ban any app that defamed people, (Location 8741)
might be politically explosive, or was deemed by Apple’s censors to be pornographic. (Location 8742)
Revolutions are about freedom.” (Location 8756)
“freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. (Location 8757)
“He’s better at being the underdog than being a humble giant.” (Location 8786)
“The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.” (Location 8863)
And this time he gave one of the clearest expressions of his credo, that true creativity and simplicity come from integrating the whole widget—hardware and software, and for that matter content and covers and salesclerks—rather than allowing things to be open and fragmented, as happened in the world of Windows PCs and was now happening with Android devices: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. (Location 8917)
There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Toy Story 3. More revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since. (Location 8933)
Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. (Location 8970)
“Accountability is strictly enforced.” (Location 9001)
his father was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products he was making. (Location 9116)
I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. (Location 9120)
Seeing him take joy in eating made Lisa feel relaxed with him for the first time. (Location 9167)
he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to stay in the country. (Location 9235)
“When you have feelings,” he said, “like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.” (Location 9286)
We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. (Location 9341)
The main thing I stressed was focus. (Location 9343)
“I used to believe that the open, horizontal model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved that the integrated, vertical model could also be great.” Jobs responded with his own admission. “Your model worked too,” (Location 9375)
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. (Location 9415)
They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.” (Location 9417)
Tags: favorite
“I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” (Location 9419)
The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity. (Location 9470)
This ability to integrate hardware and software and content into one unified system enabled him to impose simplicity. (Location 9481)
The downside of Jobs’s approach was that his desire to delight the user led him to resist empowering the user. (Location 9509)
“We do them because we want to make great products, because we care about the user, and because we like to take responsibility for the entire experience rather than turn out the crap that other people make.” (Location 9517)
Using an Apple product could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom. (Location 9522)
He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. (Location 9526)
He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism. (Location 9530)
He made a point of being brutally honest. (Location 9535)
The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary. It hindered him more than it helped him. (Location 9542)
Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. (Location 9543)
but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. (Location 9547)
Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. (Location 9549)
insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. (Location 9567)
Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. (Location 9568)
people were motivated to make great products. (Location 9579)
But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. (Location 9580)
It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. (Location 9581)
Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. (Location 9585)
I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. (Location 9588)
The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. (Location 9606)
When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. (Location 9609)
They created a company to last, not just to make money. (Location 9615)
That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. (Location 9632)
We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me. (Location 9637)
So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” (Location 9645)
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” (Location 9727)
not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.” (Location 9729)
“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. (Location 9733)
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” (Location 9734)
