Steve Jobs Quotes
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Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.
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The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one.
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You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.
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I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail.
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Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
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We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
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I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.
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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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To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
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I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I'm a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple.
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Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart.
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There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. 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.
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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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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.
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I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.
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It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want...
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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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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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What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. I was a very public failure.
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It's not like Windows users don't have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought...
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You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on.
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You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.