Quotations from Steve Jobs of Apple Computer.
- “I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”
- “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
- “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
- “It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That’s Apple’s problem: Their differentiation evaporated.”
- “The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”
- “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
- “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
- “There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod.”
- “What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the internet — and no one’s gonna shut down the internet.”
— On how he sold iTMS to the music industry, Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003 - “The G4 Cube is simply the coolest computer ever. An entirely new class of computer, it marries the Pentium-crushing performance of the Power Mac G4 with the miniaturization, silent operation and elegant desktop design of the iMac. It is an amazing engineering and design feat, and we’re thrilled to finally unveil it to our customers.”
- “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
- “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
- “John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place — which was making great computers for people to use.”
- “I think Pixar has the opportunity to be the next Disney — not replace Disney — but be the next Disney.”
— BusinessWeek, Nov. 23, 1998