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
Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
That's why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that's one of Apple's challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we'll do better, because we're completely aware of it and we make it a priority.
And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys [Bill Gates the other] on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time and we've gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing.
The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.
My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT , and I wonder about Apple.
One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.
In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they're the same thing.
Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.
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.
We went from nothing online to the gold standard in e-commerce.
What's happened at Apple is that our business has basically tripled in the last five or six years.
We convinced people fairly rapidly that survival, at least in the short term, was not an issue.
We are very careful about what features we add because we can't take them away.
Is it an inappropriate, unfair use of our copyrighted work? It seems pretty clear that it is.