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
What's happened at Apple is that our business has basically tripled in the last five or six years.
When we announced the Microsoft deal six months ago in Boston, we heard boos which I thought was crazy. In an industry of 'flash-in-the-pan' partnerships, this has turned out differently. Microsoft is out to continue a very healthy application business on the Mac,
My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.
Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.
Our transition to Intel processors is going very well, and our music business just experienced another quarter of outstanding growth.
Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.
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.
But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.
The tragedy is that Dell didn't win it - we lost it.
A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it's a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it's a meritocracy.
So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.
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.
There's a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?
You're missing it. This is not a one-man show. What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.