Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul "Steve" Jobswas an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officerof Apple Inc.; CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Shortly after his death, Jobs's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth24 February 1955
CountryUnited States of America
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.
We just wanted to build the best thing we could build
It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.
It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.
I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building.
The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.
It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with - born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.
The technology companies don't understand creative things at all. Silicon Valley's view of the creative process in Hollywood is a bunch of guys in their young thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes.
Probably death is the best invention of life.
Don't just live a life; build one.