English Steve-jobs Thoughts

"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. … Let’s be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"

"The most telling lesson to be learned from Jobs’s example might be summed up by inverting one of his favorite marketing slogans : Think Indifferent. That is, care only about the product, not the myriad producers, whether factory workers in China or staff members in Cupertino, or colleagues like Wozniak , Kottke , and Tevanian , who had been crucial to Apple’s success"

"Steve Jobs was the best marketeer at the intersection of science and art that existed in the 20th century ... he understood not just marketing and not just technology, but how to sell incredibly technical products to your mother, who would never care about bits, bytes, RAM’s, ROM’s, or whatever"

"Bill Gates : Jobs was a genius, what he did, particularly when he came back to Apple... no one else could do what he did there. I couldn’t have done that. He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spell — but I could see him casting the spell. I was so jealous."

"Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek . Steve has a reality distortion field. … In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules"

"I never really get to see, except second hand, how abrupt he is with people. I couldn't be that way with people. But maybe that's what you need to run a business, to find things that are worthless and get rid of them"

"Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be almost a running joke. It's not funny, hurts Apple's image when he does it to outsiders, and wastes our time and energy when it is done to another employee."

"Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea was a good one he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own."

"Jobs also has favorites, who can do no wrong--and others can do no right. He will uncritically dismiss an idea saying: "Oh, that's X's idea. His ideas aren't worth anything."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"We’ve got a great week plan for you. You know, this year we’ve got 42 hundred registered attendees. This is the largest WWDC ever so thank you very much for making this a record event for us."

"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these."