The Financial Times (the pink-colored paper) just reported today (May 9th, 2011) that Apple Computer has overtaken Google to become the world’s most valuable brand with an estimated brand value of more than $153bn. This can largely be attributed to the explosive success of both the iphone and ipad. I myself own both of these products and I have to say they are ingenious. Absolutely addicting. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’ve changed my life, but without these gadgets close at hand, I feel somewhat naked. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs. I don’t know how he does it but he’s got a real knack for inventing products out of thin air that once people got a hold of wonder how they could have done without them in the first place. Let’s take a peek into the mind of man who has revolutionized the way all of us work and play. These quotes are taken from “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs”, ISBN 978-0-07-174875-9.
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Pg. 1
"Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." pg. 67
"We may not know how we're going to do it, but we will figure it out.". Pg. 67
On the innovation process
“We don’t think, let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation; let’s put them up all over the company! It’s like somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool. It’s painful to watch…It’s like watching Michael Dell try to dance. Painful.” Pg. 1
“You can tell a lot about a person by who his or her heroes are.” Pg. 7
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” Pg. 13
On dropping out of college
“After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.” Pg. 15
“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.” Pg. 16
“None of this (calligraphy) had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.” Pg. 17
“The only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Pg. 18
“These Heathkits would come with detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation, but even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, you would think, “I haven’t built one of those, but I could. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.” Pg. 19
“I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work. I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the nonsuccessful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of your company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to write that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.” Pg. 20-21
“You’re work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” Pg. 21
“I never did it for the money. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful-that’s what matters to me.” Pg. 22
“I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren’t many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really into it for the money.” Pg. 38
“The Macintosh team was what is commonly known as intrapreneurship-only a few years before the term was coined-a group of people going, in essence, back to the garage, but in a large company.” Pg. 39
“We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me-too” products. For us, it’s always the next dream.” Pg. 43
“We started out to get a computer in the hands of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” Pg. 52
“I visited Xerox Parc. It was a very important visit. I remember being shown a rudimentary graphical user interface. It was incomplete, some of it wasn’t even right, but the germ of the idea was there. Within ten minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could argue about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might be, but I don’t think rational people could argue that every computer would work this way someday.” Pg. 52
“These are team sports. You’re trying to climb up a mountain bringing a lot of stuff. One person can’t do it.” Pg. 56
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” Pg. 58
“Let’s make a dent in the universe. We’ll make it so important that it will make a dent in the universe.” Pg. 59
“Here’s what you find at a lot of companies. You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, what happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.” Pg. 68
“Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision.” Pg. 74
“Creativity is just connecting things.” Pg.79
“Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” Pg. 81
“It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Pg. 86
“I wish Bill Gates the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” Pg. 89
“Since 1979 Apple has invested millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours in the development of a consistent user interface that will take the crank out of the personal computer…The philosophy behind the Macintosh is very simple: in order for a personal computer to become a truly mass-market commodity, it will have to be functional, inexpensive, very friendly, and easy to use. Macintosh represents a significant step in the evolution of the mass-market personal computer. Macintosh is Apple’s crankless Volkswagen, affordable to the quality conscious.” Pg. 90
“We, too, are going to think differently and serve the people who have been buying our products since the beginning. Because a lot of times people think they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.” Pg. 103
“The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes (when launching Apple’s retail stores) they made. But we never hire consultants per se. We just want to make great products.” Pg. 111
“It’s not about pop culture and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big thing? There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘a faster horse,’’”
“Apple invented FireWire, and we ship FireWire on every computer we make. It’s built into iPod. It’s the fastest and only music player with FireWire. Why? Because it’s fast. You can download an entire CD onto an iPod in five to ten seconds. Let’s take a look at how it compares to USB. Five to ten seconds to load an entire CD with FireWire. On a USB, you’re talking five minutes. Let’s talk about one thousand songs. On iPod with FireWire it is under ten minutes, on a USB player it is five hours. Can you imagine? You’ve got to watch it for five hours as it loads the songs. Under ten minutes with iPod. It’s thirty times faster than any other MP3 player.” Pg. 114
“How much is ninety-nine cents? How many of you had a Starbucks latte this morning? That’s three bucks. You could have bought three songs. And think about how many lattes are being sold around the world today. Now let’s look at the downsides again. What does it mean to have unreliable downloads or encoding? Here is a typical scenario. You go to Kazaa to find one song. You never find one song; you find fifty to sixty of them. And you’ve got to pick which one of those is going to give you a reliable download. You often pick wrong. The download is as slow as molasses and craps out halfway through. You try again and get the same result. After a few times, you finally download the song, only to find the last four seconds is cut off, or it has a glitch in the middle, or it was encoded by someone who didn’t know what they were doing and it sounds bad. You try again and again, and after fifteen minutes you finally succeed in getting a clean version of the song you want. What that means is you’ll spend an hour to get four songs that you can get at under four bucks from Apple. That means you’re working for under minimum wage! In addition, you are stealing.” Pg. 116
“The most advanced phones are called ‘smartphones,’ so they say. They typically combine a phone plus e-mail plus a baby Internet. The problem is they are not so smart and they are not so easy to use…They’re really complicated…What we want is to make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and supereasy to use. This is what iPhone is…” pg. 118
“It was a great challenge. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with. And we’ve got the technology. We’ve got the miniaturization from the iPod. We’ve got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and say, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let’s give them a shot. And they did.” pg. 119
“Most of us use laptops and a smartphone. A question has arisen, is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something in between a laptop and a smartphone? We’ve pondered this question for years. The bar is pretty high. In order to create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks, better than the laptop and better than the smartphone. What kinds of tasks? Things like browsing the Web. That’s a pretty tall order. Doing e-mail. Enjoying and sharing photographs. Watching videos. Enjoying your music collection. Playing games. Reading e-books. If there’s going to be a third category of device, it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than either a laptop or smartphone; otherwise it has no reason for being.” Pg. 121
“Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of wondering about what happened yesterday.” Pg. 121
“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” pg. 135
“When we got to the company a year ago, there were fifteen product platforms and a zillion variants of each one. After three weeks, I said, ‘How are we going to recommend these products to others when we don’t even know what products to recommend to our friends?’ So, we went back to business school 101 and asked, ‘What do people want?’ Well, they want two kinds of products: consumer and professional. In each of those two categories we need desktop and portable models. If we had four great products, that’s all we need. As a matter of fact, if we only had four, we could put the A-team on every single one of them. And if we only had four, we could turn them all every nine months instead of every eighteen months. And if we only had four, we could be working on the next generation of each one as we’re introducing the first generation. That’s what we decided to do, to focus on four great products.” Pg. 139
“Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea. And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” Pg. 139
On iPod’s simplicity,
“Plug it in, Whirrrrr. Done.” pg. 143
“When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and see that it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key, underlying principle of the problem. And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.” Pg. 144
“We’re going to start with a revolutionary user interface. Why? Here are four smartphones. What’s wrong with their user interfaces? The problem with them is in the bottom forty. They all have keyboards that are there whether or not you need them to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen.” Pg. 146
“Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cell phones are going to do that, so the PDA market is going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.” Pg. 153
“You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.” Pg. 197
“Every morning I look at myself in the mirror and ask myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ If the answer is ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know it’s time to change something.” Pg. 222
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