Nice timing on the cover of the new issue, Inc. magazine. pic.twitter.com/EEtW0kz1sZ
— Zac Bissonnette (@ZacBissonnette) October 17, 2015
After the agreement was signed by all three, Wayne took it to the county registrar's office. "And Apple Computer was born as a company," he says.Jobs immediately plunged the company into debt, agreeing to fill an order for 50 computers from the Byte Shop in Mountain View, then borrowing $5,000 cash and parts worth $15,000. Wayne was impressed with Jobs as a promoter — "His psyche was already fully matured," he says — but was astonished to discover huge gaps in his new partner's knowledge of electronics, such as aluminum's ability to conduct electricity. "I almost lost my uppers," says Wayne.
He also fretted that the Byte Shop — one of the first retail computer stores — "had a terrible reputation for not paying its bills." Jobs and Wozniak were essentially penniless, which meant that creditors would eventually come looking for Wayne.
"I just wasn't ready for the kind of whirlwind that Jobs and Wozniak represented," he says. "I felt certain the company was going to be successful; that wasn't the question. But how much of a roller coaster was it going to be? I didn't know that I could tolerate that kind of situation again. I thought if I stayed with Apple I was going to wind up the richest man in the cemetery.
“It’s surreal, but it doesn’t really mean anything.”This sounds like a scary business model, but Jobs makes it work:
"Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources in the world, and they way we’ve succeeded is to bet the right technological horse, to look at technologies that have a future. We try to pick things that are in their springs. And if you choose wisely, you can be quite successful.”
"To make a wireless product work well, you have to test it. And one of our employees was carrying one and there’s a debate about whether it was left in a bar or stolen….And the person who found it decided to sell it…and it turned out this person plugged it into his roommate’s computer and that roommate called the police. And the police showed up and took this guy’s computers…and the DA is investigating it…and I don’t know where it well end up.”Jobs on the Foxconn suicides:
“Foxconn is not a sweatshop.They’ve got restaurants and swimming pools….For a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory. But this is still very troubling to us.So we send over our own people and some outside folks as well, to look into the issue."
"we don’t see ourselves in a platform war. We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Microsoft, either…Maybe that’s why we lost. But we never thought of ourselves in a platform war; we just wanted to make good products.”
“Well, they’re competing with us.We didn’t go into search.We–they–decided to compete with us and got more and more serious ”
“I don’t know if I would describe Siri as a search company. They’re not in the search area…they’re in the AI area. We’re not going into search.”
“They’re doing pretty good in some ways and in others they could do better. We meet with them once a quarter. Remember, they deal with way more data traffic than anyone else. And they’re having trouble. But they have the fastest 3G network and they’re improving. I wish they were improving faster….I’m convinced that any other network, had you put the iPhone on it, would have had the same problems.”
"Any tablet that uses a stylus is a failure”What came first. the iPhone or the iPad:
“I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.”No wonder Murdoch introduced him:
“I don’t want us to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.” [I think he means private editorial oversight, not government. I hope, anyway. -RW]What Steve Jobs does all day:
“I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to hang out with some of the most talented, committed people around and together we get to play in this sandbox and build these cool products….Apple is an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We’re structured like a start-up. We’re the biggest start-up on the planet. And we all meet once a week to discuss our business…and there’s tremendous teamwork at the top and that filters down to the other employees…and so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and new problems to come up with new products.”
"When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got a lot of advice from people who said you’ve got to just let it slide…you shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you….And I thought about that and I decided that Apple can’t afford to change its core values and simply let it slide….We have the same core values as when we started, and we come into work wanting to do the same thing today that we wanted to do five years ago.”The importance of Apps and iAds:
“People are using apps way more than they are using search. So if you want to make developers more money, you’ve got to get the ads into apps. But the mobile ads we’ve got today rip you out of the app.”
"The way that we market movies is undergoing a radical shift. It used to be that you spent a fortune on advertising on TV running your trailers. But now you can advertise on the Web….When we went to the music companies, we said 'who is your customer?' And they said, 'Best Buy, Tower'…their distribution partners. But that wasn’t their customer. They needed to recognize who their true customer was….So what changed in the music business was not the back end, but the front end. The way that you market to the consumer….The film industry needs to embrace that. And it needs to let people watch the content they want to watch, when they want to watch it and where they want to watch it.”Why Apple is just a hobby:
"The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go-to-market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us… ask Google in a few months. The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everyone a set-top box, and that pretty much undermines innovation in the sector. The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it. But right now, there’s no way to do that….The TV is going to lose until there’s a viable go-to-market strategy. That’s the fundamental problem with the industry. It’s not a problem with the technology, it’s a problem with the go-to-market strategy….I’m sure smarter people than us will figure this out, but that’s why we say Apple TV is a hobby."[Quotes taken from the live blog condcuted by All Things Digital]
Steve Jobs and Apple will go one of two ways, and neither is great (but one is decidedly better than the other). In scenario 1, Jobs is permanently sidelined due to illness. To my memory, there has never existed a major corporation more personality-dependent than Apple (at least in modern times – I put him up there with Howard Hughes). Thus, within a very short period of time the brilliant, legendary, maniacal focus he possesses will be lost, and decisions that appear to be ‘better’ for the organization and its products will be made. These half-steps will be compromises designed to keep up with the world while preserving Steve’s ‘legacy’. This will not go well.
Scenario two – and in my mind also problematic for Apple -- Steve Jobs sticks around but doesn't 'think different'. In this case, we run the risk of a 2.0 version of the capitulation that was Apple 1.0 failing to discern the tea leaves and license its software to other platforms. We are beginning to see this play out now. In fact, Android exists because Apple was unwilling to work out a deal with Google. Jobs’ personal demons may not be suited to an alternative path. Android has already begun to eat the world. History may not repeat, but it usually rhymes
Steve Jobs, who helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music and refashioned the mobile phone, has XXXX. He was TK. Jobs XXXX, TK said XXXXX.
A college dropout who co-founded Apple Inc., Jobs won ardent supporters by ushering "cool'' gadgets to market. He delivered the Macintosh, the first user-friendly computer, and conquered the online music industry with the iPod, making white ear buds fashionable. In 2007, he led Apple into the mobile-phone market with the Web-surfing iPhone. And as chief executive officer of Pixar animation studios, Jobs promoted computer-generated storytelling with movies including "Toy Story.''
"In terms of an inspirational leader, Steve Jobs is really the best I've ever met,'' Microsoft Corp. Co-Chairman Bill Gates said in January 1998 when asked to name the CEOs he most admired. "He's got a belief in the excellence of products. He's able to communicate that."
When Jobs was in the 10th grade at Homestead High School in Cupertino, he assured his then girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan he was going to become a millionaire, ccording to the "Second Coming of Jobs" by Alan Deutschman.
"Steve had these dreams of becoming one of the great people that has companies and makes products that change the world," Steve Wozniak [with whom Jobs founded Apple] said in August 2008. "One of the few people like the Shakespeare's and Einstein's that get well known - he wanted to be in that group."
Jobs, who made a black turtleneck sweater and blue jeans his trademark,emphasized aesthetics in both the hardware and software used in the computer. The Mac became a fashion statement among graphic artists and students, his biggest customers early on.
In his quest to create what he called "insanely great" products,Jobs earned a reputation for being mercurial, sometimes screaming at his employees, according to biographer Deutschman. "It's painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world," Jobs said in a 1995 oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution. "My job has sometimes exactly been that - to get rid of some people who didn't measure up."
At the annual Macworld Expo computer show in January 1998, Jobs finished a 90-minute speech and was about to walk off stage when he paused. "I almost forgot. We're profitable". The crowd of 4,000 people, anxious about whether Apple would survive, roared its approval.
Questions about Jobs's health resurfaced in June 2008 after he appeared at the company's annual developer's conference looking visibly thinner. Jobs had said on Aug 1 2004, he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. His form of cancer, called a neuroendocrine tumor, can be cured if diagnosed in time, as his was, he wrote at the time to employees in an e-mail from his hospital bed.
Jobs, a Buddhist and a vegetarian, kept his cancer a secret for nine months as he sought alternatives to surgery.
Jobs had a personal fortune estimated at $5.4 billion, according to Forbes magazine's annual survey of the world's richest people in March 2008.
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work," Jobs told Stanford students in 2005. "The only way to do great work is to love what you do."
Survivors include wife Laurene Powell, children Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Eve, Erin Sienna and Reed Paul, and sister Patti Jobs and Mona Simpson.