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If you want to hire great people and have them stay, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.
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If you tell people they can't burn CDs of their music, as almost every current legal music service has done, or they can only burn one CD with a track or pay per track per burn extra, nobody is going to go for it.
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Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.
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I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do.
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Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.
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The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place.
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Woz is living his own life now. He hasn't been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.
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Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a culture shock than going to India. 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. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.
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Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.
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The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.
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You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.
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I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
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The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
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Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think 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.
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Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?
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I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I've tried my best.
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You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
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We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.
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I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and... it wasn't that important — because I never did it for the money.
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Music companies are not technology companies any more than technology companies are music companies. They're really different from each other.
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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's driven me.
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Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.
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We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.
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A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.