Aside from his business savvy, technical insight, wardrobe that included a black, long-sleeved mock turtleneck by St. Croix, Levi’s 501 blue jeans and New Balance 991 sneakers, the great Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO who passed away on October 5, 2011, is also famous for his quotes.
Here are some of them:
1. My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person; they are done by a team of people. – 60 Minutes: Steve Jobs, CNETTV
2. 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. – Business Week Online interview, May 1998
Photo via forbes.com
3. But in the end, for something this complicated, 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. – Business Week Online interview, May 1998
4. Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. – New York Times, 2006
5. Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.‘ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. – Playboy magazine interview, 1994
6. It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. – as quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple – A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future, 1987, by John Sculley and John A. Byrne
7. 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. – Wall Street Journal, 1993
8. Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better. – Rolling Stone magazine interview, June 1994
9. There’s an old Wayne Gretsky quote I love — ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.‘ That’s what we try to do at Apple. – Live from Macworld, 2007
10. Yes. We’re not going off into la-la land. – when asked if the coolest stuff coming down Apple’s product pipeline were computers, Business Week Online, 1998
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