Apple co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc for the last 14 years has succumbed to the cancer he had been battling since 2004. He was 56. Steve resigned as Apple’s CEO in August 2011 and was replaced by Tim Cook.
He transformed Apple from being nearly bankrupt into one of the most successful companies on the planet.
He was an American icon with his signature black or blue jeans and mock turtle neck shirts.
Steve founded several other companies, such as Next Computer (which was later folded into Apple and is the foundation of it’s latest iteration operating system, OS X. Also, Pixar, the animation studio responsible for Toy Story, Cars, Ratatouille, and many others.
Here are some quotes from Steve over the years:
On Design
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]
The Quintessential Salesman
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
On Character
“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.” [Apple Confidential 2.0]
On Good Design
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]
Below are some from the website MacStories. Click HERE for more.
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
“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.”
“We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.”
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
“The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They’re just like dead fish washing up on the shores.”
“Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.”
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And 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 products.”
“My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
“Click. Boom. Amazing!”
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
“Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.
So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.”
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place – the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.”
“I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple.
My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”
“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.
We just want to make great products. (I think he means “insanely great products!“)”
“So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.”
“When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.
They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else. (this actually reiterates my oft-repeated mantra of “ubiquitous evangelism” in companies)”
