Steve Jobs

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
by Andy Hertzfeld
Published 19 Nov 2011

He was instrumental in convincing Burrell to switch from the 6809 to the 68000 microprocessor, which turned Jef’s research project into the future of Apple. A year and a half later, in December 1981, he had to leave the project to return to finish his M.D./Ph.D. degree, but he eventually returned to Apple in the summer of 1984. He left Apple to co-found NeXT with Steve Jobs in September 1985, and after a seven-year stint at Sun and year and a half at Eazel, he returned to Apple as a vice president of software technology in January 2002. Steve Wozniak Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976. His brilliant design for the hardware and software of the Apple II created the foundation for Apple’s initial success.

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He’s worked at Apple continuously since 1978, co-designing many of the best Macintoshes over the years, such as the Macintosh IIci. Steve Jobs Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976, when he was twenty-one years old. After being rebuffed by the Lisa team in the fall of 1980, he took over the Mac project from Jef Raskin in January 1981, and led the Macintosh team until John Sculley ousted him in May 1985. He left Apple in September 1985 to co-found NeXT, Inc, and returned to Apple in 1997 after Apple bought NeXT in December 1996. He is currently the CEO of Apple, as well as Pixar, a leading computer animation studio.

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Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 54: Bill Gates. © Doug Wilson/CORBIS 60: Apple Lisa Computer. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 68–69: Design team signatures. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 72: Members of the Lisa team. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 79: Andy Hertzfeld sitting on his car. © D.W. Mellor 83: Crowd at US Festival. © Bettmann/CORBIS 85: Steve Wozniak playing air computer. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 99: Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson. © Norman Seeff 104, 107: Alice packaging. Photos courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 128: Mike Moritz. © Matthew Naythons 150: Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak. © Bettmann/CORBIS 169: Defender® screenshot.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

The Prototype: Interviews with Art Levinson, Ed Woolard, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, Larry Ellison, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson. Cliff Edwards, “Sorry, Steve . . . ,” Business Week, May 21, 2001. Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass: Interviews with Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs. U.S. Patent Office, D478999, Aug. 26, 2003, US2004/0006939, Jan. 15, 2004; Gary Allen, “About Me,” ifoapplestore.com. CHAPTER 30: THE DIGITAL HUB Connecting the Dots: Interviews with Lee Clow, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs. Sheff; Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001. FireWire: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein. Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001; Joshua Quittner, “Apple’s New Core,” Time, Jan. 14, 2002; Mike Evangelist, “Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article,” Writer’s Block Live, Oct. 7, 2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil Schiller.

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Lev Grossman, “Apple’s New Calling,” Time, Jan. 22, 2007; Steve Jobs, speech, Macworld, Jan. 9, 2007; John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 2007; John Heilemann, “Steve Jobs in a Box,” New York, June 17, 2007; Janko Roettgers, “Alan Kay: With the Tablet, Apple Will Rule the World,” GigaOM, Jan. 26, 2010. CHAPTER 37: ROUND TWO The Battles of 2008: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Bill Campbell, Art Levinson, Al Gore, John Huey, Andy Serwer, Laurene Powell, Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine. Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008; Joe Nocera, “Apple’s Culture of Secrecy,” New York Times, July 26, 2008; Steve Jobs, letter to the Apple community, Jan. 5 and Jan. 14, 2009; Doron Levin, “Steve Jobs Went to Switzerland in Search of Cancer Treatment,” Fortune.com, Jan. 18, 2011; Yukari Kanea and Joann Lublin, “On Apple’s Board, Fewer Independent Voices,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 24, 2010; Micki Maynard (Micheline Maynard), Twitter post, 2:45 p.m., Jan. 18, 2011; Ryan Chittum, “The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 18, 2011.

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John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010. Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?” Wired, July 2010; Jean-Louis Gassée, “The Adobe-Apple Flame War,” Monday Note, Apr. 11, 2010; Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Flash,” Apple.com, Apr. 29, 2010; Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs interview, All Things Digital conference, June 1, 2010; Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), “Steve Jobs: Savior or Tyrant?” InfoWorld, Apr. 21, 2010; Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Valleywag, May 15, 2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Apr. 28, 2010.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
by Leander Kahney
Published 14 Nov 2013

Rachel Metz, “Behind Apple’s Products is Longtime Designer Ive,” Associated Press, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-08-26/Behind-Apples-products-is-longtime-designer-Ive/50150410/1, updated 8/26/2011. 39. Isaacon, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 40. Interview with Jon Rubinstein, October 2012. CHAPTER 5 Jobs Returns to Apple 1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), Kindle edition. 2. Steve Jobs at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 1998, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGcJgpOU9w. 3. Apple 10K Annual Report 1998: http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?

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Interview with Paul Dunn, July 2013. 29. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 30. Dike Blair, “Bondi Blue,” Interview with Jonathan Ive for Purple #2, Winter 98/99, 268–75. 31. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 32. Benj Edwards, “The Forgotten eMate 300—15 Years Later,” originally in Macweek, December 21, 2012. 33. Interview with Doug Satzger, January 2013. 34. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 35. Apple brochure from 1977, noted in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. 36. David Kirkpatrick, reporter associate Tyler Maroney, “The Second Coming of Apple Through a Magical Fusion of Man—Steve Jobs—and Company, Apple Is Becoming Itself Again: The Little Anticompany That Could,” Fortune, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250834/, November 9, 1988. 37.

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Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster) Kindle Edition. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. John Paczkowski, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs Live at D8,” http://allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/, June 1, 2010. 5. Scott Forstall, Apple v. Samsung trial testimony. 6. Ibid. 7. Kevin Rose, “Matt Rogers: Founder of Nest Labs interview,” Foundation 21, 2012, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HegU77X6I2A 8. “On the verge,” The Verge, April 29, 2012, video http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2987892/on-the-verge-episode-005-tony-fadell-and-chris-grant. 9. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle Edition. 10.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

But Steve Jobs had an idea for something even more special-Lisa, a computer that would leapfrog Apple's technology, surpassing not only the Apple II, but Apple III as well. This jump would also vault Apple a generation or so past anything that its competitors were preparing. Begun when Steve Wozniak, at Steve Jobs's request, sketched its architecture on a napkin, Lisa had, in less than a year, evolved to a computer based on the powerful Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip, and was engineered to handle more complicated applications, even running several at the same time, a trick called "multitasking." Named after an Apple engineer's daughter (and allegedly an additional tribute to Jobs's own daughter), Lisa was also the first Apple computer specifically directed at office professionals-from white-collar workers to captains of industry.

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The most startling of these was an agreement forged in 1991 to join with another large company to produce the next generation of computers. Apple's new partner was its former blood nemesis-IBM. IBM! To those of us who recalled the rhetoric surrounding Macintosh's introduction-Steve Jobs claiming outright that "IBM is out to crush Apple" -this shift was straight out of Orwell's 1984, when the three global superpowers would shift alliances on a dime. Apple joining with IBM was like Luke Skywalker strolling off into the sunset with Darth Vader. When Apple's profits dipped in 1993, Sculley wound up leaving his post as Apple's leader. The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s.

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The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s. Sculley was permitted to retain the title of chairman, but no longer had a direct role in the company's operations-exactly the fate of Steve Jobs in 1985. The irony was inescapable: originally hired to anchor Jobs's dreamy fantasies, John Sculley apparently departed because his technological seduction had become too complete-he was running Apple too much like Steve Jobs had and, like Jobs, he was gone within months-still attempting to make a dent in the universe but no longer at Apple. (In Sculley's case this new launching pad was a relatively obscute company involved in wireless communications.)

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1988. ———. “How Steve Jobs Linked Up with IBM.” Fortune, October 9, 1989. ———. “The Future of the PC: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Talk About Tomorrow.” Fortune, August 26, 1991. ———. “What Bill Gates Really Wants.” Fortune, January 16, 1995. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Amazing Movie Adventure.” Fortune, September 18, 1995. ———. “Something’s Rotten in Cupertino.” Fortune, March 3, 1997. ———. “The Three Faces of Steve.” Fortune, November 9, 1998. ———. “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Apple Gets Way Cooler.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs: Graying Prince of a Shrinking Kingdom.”

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Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013. Wozniak, Stephen, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Young, Jeffrey S. Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward. New York: Scott Foresman Trade, 1987. Articles by the Author Schlender, Brenton R. “Jobs, Perot Become Unlikely Partners in Apple Founder’s New Concern.” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1987. ———. “Next Project: Apple Era Behind Him, Steve Jobs Tries Again, Using a New System.”

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The success of Toy Story had given the myth of Steve Jobs a rather nice touch-up. The question now was whether Steve’s Pixar triumph was a one-shot anomaly. For a man whose name eventually would become synonymous with great American second acts, the Steve Jobs of 1996 had had remarkably little success with his own sequels. The Apple II had been followed by the Apple III and the Lisa, both of which had been failures. The Mac became a success only in the more robust versions introduced by John Sculley. His most grandiose sequel of all, NeXT, the company he’d created to be an idealized version of Apple, had proved utterly anticlimactic.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

v=_p8AsQhaVKI. A decade earlier: “Steve Jobs to Kick Off Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2003,” Apple, May 8, 2003, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/05/08Steve-Jobs-to-Kick-Off-Apples-Worldwide-Developers-Conference-2003/; “Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store,” Apple, April 28, 2003, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/; Apple Novinky, “Steve Jobs Introduces iTunes Music Store—Apple Special Event 2003,” YouTube, April 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo. The pop star Taylor Swift: Duboff, “Taylor Swift: Apple Crusader, #GirlSquad Captain, and the Most Influential 25-Year-Old in America”; interview with Scott Borchetta.

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New York: Random House, 2019. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Ive, Jony, Andrew Zuckerman, and Apple Inc. Designed by Apple in California. Cupertino, CA: Apple, 2016. Kahney, Leander. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013. ———. Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019. Kane, Yukari Iwatani. Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs. New York: Harper Business, 2014. Kocienda, Ken. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

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The company had sold: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s Watch Outpaced the iPhone in First Year,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-cant-shake-its-critics-1461524901; Apple Press Release, “Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results,” Apple (with consolidated financial statements), October 25, 2016, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/. The second camera: Apple Press Release, “Portrait Mode Now Available on iPhone 7 Plus with iOS 10.1,” Apple, October 24, 2016, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/10/portrait-mode-now-available-on-iphone-7-plus-with-ios-101/. A year before his death: “Steve Jobs in 2010, at D8,” Apple Podcasts, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-in-2010-at-d8/id529997900?i=1000116189688. The comedy site CollegeHumor: CollegeHumor, “The New iPhone Is Just Worse,” YouTube, September 8, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

The crucial thing about Facebook is that it’s not a service or an app—it’s a fundamental platform, on the same scale as the internet itself. Steve Jobs: I admire Mark Zuckerberg. I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out—for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot. Purple People Eater Apple, the company that cannibalizes itself Only three years after reviving Apple on the back of the iPod, Steve Jobs decides to make it obsolete. As an Atari alumnus, Jobs knows firsthand the danger of trying to milk a hot product for all it is worth. He knows that somebody at some point will unseat Apple’s iPod monopoly with an MP3 player that can also place a phone call. Thus, Jobs concludes, Apple has to act first.

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He was the principal programmer behind Smalltalk, Kay’s pioneering object-oriented computer language, which ran on the Alto computer. When Steve Jobs visited PARC to see the Alto, Ingalls famously gave the demonstration. Later, Ingalls worked for Jobs at Apple. Steve Jarrett was a project manager for General Magic, the smartphone company that spun out of Apple in the midnineties. Later he joined Apple to help launch the original iPod. Today he’s an executive at Facebook, living in London. Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple, the company most responsible for bringing the personal computer to the masses. Jobs didn’t manage to gain full control of his company until twenty years later, but after he did Apple released a string of hit products—the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad—and it became the most valuable company in the world.

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Dan Kottke: The IPO was November of ’80, and Steve is raring to go. Because he had money to spend, right? The Apple III was launching, but Steve Jobs had already moved on. The Apple III didn’t interest him, because there were too many other people involved and he wanted to be in charge. John Couch: Steve says, “I want to run Lisa,” because it was the newest, newest product. Randy Wigginton: But they weren’t listening to him. Steve Jobs: I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction. David Kelley: Lisa—the Apple IV—was really mixed up. Dan Kottke: Steve was trying to bully the Lisa group.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
by Steven Levy
Published 23 Oct 2006

This situation was particularly complicated, since the Beatles' record company has the same name as Steve Jobs's computer company. Years ago, when Apple Computer created software to let its users play CDs, the Beatles sued, claiming that the Cupertino company had violated an earlier agreement not to venture into the music business. Apple paid $26 Download million to settle the case in 1991. But the appearance of an Apple iTunes store led the Beatles to claim that Jobs was going beyond the terms of the settlement, which didn't specify that Apple could start its own music store. "It'll get resolved, it's not a big deal," Jobs told me after the other Apple filed suit in London.

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It would take Phil Schiller five days to get back to California. Other people at Apple were stuck in Europe. But with the exception of some managers checking out suppliers in Asia, almost all the people working on the iPod were at home in the Bay Area. At Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Steve Jobs was sending an e-mail to Apple employees: I'm sure you've heard about today's extraordinary and tragic events. If you want to stay home with your families today, please do so. For those of you who want to come to work, we will be open. Steve By the time of Apple's iPod press conference in October, the plane crashes had been followed by a wave of anthrax attacks.

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I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. In no case, my PR contact said, would Apple send us one to arrive until after the Tuesday launch. They weren't even about to put one into a Federal Express box on Monday, afraid that some-Perfect 13 one might rip open the box and discover Steve Jobs's big secret. Instead, Apple would dispatch a pair of couriers from Cupertino to hand-deliver the new product to a few select tech writers. Apples spokesperson made it clear that they would deliver to no designee, only me. Maybe, I thought, I should have flown out to see this.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

i–iV The first two Apple sections, i and ii, are based primarily on interviews with the team responsible for carving out the interaction paradigms that formed the foundation of the iPhone—the user interface, the multitouch software, the early hardware. I conducted interviews with Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Greg Christie, in addition to other members of the original iPhone team on background. Further details and quotes from Jony Ive were taken from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive, and Brett Schlender’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs “misremembered” the iPhone’s touchscreen genesis in a Q-and-A hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their annual D: All Things Digital conference.

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i: Exploring New Rich Interactions iPhone in embryo Apple’s user-testing lab at 2 Infinite Loop had been abandoned for years. Down the hall from the famed Industrial Design studio, the space was divided by a one-way mirror so hidden observers could see how ordinary people navigate new technologies. But Apple didn’t do user testing, not since Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. Under Jobs, Apple would show consumers what they wanted, not solicit their feedback. But that deserted lab would make an ideal hideaway for a small group of Apple’s more restless minds, who had quietly embarked on an experimental new project.

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Passionate users felt that FingerWorks’ pads were the only serious ergonomic alternative to keyboards, and now that they’d been taken away, more than a few Finger Fans blamed Apple. “People with chronic RSI injuries were suddenly left out in the cold, in 2005, by an uncaring Steve Jobs,” Dstamatis wrote. “Apple took an important medical product off the market.” No major product has emerged to serve RSI-plagued computer users, and the iPhone and iPad offer only a fraction of the novel interactivity of the original pads. Apple took FingerWorks’ gesture library and simplified it into a language that a child could understand—recall that Apple’s Brian Huppi had called FingerWorks’ gesture database an “exotic language”—which made it immensely popular.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Alan Maltun, “Students Beg to Stay After School to Use Computers”; David Einstein, “Bellflower Paces Area Schools in Computer Field”; Bob Williams, “Computer Parade Uneven,” The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1983, SB1. 30. Andrew Emil Gansky, “Myths and Legends of the Anti-Corporation: A History of Apple, Inc., 1976–1997,” PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2017; Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom”; Harry McCracken, “The Apple Story is an Education Story: A Steve Jobs Triumph Missing from the Movie,” The 74, October 15, 2015, https://www.the74million.org/article/the-apple-story-is-an-education-story-a-steve-jobs-triumph-missing-from-the-movie/, archived at https://perma.cc/EZV6-UGLT. 31. Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” The New York Times, May 14, 2017, 1. 32. “’82 House Freshmen Eschew Partisanship and Posturing,” The Washington Post, December 26, 1982, A1; Zschau, “Tax Policy Initiatives to Promote High Technology,” May 13, 1983, Box 51, FF Capital Gains 1, Ed Zschau Papers, HH. 33.

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Horace Dediu, “The iOS Economy, Updated,” Asymco blog, January 8, 2018, http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/08/the-ios-economy-updated/, archived at https://perma.cc/W2Z5-MT6G. 11. Bruce Newman, “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder,” San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2011. 12. “Remembering Steve,” Apple.com, https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/, archived at https://perma.cc/7SES-3F5F; Maria L. LaGanga, “Steve Jobs’ death saddens Apple workers and fans,” The Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011. 13. “Steve Jobs’ Memorial Service: 6 Highlights,” The Week, October 25, 2011. 14. “What Happened to the Future?” Founders Fund, http://foundersfund.com/the-future/, archived at https://perma.cc/82XW-VA2A. 15.

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House Democratic Caucus, Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: Turning Point for America’s Economy (Washington: USGPO, 1982). 23. “Steve Jobs and David Burnham,” Nightline, ABC News, April 10, 1981, archived at https://perma.cc/4UER-Y3YV. 24. David Morrow, oral History interview with Steve Jobs, Palo Alto, Calif., April 20, 1995, Smithsonian Institution. 25. Quoted in Audrey Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom,” Hack Education.com, February 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple, archived at https://perma.cc/3K62-ACW5. 26. Milton B. Stewart, “Polishing the Apple,” Inc., Feb. 1, 1983, https://www.inc.com/magazine/19830201/6207.html, archived at https://perma.cc/K7UQ-4ACC. 27.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

In addition to unveiling its new computer, Apple announced the new software it intended to have ready by the time the machine shipped a few months later—a word processor, a spreadsheet program, an enhanced BASIC, and a sophisticated operating system. The marketing plan called for the Apple III to be portrayed as a serious computer that could be used in professional offices. The machine seemed likely to succeed. A few months later, continuing to ride the tide of acclaim, Apple announced its first public stock offering. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Not since Eve has an apple posed such temptation.” * * * Figure 69. Apple goes public Mike Markkula presents Steve Jobs with a check for $92 million from his stock offering in Apple. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) When Apple was first formed, Mike Markkula dreamed of building the largest privately held company in the nation, a company fully owned by its employees.

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The number of Apple dealers had risen to 3,000. Mike Markkula took over for Scotty as president of Apple, a position he believed to be a temporary one, and at age 26 Steve Jobs became chairman of the board. Apple was now investing millions of dollars in research and development to create a product that would stun the world. It wanted to prove that it had learned the lessons of the Apple III, that Apple could indeed introduce a new product successfully. By the fall of 1981, rumors abounded in the trade journals about new products Apple was developing. The rumors were wrong, though not even Apple realized it at the time.

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Some questioned his choice of processor, but no one argued with the processor’s $20 price tag. He called his machine an Apple. * * * Figure 57. The Apple I Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I was a circuit board. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) The Apple I had only the bare essentials. It lacked a case, a keyboard, and a power supply. The hobbyist owner had to connect a transformer to it in order to get it to work. The Apple I also required laborious assembly by hand. Woz spent a lot of time helping friends implement his design. Steve Jobs saw a great financial opportunity in this skeletal machine, and urged Woz to start a company with him.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

Because of the iPod: Apple press release, 4/9/2007. Jobs said he never saw: Kara Swisher, “Full D8 Interview Video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/full-d8-video-apple-ceo-steve-jobs. Apple’s three-year head start: “Apple Says App Store Has Made Developers over $1 Billion,” AppleInsider.com, 6/10/2010. 7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again Starting in 2010 Jobs had: “Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone,” iFixIt.com, 1/20/2011. “It turns out”: Beth Callaghan, “Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions,” AllThingsD.com, 10/5/2011.

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Jobs was personally offended: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past Video: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D1 in 2003,” AllThingsD.com, 5/3/2010. It’s hard to imagine: “iPhone,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements. Publicly, Jobs continued his: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D2 in 2004,” AllThingsD.com, 5/10/2010. The tension between the partners: Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, 11/2005. Jobs successfully pinned the Rokr screwup: “iPod Sales per Quarter,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements; Peter Burrows, “Working with Steve Jobs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 10/12/2011.

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But perhaps the most notable example: Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012; Liz Gannes, “Google Maps for iPhone Had 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours,” AllThingsD.com, 12/17/2012. Apple’s Tim Cook knows all the challenges: Ina Fried, “Apple’s Tim Cook: The Full D11 Interview,” Tim Cook interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 5/29/2013, available at www.allthingsd.com/20130529/apples-tim-cook-the-full-d11-interview-video. Jobs was a master: Peter Kafka, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs at D8: The Full, Uncut Interview,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/steve-jobs-at-d8-the-full-uncut-interview. Acknowledgments Writing is usually a solitary act.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda
Published 3 Sep 2018

johnaugust.com. https://johnaugust.com/2009/what-does-execution-dependent-mean. Accessed November 16, 2017. 10. At This Point 1. Apple Newsroom, “Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Steve-Jobs-Resigns-as-CEO-of-Apple/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Letter from Steve Jobs,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Letter-from-Steve-Jobs/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Apple Media Advisory,” October 5, 2011. Accessed November 16, 2017. Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book.

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Patent 7,469,381, filed December 14, 2007, and issued December 23, 2008. This is the patent describing inertial scrolling. http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7469381; Matt Brian, “The Apple Patent Steve Jobs Fought Hard to Protect, and His Connection to Its Inventor,” The Next Web, August 7, 2012. Accessed November 19, 2017. https://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/07/the-apple-patent-steve-jobs-fought-hard-to-protect-and-his-connection-with-its-inventor/ 3. “Crackberry,” Urban Dictionary. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crackberry 4.

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While other companies design beautiful hardware, excel at marketing, hire good lawyers, and manufacture gadgets at scale, no other company makes software as intuitive, carefully crafted, or just plain fun. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important software in the company’s history. When I joined Apple in 2001, desktop and laptop computers were still the company’s main products, and while the colorful iMac had been a notable success in reestablishing Apple as a design leader in high technology—Steve Jobs had been back for four years following his eleven-year exile—the company still sat below 5 percent share in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows. Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

Notes Chapter One 1998 1 Ken Auletta (2009) Googled: The end of the world as we know it, Virgin Books, London. 2 http://gladwell.com/outliers 3 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 4 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 5 Alan Deutschman (2000) The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Broadway Books, New York. 6 http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/58082/16-Brilliant-Insights-From-Steve-Jobs-Keynote-Circa-1997.aspx 7 http://www.zdnet.com/news/jobs-apple-still-on-right-track/99946 8 http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html 9 http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortune/index.htm 10 http://www.industryweek.com/articles/whats_really_driving_apples_recovery_325.aspx 11 http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament 12 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 13 http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/att_lessons_fro.html 14 http://frozennorth.org/C509291565/E668712860/index.html 15 http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ Chapter Two Microsoft antitrust 1 Private e-mail. 2 Private e-mail.

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In 1998 Microsoft was crushing yet another upstart – Netscape, which had had the temerity to suggest that the browser could become the basis for doing work anywhere, so that Windows itself would become irrelevant; all you’d need would be a computer that could run a browser, and you’d be able to do everything for which you presently needed a PC. Steve Jobs and Apple Microsoft had reached the pinnacle by besting Apple – the company co-founded by Steve Jobs, a charming, brilliant, tempestuous, iconoclastic, unique businessman who had been thrown out of it in 1985 but returned, triumphantly, at the end of 1996 when another company he had set up, NeXT Computer, was bought by the then ailing Apple, which was bleeding cash. He forced out the incumbent chief executive in July 1997 and became ‘interim’ chief executive that September – at which point the company had made a loss of a billion dollars for the financial year.

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Among those also targeted for Microsoft’s arm-twisting via Windows to try to crush other products in different fields, the trial heard, were Intel, Sun Microsystems, Real Networks, IBM – which was denied an OEM licence for Windows 95 until a quarter of an hour before its official launch, and so missed out on huge swathes of PC sales – and Apple. In particular, Apple was offered a deal: stop developing its own systems for playing music and films on Windows, and let Microsoft handle them using its DirectX system. If it did, Microsoft would stop putting obstacles in the way of Apple’s QuickTime on Windows. Steve Jobs, who was at the meeting in June 1998, rejected the idea because it would limit the ability for third parties to develop content that would run on Windows PCs and Apple machines. (In retrospect, that decision may be one of the most significant to Apple’s later success that Jobs ever made, since it meant that Microsoft could not control how Apple-encoded music was played on Windows.)

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

Tesler could not help but contrast the situation at PARC with what he had seen of Apple. By 1980, he had an inside view. His first extended encounter with Apple came in December 1979, when he, along with Adele Goldberg (also from Alan Kay’s group in PARC’s systems science lab), gave two demonstrations of the Alto to a group from Apple that included Steve Jobs.9 Six months before the demos, in June 1979, Xerox had purchased 100,000 shares of Apple for $1.05 million in Apple’s second round of private investment.IV An investment in Apple made sense for Xerox because if the smaller company did well, Xerox could make a good deal of money, and if Apple failed, Xerox would be well positioned to acquire it.III Apple, by this time, was seen as such a potentially lucrative investment that Markkula could hand-select investors.

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Comment from stevewoz at http://www.cultofmac.com/96939/apples-first-ceo-says-young-steve-jobs-could-be-trusted-with-detail-but-not-with-a-staff/. 34. Ann Bowers, interview by author, Nov. 7, 2015. 35. “The overriding consideration was pride—Mike just wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of making Apple a huge success and fulfilling the implied commitment to the Apple employees.” Introductory remarks given by Arthur Rock at the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Award Dinner Honoring Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula, San Francisco Olympic Club, Feb. 3, 1983, AR. 36. Mike Markkula, interview by author, Feb. 24, 2016. 37. Steve Jobs, quoted in “Apple Shuffling Reflects Growth,” Computer Systems News, April 13, 1981. 38.

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He calls the ethics center “the most bang for my philanthropic buck that I’ve ever gotten.”9 Markkula remained on Apple’s board until 1997, when Steve Jobs, who had left the company a dozen years earlier to launch NeXT, returned and asked him, along with every other Apple director save two, to resign. Markkula and Jobs had been somewhat estranged for years. Jobs felt betrayed by Markkula’s backing John Sculley over him in the power struggle that had pushed him out of Apple in 1985. Markkula thought that Jobs had left Apple in a way that was “unethical,” recruiting employees for NeXT while still chairing the Apple board.10 But the conversation upon Jobs’s return after Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million was long and cordial.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

The following afternoon he had lunch with a colleague who worked at Apple. They mentioned they were kicking off a new project. Did he happen to know anyone with experience building handheld devices? I got a call from Apple the next day. Because you’ve picked up this book, the rest of the story is probably pretty familiar. I took a consulting gig with Apple at first, just hoping to make enough money to pay my employees or maybe leverage my job into a buyout for Fuse. Putting my hopes on Apple was a serious long shot. Steve Jobs was back at the helm then, but during the previous decade Apple had been in a death spiral, launching a slew of mediocre products that edged the company close to collapse.

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But that’s not to say that sticking to your vision will always lead to success. Not even for Steve Jobs. Most people don’t realize what the iPod was originally built for. Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers. That’s what was in Steve Jobs’s head: We’re going to make something amazing that will only work with our Macs. People will love it so much that they’ll start buying Macs again. At the time Apple was near death. It had almost no market share—even in the United States. But the iPod would solve that problem. It would save the company. So as far as Steve Jobs was concerned, the iPod would never work with a PC.

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I should have remembered what it was like at Apple during the very first months when we started building the iPod. It just didn’t occur to me—Nest was so much bigger and more established than my tiny iPod team, I thought this was a completely different situation. But it was exactly the same. Back then Apple’s executive antibodies saw us coming to take their time and draw away their resources, so they tried to block our way and ignore our requests. That’s when Steve Jobs gave us air cover, dropped bombs on the teams who were slowing us down, forced the issue, yelled sometimes to make sure we got what we needed. Steve Jobs fighting for us was ultimately what allowed us to succeed.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

I believe the world would be a better place had LS&Co. registered Apple-like success, as the Haas family (who own LS&Co.) is what you hope all business owners would be: modest, committed to the community, and generous. Steve Jobs brought Drexler onto Apple’s board of directors in 1999, soon after his return to Apple—and two years later Apple launched its first brick-and-mortar store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.30 Apple’s stores were glitzier than Gap stores. Most experts yawned. Brick and mortar, they said, was the past. The internet was the future. As if Steve Jobs, of all people, didn’t understand that. It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance; and that by opening fancy stores it was positioning itself for luxury with the equivalent of a walker.

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They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young people do, and have a facility with technology that makes them influential and important to business.4 They sided with Apple, as the firm embodies their own maverick, antiestablishment, progressive ideals—and conveniently ignored the fact that Steve Jobs gave nothing to charity, almost exclusively hired middle-aged white guys, and was an awful person. It didn’t matter, because Apple is cool. Even more, Apple is an innovator. And so, when the federal government decides to force Apple to change its behavior, the Apple Macolytes leap to its defense. I’m not one of them. Double Standard I’ve always tried to give the impression that I just don’t care what others think.

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That set the stage for the masterpiece—the iPhone—that had Apple fanatics all over the world camping out in front of electronics stores. And finally, the sublime iPad. The unsung hero of Apple’s success is Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms of Apple, and who set about partnering with them similar to the way a vampire partners with a blood bag. Could Apple have maintained this pace into the current decade had Steve Jobs survived his illness? Probably. Because for all of his less than savory traits, he accomplished one important thing: he turned Apple, after the risk-averse years under John Sculley, into a company—arguably the biggest company ever—that made taking risks its first option.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

Samsung, however, won legal victories: Charles Arthur, “Samsung Galaxy Tab ‘Does Not Copy Apple’s Designs,’ ” The Guardian, October 18, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2012/​oct/​18/​samsung-galaxy-tab-apple-ipad; Associated Press, “Samsung Wins Korean Battle in Apple Patent War,” August 24, 2012, https://www.cbc.ca/​news/​business/​samsung-wins-korean-battle-in-apple-patent-war-1.1153862; Mari Saito and Maki Shiraki, “Samsung Triumphs Over Apple in Japan Patent Case,” Reuters, August 31, 2012, https://in.reuters.com/​article/​us-apple-samsung-japan/​samsung-wins-over-apple-in-japan-patent-case-idINBRE87U05R20120831. Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/​63316/​steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/.

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Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/​63316/​steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/. Apple designers borrowed: Christina Bonnington, “Apple v. Samsung: 5 Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents,” Wired, July 27, 2012, https://www.wired.com/​2012/​07/​apple-reveals-for-monday-trial/. “We are going to patent it all”: Fred Vogelstein, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013), p. 172. calling their larger phones “Hummers”: Chris Ziegler, “Apple’s Steve Jobs: ‘No One’s Going to Buy’ a Big Phone,” Engadget, July 16, 2010, https://www.engadget.com/​2010/​07/​16/​jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy-a-big-phone/.

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But that didn’t deter Jobs: Alan Kay, “American Computer Pioneer Alan Kay’s Concept, the Dynabook, Was Published in 1972. How Come Steve Jobs and Apple iPad Get the Credit for Tablet Invention?” Quora, April 21, 2019, https://www.quora.com/​American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/​answer/​Alan-Kay-11. would need to be portable: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Jobs disembarked at the grimy: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Samsung began supplying Apple: Frank Rose, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (New York: Stuyvesant Street Press, 1989), p. 163.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/ imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Next the team traveled: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?”; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012; Janet Abrams, “Radical Craft/The Second Art Center Design Conference,” http://www.core77.com/reactor/ 04.06_artcenter.asp, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Ive then spent yet more: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?” 188 They also designed a beautiful: Neil Hughes, “Book Details Apple’s ‘Packaging Room,’ Steve Jobs’ Interest in Advanced Cameras,” Apple Insider, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.appleinsider.com/ articles/12/01/24/book_details_apples_packaging_ room_interests_in_advanced_cameras_.html; Yonu Heisler, “Inside Apple’s Secret Packaging Room,” Network World, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.networkworld.com/community/ blog/inside-apples-secret-packaging-room. 188 The iMac’s launch in 1998: http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Instead of being a technological marvel, the Sony VCR would be a great consumer experience. It’s no accident that when he launched his company, Steve Jobs followed the Sony model of a consumer-friendly technology company. He knew that it was always tempting for technology companies to frame themselves from the engineer’s point of view, not the consumer’s. Over time, Jobs would fight his engineers constantly to keep Apple products easy to use. No one has reframed the story of personal technology quite like Steve Jobs. With every new product, he further moved the focus away from engineered functionality and toward user experience.

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Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 16. 186 Walter Benjamin argued: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1968). 187 When Steve Jobs returned: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 348–57. 187 Designers Jonathan Ive and Danny Coster: Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive? The Man Behind Apple’s Design Magic,” IN: Inside Innovation, September 2006. The “jelly bean story” was told to Peter Burrows at the Radical Craft Conference at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 2006, and reported on in IN magazine, a quarterly magazine inside BusinessWeek, which I founded that year and edited.

To Pixar and Beyond
by Lawrence Levy

The last thing I expected was to speak to a celebrity. “Hi, is this Lawrence?” “Yes, it’s me.” “This is Steve Jobs,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I saw your picture in a magazine a few years ago and thought we’d work together someday.” Even in those days, when the downfall of Steve Jobs was a favorite topic around Silicon Valley eateries, a call from him was enough to stop me in my tracks. Maybe he wasn’t as hot as he had been before his unceremonious departure from Apple ten years earlier, but our industry had never had a more charismatic figure. I couldn’t help but feel a spurt of excitement at realizing not only that he knew who I was, but that he had actually called me.

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Classification: LCC PN1998.3.L4673 A32016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.L4673 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020541 COVER DESIGN BY BRIAN MOORE eISBN 978-0-544-73419-7 v1.1016 For Hillary, Jason, Sarah, and Jenna Prologue “Hey, Steve, you up for a walk?” I asked over the phone. It was the fall of 2005. Steve Jobs and I had asked each other that question countless times over the past ten years. But this time was different. Steve had turned fifty earlier that year and the burden of cancer and surgery was taking its toll. For a while now we had kept our talks and walks light. Steve had enough on his hands at Apple. In the past year he had introduced a new line of iPods, including the brand-new iPod shuffle and iPod nano that continued to usher in a new era of music listening.

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His last two products before being stripped of all responsibilities at Apple in 1985—the Lisa and the original Macintosh computers—had both been commercial disasters, and the NeXT Computer was regarded by many observers as the triumph of hubris over practicality. It had been heralded as a technological marvel, but it had been unable to compete with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics that sold less expensive, more compatible machines. More and more, Jobs was looking like yesterday’s news. When I told friends and colleagues that I was meeting Steve Jobs about Pixar, the most common response was “Why would you want to do that?”

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims
Published 18 Apr 2011

Pixar was a computer hardware company when Steve Jobs bought it in 1986. Before purchasing Pixar, Jobs had been forced out of Apple in 1985 by his hand-picked CEO successor, John Scully, following frequent clashes. Scully wanted Jobs to focus exclusively on products, while Jobs wanted to take Apple back over from Scully. After Scully caught wind of an attempted coup by Jobs when Scully was on a trip to Asia, he stripped Jobs of his responsibilities. Jobs then left Apple, bought Pixar, and started another computer company, called Next Computer. Both Pixar and Next struggled, and the open question was whether Steve Jobs was just another one-hit wonder.

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by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review blog, September 28, 2009, which can be found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2009/09/how_do_innovators_think.html. Jeff Bezos quote from: “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos,” by Julia Kirby and Thomas Stewart, Harvard Business Review, October 2007. Apple and Steve Jobs: Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio (2008), 190–197. “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” by Gary Wolf, Wired, March 2002. Steve Jobs calligraphy example taken from his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. James Chanos reference: Interview with Chanos. Jerry Seinfeld: Drawn from The Comedian (DVD), Directed by Christian Charles, with Jerry Seinfeld (2002).

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CHAPTER 3 Failing Quickly to Learn Fast Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. After all, Chris Rock, the Pixar filmmakers, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs, and Colonel Casey Haskins are all perfectionists and yet they accept, even welcome, failure as they develop new ideas and strategies. Rock won’t appear on national television without perfecting his act, while Gehry was for years frustrated by the imperfections he noticed while watching performances at Disney Hall (he’s past that now). Steve Jobs will famously refuse to release a new Apple product, or product enclosure even, until it’s as close to perfect as possible. Yet none of them allow perfectionism to paralyze their creative processes, at least not for long.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
by Eric Schmidt , Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
Published 15 Apr 2019

Going out to the wild, woolly west, where it was more a meritocracy, I would have a chance to move quickly and sit on the management team.”8 Move quickly, indeed. Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of sales and marketing and given the task of overseeing the launch of the highly anticipated Macintosh, Apple’s new computer that would replace the Apple II as the company’s flagship product. To kick off the launch, the company made a big move: it bought a slot to run a commercial during the Super Bowl, which would be played in Tampa, Florida, on January 22, 1984. Once the ad was produced, Bill and the team showed it to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An allusion to George Orwell’s novel 1984, it showed a young woman running through a dark hallway, fleeing guards, and emerging into a chamber where hundreds of gray-clad, head-shaven men are listening, zombie-like, to a droning “big brother” figure on a large screen before them.

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.* Although he did not know it at the time, he was about to enter the third chapter of his career, a return to coaching full-time, but not on a football field. When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, Bill Campbell was one of the few leaders at the company who fought against the move. Dave Kinser, an Apple colleague of Bill’s at the time, recalls Bill saying that “we’ve got to keep Steve in the company. He’s way too talented to just let him leave!” Steve remembered that loyalty. When he returned to Apple and became its CEO in 1997, and most of the board members stepped down, Steve named Bill as one of the new directors.* (Bill served on the Apple board until 2014.) Steve and Bill became close friends, speaking frequently and spending many Sunday afternoons walking around their Palo Alto neighborhood discussing all sorts of topics.

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He was a football coach turned sales guy. Yet somehow, Bill had become so influential that he went on a weekly Sunday walk with Steve Jobs, and the Google founders said they wouldn’t have made it without him. Bill’s name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Eventually it hit me: I recognized him from a case I had taught a few times on a management dilemma at Apple in the mid-1980s, when a brave, bright young manager named Donna Dubinsky challenged a distribution plan from Steve Jobs himself. Bill Campbell was Donna’s boss’s boss, and he dished out exactly the kind of tough love you’d expect from a football coach: he tore her proposal apart, pushed her to come up with something stronger, and then stood up for her.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
by Franck Frommer
Published 6 Oct 2010

Aside from the usual tricks of a good PowerPoint presentation—simple slides, well organized argument, speaker involvement, moments of feeling, and so on—he points to some unusual innovations that make Steve Jobs a great stage director: constant invention of an enemy against which Apple must always fight,24 an extraordinary feeling for slogans, the ability to make sense out of numbers by magnifying them, and a constant search for analogies or comparisons to make them as eloquent as possible. And finally, Steve Jobs has the ability to create memorable moments, discreetly accentuated by technological wizardry, that the audience will long remember. With Steve Jobs, we touch on the quintessence of oral presentation. The performance becomes its own subject, the medium mediates itself and is no longer there simply to communicate messages and persuade an audience.

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The “Mac family” waits like impatient fans for Steve Notes, the boss’s presentation.16 Over the years, these annual meetings have become highly codified ceremonies, the staging of which Steve Jobs has brought to a high polish. Helped by increasingly inventive technology, the entertainer of the early days turned into a guru able to convert millions of the faithful into purchasers of his latest technological gadgets. Boston, January 1997, Macworld Conference Expo: it is a historic moment. As the mythical brand is running out of steam—not only are the numbers down, but the notoriety and the originality of Apple are under severe strain—Steve Jobs, then president of Pixar,17 returns after ten years away. He is greeted like a messiah by the Apple community, which sees his return as a sign of renewal.

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The presentation follows a well-tried plan: brief slide on earnings—better to be quick; they’re bad—then Steve Jobs, armed with his remote, the essential tool of Steve Notes, briefly recounts his time at Pixar, then follows with three quotations that appear on the screen. “Apple has become irrelevant.” “Apple can’t execute anything.”18 “Apple’s culture is anarchy; you can’t manage it.” Jobs’s entire presentation is based on these three negative judgments. The procedure is clever; it enables him to build, practically in real time, Apple’s new strategy on the basis of criticisms made of it and to bring out the value of the innovative products and services intended to contradict these received ideas.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Hardware hackers such as Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards. The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.

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But growth began to taper off, largely because Commodore’s computer sales were slumping in the face of new competition from Apple and others. “We have to take control of our destiny,” Kimsey told Case.29 It was clear that for Quantum to succeed, it had to create its Link online services for other computer makers, most notably Apple. With the tenacity that came with his patient personality, Case targeted the executives at Apple. Even after its brilliantly controlling cofounder Steve Jobs had been forced out of the company, at least for the time being, Apple was difficult to partner with. So Case moved across the country to Cupertino and took an apartment near Apple’s headquarters. From there he waged his siege.

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Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 135. 108. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 94. 109. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 110. Steve Jobs presentation, Jan. 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY. 111. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 173. 112. Author’s interview with Andy Hertzfeld. 113. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 114. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly Media, 2005), 191. See also Andy Hertzfeld, http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt. 115. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 116. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 117.

Presentation Zen
by Garr Reynolds
Published 15 Jan 2012

If truth be told, it was Steve’s special ability to connect and engage a large audience in such a natural and simple way that first attracted me to Apple a generation ago. I had read all the public speaking and presentation books over the years, of course, but it was Steve Jobs’s presentation skills from which I learned the most by far. I saw virtually every keynote presentation Steve Jobs ever made since 1997 (and all the archived videos before then), and while I was with Apple I never missed a special employee event or town hall meeting on campus. Although I touched on lessons from Steve Jobs a few times earlier in this book, what follows is a summary of some of the most salient lessons from the master of the keynote presentation.

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This sounds paradoxical, but once we allow our minds to drift to thoughts of success and failure or of outcomes and technique while performing our art, we have at that moment begun our descent. Steve Jobs’s approach to presentation reminds us today that engagement can be enhanced by being nowhere else but completely here in the moment. To see videos of presentations by Steve Jobs, go to the Apple website: www.apple.com/apple-events The Mind That Is No Mind When a swordsman is in the moment and his mind is empty (mushin no shin or the “mind that is no mind”), there are no emotions stemming from fear and no thoughts of winning, losing, or even using the sword.

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Remove the walls—all of them—as much as possible. * * * Redux: Presentation Lessons from Steve Jobs On the morning of October 6, 2011, I sat down at the kitchen counter at our home in Nara, Japan, with a cup of coffee and turned on the news to check the day’s weather forecast. Instead the network issued a special report from the U.S.: “Steve Jobs has died.” My heart sank. Except for a couple of e-mails and occasionally saying hello to Steve at the Cafe Macs’s salad bar on the Apple campus in Cupertino, I never had much direct contact with him while I worked at Apple. Still, I was deeply, deeply saddened by the news of his passing.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

Snapchat investors and advisors, afraid of irritating Evan, have often been unwilling to speak publicly about even basic things like how the company differentiates itself and what its mission is. Evan is hardly the first tech founder to be secretive. Some of the industry’s most revered leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are known for their intense corporate secrecy. As much as Evan has had a rivalry with Mark Zuckerberg, he has also been empowered by Zuckerberg, who blazed the trail for him. Steve Jobs was not the CEO of Apple until his second stint with the company; Google’s investors demanded they bring in Eric Schmidt as a more professional CEO than cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But Zuckerberg’s overwhelming success and maturation from immature genius into visionary CEO caused a shift in Silicon Valley to strongly favor founders as CEOs.

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Michael. Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. New York: Overlook Press, 2009. Reis, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011. Roose, Kevin. Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014. Rose, Todd. The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. New York: HarperOne, 2016. Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs. New York: Crown Business, 2015. Sorkin, Andrew Ross.

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By the time Reggie had his epiphany, the tech world was embracing front-facing cameras. On October 14, 2011, Apple released the iPhone 4S, its second phone with a front-facing camera (making the iPhone 4, also with a front-facing camera, more affordable). Apple’s front-facing cameras were mostly for its video chat feature, FaceTime, but were starting to be used for photographs as well. Technology and art were converging as the iPhone created amateur photographers of everyone. Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company, modeled after two of his heroes, Edwin Land and Steve Jobs. Jobs had also considered Land a personal hero and someone he modeled his career after.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 1 Jan 2011

Only about a decade ago Apple was best known for its innovative personal computer design and production. Established on 1 April 1976 in Cupertino, California by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Apple was incorporated in 1977 by Jobs and Wozniak to sell the Apple I personal computer.1 The company was originally named Apple Computer, Inc. and for 30 years focused on the production of personal computers. On 9 January 2007, the company announced it was removing the ‘Computer’ from its name, reflecting its shift in focus from personal computers to consumer electronics. This same year, Apple launched the iPhone and iPod Touch featuring its new mobile operating system, iOS, which is now used in other Apple products such as the iPad and Apple TV.

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From capacitive sensing to click-wheels As the pioneer of personal computers, Steve Jobs was on his second mission for re-revolutionizing them. His vision for Apple was to prepare the company for the post-computer era, in what he envisioned and often acknowledged in his interviews and media appearances as the new era of the consumer–computer relationship. During an interview at the 2010 D8 conference, Steve Jobs explained his vision of the future for computing by using the analogy of rapid urbanization and its effects on changing consumer views and the need for transportation (Jobs 2010). During his talk, Jobs redefined Apple’s overall strategy as building a family of products around the concept of fragmented computing needs by different uses.

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Besides the communication technologies (discussed in Chapter 4), the iPhone is smart because of features such as the Internet, GPS, a touch-screen display, and the latest new voice activated personal assistant (SIRI). While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has failed to make this fact more broadly known. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the epitome of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on (Mazzucato 2013b).

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

The computer was almost surely an Alto and the principal demonstrators were Goldberg, Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and Diana Merry. Steve Jobs was initially skeptical of what PARC might have to offer but allowed his engineers to convince him otherwise. As for Jobs’s acuity, he later admitted that he was shown three mind-bending innovations at PARC, but the first one was so dazzling it blinded him to the significance of the second and third. Perhaps most important, the Steve Jobs demo was not a random event or a stroke of luck for Apple, as it has sometimes been portrayed. Apple’s engineers knew what they were after. They had taken great pains to plan for the moment, and they arrived at PARC fully prepared to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

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That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC’s front door. CHAPTER 23 Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell Thus we come to Steven P. Jobs. The Apple Computer cofounder’s visit to PARC, from which he reputedly spirited off the ideas that later made the Apple Macintosh famous, is one of the foundation legends of personal computing, as replete with drama and consequence as the story of David and Goliath or the fable of the mouse and the lion with an injured paw. It holds enough material to serve the mythmaking of not one corporation but two, Xerox and Apple. If one seeks proof of its importance, one need look no further than the fact that to this date no two people involved in the episode recollect it quite the same way.

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Because I was the only one there all the time!” Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple’s mythmaking rather than PARC’s. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs’s peerless perspicacity as Xerox’s obtuseness. The author who wrote, “You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery…the slickest trick of all was Apple’s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened. Yet it is possible to resolve all these accounts and reconstruct a story that has never before been told in its entirety.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

He has since founded Vatera Healthcare Partners, a health venture capital firm, and Arisaph Pharmaceuticals, a biotech discovery firm. Steve Jobs 1955–2011, United States Apple Computer, Pixar Jobs was a game designer at Atari when he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne launched Apple Computer in 1976 to market a personal computer Wozniak had invented. The first Apple PCs proved a huge success, but later products floundered. Infighting led to Jobs’s 1985 ouster. He founded NeXT Computer and bought the Pixar animation studio from George Lucas. Pixar’s 1995 IPO made Jobs a billionaire. Two years later, Apple bought NeXT and reinstated Jobs as CEO, ushering in an era of tremendous innovation and growth driven by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

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Compare Boone Pickens’s resiliency to the hesitancy that affected Ron Wayne, an original partner in Apple Computer. Wayne had started a slot machine business that failed, swallowing $50,000 of savings. After that failure he went to work at Atari, where he met Steve Jobs. When Jobs later asked Wayne to join Apple Computer as a third partner to balance and adjudicate between Jobs and the engineering wunderkind Steve Wozniak, Wayne was initially enthusiastic. But then it became clear that they were going to structure the nascent Apple Computer as a partnership. Wayne, who was significantly older than his partners, was worried about the personal liability he would incur if all the borrowing and spending Jobs was doing to manufacture the Apple I at volume did not pan out.

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Such acumen explains how Dietrich Mateschitz was able, as an unknown businessman, to persuade the young Formula 1 driver Gerhard Berger to walk around with a bottle of Red Bull in his hand without having an official endorsement contract. It explains how Steve Jobs—the same man who had been ousted ten years earlier—was able to persuade the leaders of Apple not only to buy NeXT, a company with little in the way of unique technology, but also to reinstate him as Apple’s CEO. And it offers some insight into the history of the Time Warner Center, the jewel in the crown of Stephen Ross’s Related Companies portfolio.14 Redevelopment projects require a strong, name-brand tenant to anchor the deal.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.” The hostility he created between the two groups, by lionizing the artists and belittling the soldiers, was so great that the street between their two buildings was known as the DMZ—the demilitarized zone. The hostility undermined both products. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability).

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A Forbes article stated, “There are very few miracle workers in the business world, and it is now clear that Steve Jobs is not one of them.” WHEN MOSES DOUBLES DOWN The facts of Jobs’s forced exit from Apple in 1985, and his path to the mess at NeXT, have been well laid out. In 1975, Steve Wozniak combined a microprocessor, keyboard, and screen into one of the earliest personal computers. Jobs convinced Wozniak to quit his job and start a company. After some initial success with their Apple I and II, however, competitors quickly passed Apple by. In 1980, Atari and Radio Shack (TRS-80) sold roughly seven times as many computers as Apple. By 1983, Commodore dominated the market, with the IBM PC, launched only two years earlier, a close second.

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The company translated that scientific and manufacturing expertise into products generating over $10 billion in annual sales. It did so, in large part, by balancing loonshots and franchises extraordinarily well. In April 2000, three years after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he invited Art Levinson to join his new board of directors. After Jobs passed away in 2011, Levinson replaced him as chairman of Apple. RESCUE OPERATIONS The well-told story of Jobs’s return to Apple and its subsequent rise to the most valuable company in the world is a remarkable example of nurturing loonshots, in a race against time, to rescue a franchise in crisis. But it should be, by now, a familiar example.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Published 23 Jul 2009

We’d known from the outset that entering into a relationship with GM and Philips would likely put an end to our dream of making the first animated feature film, but that was a risk no matter who we joined up with: Each investor was going to have its own agenda, and that was the price of our survival. To this day, I am thankful that the deal went south. Because it paved the way for Steve Jobs. I first met Steve in February of 1985, when he was the director of Apple Computer, Inc. Our meeting had been arranged by Apple’s chief scientist, Alan Kay, who knew that Alvy and I were looking for investors to take our graphics division off George’s hands. Alan had been at the U of U with me and at Xerox PARC with Alvy, and he told Steve that he should visit us if he wanted to see the cutting edge in computer graphics.

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A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled—initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment—I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments. In the late 1980s, while we were building Pixar, Steve Jobs was spending most of his time trying to establish NeXT, the personal computer company he’d started after being forced out at Apple. He came to the Pixar offices only once a year—so rarely, in fact, that we had to give him directions each time so that he wouldn’t get lost. But I was a regular visitor to NeXT. Every few weeks, I’d head down to Steve’s office in Redwood City to brief him on our progress.

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Perhaps they thought that if they asked that question they would come up with something original, that they would remain true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. In fact, this kind of thinking only accomplished the opposite. Because it looked backward, not forward, it tethered the place to the status quo. A pervasive fear of change took root. Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?” No one—not Walt, not Steve, not the people of Pixar—ever achieved creative success by simply clinging to what used to work. When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

The top manager—the CEO—takes the widest perspective and the most long-range time frame. In Apple’s case, Steve Jobs would eventually come to play this role as well. Jobs had been forced to resign from the company he helped to create in 1985, but after a string of bad managers put Apple on the brink of bankruptcy, he returned to the company in 1997 and assumed the position, first, of interim CEO, and then of CEO. Many people at the time thought Apple was done for, its market share torn to shreds by Microsoft. Jobs disagreed. In Jobs’s view, Apple had been destroyed by its previous leaders’ “bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values” and abandoning its commitment to “making great products.”12 To save Apple, Jobs would enact vast changes on both fronts.

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Quoted in Sean Rossman, “Apple’s ‘The Woz’ Talks Jobs, Entrepreneurship,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 6, 2014, http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2014/11/05/apples-woz-talks-jobs-entrepreneurship/18561425/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 11. Quoted in Alec Hogg, “Apple’s ‘Other’ Steve—Wozniak on Jobs, Starting a Business, Changing the World, and Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish,” BizNews.com, February 17, 2014, http://www.biznews.com/video/2014/02/17/apples-other-steve-wozniak-on-jobs-starting-a-business-changing-the-world/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 12. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 295. 13.

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See Don Watkins, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2014), and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1992). Chapter 6 1. Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova, “CHART OF THE DAY: Apple’s Incredible Run under Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, August 25, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-market-cap-during-steve-jobs-tenure-2011-8 (accessed May 28, 2015). 2. JPL, “A Look at Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Market Returns from 1968–2007,” AllFinancialMatters.com, April 2, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080412003318/http://allfinancialmatters.com/2008/04/02/a-look-at-berkshire-hathaways-annual-market-returns-from-1968-2007/ (accessed May 28, 2015); “Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
Published 29 Oct 2009

“I want to put a ding in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it. And that’s exactly what Apple does in the industries in which it competes. Apple is born out of its founders’ WHY. There is no difference between one or the other. Apple is just one of the WHATs to Jobs’s and Woz’s WHY. The personalities of Jobs and Apple are exactly the same. In fact, the personalities of all those who are viscerally drawn to Apple are similar. There is no difference between an Apple customer and an Apple employee. One believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to work for the company, and the other believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to buy its products.

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In 2003 and 2004, Apple ran a promotion for iTunes with Pepsi—the cola branded as “the choice of the next generation.” It made sense that Apple would do a deal with Pepsi, the primary challenger to Coca-Cola, the status quo. Everything Apple does, everything they say and do, serves as tangible proof of what they believe. The reason I use Apple so extensively throughout this book is that Apple is so disciplined in HOW they do things and so consistent in WHAT they do that, love them or hate them, we all have a sense of their WHY. We know what they believe. Most of us didn’t read books about them. We don’t personally know Steve Jobs. We haven’t spent time roaming the halls of Apple’s headquarters to get to know their culture.

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This is an issue that will have an exponential impact as time passes. Such a departure as Gates’s is not without precedent among companies with equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound. Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

He next became CEO of Intuit when Doerr suggested to founder Scott Cook that Campbell would be a great partner. Four years later, he moved up to chairman of the board. On the eve of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, he asked Campbell to join his board. Today Campbell serves as a mentor to some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Marc Andreessen to Steve Jobs, whom he walks and talks with most weekends in Palo Alto, where they are neighbors. He estimates that he spends about 10 percent of his time on Apple business, about 35 percent on Intuit business, an equal amount at Google, about 10 percent as chairman of the board of Columbia University, and the remainder on assorted activities.

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Campbell’s boldness appealed to the ever-rebellious Steve Jobs. The two men bonded. By 1984, said Campbell, “Sculley and Jobs were going at each other already.” Although Jobs had recruited Sculley to bring professional management to Apple, he came to think he was more interested in marketing, including marketing himself, than in Apple products; Sculley believed Jobs wanted an acolyte, not a CEO. Nevertheless, Campbell earned the rare distinction of being able to both befriend Jobs and command Sculley’s respect. Before Sculley succeeded in pushing Jobs out of Apple in 1985, Campbell warned him it would be a huge mistake.

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Neither Seidenberg nor representatives from AT&T or Nokia joined in Google’s November announcement of the first truly open mobile operating system. A traditional Google corporate ally, Steve Jobs, also did not join because Apple’s iPhone provides a mobile operating system, one less open than Google’s. This was a little clumsy, because half of Apple’s eight directors serve as Google directors or advisers, among them Eric Schmidt, Bill Campbell, and Al Gore. At Apple board meetings, Schmidt told me he now recused himself from mobile phone discussions. In the auction, that commenced in January, all bidders were instructed not to reveal their bids.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37, no. 7 (1996). doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1996.tb01475.x. Lehman, C. “Interview with a Software Engineer.” Quillette.com. January 5, 2018. Leibowitz, G. “Steve Jobs Might Have Never Started Apple If He Didn’t Do This 1 Thing.” Inc., 2018. https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/in-a-rare-23-year-old-interview-steve-jobs-said-this-1-pivotal-experience-inspired-him-to-start-apple-computer.html/. Lesinski, J. M. Bill Gates: Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. Springfield, MO: Twenty-First Century Books, 2009. Lienhard, D. A. “Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments (1959–1968).”

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Cognition and Instruction 20, no. 1 (2002): 47–77. Kozhevnikov, M., et al. “Spatial versus Object Visualizers: A New Characterization of Visual Cognitive Style.” Memory and Cognition 33, no. 4 (2005): 710–26. Premier Composite Technologies, Dubai, Arab Emirates. Steve Jobs Theater Pavilion. http://www.pct.ae/steve-jobs-theater (accessed August 7, 2021). Sedak, Gersthofen, Germany. Apple Park, Cupertino, California, 2,500 glass units in facade. https://www.sedak.com/en/references/facades/ (accessed August 7, 2021). 1. WHAT IS VISUAL THINKING? Adolphs, R. The Neuroscience of Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

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“Academic Acceleration in Gifted Youth and Fruitless Concerns Regarding Psychological Well-Being: A 35-Year Longitudinal Study.” Journal of Educational Psychology (2020). https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Article-JEP-Bernstein-2020-F.pdf. Bianchini, R. “Apple iPhone Design—from the 1st Generation to the iPhone 12.” January 18, 2021. https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/apple-iphone-history-of-a-design-revolution/. Blume, H. “Neurodiversity: On the Neurobiological Underpinning of Geekdom.” Atlantic, September 1998. Blumenthal, K. Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2012. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., et al. “Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart.”

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
Published 6 Apr 2015

By that day, it had already inspired more than 11,000 print articles and generated 69 million Google hits.7 No one understood consumers’ digital desires better than Steve Jobs. A generation earlier Apple’s elegant Macintosh took desktop computers mainstream. Six years before the iPhone launch, Apple reinvented the music business in the face of industry skepticism by making portable music easy and fun with the iPod digital music player and its iTunes online music service. Computer and music industry executives dismissed iTunes as a pipe dream. Record labels would not initially yield to Apple the right to control the online distribution of music purchases, but eventually relented.8 They were wrong. Apple offered a lifeline to a drowning business, and Jobs appealed personally to artists hurt by Internet music pirates, including Bob Dylan, who agreed to let iTunes prerelease his new album Modern Times.9 For the first time in thirty years, a Dylan album ranked number one on the Billboard chart.

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Rubin’s Dream touch-screen phone was moved into the fast lane.5 Fred Vogelstein summed up iPhone’s impact that day in his book Dogfight with a quote by Google engineer Chris DeSalvo: “We’re going to have to start over.” 6 Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw a TV report about Apple’s news. He soon forgot about exercise. There was Steve Jobs waving a small glass object, downloading music, videos, and maps from the Internet onto a phone. “How did they do that?” Lazaridis wondered. His curiosity turned to disbelief when Sigman took the stage to announce Cingular’s deal to sell Apple’s phone. What was its parent, AT&T, thinking? “It’s going to collapse the network,” he thought. The next day Lazaridis grabbed Balsillie at the office and pulled him in front of a computer.

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By early 2010, RIM had a plan to produce a tablet with a seven-inch-long screen—small enough to fit in a coat pocket or purse—with a high-quality, high-definition screen, a fast browser, a sharp camera, and great sound. The device would be called PlayBook. But Apple once again set the agenda when Steve Jobs unveiled its tablet in late January 2010. With its ten-inch multitouch screen, familiar features including iTunes, a full browser, and lots of apps, plus an electronic reader, all wrapped in an elegant and accessible design, the Apple iPad would become one of the fastest-selling electronic devices ever when it hit the market that April. One of the iPad’s strengths was that it looked like a larger iPod or iPhone, complete with the all-glass screen and a single home button, but it was better suited to applications that called for a larger screen, including games, watching movies, and reading.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

The Road Not Taken Donna Dubinsky was just shy of thirty, and it was the most hectic time of her life. As Apple’s distribution and sales manager in 1985, she was working virtually nonstop from morning until bedtime, maniacally focused on shipping computers to keep up with explosive demand. Suddenly, Steve Jobs proposed eliminating all six U.S. warehouses, dropping their inventory, and moving to a just-in-time production system in which computers would be assembled upon order and overnighted by FedEx. Dubinsky thought this was a colossal mistake, one that could put the company’s entire future in jeopardy. “In my mind, Apple being successful depended on distribution being successful,” she says.

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Washington, “Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 354–58. “Apple being successful depended on”: Personal interview with Donna Dubinsky, June 20, 2014; Todd D. Jick and Mary Gentile, “Donna Dubinsky and Apple Computer, Inc. (A),” Harvard Business School, Case 9-486-083, December 11, 1995. Jobs promoted every one of them: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). “Voice feeds” : Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it. Even then, Copernicus stalled for four more years. His magnum opus only saw the light of day after a young mathematics professor took matters into his own hands and submitted it for publication. Almost half a millennium later, when an angel investor offered $250,000 to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to bankroll Apple in 1977, it came with an ultimatum: Wozniak would have to leave Hewlett-Packard. He refused. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects. “My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company. Because I was just afraid,” he admits. Wozniak changed his mind only after being encouraged by Jobs, multiple friends, and his own parents.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

When originally completed, it served as a research and development center, but as Apple scaled down after Sculley left in 1993, it became a fortress for an increasingly besieged company. When Steve Jobs returned, first as “iCEO” in 1997, there were many noticeable changes including a dramatic improvement in the cafeteria food. The fine silver that had marked the executive suite during the brief era when semiconductor chief Gilbert Amelio ran the company also disappeared. As his health declined during a battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011, Steve Jobs came back for one last chapter at Apple. He had taken his third medical leave, but he was still the guiding force at the company.

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Instead, the Knowledge Navigator envisioned a natural conversation with an intelligent machine that both recognized and synthesized human speech. Brought to Apple as chief executive during the personal computing boom, Sculley started his tenure in 1983 with a well-chronicled romance with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs. Later, when the company’s growth stalled in the face of competition from IBM and others, Sculley fought Jobs for control of the company, and won. However, in 1986, Jobs launched a new computer company, NeXT. Jobs wanted to make beautiful workstations for college students and faculty researchers. That placed pressure on Sculley to demonstrate that Apple could still innovate without its original visionary.

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When word circulated that the firm had been acquired, possibly for more than $200 million, it sent shock waves up and down Sand Hill Road and within the burgeoning “app economy” that the iPhone had spawned. After Apple acquired Siri, the program was immediately pulled from the App Store, the iPhone service through which programs were screened and sold, and the small team of programmers who had designed Siri vanished back into “stealth mode” inside the Cupertino campus. The larger implications of the acquisition weren’t immediately obvious to many in the Valley, but as one of his last acts as the leader of Apple, Steve Jobs had paved the way for yet another dramatic shift in the way humans would interact with computers.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

We’ll examine both of these key moves in greater detail later in the book, with Facebook’s shift to mobile featured in our analysis of Facebook’s business model, and Facebook’s hiring of Sheryl Sandberg in the section on the key transition from contributors to managers to executives. Apple illustrates how this overlap looks over multiple decades. In its storied history, Apple went through complete scaling cycles for the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iMac, and the iPod (with the cycle for the iPhone still under way). It’s worth noting that Apple failed to launch any blitzscalable products after the Apple II and the Mac until Steve Jobs returned and launched the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. It was part of Steve’s rare genius that time and time again he was able to pick the right product for Apple to blitzscale, even without slowing down for a period of classic start-up growth to gather feedback from the market.

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If the company doesn’t realize the root cause, the most common (and unhelpful) response is to call for changing the CEO or the executive team—the VP of sales is particularly vulnerable because he or she often takes the blame for the slowdown—or both. How many times does replacing the CEO actually reignite massive growth? The only good example we can think of is what Steve Jobs did at Apple. So if you have a Steve Jobs waiting in the wings, go ahead and switch CEOs. Otherwise, it probably won’t help. Consider what happened to two blitzscalers who ran out of headroom—Groupon and Twitter. Groupon was one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, thanks to its leadership position in the rapidly-emerging daily deals market.

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Many of Google’s services are strong enough to succeed on their own, but this means that they are succeeding in spite of, rather than because of, multithreading. In contrast, Apple’s highly centralized approach allows it to produce highly integrated and polished products, but, as a result, it restricts itself to a much smaller product line. Of course, this is intentional; Steve Jobs always wanted to run as close to single-threaded as possible to maintain Apple’s unity of purpose. One of the first things Steve did when he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997 was to reduce the company’s product line from dozens to a simple two-by-two matrix: consumer desktop, pro desktop, consumer laptop, and pro laptop.

The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone
Published 20 Jul 2021

For Jobs, any son of a bitch who charged him too much for a part or didn’t like him personally or who competed with Apple—that is, with Steve Jobs—deserved whatever evil befell him. This was a dumb strategy when Apple was small, and even dumber when it grew large. Luckily, Jobs’s subordinates knew better, and it became standard operating procedure to simply sneak in the back door contracts with his latest set of enemies in order to keep the assembly lines running. Meanwhile, as Jobs was undergoing the transition to adulthood, Apple continued to grow at a frantic pace. The finished Apple II was a magnificent machine. Inside was Wozniak’s masterful design, which required only 62 chips (compared with hundreds in other personal computers).

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Late one evening, after 20 hours of work, one executive turned to a poster on the wall showing a still from the now-famous Macintosh 1984 commercial and punched it down, yelling, “You want to know where Big Brother really is? It’s not at IBM. It’s right here.” Meanwhile, Steve Jobs smirked and relaxed by sticking his bare feet in a flushing company toilet. Yet Apple had become too big even for Steve Jobs to ruin. With Markkula, then Sculley, at the controls, presiding over a growing professional middle management, Apple grew up. Jobs aside, it became a good, solid place to work, with extended career paths and professionalism that instilled employee loyalty. There were no more Nights of the Long Knives and fewer mercurial, unpredictable bosses—except Jobs. Much of the funkiness and flash were gone, but so was the amateurishness and the risky company swings.

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At meetings they would begin talking to one another, ignoring everyone else, riffing off each other’s thoughts, anticipating the other’s ideas before they were said, speaking almost in a private language. Yet there were those Apple managers who looked in Sculley’s eyes and saw the shrewdest of businessmen, a chameleon with a color so pure that even Steve Jobs couldn’t see past it to the real John Sculley inside. Apple had at last become a serious company. But it was almost too late. 1983 was a watershed year in the personal computer market. Most of the computer companies on the market recognized the inevitable and offered IBM software-compatible equipment—except Apple. IBM further consolidated its control of the market with the PC and a more powerful version called the PCxt, which as good as obliterated the poor Apple III and stole the lower end of Lisa’s market.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge
by Brian Bagnall
Published 13 Sep 2005

According to Wozniak, “We went to Commodore and talked primarily with Andre Sousan. Steve Jobs was trying to talk Commodore into buying the Apple II for a large amount, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. … Steve Jobs also wanted Commodore to hire us along with the proposed deal. The deal was never on paper and never concrete, as to how much.” “The discussions never got beyond a meeting with Jack and Steve,” says Peddle. “Jack’s view was that Steve wanted much too much for the company and in the fall of 1976 he was right. I remember him laughing about Steve Jobs and his view of his company’s position.” Tramiel was willing to purchase Apple, but he wanted the lowest price possible.

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Wozniak also created six expansion slots for his improved Apple. This brought it up to date with the functionality available to other computers, including the Altair and the KIM-4 expansion module. In October, Peddle approached Apple in the hopes of acquiring Wozniak’s technology. “We tried to get them to sell us the Apple … as the basis for our PET,” says Peddle. The person negotiating on behalf of Apple was Steve Jobs. The two partners came to Commodore headquarters with the intention of selling their fledgling company. “Andre sets up a meeting with Apple to have a discussion about how we could get to the CES show together,” recalls Peddle.

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In August 1978, Apple came to Peddle in search of a head engineer. “Jack * me up and Steve [Jobs] came to me with a great offer,” recalls Peddle. And what was the job offer? “To replace Woz and be the technical guru for the company.” Apple used everything in their power to lure Peddle. “I met with [Mike] Scott and Steve [Jobs],” says Peddle. “Basically the guys at Apple offered me a deal that would have made me one of the top five stockholders at Apple.” The offer was too attractive to decline. “I guess he’d just had it,” says Seiler. “He was always fighting with Jack Tramiel. There were always differences about how the business should be run. Jack was cheap.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

It did stick with me, however, that to take their show on the road, even a megabrand like McDonald’s can, on occasion, be forced to ‘think outside the bun’. APPLE SEEDS SALES Another brand that is anything but typical in its approach to every element of doing business is Apple. Steve Jobs’ fanaticism for product design and detail was (and still is) seamlessly visible all the way from technical form and function to packaging to the Apple Stores. And boy, has it ever paid off – there is nothing remotely ‘average’ about an Apple Store. I find the shopping experience there to be a disarming cross between visiting an art gallery and some form of an electronics exhibition that has been stripped of everything but the coolest and best the business has to offer.

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This means as few walls as possible – real and imaginary. It also calls for leaders that are out there getting their hands dirty every day. Steve Jobs put it perfectly when he said to his biographer Walter Isaacson, ‘Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’ MEET ME IN THE PIAZZA Collaboration should have been Steve Jobs’ middle name as he was forever going to amazing ends to foster it – and not just at Apple. When he created Pixar, home to Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and many other animated classics, he went to great lengths to make unplanned collaboration part of the company’s foundations – literally!

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A counterpoint to my friend Antonio’s story is that of Ronald Wayne. Wayne had worked alongside Steve Jobs at Atari and became one of the co-founders of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak. At forty years of age, Wayne was almost twice as old as his young co-founders and so he agreed to essentially act as the venture’s ‘adult supervisor’ in return for which he was given a ten per cent stake in the nascent company. Among other things Wayne drew up the partnership agreement between the three, drafted the first company logo and wrote the Apple 1 manual. For a variety of reasons, however, Wayne just didn’t feel comfortable that things were going to work out – he also didn’t particularly enjoy working with Jobs – and so after only a couple of months Wayne called it quits and relinquished his stock in the company for a one-time pay-out of $800.

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
by Fumio Sasaki
Published 10 Apr 2017

Minimalism imported back to Japan The American company Apple has an intriguing connection to the minimalist culture of Japan. Many minimalists are fond of Apple products and of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. The products that Jobs created always avoided excess. The iPhone only has one button, and you don’t have to worry about being stuck with a lot of extra wires and ports when you buy a Mac. Apple products generally don’t include operating manuals. I think this is all due to the fact that Jobs had been a minimalist, and he was known to be a believer in Japanese Zen, which teaches minimalism. It’s quite well-known that Steve Jobs considered Master Kobun Otogawa of the Soto school his master and had at one point seriously considered studying Zen at the temple Eiheiji, located deep in the mountains on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

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To him, scoring is his top priority. He’s reduced everything else to save his energy and focus on what’s truly important: those crucial opportunities to score. Steve Jobs, the perfect minimalist Steve Jobs was not a minimalist simply because he always wore the same thing and removed excess from his products. Minimalism really did guide almost everything he did. The first thing that Jobs is said to have done after making his comeback to Apple was to donate old documents and machines that were almost covered by cobwebs to a museum. He started out by parting with material objects. He wanted to focus on producing products that would change the world, so he got rid of everything else that wasn’t important.

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Those at Toppan Printing who printed this book, everyone at National Bookbinding who put this work together, those of you at ALEX Corporation who handled the desktop publishing, the people at Tokyo Shuppan Service Center who were responsible for the proofreading, and the people at Taiyo Shoji for always transporting our heavy loads of books—thank you all very much. And last but not least, many thanks to the people who serve as our agents and those of you at the wonderful bookstores. I hope you’ll continue to offer this book to our readers. I’d also like to thank Steve Jobs and Apple. It’s because of the iPhone and MacBook Air, two truly minimalist products that Mr. Jobs introduced to the world, that I’ve been able to say goodbye to so many of my material possessions, while also being able to write at any location. It’s thanks to Microsoft Word that I was able to write this.

The New Kingmakers
by Stephen O'Grady
Published 14 Mar 2013

Here are five businesses that, in at least one area, understood the importance of developers and engaged appropriately. Apple In August 2011, a month after reporting record earnings, Apple surpassed Exxon as the world’s biggest company by market capitalization. This benchmark was reached in part because of fluctuations in oil price that affected Exxon’s valuation, but there’s little debate that Apple is ascendant. By virtually any metric, Steve Jobs’s second tenure at Apple has turned into one of the most successful in history, in any industry. Seamlessly moving from hit product to hit product, the Apple of 2012 looks nothing like the Apple of the late nineties, when Dell CEO Michael Dell famously suggested that Apple should be shut down, to “give the money back to the shareholders.”

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Even its forgotten desktop business is showing steady if unspectacular growth. There are many factors contributing to Apple’s remarkable success, from the brilliance of the late Steve Jobs to the supply chain sophistication of current CEO Tim Cook. And of course, Apple’s success is itself fueling more success. In the tablet market, for example, would-be competitors face not only the daunting task of countering Apple’s unparalleled hardware and software design abilities, but the economies of scale that allow Apple to buy components more cheaply than anyone else. The perfect storm of Apple’s success is such that some analysts are forecasting that it could become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

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What led 42Floors to this decision? In their own words, “The very best can’t be hired. They must be courted.” For perhaps the first time in the history of the industry, people are worth more than the code they produce, a valuation supported by logic. Steve Jobs believed that an elite talent was 25 times more valuable to Apple than an average alternative. For Jobs, this was critical to Apple’s resurgence: That’s probably…certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, saying in a 2010 interview: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

He sagely recommended to the board members that they stick with their founder. Galli says that the final decision to leave Amazon was his own. Before he joined the company, he had read the book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley, who had joined Apple as CEO in the mid-1980s and then ousted Steve Jobs in a boardroom coup. “Before I went out there, I promised myself and my family that I would never do to Jeff what Sculley did to Steve Jobs,” Galli says. “I just felt like Jeff was falling in love more and more with his vision and what the company could be. I could anticipate it was not going to work. He wanted to have a more hands-on role.

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Over his years at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs usually reviled those former colleagues who had defected from his company and abandoned its righteous mission. Though Diego Piacentini left Apple for a startup that Jobs had incredulously dismissed as just a retailer, the two remained unusually cordial, perhaps because Piacentini had given Apple six months to find his replacement as head of European operations. Jobs would occasionally contact Piacentini when he needed something from Amazon, and in early 2003, Piacentini e-mailed his former boss with a request of his own. Amazon wanted to make Apple a proposal. Piacentini brought Neil Roseman and H.

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I had to roll up my sleeves and start all over again.” He’s now a life coach living in Barcelona, Spain. Diego Piacentini, a new executive from Apple, was thrust directly into the mess. Bezos hired the suave, Italian-born Piacentini in early 2000 to take the top spot running Amazon’s international operations. Piacentini’s old boss Steve Jobs had expressed incredulity at the move in his typically strident way. Over lunch in the Apple cafeteria in Cupertino, Jobs asked Piacentini why he would possibly want to go to a boring retailer when Apple was in the process of reinventing computing. Then in the same breath, Jobs suggested that maybe the career move revealed that Piacentini was so dumb that it was a good thing he was leaving Apple.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

The fertility of the network was illustrated by the story of Apple, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. On the face of it, Apple was an obvious candidate for venture investment, because scores of insiders already understood that the personal computer would be the next big thing in technology. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, had recognized the PC as “an idea whose time has arrived” and had produced a prototype complete with mouse and graphical interface. Intel and National Semiconductor had considered making a PC, and Steve Wozniak had twice offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard.[1] But all four companies had decided not to build a PC, inhibited by what the business thinker Clayton Christensen termed the “innovator’s dilemma.”

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All four companies had too much of a stake in the status quo to risk disrupting it. A startup that filled the resulting vacuum looked like an obvious bet for venture capitalists. And yet when Apple set out to raise money, the stars in the venture-capital firmament failed to recognize the opportunity, proving that even the most brilliant VCs are capable of costly errors. Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner refused even to meet with Steve Jobs. Bill Draper of Sutter Hill sent an associate to visit Apple, and when the associate reported that Jobs and Wozniak had kept him waiting, Draper wrote them off as arrogant.[2] Meanwhile, Draper’s old SBIC partner, Pitch Johnson, wondered, “How can you use a computer at home?

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At a telling point in their courtship, Yang asked Moritz if the company should change its name, maybe to something more serious. Moritz retorted that if Yang did that, Sequoia would not back him.[10] Moreover, Moritz had a rationale for his retort—one that Yang himself had never thought of. In his years as a journalist, Moritz had written a perceptive book about Steve Jobs. Now he insisted that Yahoo was that precious thing, an inspired and memorable company name. Like Apple.[11] Whether by instinct or cunning, Moritz had given the perfect clincher of an answer. Because he understood Jobs as well as anybody in the Valley, he had the credibility to imply a connection between two unknown grad students and a storied Silicon Valley legend.

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
by David Kadavy
Published 5 Sep 2011

There is no better example of a company that enjoys a heavier advantage thanks to its design than Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs – upon returning to the company after a 12-year absence – discovered the under-appreciated design laboratory of Jonathan Ives. Since then, Apple has released innovative products with great design time and time again, enjoying tremendous success. It’s grown to be the largest tech company in the world, at as much as 100 times its own size in 1997. Apple has accomplished this success by releasing one great product after another, but it owes its growth to one product above all others: the iPod. Before the iPod, contact with the elegance of Apple’s design was reserved for its relatively small group of extremely dedicated followers.

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Since Microsoft Office was such a dominant software program, so important to doing business, getting people to switch to a Mac was nearly impossible. So, Apple went for a more emotional point by attacking music. “Music is a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music has been around forever. It will always be around,” Steve Jobs said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. People had been listening to music on their computers for a few years at that time, but the portable digital player market was just emerging. Many of the players that were on the market at the time of the iPod’s introduction were bulky, difficult to transfer music to, and had interfaces that were “unbelievably awful,” as Steve Jobs put it. Apple had an opportunity to get one of its products into the hands of consumers more easily than it could a personal computer, and it seized that opportunity with the iPod.

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Gastev (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/) The height of Roman typography The influence of the brush even found its way into lettering carved in marble, such as in the base of Trajan’s Column, which is considered the height of Roman typography. Though there is subtlety in the lettering that, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said of calligraphy, is “beautiful in a way that science can’t capture,” the general “skeleton” of the letters is based upon the square, the triangle, and the circle (see Figure 3-14). Figure 3-14 The theoretical underpinnings of Roman capitals: the square, the circle, and the triangle.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

The tech blogs, now believing that Jack had founded and built Twitter on his own, that he had come up with the idea when he was just a child—which Jack insinuated to dozens of media outlets—and that he possessed the same principles as Jobs in both design and management, started asking: “Is Jack Dorsey the next Steve Jobs?” (They inevitably answered: “Yes.”) It wasn’t a grand master plan by Jack to copy Jobs. Rather it was dozens of little plans that added up to a re-creation. In many respects it was Steve Jobs who helped create Jack Dorsey. Jobs was notorious for denying access to reporters. He had trained the media to behave exactly how he wanted them to—when he spoke, they listened, which was his best magic trick of all. So when he took a leave from Apple after falling ill in 2009, the media went in search of the next Steve Jobs. Jack walked like that duck, used the same quotes as that duck, wore the same glasses, had the same principles, and the same astounding theories on design as that duck.

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Everyone else, now seated, started giggling at them. But worse than the anarchy inside was the fact that Apple Computer had recently torn a hole in the hull of the company. On a Tuesday morning several months earlier, Odeo employees had gathered around their computers to watch Steve Jobs, the venerable CEO of Apple, announce the latest iPod. But stunned silence had enveloped them when Jobs declared that Apple was adding podcasts to iTunes. At the end of the announcements, the tech giant sent a brief press release across the news wires with the ominous headline, APPLE TAKES PODCASTING MAINSTREAM. In that brief moment podcasting, which had been the entire company thesis for Odeo, had become a simple add-on for Apple.

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He referred to “rounding the edges” in design meetings, a term Jobs began using in 1981 when he designed the Macintosh operation system. He set up the same weekly schedule for product meetings at Square that Jobs had commanded at Apple. And he started using Jobs quotes in his own speeches. Then Jack started hiring former Apple employees at Square. But their interviews were different from those of other candidates. “Did you have the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs?” Jack would ask. “Can you tell me a little about his management style?” During discussions with former Apple employees who had been hired at Square, Jack heard that Jobs didn’t consider himself a CEO but rather an “editor.” At some point Jack started referring to himself as “the editor, not just the CEO” of Square.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

Campbell, “Rainbow Makers,” Chemistry World, June 1, 2003. 3. APPLE ENVY In January of that year: John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, January 9, 2007. One of them was Ana Arriola: Ana used to be a man named George. She transitioned from male to female after she worked at Theranos. “We have lost sight of our business objective”: Email with the subject line “IT” sent by Justin Maxwell to Ana Arriola in the early morning hours of September 20, 2007. Avie was one of Steve Jobs’s oldest: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 259, 300, 308.

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Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it.

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The lawyers weren’t of much help when he asked them, so he looked up Food and Drug Administration regulations on his own and decided that a “for research use only” sticker was probably the most appropriate. This was not a finished product and no one should be under the impression that it was, Tony thought. | THREE | Apple Envy For a young entrepreneur building a business in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was hard to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs. By 2007, Apple’s founder had cemented his legend in the technology world and in American society at large by bringing the computer maker back from the ashes with the iMac, the iPod, and the iTunes music store. In January of that year, he unveiled his latest and biggest stroke of genius, the iPhone, before a rapturous audience at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss
by Ron Adner
Published 1 Mar 2012

CNET.com, July 12, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-943519.xhtml. 210 iPod, boasting 100 million customers: Steven Levy, “Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone,” Newsweek, July 16, 2007. 210 Apple’s stock shot up 44 percent: Matt Krantz, “iPhone Powers up Apple’s Shares,” USA Today, June 28, 2007. 211 “four times the number of PCs that ship every year”: Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out.” 211 Ericsson released the R380: Dave Conabree, “Ericsson Introduces the New R380e,” Mobile Magazine, September 25, 2001. 211 Palm followed up with its version: Sascha Segan, “Kyocera Launches First Smartphone in Years,” PC Magazine, March 23, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361664,00.asp#fbid=C81SVwKJIvh. 211 “one more entrant into an already very busy space”: “RIM Co-CEO Doesn’t See Threat from Apple’s iPhone,” InformationWeek, February 12, 2007. 212 the phone was exclusively available from only one carrier: In a handful of markets regulators ruled the exclusivity arrangement illegal. 212 “The bigger problem is the AT&T network”: David Pogue, “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 212 priced at a mere $99 in 2007: Kim Hart, “Rivals Ready for iPhone’s Entrance; Pricey Gadget May Alter Wireless Field,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007. 212 “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software”: Apple, press release, September 24, 2007. 213 “I say I like our strategy”: Steve Ballmer interviewed on CNBC, January 17, 2007. 213 They ran out of the older model six weeks before the July 2008 launch: Tom Krazit, “The iPhone, One Year Later,” CNET.com, June 26, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9977572-37.xhtml. 213 60 percent went to buyers who already owned at least one iPod: Apple COO Tim Cook’s comments at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, cited in JPMorgan analyst report, “Strolling Through the Apple Orchard: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Scenarios,” March 4, 2008. 215 the average iPhone user paid AT&T $2,000: Jenna Wortham, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” New York Times, September 2, 2009. 215 as high as $18 per user per month: Tom Krazit, “Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 per iPhone, Per Month,” CNET.com, October 24, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.xhtml. 216 Apple announced its 10 billionth app download: Apple.com, “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” February 25, 2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.xhtml. Accessed October 20, 2011. 219 financial analysts, technology blogs, and the mainstream media were already obsessed: James Quinn, “Apple’s ‘Tablet’ to rival Amazon’s Kindle,” Daily Telegraph (London), May 22, 2009. 219 “Apple’s latest billion-dollar jackpot”: David Smith, “Steve Jobs’ New Trick: The Apple Tablet,” Observer, August 23, 2009. 219 “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet”: Nick Bilton, “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet,” New York Times, December 28, 2009. 219 “already 75 million people who know how to use this”: Joshua Topolosky, “Live from the Apple ‘Latest Creation’ Event,” Engadget.com, January 27, 2010. 219 all committed to providing books for the device: Ibid. 219 daily version of the paper specially tailored for iPad users: Andy Brett, “The New York Times Introduces an iPad App,” TechCrunch, April 1, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/new-york-times-ipad/.

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The iPod Wins, Three Years Late The MP3 player market did eventually consolidate around a dominant product, Apple’s iPod. But the iPod, launched in late 2001—three years after the MPMan—was anything but a first mover. How can we understand the iPod’s success despite its delayed entry? In 1997, the late Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company he had co-founded as a college dropout, as interim CEO. As the Internet bubble grew, Apple was hungry for growth. Only a sliver of computer users had embraced its Mac offering. In 2001, Jobs noted: “Apple has about 5 percent market share today. Most of the other 95 percent of computer buyers don’t even consider us.”

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But its approach is timeless. iPod: Staged Expansion While the 1990s were rocky for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in the new century it seemed he could do no wrong. In chapter 6 we saw how Jobs constructed the iPod ecosystem. For his minimum viable ecosystem he carried over two elements from the Macintosh world—the Apple Store and the iTunes music management software—and waited for the other key elements—broadband and content—to arrive before he introduced his MP3 player into the marketplace. In 2001, the iPod player was rolled out. The MVE was in place. Apple’s first expansion of the iPod ecosystem came with the rollout of the iTunes music store in 2003, which offered consumers an easy way to purchase legal digital music.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

It had been eight years since Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs had tantalizingly hinted that Apple would do for television what it had done for computers, music players, and phones—make them simple and elegant. Jobs said his television would render complex remote controls obsolete. The yearned-for Apple TV set never materialized, although a prototype existed in Apple’s labs. The ailing Jobs would meet with executives in his Palo Alto home and discuss his vision for a television that could be controlled through voice and touch, said one former Apple executive. Internal design teams worked through various prototypes that would deliver on Jobs’s ambition to create a simplified TV interface.

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Building the audience into a state of frenzied anticipation, the Apple cofounder would culminate with the day’s big product news, casually underselling it as just “one more thing.” The days of Steve Jobs’s euphoric introductions of Apple’s “insanely great” creations were gone. Instead of chasing “the new hotness,” Cook favored iterating on the Apple TV set-top box the company had unveiled in 2006, betting that the comparatively inexpensive product could find its way into consumers’ living rooms. Launching a physical product is one thing. Bringing to life a rumored subscription video streaming service is another matter. It would fit neatly with Apple’s burgeoning, multibillion-dollar services business, which by March 2019 had brought in more revenue than sales of Mac computers and iPads combined.

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Chapter 15: “If You Want to Grab People’s Attention, You Have to Tease” Chapter 16: The IQ Test Part IV: The Incumbent Responds Chapter 17: Netflix Bets on Itself Part V: Meeting the Public Chapter 18: Liftoff Chapter 19: In Space, No One Can Hear You Stream Part VI: Navigating the Recovery Chapter 20: To Everything (Churn, Churn, Churn) Chapter 21: Amazon on the March Chapter 22: Paciencia y Fe Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Streamatis Personae Amazon Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman, former CEO Andy Jassy, CEO Mike Hopkins, senior vice president, Prime Video and Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios Albert Cheng, chief operating officer, co-head of television Roy Price, former head of global video content and Amazon Studios Bob Berney, former head of marketing and distribution, Amazon Studios Apple Steve Jobs, late cofounder and CEO Tim Cook, CEO Zack Van Amburg, co-head of Apple TV+ Jamie Erlicht, co-head of Apple TV+ Eddy Cue, senior vice president, internet software and services AT&T/WarnerMedia Randall Stephenson, former CEO, AT&T John Stankey, CEO, AT&T; former CEO, WarnerMedia Jason Kilar, CEO, WarnerMedia Andy Forssell, executive vice president and general manager, WarnerMedia direct-to-consumer Bob Greenblatt, former chairman, WarnerMedia Kevin Reilly, former chief content officer, HBO Max Jeremy Legg, former chief technology officer, WarnerMedia Richard Plepler, former chairman and CEO, HBO Comcast/NBCUniversal Brian Roberts, CEO, Comcast Steve Burke, former CEO, NBCUniversal Bonnie Hammer, vice chairman, NBCUniversal Matt Strauss, chairman, direct-to-consumer and international Jeff Shell, CEO, NBCUniversal Netflix Reed Hastings, cofounder, co-CEO Marc Randolph, cofounder, former CEO Ted Sarandos, co-CEO Cindy Holland, former vice president, content acquisition and original series Bela Bajaria, vice president, content Scott Stuber, vice president, original films Neil Hunt, former chief product officer Patty McCord, former head of HR Quibi Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder Meg Whitman, CEO Roku Anthony Wood, founder, CEO Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president, platform business The Walt Disney Co.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
by Derek Sivers
Published 20 Jun 2011

We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect. Then out came Steve Jobs. Whoa! Wow. He was in full persuasive presentation mode—trying to convince all of us to give Apple our entire catalog of music, talking about iTunes’ success so far, and all the reasons we should work with Apple. He made a point of saying, “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.” This was huge to me, because until 2003, independent musicians were always denied access to the big outlets. For Apple to sell all music, not just music from artists who had signed their rights away to a corporation—this was amazing!

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But there was one problem. iTunes wasn’t getting back to us. Yahoo!, Rhapsody, Napster, and the rest were all up and running. But iTunes wasn’t returning our signed contract. Was it because I had posted my meeting notes? Had I pissed off Steve Jobs? Nobody at Apple would say anything. It had been months. My musicians were getting impatient and angry. I gave optimistic apologies, but I was starting to get worried, too. A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs, while Rhapsody and Napster had more than 2 million songs.

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When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line. The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby’s catalog into the iTunes Music Store. iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the major labels. Many of us in the music biz—especially those who had seen companies like eMusic use this exact same model for years without much success—were not sure this idea was going to work. I flew to Cupertino, California, thinking I’d be meeting with one of Apple’s marketing or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people from small record labels and distributors had also been invited.

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
Published 7 Nov 2023

Ray Dalio is Steve Jobs with a business school degree.” The headline for the profile on the cover asked, “Is Ray Dalio the Steve Jobs of Investing?,” a question that McDaniel intentionally left unanswered in the piece. Over time, the question mark faded. The next publication to compare the two men was Wired, which in an article about Apple acolytes included Dalio as an example and said he “has been called ‘the Steve Jobs of investing,’” a reference to McDaniel’s piece. That was enough to get Dalio’s official biography on Bridgewater’s website changed to read, “Ray has been called the ‘Steve Jobs of Investing’ by aiCIO Magazine and Wired Magazine

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A wiry, tall fellow who seemed not to have physically changed since his bar mitzvah, Rubinstein was eighteen years older than Jensen. He had made his reputation at Apple, where he earned the nickname the Podfather, for helping Steve Jobs create the first iPod. As the years passed, however, Rubinstein gained the reputation inside Apple as a practical, and somewhat irritating, square. He got into profanity-laden shouting matches with Jobs and other members of the Apple C-suite while opposing proposed design improvements to Apple products that he worried would be too difficult to manufacture. After sixteen years, Jobs decided that Rubinstein had a big ego and the two parted ways.

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Dalio noted in his usual daily economic commentary to clients, “This is no ordinary day, this is the day Steve Jobs died.” Dalio began to talk about Jobs ad nauseum, and some at Bridgewater concluded that he was less interested in Jobs’s accomplishments at Apple than in his outsize public persona. In Jobs, Dalio could see a model for his own hero’s journey. Both men were, charitably, viewed as jerks. Both had multiple legs to their careers. The difference was that while Jobs in his second stint had built Apple into a universally envied model for the technology world, Bridgewater was mostly known just in finance.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

See Jay Yarow, “Google Is Reportedly Trying to Get a Bigger Slice of Android App Revenue,” Business Insider, June 28, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/google-play-store-revenue-2013-6; Vogelstein, Dogfight, 121. 42. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 500–502. 43. Arnold Kim, “Steve Jobs Announces Third Party SDK for iPhone for February 2008,” MacRumors, October 17, 2007, http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/17/steve-jobs-announces-3rd-party-sdk-for-iphone-for-february-2008/; Apple Hot News (archived October 18, 2007), “Third Party Applications on the iPhone,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071018221832/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/. 44. Nielsen Informate, “International Smartphone Mobility Report,” March 2015, http://informatemi.com/final_download_report.php?

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He couldn’t get the company to approve a mobile phone app because it would cannibalize its thirty-year-old legacy technology.25 The Symbian experience showed Apple and Google that just starting a two-sided platform and securing customers on both sides wouldn’t be enough. The platform would also have to nurture a healthy ecosystem around it. Symbian couldn’t do that. If anything, Symbian contributed to making its ecosystem more dysfunctional. In 2005, when Apple and Google started looking into how to reduce the frictions in the mobile phone business, it wasn’t obvious what sort of platform they should build or how they should go about nurturing a healthy ecosystem around it. Maybe One Side Is Enough Steve Jobs, having created a highly successful music business around the iPod, was worried: “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.”26 People wouldn’t need iPods if handset makers built music players into them.

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Since AT&T’s share of US mobile connections in the second quarter of 2007 was only 26.2 percent, the iPhone wasn’t available to 73.8 percent of subscribers unless they switched carriers.32 The iPhone was thus a single-sided business when Apple made the first iPhone available on June 29, 2007. Apple made the handset, the operating system, and most of the apps. It just needed to get the subscribers of the mobile carriers, the ones it did exclusive deals with, to buy its new phone. Herding Cats Larry Page was as worried about the mobile phone as Steve Jobs, but for a different reason.33 Google made its money serving ads on the web that people accessed from desktop computers. With the explosion in mobile devices, Page thought it was clear that most people were eventually going to move from fixed to mobile devices.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 2: Pirates and the New Frankenstein In 1983, at an off-site retreat: Sarah Todd, “The Steve Jobs Speech That Made Silicon Valley Obsessed with Pirates,” Quartz, Oct. 22, 2019, qz.com/​1719898/​steve-jobs-speech-that-made-silicon-valley-obsessed-with-pirates. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It’s award-winning 1984 commercial: Peter Cohen, “1984: How Apple’s TV Ad Changed Everything, and Why 2014 Won’t Be Anything Like It Either,” iMore, Feb. 28, 2018, imore.com/​1984-apples-famous-tv-ad-changed-everything. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the company’s 1997 commercial: “Apple—Think Different—Full Version,” YouTube, youtube.com/​watch?

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the company’s 1997 commercial: “Apple—Think Different—Full Version,” YouTube, youtube.com/​watch?v=5sMBhDv4sik; “Steve Jobs: 20 Best Quotes,” ABC News, Aug. 15, 2011, abcnews.go.com/​Technology/​steve-jobs-death-20-best-quotes/​story?id=14681795/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Even an early (unused) design: Luke Dormehl, The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture, and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World (London: Ebury Publishing, 2012), 83–84. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the counterculture’s scorn”: Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, Mar. 1, 1995, content.time.com/​time/​subscriber/​article/​0,33009,982602,00.html.

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Chapter 2 PIRATES AND THE NEW FRANKENSTEIN: How Outsiders Toppled the Status Quo and Unleashed a Tsunami of Unintended Consequences … And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. —Shakespeare, Twelfth Night In 1983, at an off-site retreat in Carmel, California, Steve Jobs addressed the Apple developers who were working on the Mac computer, exhorting them to remember the company’s scrappy counterculture roots. “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy,” Jobs said, and for a while a Jolly Roger flag (featuring a skull wearing a rainbow-colored eye patch in the shape of the Apple logo) flew over the company’s headquarters. Apple’s ads also played to its renegade, antiestablishment image—its outsider street cred. Its award-winning 1984 commercial directed by Ridley Scott, for instance, conjured a grim, futuristic world in which a Big Brother–like figure appears on a giant screen, preaching the “unification of thoughts” to a captive audience wearing gray prison garb.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
by Cal Newport
Published 17 Sep 2012

Rule #1 is dedicated to laying out my argument against passion, as this insight—that “follow your passion” is bad advice—provides the foundation for everything that follows. Perhaps the best place to start is where we began, with the real story of Steve Jobs and the founding of Apple Computer. Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said If you had met a young Steve Jobs in the years leading up to his founding of Apple Computer, you wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who was passionate about starting a technology company. Jobs had attended Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts enclave in Oregon, where he grew his hair long and took to walking barefoot.

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Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, “Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.” The Messy Lessons of Jobs I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break—a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.

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In Rule #1, I provided several examples of people who had great jobs and love (or loved) what they do—so we can draw from there. Among others, I introduced Apple founder Steve Jobs, radio host Ira Glass, and master surfboard shaper Al Merrick. Using this trio as our running example, I can now ask what it is specifically about these three careers that makes them so compelling? Here are the answers that I came up with: TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
by Mitch Joel
Published 20 May 2013

Even in open environments, remember that headphones are the new DO NOT DISTURB sign. Lesson #3—Create more collisions. Apple’s new campus (which is due to be completed in 2016) will cover close to three million square feet and hold up to thirteen thousand Apple employees. The headquarters (based in Cupertino, California) will also house its own power plant and over six thousand trees. The design has been called a “spaceship,” and reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson tells us there’s a powerful reason for its circular shape: Steve Jobs loved moments of collision. The biography tells the tale of Pixar’s headquarters where the bathrooms were something of a hike for the majority of employees.

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And what this data indicates is that the one-screen world is not a possible trend but an inevitability that has already taken place, and that the growth continues at an exponential pace. When Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 7, 2012, many people were waiting to see both how Cook would handle the first major release from Apple in a post–Steve Jobs world and what the rumored iPad would be capable of, as the iPad 2 was still selling well. Beyond a smooth performance and a new iPad that featured Retina Display with a faster computer processor (dual-core A5X processor with quad-core graphics, thank you very much), few picked up on the staggering data point that Cook enlightened us all with. Apple sold over fifteen million iPads in the first quarter of 2012.

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In it, author Henry Bloget reported that two-thirds of Apple’s revenue came from products that were invented from 2007 onward. One of the most memorable lines out of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was this quote: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” The question becomes this: Is there a critical path or road map for the rest of us? Is it really possible for the rest of us to be as innovative and risk-taking as Apple? If it were possible, then Apple would not seem to be so different, brave, and bold. That being said, there are some common threads that weave through the most entrepreneurial individuals and organizations. For some this involves their ability to embrace new business models; for others it’s the ability to respect the business owners that they have become, while still embracing their internal entrepreneurs (and letting that mindset roam free).

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

Branding A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly. Today’s strongest tech brand is Apple: the attractive looks and carefully chosen materials of products like the iPhone and MacBook, the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own. Many have tried to learn from Apple’s success: paid advertising, branded stores, luxurious materials, playful keynote speeches, high prices, and even minimalist design are all susceptible to imitation.

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But by then Gates’s enemies had already deprived his company of the full engagement of its founder, and Microsoft entered an era of relative stagnation. Today Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist. THE RETURN OF THE KING Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates’s dominance, Steve Jobs’s return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company’s founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

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Grossman and David Gahr/Getty Images 14.5: Jim Morrison, Elektra Records and CBS via Getty Images 14.5: Kurt Cobain, Frank Micelotta/Stringer/Getty Images 14.5: Amy Winehouse, flickr user teakwood, used under CC BY-SA 14.6: Howard Hughes, Bettmann/CORBIS 14.6: magazine cover, TIME, a division of Time Inc. 14.7: Bill Gates, Doug Wilson/CORBIS 14.7: magazine cover, Newsweek 14.8: Steve Jobs, 1984, Norman Seeff 14.8: Steve Jobs, 2004, Contour by Getty Images Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abound Solar Accenture advertising, 3.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 Afghanistan Airbnb airline industry Allen, Paul Amazon, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 12.1 Amundsen, Roald Andreessen, Horowitz Andreessen, Marc Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) antitrust Apollo Program Apple, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 14.1 branding of monopoly profits of Aristotle Army Corps of Engineers AT&T Aztecs Baby Boomers Bacon, Francis Bangladesh Barnes & Noble Beijing Bell Labs Berlin Wall Better Place Bezos, Jeff, 5.1, 6.1 big data Bill of Rights, U.S.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

And to have strategic insights. Steve Jobs was famous for not worrying much about Apple’s stock price. How did Steve Jobs manage Apple? He was not an engineer himself, yet he guided Apple into being one of the great engineering companies, in the true sense of what it means to “engineer.” Competitors raced to be first to market or to include the most features in their products, but they tended to create products that were clunky and awkward in comparison to Apple’s. Many people and companies want to emulate Apple and study what the company has done. In trying to learn from Steve Jobs’s Apple, it is useful to pay attention to what he did not do.

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Luckily, I was able to watch and learn something from leaders who were skilled strategists: • like Pierre Wack, the legendary head of strategy at Shell, who taught me to see the correlations among the elements of a situation and to be alert for whipsaws as trends overshoot and rebound • like Steve Jobs of Apple, whose brutal honesty let him cut through layers of baloney and grab the crux of a situation (and annoy many people around him) • like Andy Marshall (Office of Net Assessment/Department of Defense) who had a fine instinct for defining the competition at just the right level to change the conversation for the better (his paper on redefining the Cold War situation as a long-term competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was pivotal in moving US policy makers away from an armaments view to one that encompassed economic and social dimensions) • like Andy Bryant, the board chair of Intel who understood how size and complexity can compete with having the technological edge • like Simon Galbraith of Redgate Software, whose natural talent for diagnosis led him to a canvas larger than a single business These general managers, and others, did things differently, and, over time, I began to get a feel for the broad outlines of that difference.

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Amazon began to greatly improve its logistics system and offered the Marketplace sellers use of its warehouse and shipping services. It was an offer of marriage most could not refuse. And its continued expansion into more and more products countered threats from almost all suppliers. Another case of seeing the crux was Apple management realizing that Steve Jobs’s devotion to doing everything in-house was in stark conflict with the concept of an app store. They began to realize that opening up the iPhone’s app store to outside programmers would produce enormous competition among app makers, driving down their prices, increasing their quality through comparison, and thereby increasing the value of each iPhone.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

No to P2P; yes to i. Along with John Ashcroft, Steve Jobs helped lead America’s B2K transition, and the internet has not changed back. The connection between Steve Jobs and Apple’s customer base is intense and bizarre, but it’s at most half the story: DESIGNED BY APPLE IN CALIFORNIA reads the most common label on the company’s products, followed by ASSEMBLED IN CHINA. Behind Apple’s success was another world-historical phenomenon: the rise of Chinese high-tech manufacturing. In 1998, Jobs hired a VP from leading compatibles producer Compaq named Tim Cook to build Apple’s offshore manufacturing relationships.

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Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 90. 47. Walter Frick and Scott Berinato, “Apple: Luxury Brand or Mass Marketer?” Harvard Business Review, October 2, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/10/apple-luxury-brand-or-mass-marketer. 48. Dawn Kawamoto, “Apple Acquires Next, Jobs,” CNET, December 20, 1996, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-acquires-next-jobs. 49. Alvy Ray Smith, A Biography of the Pixel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 429. PARC star and Pixar leader Smith left a few years before the IPO. As to why, he recalls, “I had to get Steve Jobs out of my life.”

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This was the context for the 1979 show-and-tell between PARC and Apple that led to the Mac. The meetings were a condition Steve Jobs placed on a million-dollar investment from Xerox. A chance to buy 100,000 big shares of Apple at $10.50 was, in retrospect, quite the opportunity, but that wasn’t what the copier company was really after.10 The investment was a way for the bigger firm to secure a stake in what it hoped would be a contract manufacturer for the retail Alto. It wasn’t a crazy idea; Warner-owned Atari was making an unsuccessful pitch to IBM for the privilege of building a Blue microcomputer at the same time. Apple, however, had other plans, and Jobs was up front (if bratty), telling the PARC team that he had no intention of building the Xerox machine.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides
by Garr Reynolds
Published 29 Jan 2010

Conversations, after all, are not one way. Admitting that it is a bit of a generalization, Sierra says, “If you’re using formal language in a lecture, learning book (or marketing message, for that Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 147 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Presentation Tips from a Steve Jobs Keynote Apple’s Steve Jobs is a good example of someone who presents with the help of multimedia in an engaging style. It’s true that he has great products to talk about, but he is also incredibly skilled at presenting those products. Great content is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. Jobs has both solid content and excellent delivery skills.

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If we are not vehemently devoted to avoiding cognitive overload, we may end up preventing learning. Chapter 2 First Things First: Preparation 37 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Know your audience When I was working at Apple in Cupertino, California, I received an email forwarded from Steve Jobs’s office. The email was from the leader of a user group whose organization had received a presentation from one of Apple’s field engineers the day before. The user group leader was not happy with the presentation and decided to let the CEO of the firm know of his displeasure. My job was to investigate the problem and smooth things over with the user group.

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Nonetheless, I set up the equipment as planned. I mingled around and talked to many members before the presentation. They were gracious hosts, a common characteristic of Apple user groups. During this time I realized that my prepared talk—as good as I thought it was—was not going to be a good fit for this particular group. I was disappointed, but was determined to push ahead with my presentation. After all, I was from Apple and people expect a kind of “mini-me” version of a Steve Jobs presentation, don’t they? Still, somehow the projector-and-computer accompaniment did not feel right for the context. Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 141 Wow!

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

It’s still a data problem, just an inverse one. What makes someone creative is the ability to recognise that they are on the right lines with a certain idea. Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs described innovation as the ability to say no to 1,000 possible ideas. ‘You have to pick carefully,’ he said. ‘I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.’ Steve Jobs eventually led Apple to create iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, but before he did this he said no to dozens of other products the company had been working on in his absence. Fortunately, machines are getting better at this task, too.

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It could, for instance, pull concert data from StubHub, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp, and order taxis through TaxiMagic. In April 2010, Apple acquired the company for an amount reported to be around $200 million. Under the guidance of Steve Jobs (one of the last projects he was heavily involved with before stepping down as Apple’s CEO as his health worsened), several modifications were made to Siri. Much as Apple had done thirty years earlier with its graphical user interface, Jobs played up the friendliness and accessibility of the AI assistant. He insisted on giving it spoken responses – which the original Siri app had not had – and got rid of the ability to type requests as well as just ask them, so as not to complicate the experience of using it.

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In all their ‘bigger, taller, heavier’ grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer-driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that. As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

“We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.” Apple visit “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter,” Musk tweeted at the end of November. “Do they hate free speech in America?” That evening, Musk had one of his regular long phone conversations with his mentor and investor Larry Ellison, who was then living mainly on Lanai, the island he owned in Hawaii. Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available in the iPhone’s App Store.

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“He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.” * * * When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

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“The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says. This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.” Friendly design There was another principle that came out of Apple’s design studio. When Jony Ive conceived the candy-colored, friendly iMac in 1998, he included a recessed handle.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
by John Tamny
Published 6 May 2018

But when its CEO, Ken Olson, was asked about the personal desktop computer that rival IBM was readying for the market, he responded that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”40 At the time, Harvard dropout Bill Gates’s obscure startup, Microsoft, had thirty-eight employees.41 Gates plainly didn’t agree with Olson about the future of the personal computer, and neither did his eventual rival Steve Jobs, the Reed College dropout who founded Apple Computer in 1977.42 Four years later, Apple went public in the most oversubscribed initial public offering since 1956,43 turning three hundred Apple employees into millionaires. Not long after Apple went public, a pre-med student at the University of Texas named Michael Dell started PCs Limited out of his dorm room. Lacking funds to take on a lot of inventory, Dell hit on the idea of selling computers over the phone so he wouldn’t have to commit capital to equipment until he had actual orders.44 It’s a safe bet that most of those new Apple millionaires, like the tycoons at Apple’s competitors, had gone to college.

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Chapter Nine: Why We Need People with Money to Burn 1.Warren Brookes, The Economy in Mind (New York: Universe Books, 1982), p. 77. 2.Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 407. 3.Ibid., 157. 4.David McCullough, The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 34. 5.Ibid., 108. 6.Konstantin Kakaes, “New Directions,” Wall Street Journal, June 25–26, 2016. 7.Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 339. 8.Dawn Kawamoto, Ben Heskett, and Mike Ricciuti, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple,” CNET, August 6, 1997. 9.Alexis Tsotsis, “Uber Gets $32 Million From Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs,” Tech Crunch, December 7, 2011. 10.Source: Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/. 11.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 12.Noam Cohen, “Technology’s Trumpian Visions,” New York Times, July 27, 2016. 13.Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 37. 14.Ibid., 13. 15.Ibid., 168. 16.Ibid., 52. 17.Ibid., 60. 18.Ibid., 62. 19.Michael Freeman, ESPN: The Uncensored History (Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000), 58. 20.Ibid., 59. 21.Ibid. 22.Ibid., 7. 23.Ibid., 77. 24.Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind Its Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 25.T.

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The Washington Post once confidently asserted, “It is a fact that man can’t fly.”4 Thank goodness the Wright Brothers not only ignored the naysayers but also had enough revenue from their bicycle shop to invest the considerable sum of one thousand dollars in their seemingly impossible aviation project.5 When the venture capitalist Ed Tuck set his mind to making GPS technology available to the general public, his search for investors led to eighty-six rejections before he found someone to help him bring Magellan GPS systems to market.6 But consider the unseen. How many advances have never seen the light of day because the wealth to back them wasn’t available? It’s hard to believe, now that Apple is the most valuable company on Earth, but when Steve Jobs returned from exile in 1997 to run the company he had co-founded, it was “less than ninety days from being insolvent.”7 Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, invested $150 million in Jobs’s return to Apple.8 How many more investments might Gates have made, how many more world-changing companies might he have saved, how many more global problems might his foundation have solved with the billions that he and Microsoft have handed over in taxes over the years?

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

The interface, which depicted green leaves sprouting when drivers went easy on the gas and brakes, provided positive, emotional reinforcement of environmentally friendly driving practices—an early attempt to fuse user-friendly design and sustainability. 2007: IPHONE MULTI-TOUCH SCREEN, Apple Before the iPhone was announced, Apple was worth $74 billion; by 2018, it was worth over $1 trillion. Steve Jobs had always dreamed of increasingly natural ways of interfacing with computers. In the iPhone, which served the functions of at least half a dozen different devices, his company finally hit on one that made computers not only personal but ever present. But in doing so, Apple brought forth a world of constant access and distraction whose consequences are still unfolding. 2008: APP STORE, Apple The iPhone may have been the first, most important step, but it was the App Store that unleashed the mobile revolution.

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It’s what transformed the minicomputer into the personal computer: from command lines glowing coldly on black screens to operating systems that sit on almost every office desk in the world. It’s what made computing the glue of the modern knowledge economy. The story goes that Steve Jobs went for a demo at Xerox PARC, saw the future there, and more or less stole it. But it’s a story riddled with holes, starting with the obvious: How would Steve Jobs have even thought there was anything to steal in the first place? Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his Ph.D. program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become known for designing computer programs that made 3-D maps of mouse brains.

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In the middle lies a grove meant to recall the time, just fifty years ago, when Silicon Valley wasn’t Silicon Valley, but rather the Valley of Heart’s Delight, covered in 10 million fruit trees—apricot, cherry, peach, pear, and apple. It took Apple, the computing giant, years to buy up all that land in secret, assembling some sixteen different plots across fifty acres in a $5 billion jigsaw. If the building looks like a spaceship, then it’s one that lifted off directly from Steve Jobs’s imagination to land in the heart of an otherwise sleepy suburb. It was one of the last undertakings that the great man signed off on before he died. Every morning during the construction of Jobs’s last dream, Harlan Crowder woke up to the dull roar of heavy trucks on their way to the site, their alarms bleating as they nudged their loads into place.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin
Published 9 Jun 2005

Small entrepreneurs depend totally: Robert Noyce, Testimony before Congress, Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, High Definition Television: Hearing Before the House Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, 13 Sept., 1989. Apple founding: Mike Markkula, interview by author; Steve Jobs, interview by author; Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984). Nothing else was in Intel’s interest: Mike Markkula, interview by author. Even a supplier-customer relationship between Intel and Apple failed to materialize. Wozniak had originally chosen a Motorola processor for Apple machines, and even though Markkula says he and Grove met several times to discuss whether a switch to an Intel chip was warranted, “the timing was never right,” and so Apple stayed with Motorola.

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Jobs at McKenna dinner: Ann Bowers, interview by author. Not very appealing: Arthur Rock quoted in “HBS [Harvard Business School] Working Knowledge,” http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=1821&t= special_reports_donedeals Noyce and Jobs Seabee accident: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Remember personal things: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Apple Computer IPO: Apple Computer prospectus, 12 Dec. 1980. On Tandem: Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit”; “The fall of an American Icon,” Business Week, 5 Feb. 1996. Compaq acquisition of Tandem: David Lazarus, “Compaq Boosts High End with Tandem Deal,” Inc., 23 June 1997.

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But he was equally 252 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP convinced that Jobs and Wozniak were not the men to lead that market. This was especially true after Bowers brought home her first Apple in 1978, and she and Noyce spent much of the weekend on the phone to Mike Markkula trying to set it up properly. The Apple machine did not strike Noyce as the groundbreaking technical breakthrough necessary to bring computing power to the common man. But over time, Noyce’s feelings about Apple began to change. This was due, in no small measure, to Steve Jobs, who deliberately sought out Noyce as a mentor. ( Jobs also asked Jerry Sanders and Andy Grove if he could take them to lunch every quarter and “pick your brain.”)

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

Even Steve Jobs committed this error after insisting on the opposite: that projects have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. The most notorious example was Apple’s Power Mac G4 Cube computer. Released in 2000, the G4 was a translucent cube that even today looks gorgeously futuristic. It had no power switch. You just waved your hand, and it turned on. So cool. So Steve Jobs. And that was the problem. The G4 had not been designed by looking at who Apple’s customers were and what would serve them best. Its combination of cost, capabilities, and aesthetics was molded by Steve Jobs’s passions, and impressive as the machine was, it was an awkward fit for customers. The G4 flopped, and Apple scrapped it a year later at great cost.10 But “work backwards” also fails when planners aren’t compelled to nail down what’s in that final flowchart box on the right and forced to think from right to left.

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“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out how you’re going to try to sell it. I made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”9 Today, “work backwards” is a mantra in Silicon Valley. LOSING SIGHT OF THE RIGHT The most common way in which thinking from right to left fails is losing sight of the right, the goal. Even Steve Jobs committed this error after insisting on the opposite: that projects have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

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For a longer and more detailed list of my heuristics, including deeper explanations of what heuristics are, why they work, and how to tease them out, with more examples, see Bent Flyvbjerg, “Heuristics for Masterbuilders: Fast and Frugal Ways to Become a Better Project Leader,” Saïd Business School Working Papers, University of Oxford, 2022. 5. Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (New York: Random House, 2014), 315. 6. medianwandel, “WWDC 1997: Steve Jobs About Apple’s Future,” YouTube, October 19, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o. BIBLIOGRAPHY 258t. 2015. “Steve Jobs Customer Experience.” YouTube, October 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2O5qKZlI50. Aaltonen, Kirsi, and Jaakko Kujala. 2010. “A Project Lifecycle Perspective on Stakeholder Influence Strategies in Global Projects.” Scandinavian Journal of Management 26 (4): 381–97.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

So, in what many analysts at the time thought was an act of desperation, Apple’s board made a decision to buy NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs had set up after he was ousted from Apple back in 1985. Acquiring NeXT gave Apple a much-needed new operating system to work with – and a really good one at that. But far more crucially…it also gave it Steve Jobs. While Apple’s engineers were tasked with the job of modifying NeXT’s OS to work with its drab grey boxes, Jobs was given the job of turning the company around. And this is when he did something that would set Apple on course to become the most innovative, influential, and valuable company of the 21st century – and in so doing, pave the way for a generation of new companies that would soon start to transform the way the world worked.

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Bright, savvy customers like Jay know how to get a good deal. If she were thinking and acting like a normal customer, Apple would be toast. But she isn’t. Jay’s behaviour mirrors that of the Manchester United supporters on the terraces at Old Trafford. Jay isn’t an Apple customer, she is an Apple fan – which means she has a totally different relationship with the brand. This is what Apple – and particularly Steve Jobs, when he was at the helm – has known for years, and what Nokia totally missed when they opened their concept store. Apple doesn’t have customers, it has fans. And you don’t get fans simply by opening a flashy store.

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It also has the same root as the word “spiritual”. Steve Jobs engaged at a very deep and personal level. He called Apple “the largest start-up in the world” for a good reason. Under his leadership, its primary purpose was the fulfilment of its social mission. It was all about the why, not the what. In 1997, Apple was a failing computer company with a rapidly diminishing value of $3 billion. Nokia dominated the high-end mobile phone market. Kodak dominated the photography market. Palm and Handspring vied with each other in the hand-held market. Twenty years later, Apple’s iPhone dominated all three categories.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

Be Willing to Wave Good-Bye to the Past We haven’t spent much time in this book detailing perhaps the most iconic transformations of the 1990s (IBM) and early 2000s (Apple). Both examples are well documented and indeed are powerful examples of dual transformation. And in both cases transformation A involved jettisoning key parts of the historic core business. In IBM’s case, over the past two decades, beyond substantial investments to create a services arm, the company exited the hard disk drive, printer, and personal computer markets. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was known as a creation maestro, but his first set of actions when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s wasn’t to create; it was to destroy. He consolidated Apple’s complicated product portfolio to four products.

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Commercials, hilarious in retrospect, touted the fact that Rokr was the first handset that integrated Apple’s iTunes music software. Popular artists like Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers poured into a phone booth and the voice-over intoned, “One hundred tunes in your pocket, baby.” One hundred tunes. Wow. It was clear from the beginning that then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ambivalent about the partnership. Just two weeks after the commercial launch, Jobs noted publicly, “We see it as something we can learn from. It was a way to put our toe in the water.” Apple had also filed a number of patents that would enable it to create a simple, elegant phone, such as its 2004 filing (granted in 2010) for a “capacitive touchscreen.”

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The great fun is doing what you do every day. I’m sort of a poster child for not sort of doing anything but what we do every day . . . We’re a very poorly diversified portfolio. It either goes to the moon or crashes to the Earth.” And crash both Nokia and RIM did. In January 2007 Steve Jobs announced, and in June Apple launched, the iPhone. Dubbed the “Jesus phone” by worshippers, the phone created a media firestorm and immediately started showing up in the hands of celebrities. In November, Google, along with a range of handset manufacturers, formed the Open Handset Alliance, powered by Google’s Android operating system.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age
by David S. Abraham
Published 27 Oct 2015

Fred Vogelstein, “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone,’ ” New York Times, October 6, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?pagewanted=all; Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs: Complete Transcript of Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo, January 9, 2007,” Genius, January 9, 2007, http://genius.com/Steve-jobs-complete-transcript-of-steve-jobs-macworld-conference-and-expo-january-9-2007-annotated/. 4. Helen Walters, “A Sputnik Moment for STEM Education: Ainissa Ramirez at TED2012,” TED Blog, March 2, 2012, accessed November 2, 2014, http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/02/a-sputnik-moment-for-stem-education-ainissa-ramirez-at-ted2012/. 5.

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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” Ballmer prophesied during a CEO Forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007. But, by the end of the first week of sales, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones. The company was fast on its way to taking more than 20 percent of the smartphone market within just a few months.1 To those who waited in line outside Apple stores for a day or two to snap up the first phones—or paid others hundreds of dollars to wait for them—the iPhone was a revolution, the stuff of dreams.

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Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2012–5215” (Reston, VA, 2012), available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5215/. 10. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 11. C. Hagelüken, R. Drielsmann, and K. Ven den Broeck, “Availability of Metals and Materials,” in Precious Materials Handbook, Ulla Sehrt and Matthias Grehl, 10–35 (Hanau-Wolfgang, Germany: Umicore AG, 2012). 12. Michael Wolff, “Michael Wolff: Uber Invades the World,” USA-Today, June 14, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/14/the-rise-of-uber/10417655/; Brian Lam, “The Life of Steve Jobs,” Gizmodo, August 24, 2011, http://gizmodo.com/5301470/the-life-of-steve-jobs---so-far. 13. Michael Feroli, “Economics Web Note,” Morgan Markets, J.P.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

Frox was developing “revolutionary” home entertainment systems, including the much-publicized Frox wand, a one-button universal remote. Frox had attracted engineers from Lucasfilm, Droidworks, Xerox PARC, Sun Microsystems, and Apple Computer. But Frox didn’t have the design flair of Steve Jobs. Kaphan lasted about three years, the company lasted twenty. In 1992 Kaphan joined Kaleida Labs, a joint venture between Apple and IBM, which created a digital multimedia player for computers, and wanted to create a similar program for television set-top boxes. Founded in 1991, it was folded into Apple in 1995. In the spring of 1994, just about the time Bezos was looking for an idea that he could turn into a good Web-based business, Herb and Shel were doing the same thing.

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Except for Web services, Bezos sold only physical goods in Amazon’s first decade. Then, on March 4, 2003, Apple’s Steve Jobs demonstrated that some physical products were unnecessary. The music CD was simply a way of delivering the real product, the music itself. But music can be digitized and shipped over the Internet without the cost of the physical CD or the expense of mailing. The iTunes music store was born. Sometime in 2004 Bezos had an Amazon executive approach Gregg Zehr, a hardware developer who had worked at Apple and at palmOne, which created the Palm personal digital assistant. The executive asked Zehr to start a new company in order to create a new electronic book reader for Amazon.

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This was, no doubt, due partly to the fact that Steve Jobs had already agreed to the agency model, which could have given Apple better access to e-books from placated publishers. On the other hand, in October 2010 Amazon offered to pay royalties of 70 percent to authors who self-publish through the Kindle store, compared to 25 percent from most publishers. For now, the Kindle still leads the market for e-book readers at its current price. Research company ChangeWave estimated that the Kindle had the largest share of the market in early 2011, at 47 percent. Apple’s iPad (which does much more than just read books and is more expensive) had a 32 percent share.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States
by Joy Lisi Rankin

MECC ­people reflected on their “awareness and appreciation” of computing, just as they praised the social aspects of their network, the rich “people-­ to-­ people contact.”34 Networked computing via time-­sharing thrived in Minnesota, having been motivated by a desire to equally serve citizens across the state, to provide the “same opportunities in computing . . . ​to a rural resident as to anyone in the suburbs or Twin Cities.”35 Just as DEC had spurred sales of its time-­sharing minicomputer systems by making them attractive to students and educators, Apple also targeted schools in the late 1970s. Steve Jobs ­later explained that “schools buying Apple IIs” was “one of the t­ hings that built Apple IIs.”36 Indeed, a MECC staff member who had attended a conference in California reported to his colleagues in Minnesota about the amazing Apple II computer he had seen, and MECC soon arranged to buy over five hundred of them from Jobs and Wozniak.37 MECC led the nation in placing microcomputers in its classrooms, and Apple gained an early and large share of the educational computing market; moreover, the long-­ ago decision to implement Dartmouth Time-­Sharing with BASIC at UHigh in Minneapolis had impor­tant ramifications all ­these years l­ater.38 MECC and its constituent members (such as TIES and MERITSS [Minnesota Educational 240 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States Regional Interactive Time-­Sharing System]) had been building a library of applications and games—­w ritten in BASIC —­since the 1960s.

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Increasingly, ­people would have to purchase computers and software (now, devices and apps) for their personal and social computing. BASIC also figures prominently in the history of Apple. Steve Wozniak produced his own “Integer BASIC” for his homemade computer, built around MOS Technology’s 6502 micropro­cessor chip; he shared Integer BASIC , and he even published programs in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.29 When Wozniak’s high school chum Steve Jobs saw the computer, he proposed they team up to assem­ble and sell them. They named the computer Apple, and soon began working on a new version, the Apple II. Although Apple declared its philosophy 238 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States was “to provide software for our machines ­f ree or at minimal cost,” Apple sought (aggressively) to sell its hardware.30 ­W hether they w ­ ere called home computers, hobby computers, microcomputers, or personal computers, they ­were consumer products, purveyed by Steve Jobs.

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Gates first learned to program in BASIC , the language on which he built his Microsoft empire. Wozniak adapted Tiny BASIC into Integer BASIC to program his homemade computer, the computer that attracted the partnership of Steve Jobs and launched Apple. And the Minnesota software library, mostly BASIC programs including The Oregon Trail, proved to be the ideal complement for the hardware of Apple Computers. During the 1980s, the combination of Apple hardware and MECC software 10 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States cemented the transformation from computing citizens to computing consumers. The title of this work nods to Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking A ­People’s History of the United States.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

Gates would soon enter the software applications business himself to grow the IBM-compatible PC market and take more of the profit, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. He did this first for Apple’s Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, and then for DOS and Windows PCs, bundled in the Office suite from 1990. To encourage other companies to help expand demand for PCs, Gates also decided to give away for free the software development kit (SDK) needed to build applications for DOS and then Windows. By contrast, Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs did not give away software development kits for free or try to build a broad applications market. Instead, he hired Microsoft in 1982 and paid Gates a $50,000 advance to write applications for the Macintosh personal computer, which was incompatible with DOS.5 Jobs also charged hundreds of dollars to developers who wanted to build Macintosh applications on their own.

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Selby, Microsoft Secrets (New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1995), 137, 158–59. 3.This information comes from a 1994 magazine interview with Bill Gates cited in Cusumano and Selby, Microsoft Secrets, 159. 4.David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (New York: HarperBusiness, 2015), 98–100. 5.Manes and Andrews, Gates, 245–46. 6.For details, see “Did Apple not originally allow anyone to develop software for the Macintosh?” Stack Exchange Retrocomputing, https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2513/did-apple-not-originally-allow-anyone-to-develop-software-for-the-macintosh/2520?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa (accessed May 21, 2018). 7.Yoffie and Cusumano, Strategy Rules, 114. 8.Mathew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents,” New York Times, March 18, 2018; and Katrin Benhold, “Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate,” New York Times, May 19, 2018. 9.Politico Staff, “Full Text: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday Testimony to Congress on Cambridge Analytica,” Politico, April 11, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978 (accessed May 15, 2018). 10.See “List of Unicorn Start-Up Companies,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_start-up_companies (accessed May 21, 2018). 11.Brian X.

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We also wrote up our initial thoughts on market dynamics and how business models and strategy differed for innovation platforms as compared to transaction platforms. David Yoffie joined the project after the publication of Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (Yoffie and Cusumano, 2015), which included a detailed analysis of how platform thinking evolved at Microsoft, Intel, and Apple.4 We then expanded the scope of this new book to examine common mistakes among platform companies, challenges for conventional firms trying to compete with digital platforms, platform governance and antitrust issues, and some emerging platform technologies that could greatly impact the future.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

That’s why so many busy and powerful people practice mind-clearing meditation and stick to rigid daily routines: to minimize distractions and maximize good decision making. Simplification is why Steve Jobs’s Magic Mouse doubled Apple’s mouse market share overnight. With zero buttons (the whole thing is a button, actually) and a touchscreen glass top, the mouse is both pretty and intuitive—a huge departure from the conventional “innovative” mouse arms race, which amounted to adding more bulk and more buttons. Similarly, Apple’s iPod won the MP3 player war with breakthrough simplicity, both in physical design and how the company explained it. While other companies touted “4 Gigabytes and a 0.5 Gigahertz processor!” Apple simply said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

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Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us.

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He got to be the best by focusing on what he needed to know, knowing how to figure out what he didn’t know, and forgetting about everything else. Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives. They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs. This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices. US presidents do the same thing. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Brown explains: “Xerox built big complicated stuff that sold for $250,000 a unit and came with three-year guarantees. What was the chance that any of the PARC stuff could ever be sold through the Xerox channels? Zero.” So the decision was made to try to partner with Apple. Almost every version of the story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC for a demonstration in December of 1979 is wrong. It is usually said to epitomize the complete failure on Xerox’s part to understand what they had invented. A bit of background: Apple had successfully launched the Apple II computer in April of 1977. It was an instant hit, and between September of 1977 and September of 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533 percent.

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The tragedy for Xerox was that two years later, the Xerox CFO sold all its Apple stock. Imagine what it would have meant to the company if it had held on to 5 percent of Apple, which would now be worth about $32 billion. In 1985, after the debut of the Macintosh, Microsoft quickly introduced Windows, an operating system that totally mimicked the Macintosh. Whatever advantage Apple had was quickly extinguished, and Steve Jobs was forced out of the company. Jobs immediately set out for revenge on his old company by building a new computer called NeXT. Not long after that, a twenty-nine-year-old English engineer, Tim Berners-Lee, took up a position at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).

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The earliest networks—like the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), organized by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog—grew directly out of 1960s counterculture. Brand had helped novelist Ken Kesey organize the Acid Tests—epic be-ins where thousands of hippies ingested LSD and danced to the music of a new band, the Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc., dropped acid as well. “Jobs explained,” wrote John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said, “that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew well had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.”

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

You could open up the Apple II, and there were slots and so on, and anyone could write for it. The Mac was way more closed. What happened?” “Oh,” said Wozniak. “That was Steve. He wanted it that way. The Apple II was my machine, and the Mac was his.” Apple’s origins were pure Steve Wozniak, but as everyone knows, it was the other founder, Steve Jobs, whose ideas made Apple what it is today. Jobs maintained the early image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the age of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, he led Apple computers on a fundamentally different track.

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The spirit of Theodore Vail was alive and well in the resurrected dominion of the firm with which Apple was now allied. Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. In 2009 hearings before the FCC, they now sat on opposite sides. Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.… I hate it.”3 As this makes clear, where once there had been only subtle differences there now lay a chasm. Apple, while it had always wavered on “openness,” had committed to a program that fairly suited not just the AT&T mind-set, but also the ideals of Hollywood and the entertainment conglomerates as well.

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Even if Windows was never as advanced or well designed as Apple’s operating system, it enjoyed one insuperable advantage: it worked on any computer, supported just about every type of software, and could interface with any printer, modem, or whatever other hardware one could design. After it was launched in the late eighties, early-nineties Windows ran off with the market Apple had pioneered, based mostly on ideas that had been Apple’s to begin with. The victory of PCs and Windows over Apple was viewed by many as the defining parable of the decade; its moral was “open beats closed.” It suggested that Wozniak had been right from the beginning. But by then Steve Jobs had been gone for years, having been forced out of Apple in 1985 in a boardroom coup. Yet even in his absence Jobs would never agree about the superiority of openness, maintaining all the while that closed had simply not yet been perfected.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
by James Vlahos
Published 1 Mar 2019

Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.

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He swiped at the little slider on the screen to answer the call, but for some reason it took seven tries before it worked. This little fail was ironic given who was phoning. “Hi,” the caller said. “Is this Dag?” “Yeah,” Kittlaus replied. “This is Steve Jobs.” “Really?” said Kittlaus, who had received no forewarning that the Apple CEO was going to call. He turned toward a colleague standing nearby and mouthed, It’s Steve Jobs! No way! his colleague mouthed back. Jobs came straight to the point, according to Kittlaus’s account. “We love what you are doing,” Jobs said. “Can you come over to my house tomorrow?” Kittlaus got directions and asked if he could bring along his cofounders.

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Game Changers 4 To be sure, they have an unsurpassed ability: “The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet),” accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/ihb0. 5 “The next big step”: Sundar Pichai, “This year’s Founders’ Letter,” Google blog, April 28, 2016, https://goo.gl/hMKbBS. 5 On computers, we squeeze our fingers: “Typewriter History,” Mytypewriter.com, https://goo.gl/cNSxXM. 7 There are around 2 billion: “Number of mobile phone users worldwide from 2015 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/tv793j. 7 The number of deployed smart speakers: Bret Kinsella, “Smart Speakers to Reach 100 Million Installed Base Worldwide in 2018, Google to Catch Amazon by 2022,” Voicebot.ai, July 10, 2018, https://goo.gl/VKLB3F. 11 “When you hear a voice”: Ryan Germick, interview with author, April 26, 2018. 12 “Conversation is probably the hardest AI problem”: Ashwin Ram, interview with author, May 26, 2017. 14 “speech is so essential to our concept of intelligence”: Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), accessed July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/VUpsxh. 2. Assistants 17 This slice of campus life: Knowledge Navigator (1987) Apple Computer, Apple concept video posted to YouTube on December 16, 2009, https://goo.gl/MyHN8l. 17 “mini-Steve Jobs”: Jay Yarow, “Why Apple’s Mobile Leader Scott Forstall Is Out,” Business Insider, October 29, 2012, https://goo.gl/p8rCss. 17 “I am really excited to show you Siri”: Let’s Talk iPhone—iPhone 4S Keynote 2011, posted to YouTube on October 5, 2011, https://goo.gl/32qJ5o. 18 “Telling me I can’t do something really sets me up”: this and subsequent quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise noted, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 19 Cheyer had started a school club: Jon C.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

People don’t say, “Hotmail me” or “Bing it,” but they could have if the marketing departments at those companies had done some thinking about making their companies’ services into a verb. As you go through your daily routine, try to think about all the companies that touch you and whether they are verbs. Marketing is 20% hard facts and 80% human brain. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, there were 40 other music storage devices on the market and some with four times as much memory. But Apple dominated the market. Why? Because Steve Jobs understood the human side of commerce. He understood that by creating a story behind the product, by making it “cool” or “hip” to have an iPod and making it fun and easy to use, it didn’t matter if the product was not quite as powerful or as fast or as cheap as the competition, because he knew that he could capture the customer’s emotion, mind, spirit and ego.

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Don't do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it. Gary Vaynerchuk A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. Jeff Bezos My Brand Logo. Your logo should mean something. The initial logo for Draper Associates, designed by my cousin, Phyllis Merikallio, was a blue globe in front of a black triangle. I liked this for a lot of reasons. The triangle represented “change” and the globe represented “the world,” so together these images said, “Change the world.” Apple’s logo was a rainbow-colored apple, which was both eye catching and meant that the products were for everyone.

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His employees started chanting the same mantras and they even took on his fashion sense, wearing the same t-shirts and jeans that he did. He encouraged a very casual tone among his employees so that they knew that he just wanted them to get the job done (not to wait on protocol) and they responded accordingly. Steve Jobs created the meme of calling his employees “evangelists” so Apple employees would take on his religious fervor for the company. Many even wore jeans and black turtlenecks to emulate the great man. Bill Gates prided himself on his high IQ, so everyone at Microsoft was focused on being smart. Some employees even wore glasses that looked like the ones Bill wore whether they had a vision problem or not.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

HOW TECHNOLOGY COULD TURN THE PAGE ON PUBLISHING On January 28, 2010, John Sargent Jr. and Brian Napack, the chief executive and the president of Macmillan Publishers, flew to Seattle to give Amazon.com some news they knew the online retailer wouldn’t like. A couple of days before, Macmillan had made a deal to sell its titles in Apple’s iBookstore, just as Steve Jobs was set to introduce the company’s new iPad. Rather than sell titles to Apple on a wholesale basis and let the company set a retail price, as it did with Amazon and other bookstores, Macmillan would set the price for its digital books itself and give Apple a 30 percent commission for selling them to consumers. Apple had also made similar deals with four of the other five major U.S. publishers. But Amazon wanted to set book prices as well.

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In the grand narrative of the music business collapse, the labels were rescued from their own incompetence by Steve Jobs’s iTunes music store, which made piracy a marginal problem. Apple certainly pushed the labels into doing something they were unable to do themselves, and its iTunes Store has become the biggest music retailer in the United States. But legitimate online music stores like Apple’s have hardly stopped piracy: more music is downloaded illegally than legally, according to the NPD Group.82 (Not all of those songs represent lost sales, of course, but surely some must.) And, like the industry’s attempts to turn file sharing into a legitimate business, the real story of Apple’s effect on the music business is more complicated than most people realize.

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To understand how technology executives see issues involving open platforms, remember that their perspective is informed by Apple’s 1980s struggle with Microsoft for the personal computer business. Then, as now, Steve Jobs wanted to control his products, so he declined to license the Macintosh operating system software to other computer makers. Since Microsoft didn’t make machines, it made deals to supply its operating system software to every PC clone company it could. As more companies began making computers that used Intel chips and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, competition drove down prices, “Wintel” machines dominated the industry, and Apple became an also-ran in the business it invented.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995. 13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html 14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php 15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html 16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html 17. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 1996). 18. http://pdgmag.com/2012/02/02/steve-jobs-lee-clow-and-ridley-scott-the-three-geniuses-who-made-1984-less-like-1984/ 19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 20. Adelia Cellini, “The Story Behind Apple’s ‘1984’ TV Commercial: Big Brother at 20.”

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We’ve simply subjected the world to our designs, leaving everyone else to live with the consequences, whether or not we like them. Technology seems value-neutral, yet it isn’t. It has its own worldview, one the rest of us adopt without consideration because of the convenience and fun of our communications devices. People worship Steve Jobs and his legendary leadership of Apple, and they consume Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad with delight and intensity—yet these products and indeed the vision of Jobs are reorganizing our world from top to bottom. The nerds who brought you today’s three most dominant communications technologies—the personal computer, the Internet, and mobile phones—were in different ways self-consciously hostile to established authority and self-consciously alert to the vast promise and potential of individual human beings.

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Years later, after the PC was an established reality, Ken Olson, the founder of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation, still … publicly asserted that there was no need for a home computer.”17 On the other hand, antiestablishment ideology became entrenched in manifold specifics of the PC’s design; Markoff relates, for instance, that the visualization that comes with iTunes—the pretty colors that move and change in sequence with the music—was inspired in part by Jobs’s use of LSD, which Jobs called “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” A liberationist ethic also became entrenched in the overt marketing of personal computing devices, most famously in a classic television commercial, Apple’s 1984 spot. Following the rousing success of Apple’s first two home computer models, Steve Jobs wanted to do something big to roll out its third model, the Macintosh personal computer. He hired Ridley Scott, who two years earlier had directed the sci-fi classic Bladerunner, to make the commercial.18 The result was a powerful and intense ad that referenced the dystopian future of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

On September 23, 1997, Steve Jobs walked onstage to applause at a meeting of Apple executives and managers. He had returned to the company two months earlier as interim CEO and was determined to make changes. Dressed in sandals, shorts, and a black mock turtleneck with which the world would later become familiar, he looked relaxed, even though he had been up until 3:00 A.M. working on an ad campaign that he hoped would revive Apple’s brand. The brand had suffered from neglect since he left the company in 1985. Jobs didn’t mention it in the meeting, but the brand wasn’t all that was suffering at Apple. By 1997, the company had just 4 percent of the personal computer market and that year stood to lose more than a billion dollars.

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We’d already carved up mountains, paved over swamplands, and invented garages to cater to our four-wheeled wonder wagons, so giving up on them now hardly seemed realistic. After a multitude of commenters disabused me of my car-free fantasy, I breathed a sigh of concession and moved on. It was about then that I discovered Tesla. I had joined Pando in April 2012, a few months after Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, died, and I found a tech world still grieving the loss of its superstar. The industry was bereft of a figure who could command the world’s attention with the twitch of a stage-managed eyebrow, a man who could send the media into conniptions with an addendum to a slide show. Silicon Valley was frantically searching for one more thing, but results had been mixed.

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That was a huge bet he made, and it worked,” Musk said in 2013. Management books tend to be written by management consultants who study companies during their times of peace, Horowitz cautioned. Other than Grove’s writing, he didn’t know of any books that taught people how to manage in wartime like Steve Jobs. When Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO in 1997, the company was months away from bankruptcy. Four years later, it released the iPod. On May 8, 2013, Tesla reported its first quarterly profit. There had been many start-ups over the decades, but, at last, an electric car company was selling enough cars to stay in business.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience. Apple machines were more fun. But you could access these capabilities only by buying Apple’s integrated software and hardware. Apple’s determination to maintain its proprietary system failed in the face of widespread adoption of the more open standard of the IBM PC: Windows, a combination of Apple’s graphical user interface with Microsoft’s ubiquitous MS-DOS, swept the world, and almost swept Apple from that world. By the mid-1990s, Apple was on the edge of bankruptcy, its market share falling, its innovations failing. But 1997 was the year of the Second Coming of Steve Jobs (he had been forced out of the company a decade earlier by the board).

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When IBM attempted to regain control with a new and more sophisticated operating system, OS/2, it was too late. MS-DOS (powering Windows 3.1) was everywhere. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began assembling Apple machines in 1976 in Jobs’s garage, now designated a historic site. 18 Although Gates and Microsoft had understood that ease of use was as important as technical sophistication to commercial success, Jobs extended this vision further and conceived a computer that you could use without understanding anything about computers. To achieve this goal, Jobs drew on another invention from Xerox Parc – the graphical user interface. Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience.

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But in the right circumstances – those of 1940 – Churchill’s optimism and confidence were vital. Steve Jobs similarly failed to conform to the conventional depiction of ‘rational’ behaviour under uncertainty. Just as Churchill became premier with no specific plan for how the war would develop, Jobs returned to Apple content to wait for ‘the next big thing’. Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes of his subject’s ‘reality distortion field’. The phrase was adopted from Star Trek by one of Apple’s first software designers, who identified his CEO’s approach as ‘a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’ – characteristics similar to those identified by Churchill’s biographers. 33 Strikingly, however, the first half of Isaacson’s book, which deals with the period prior to Jobs’s 1997 return to Apple, contains sixteen references to the ‘reality distortion field’, the remainder contains only three.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

Like McNutt, his motto was: “The good God is in the detail.” Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple, took that creed to the level of obsessive compulsion. Towards the end of his life, as he lay dying in hospital, he burned through 67 nurses before settling on three that met his exacting standards. Even when heavily sedated, he tore an oxygen mask off his face to object to the way it looked. The pulmonologist was startled when Jobs demanded to see five other mask designs so he could pick the one he liked best. Yet what sounds like a rampant case of OCD helped turn Apple into one of the most successful companies in history.

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You have to find and marshal the right people, and then manage the creative collisions that ensue. But it works even in the fastest-moving sectors of the economy. Steve Jobs once observed that Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh computer “turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.” Nearly three decades later the company is still thrashing the competition with the same recipe. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” Jobs declared after the launch of the world-conquering iPad. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

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“He knows how to walk that tightrope of giving us the freedom to contribute our own ideas while also bringing us all along together down a single path.” Not all successful leaders have a mother’s heart. Steve Jobs is the classic counter-example. Apple insiders described him as a tyrannical control freak who could be obnoxiously rude to his staff, shouting them down, passing off their ideas as his own, displaying zero interest in their private lives. Would Apple have thrived even more had his EI matched his IQ? We will never know. But perhaps Jobs was that very rare thing: a genius you walked away from at your peril. To what extent lesser mortals can work the Mr Nasty leadership style is up for debate, but there is no doubt that fixing a complex problem often depends on a driving, central figure.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

Maura O’Neill, “Disruptive Innovation Often Comes from Unexpected Places,” Huffington Post, January 25, 2013. 7 the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs . . . Jobs’s interest in shoshin and other Zen principles has been chronicled in a number of places, including Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); as well as Daniel Burke, “Steve Jobs’ Private Spirituality Now an Open Book,” USA Today, November 2, 2011; and my own article for Fast Company, “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs (and Silicon Valley) about Innovation,” April 9, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669387/what-zen-taught-silicon-valley-and-steve-jobs-about-innovation. 8 a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to . . .

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The company figured that the only way to pull off something as audacious as this was through a partnership with a tech company. Striking a collaborative deal with Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t easy. (According to a press report, Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive9 Mark Parker for trying to expand into digital; stick to the sneakers was Jobs’s message, with a profanity or two thrown in.) But eventually, Nike won over Jobs and produced a hybrid product, Nike+, which wirelessly connected a Nike running shoe to an Apple iPod device, which was in turn connected to a website. A classic “smart recombination,” it enabled the runner to program music, track running and health data, communicate with other runners, find running partners, share tips, and so forth.

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Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”2 and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything. Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices.

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

Never follow the masses, at least not until you had gone back to first principles and thought the thing through. Much later, when he was moving up the corporate ladder at Genentech, Levinson met Steve Jobs and eventually joined the Apple board. Then, in 2004, he was asked to join Google’s board, where he remained for five years until the corporate orbits of Apple and Google began to collide. Nevertheless, even after Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, when Apple’s board made Levinson chair, he remained on good terms with Page and Brin and Schmidt at Google. That was the way Levinson was: He seemed to get along with everyone. 6 | THE DINNER Just as Art Levinson wasn’t your average dyed-in-the-wool scientist, Bill Maris wasn’t your average number-crunching venture capitalist.

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—WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass 5 | CALICO The evening of October 18, 2012, was warm and cloudless the way Silicon Valley evenings often are. Art Levinson had just departed Laurene Jobs’s home and was motoring along in his aging Lexus to see Larry Page, and a few others, for dinner at his house in Palo Alto. Laurene was Steve Jobs’s widow, and as Apple’s chairman Levinson had driven down earlier from San Francisco to review a few matters with her. On and off, Levinson had been thinking about the get-together with Page. He was skeptical, but that wasn’t unusual for him. He was always skeptical. But this particular idea…well, it was intriguing.

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Before joining Calico, Koller knew she could write her own ticket at any of Silicon Valley’s great Cloud makers: Google, Facebook, Apple. But did she really want to create software that made better Twitter feeds, or cool faces on Snapchat, or yet another product that piled up more of the planet’s digital ad revenues? In the sprawling world of Google, she would be a blip: one more very smart human in a sea of geeks. But Calico was different. She had never forgotten Steve Jobs’s grand goal: “Make a dent in the universe.” At Calico, maybe she could make a dent—save lives, perhaps millions—even her own.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

Thanks to Charley and some software Draper had written, some of phone phreaking’s drudgery was eliminated; what Charlie Pyne and Jake Locke had to do with their index fingers at Harvard in the 1960s—dialing thousands of numbers and listening for dial tones—an Apple II could now do automatically. According to Wozniak, Draper cracked some twenty WATS extenders by Charley’s brute-force dialing of codes while Draper was working at Apple. All this did not sit well with Steve Jobs and the other managers at Apple, who thought the Charley Board product was a bit too risky and, besides, they disliked Draper to begin with. Charley was shelved. Draper left Apple and moved from California to rural Pennsylvania to work at a friend’s company designing a product for the emerging cable television industry.

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Riches, or promises of riches, or maybe just a fun job that might pay the bills beckoned. In 1976 former phone phreaks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were selling Apple I computers to their fellow hobbyists. “Jobs placed ads in hobbyist publications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66,” journalist Steven Levy wrote. “Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with the purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder.” The fully assembled and tested Apple II followed later that year. By 1977 microcomputers had begun to enter the mainstream.

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And it made me want to have more of those adventures by designing more things like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that people didn’t expect. For the rest of my life, that was the reason I kept doing project after project after project, usually with Steve Jobs. You could trace it right up to the Apple II computer. It was the start of wanting to constantly design things very, very well and get noticed for it. Steve and I were a team from that day on. He once said that Apple wouldn’t have existed without the blue box, and I agree. Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

Whenever a new marker is discovered, a person’s DNA (or more precisely, the relevant part of it) has to be sequenced again. Working with a subset, rather than the whole, entails a tradeoff: the company can find what it is looking for faster and more cheaply, but it can’t answer questions that it didn’t consider in advance. Apple’s legendary chief executive Steve Jobs took a totally different approach in his fight against cancer. He became one of the first people in the world to have his entire DNA sequenced as well as that of his tumor. To do this, he paid a six-figure sum—many hundreds of times more than the price 23andMe charges. In return, he received not a sample, a mere set of markers, but a data file containing the entire genetic codes.

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Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. That data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company.” Brilliance doesn’t depend on data. Steve Jobs may have continually improved the Mac laptop over years on the basis of field reports, but he used his intuition, not data, to launch the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He relied on his sixth sense. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he famously said, when telling a reporter that Apple did no market research before releasing the iPad. In the book Seeing Like a State, the anthropologist James Scott of Yale University documents the ways in which governments, in their fetish for quantification and data, end up making people’s lives miserable rather than better.

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Ironically, Google’s co-founders wanted to hire Steve Jobs as CEO (despite his lack of a college degree); Levy, p. 80. Testing 41 gradations of blue—Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, March 1, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html). Google’s chief designer’s resignation—Quotation is excerpted (without ellipses for readability) from Doug Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” blog post, March 20, 2009 (http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html). [>] Jobs quotation—Steve Lohr, “Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?” New York Times, January 18, 2011, p.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

See also “Average App Store Review Times,” http://appreviewtimes.com/. 25Laura McGann, “Mark Fiore Can Win a Pulitzer Prize, but He Can’t Get his iPhone Cartoon App Past Apple’s Satire Police,” Nieman Lab, April 15, 2010. http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/. 26Gabe Jacobs, “Bushisms iPhone App Rejected,” Gabe Jacobs Blog, September 13, 2008, http://www.gabejacobsblog.com/2008/09/13/bushisms-iphone-app-rejected/ (no longer available online); Alec, “Freedom Time Rejected by Apple for App Store,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 21, 2008, https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/freedomtime-rejected-by-apple-for-app-store/. 27Robin Wauters, “Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/apple-rejects-obama-trampoline-iphone-app-leaves-us-puzzled/; Don Bora, “Rejected App (Biden’s Teeth),” Eight Bit Blog, June 6, 2009, http://blog.eightbitstudios.com/rejected-app. 28“iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple,” Lambda Jive, September 26, 2009, http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/. 29Alec, “Steve Jobs Responds,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 23, 2008, http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/. 30Ryan Singel, “Jobs Rewrites History about Apple Ban on Satire,” Wired, June 3, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/jobs-apple-satire-ban/. 31Alexia Tsotsis, “WikiLeaks iPhone App Made $5,840 before Pulled by Apple, $1 From Each Sale Will Be Donated to WikiLeaks,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-2/. 32Rebecca Greenfield, “Apple Rejected the Drone Tracker App Because It Could,” Atlantic, August 30, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/apple-rejected-drone-tracker-app-because-it-could/324120/. 33Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Speech Policies Should Still Worry the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 20, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_speech_policies_should.php. 34Charles Christensen, “iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators,” Prism Comics, June 2010, http://prismcomics.org/display.php?

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So only certain providers have voluntarily taken on this burden. Among the largest social media platforms, Apple’s App Store is the only one that has instituted a review mechanism for user-provided content that precedes the content’s being made available. For Apple, this was extremely important. Ensuring the user “freedom from porn,” as Steve Jobs notoriously promised, was just part of the broader promise of the iPhone and iPad.14 Apple wanted the feel and experience of each device to seamlessly extend to the apps designed for it. Imposing a review process for third-party apps, to ensure that they meet Apple’s standards of technical quality and design but also of propriety, was a way to protect the Apple brand—by extending the boundaries of the commodity itself to include not just the iPhone or iPad but a carefully moderated set of apps for them.

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The Birth of the Bleep and Modern American Censorship,” Verge, August 27, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/27/4545388/curses-the-birth-of-the-bleep-and-modern-american-censorship. 13Horwitz, “The First Amendment Meets Some New Technologies”; Lane, The Decency Wars. 14Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Gawker, May 15, 2010, http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-from-porn. 15Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; Grimmelman and Ohm, “Dr. Generative”; Steven Johnson, “Everybody’s Business—How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web,” New York Times, April 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/technology/internet/11every.html. 16Hestres, “App Neutrality.” 17Weber, The Success of Open Source; Fred von Lohmann, “All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 9, 2010, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-program-license-agreement-all. 18Rogers, “Jailbroken.” 19Nick Statt, “US Government Says It’s Now Okay to Jailbreak Your Tablet and Smart TV,” Verge, October 27, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/27/9622066/jailbreak-unlocked-tablet-smart-tvs-dmca-exemption-library-of-congress. 20Boudreau and Hagiu, “Platform Rules.” 21Morris and Elkins, “There’s a History for That”; Nieborg, “Crushing Candy.” 22Elaluf-Calderwood et al., “Control as a Strategy”; Tiwana, Konsynski, and Bush, “Platform Evolution.” 23Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping.” 24Graham Spencer, “Developers: Apple’s App Review Needs Big Improvements,” MacStories, March 1, 2016, https://www.macstories.net/stories/developers-apples-app-review-needs-big-improvements/.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

While personal computers tend to have an identifiable brand, different firms design and manufacture different parts of a finished computer. Even Apple’s devices, which are proudly designed in California, contain parts—such as their displays—that are designed and manufactured by others, including Apple’s nemesis, Samsung.8 In fact, soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple he begun to outsource the manufacturing of devices, relying heavily on technologies from other firms.9 The iPod was made possible by a small hard drive that was invented by Toshiba. The Gorilla Glass screen of the iPhone was the brainchild of Corning, a glass manufacturer in upstate New York. What is true for Apple products is also true for many other modern devices.

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Silicon Valley’s knowledge and knowhow are not contained in a collection of perennially unemployed experts but rather in the experts working in firms that participate in the design and development of software and hardware. In fact, the histories of most firms in Silicon Valley are highly interwoven. Steve Jobs worked at Atari and Steve Wozniak worked at HP before starting Apple. As mentioned previously, Steve Jobs is also famously known for “borrowing” the ideas of a graphical user interface and object-oriented programming from Xerox PARC. If HP, Atari, and Xerox PARC had not been located in the valley, it is likely that the knowledge and knowhow needed to get Apple started would not have been there, either. Hence, industries that require subsets of the knowledge and knowhow needed in other industries represent essential stepping-stones in the process of industrial diversification.

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So social institutions affect not only the size of the networks that people form but also their adaptability, and this helped Silicon Valley leave Route 128 in the dust.15 Silicon Valley’s porous boundaries and adaptability are exemplified in Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in late 1979. It was there that Jobs learned about graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and object-oriented programming. Ultimately Apple, not Xerox, was the company that succeeded in commercializing these technologies. Intellectual property purists might complain about Apple and not Xerox profiting from these ideas, but a more pragmatic view holds that it was better for the long-term sustainability of Silicon Valley to have Apple (or anyone, for that matter) develop and commercialize ideas that otherwise could have died in the inboxes of Xerox’s managers or, worse, might have been commercialized by a company in a competing cluster.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

The cosmetic issues, though, were minor compared to a tumultuous set of internal circumstances, revealed in detail here for the first time, that threatened to bankrupt the company once again. Musk had hired George Blankenship, a former Apple executive, to run its stores and service-center operations. At Apple, Blankenship worked just a couple of doors down from Steve Jobs and received credit for building much of the Apple Store strategy. When Tesla first hired Blankenship, the press and public were atwitter, anticipating that’d he do something spectacular and at odds with the traditions of the automotive industry. Blankenship did some of that. He expanded Tesla’s number of stores throughout the world and imbued them with that Apple Store vibe. Along with showcasing the Model S, the Tesla stores sold hoodies and hats and had areas in the back where kids would find crayons and Tesla coloring books.

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*At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said. Steve Jobs caught wind of these meetings and turned on the charm to keep Fadell. “He was sure nice to me for a while,” Fadell said. A couple of years later, Fadell left Apple to found Nest, a maker of smart-home devices, which Google then acquired in 2014.

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SpaceX flew a supply capsule to the International Space Station and brought it safely back to Earth. Tesla Motors delivered the Model S, a beautiful, all-electric sedan that took the automotive industry’s breath away and slapped Detroit sober. These two feats elevated Musk to the rarest heights among business titans. Only Steve Jobs could claim similar achievements in two such different industries, sometimes putting out a new Apple product and a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year. And yet, Musk was not done. He was also the chairman and largest shareholder of SolarCity, a booming solar energy company poised to file for an initial public offering. Musk had somehow delivered the biggest advances the space, automotive, and energy industries had seen in decades in what felt like one fell swoop.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

C H A P T 3 E R Steve Wozniak Cofounder, Apple Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II. Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent.

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We wanted to be able to demonstrate that you could use the same technology on the screen that you used on the printed page. Apple had actually been working on that for a while. Their technology was called TrueType. We were trying to market our solution to Apple, not with a lot of success. By then Steve Jobs had left. He’d been the primary Adobe champion inside Apple. Now Jean-Louis Gassée had taken over the product side of the business, and for whatever reason, Jean-Louis and Adobe never got along. So we were beginning to really have a problem with Apple. They were getting tired of paying us royalties for the LaserWriter; they thought that they shouldn’t have to pay anymore.

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It was sad to see him go because he supported good people so well in the company. Steve Wozniak 47 Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn’t he one of the founders? Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I, and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer, Incorporated. Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super-conservative guy. I didn’t know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read all these right-wing books like None Dare Call it Treason, and he could rattle the stuff off.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

Since it’s at the core, it’s responsible for all human behaviour, all decision-making – and, importantly, across all people. Some products succeed in the US but sit on the shelves overseas. Songs, books and films that are hits in Europe flop in North America. Apple became a worldwide success because it connected with the limbic brain, which characterizes all humans – young and old, male and female, black and white. It started with why. You’ve just read two of the most famous explanations for Apple’s success. The first is from the multimillion-selling biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The second is from Simon Sinek’s ‘How great leaders inspire action’, the thirdmost-watched TED talk of all time, with over 60 million views and the basis for his book Start with Why.

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Anders 61, 62–3, 66, 104 errors of commission 250 errors of omission 250 estimation 246 evaluation 223, 233 evidence 5, 12, 13, 122 average results 280, 282 credentials 226–8 identity and 266 is not proof 192–210 scientific management 198–9 lack of 219 limitations of 280, 282 smarter thinking 288–9 in social sciences 224 systematic reviews 222 testing 217–18 validity 199 EXCOMM 237–8, 244, 254 cognitive diversity 238–9, 240 deliberation process 244–5 demographic make up 238 executive pay 67–9 exogenous parts of instruments 178–9, 179–80, 182, 190 experts 223–4 explained components of instruments 178–9 explorers 170, 171–2 external validity 199, 202, 204, 209 Fabo et al. 225–6 Facebook 272 Fact Check (Reuters) 270 fact-checking websites 270–71, 277, 282 facts 12, 13 are not data 89–114 learning from a blank slate 108–13 narrative fallacy 104–8, 113 seeing the full picture 95–104 selected samples 95–6, 102, 113 Steve Jobs and Apple 89, 90–92, 93, 94, 101–2, 103, 106, 107, 200 checking 7–8, 12, 21, 37, 85, 88, 103, 268–9 interpretation of 24 smarter thinking 285–6 failure parties 250 failures 250–51 fake news 271, 272, 282 Faleye, Olubunmi 4 family businesses 181–2 Fancy, Tariq 83–5, 226 fast-food employment 184–5 Fernbach, Philip 251 ‘Fifty shades of QE’ (Fabo et al.) 225–6 Financial Management Association 270 Financial Reporting Council 74 fintech companies 85–6 Fisher, Matthew 54 Fixit (fictional company) 119, 135–40, 137–40 data mining see data mining see also Xinyi (fictional name) Flammer, Caroline 243 flexibility 108 Flint, Austin 174–5 Floyd, George 75 Fong, Geoffrey 262 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb) 274 football 126–7, 188 decline in stock markets 134–5 Euros (2004) 126–7 mood and emotions 126–7, 128, 129 sentiment 129 World Cup (2014) 133–4 Forbes 219 Forbes 15 Best Business Books (2015) 268–9 Ford, Henry 245 Fortune 60, 219, 223 Fos, Slava 241 frequent trading 97–101 Frontiers in Nutrition study 144, 145 Full Fact 270 Galileo Galilei 226 Gallagher, Liam 44 Gama, Vasco da 171 García, Diego 129 Gavin, Jim 23 gender diversity 243 company performance research 118–24, 135–40 data mining see data mining evidence for fund launch 116–18 geoengineering 268 Getting Things Done (Allen) 229, 270 Gibson, Belle 17–20, 103–4 Gimbel, Sarah 28–9 Gladwell, Malcolm 6, 60, 66 Ericsson study 61, 62–3, 66, 104 magazine interview 60, 61, 63 10,000-hours rule 6, 59–61, 62–6 Global Head of Sustainability Research 85 global warming 265–6 Glossner, Simon 243 Golden Circle Model 92 Google 157, 255 Gore, Al 266 gradients 136–7 Grant Thornton 224 Grant Thornton Corporate Governance Index 225 granular world 45, 51–2, 56, 201 Great North Run 47 Gresham College 62, 264 grit 204–5, 207 group discussions 247–8 grouping 137–40, 140, 141 groupthink 236, 237, 241, 247–8, 257 growth mindset 62 Guardian, The 215 Guriev, Sergei 271–2 Guzey, Alexey 270 Halo Effect, The (Rosenzweig) 111 Harris, Sam 28–9 Harvard Business Review 103, 152, 154, 290–91 Harvard University 228 Heeb, Florian 54 Henry, Emeric 271–2 hierarchies 249–50 high pollution 150–51 Holmes, Elizabeth 20–21, 219 homeopathy 6 honorary doctorates 227 Hoxby, Caroline 169, 177–9, 202, 221 HSBC 256 Hughes, Robert 22 Hung, William 207 hunter gatherers 43–4 hydroxychloroquine 6–7 Hypocritical Oath 230 hypotheses 23–5, 66 average output 99 control samples 99, 102 inputs and outputs 98–9 magnitude of underperformance 100 representative samples 99, 102 reverse engineering 124–5 sample size 100 statistical significance 100–101 test samples 99 identity 266 Imperial Tobacco 152 inclusion 243–8 micro-processes 248–9 An Inconvenient Truth 265, 266 inequality 159–61, 162–3 information gathering 214 InfoWars 231 initial beliefs 216 instruments 177–8, 190 endogenous parts 178–9, 180, 182 exogenous parts 178–9, 179–80, 182, 190 natural experiments and 186 relevance 179, 180, 182, 190 ridiculousness and irrelevance 180–81 interaction effect 207 internal validity 199, 200, 202, 209 intervention studies 173 investors 127 Ioannidis, John 219 iPhone 91, 92 IQ (intelligence quotient) 143–4, 145–7 irrelevance of instruments 180–81 Isaacson, Walter 93, 101–2, 103 James (acrobat) 59–60 Jandali, Abdulfattah 89 Janis, Irving 236 Jensen, Michael 69, 70–71 Jobs, Clara 90 Jobs, Paul 89–90 Jobs, Steve 89, 90–92, 93, 101–2, 103, 106 Johnson, Tim 127–8 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) 236, 237, 239, 240 Journal of Finance 129, 218 Journal of the American Medical Association 219 journal quality 218 journalists 228, 282 checking facts 273 journals impact factor 220 peer-reviews of 217–18 publication bias 220 Joy, Bill 61 Kahan, Dan 263, 266, 268 Kahneman, Daniel 29 Kaplan, Jonas 28–9 Keil, Frank 54, 251 Kempf, Elisabeth 241 Kennedy, General Robert 244, 245 Kennedy, President John F. 244 Bay of Pigs invasion 235–7, 244 Cuban Missile Crisis 235, 237–8, 239–40, 244–5 EXCOMM 238–9, 244–6 Kerry, John 29–30 Khrushchev, Nikita 235, 237, 240 Kirk, Stuart 256–7 knowledge 7–8, 10 biased interpretation 37 biased search 36–7 Krantz, David 262 Krueger, Alan 184–5 Krueger, Joachim 52 Ladder of Misinference 11, 56, 152, 232 Lancet 221 Lancet Public Health study 46 Langley, Samuel Pierpont 200 law of attraction 20 Leavers (Brexit) 214 LeMay, Curtis 239, 240 Lemnitzer, Lyman 239 Lepper, Mark 30–31, 259, 260, 261 Les Décodeurs 270 lies 12 limbic brain 93, 107 Lind, James 172–3, 174 LinkedIn post 153 Lisker, Bruce 21–3, 24 Lisker, Dorka 21–2 Living Wage 76–7 Lodge, Milton 36–7 London Business School 74–5 London Marathon 47 Lord, Charles 30–31, 259, 260, 261 Macintosh 91 marbled world 45, 53–5, 56 Martin, Roger L. 290–92 McDaniel, Mark 48 McGrath Task Circumplex 240 McKinsey 225 report (2020) 78 study (2017) 152, 154, 187, 291–2 McLaughlin, Dan 64–5 McNamara, Robert 239–40, 244 Mearsheimer, John 86 Meckling, William 69, 70–71 Medium 84 Medscape 219 Merton College 213 Merton in the City reunion (2016) 213–14 metal cutting 193–4 micro-processes 248–9, 258, 263 Midvale Steel Works 193 Miliband, Ed 160, 161 minimum wage laws 183–4 misinformation 5–7, 9–10, 67–8, 214, 230, 231, 234 misrepresentation 74–6 MIT 125, 126, 127 moderate world 45–50, 55 moderation 206–7, 209–10 momentum 157 Monsue, Andrew 22–3, 24 Montessori education method 263 Morgan Stanley 125, 130–31, 189, 255–6 ‘balanceworks’ programme 156 motivated reasoning 27–8, 30, 37, 184 Motor Neurone Disease Association 47 Mountain View (later Silicon Valley) 90 Mozart 61 Mullainathan, Sendhil 175–6 Murdoch, Lachlan 181 Murdoch, Rupert 20, 181 my-side reasons 264 naïve acceptance 25–7, 32, 37–8 narrative fallacy 105–8, 109, 113 twin biases 106 National Childbirth Trust (NCT) 143, 144–5 National Geographic 223 National Health and Medical Research Council 222 National Health Service (NHS) website 222 National Security Council (NSC) 237 National Union of Journalists 273 NATO 86 natural experiments 185–6, 187, 190 instruments and 186 Nature 6, 218 neocortex 92, 107 New Scientist 223 News Corporation 181 news feeds 6 Nisbett, Richard 262 No Child Left Behind Act (2001) 196–7 non-pecuniary benefits 70–71 Norli, Øyvind 129 Nyhan, Brendan 270 Obama, Barack 265 Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire 240, 241 observational studies 173 Odean, Terry 96–8 oil spills 25–8 100 Best Companies to Work for 116–17, 156–7, 189 opinions, articulating in detail 251 Organization Stream Analysis 111 organizations 235–58 Oster, Emily 147, 201, 222 other-side reasons 264 out-of-sample tests 133 Outliers 61, 64, 104, 270 over-extrapolation 206–7, 209–10 Pagella Politica 270 Paige, Rod 196, 199 Paine, Lynn 290–91 Palin, Sarah 81 papers, scientific retractions 221 reviewed by scientists 220–21 submitted for review 217–18 parachutes 208–9 Paris Agreement (2015) 49, 50 pausing before criticizing 232–3 pausing before sharing 230–32 pay gaps 3–4, 5 Peak (Ericsson) 63, 104 peer reviewers 8 peer reviews 217–19, 233 books 223 reliability of 220 Pennycook, Gordon 231, 272 Perkins, David 264 Ph.D.s 227 Phillips et al. 242 Pickett, Kate 160–61, 162–3 The Spirit Level 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 pig-iron handling 194–5 Pixar 91, 250–51 placebo effect 174–5 PolitiFact 81, 270, 271 Pollock, Joycelyn 24–5 population density 151 Porras, Jerry 110–12 positive correlation 165 post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy 164–5 post-mortem 255 poverty 160–61 power distance 249 power posing 221 Power, Thomas 239 PowerPoint 251–2 pre-mortem 255 precision 170–73 predictions 151, 152, 154, 167 Presence (Cuddy) 269, 270, 274 Preston, Elizabeth 259, 260, 261 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor) 195 processing power 248–52 productivity 193–4 professorship 227 proof 198–9 Psychological Science 221, 269, 270 psychometric tests 108–9 publication bias 220 publication process 273–4 endorsements 274–5 quantitative easing 226 Quest, Richard 133–4 Quote Investigator 270 racial discrimination 175–6 Rambotti, Simone 161 random events 107 randomized control trials (RCTs) 173, 174–6, 189–90 instruments 177–8 limitations of 177 parachute experiment 208–9 randomness 170–73 range of values 206, 207–8 Raquel, Ronald 23 Rassemblement National 271–2 Reading Football Club 159 reasoning 264–5 red teams 254–5 reducing hierarchies 249–50 regression 136–7, 139, 140, 158, 161–2 common causes 158–9 regression coefficient 136 regulation 123 Reifler, Jason 270 Reis, Ebru 4 relevance of instruments 179, 180, 182, 190 Remainers (Brexit) 213, 214 replication studies 221 representative samples 96, 99, 102 research 4–5 best practice 273 boardroom diversity 74–5 confirming opinions 5 data mining 119–20 diversity 117–19 gender diversity see gender diversity open access 35 rigour 8, 117–19 sources 5–6 unvetted 218 research qualifications 226–7 resilient companies 78 Responsible Investment Advisory Committee 248–9 Retraction Watch 269, 270 Reuters 79 reverse causation 164–5, 167, 170, 187 reverse engineering 94, 107–8 review papers 222 Reyes the Entrepreneur 95, 97 rhetoric 215 rheumatism experiment 174 Rice-Davies, Mandy 76–7, 226 ridiculousness of instruments 180–81 Rogers, David 47, 207 Rosenzweig, Phil 111 Ross, Lee 30–31, 259 Rossmo, Kim 24–5 Rothschild, Jesse 221–2 Royal London Asset Management 248 Rozenblit, Leonid 251 Rozin, Paul 51–2 rules 66 Rusk, Dean 240, 244 sailors 170–72 Sainsbury’s 76–7 sample mining 131–3, 141 defending against 133–5 sample size 100 San Francisco Business Times 219 Sanders, Bernie 82 scaffolding 264–5, 281 Schieble, Joanne 89 Scholar’s Mate 32–3 school curriculum 196 schools choice of 169 collective learning 169 competition between 168–9 Schultz, George 20 scientific consensus 222, 233 scientific culture 253–5, 258 scientific curiosity 263 scientific intelligence 263 scientific journals 134 debunking studies 221 papers for review 217–18 scientific management in education 195–7 failure of 198–9 in manufacturing 195 scientific method 24, 25, 98–101, 102–3, 124 scientists 220–21 Scott, Willard 53 scurvy 170–72 citrus fruits 173 endogenous remedy 172 exogenous remedy 172, 173 Select Committee on Business 3–5 CEOs’s executive pay report 67–9 selected samples 95, 99, 102, 109–10, 111 self-help books 229 self-interest 215 semiconductors 53–4 ShareAction 76–7 shareholder returns 120–21 shareholder value 69, 70–71, 71, 85, 86 sharing information 230–32 shoulders of giants 217–18 shovelling technique (Taylor) 194 significance level 100 silent majority 247 silent starts 246, 251–2, 257 Silicon Valley Bank 28 Silicon Valley Business Journal 219 Sinek, Simon 69, 71, 93, 94, 107, 200, 229 sleep 71–3 Sloan, Alfred 254 smarter thinking see thinking smarter smoking 163–4, 202 Snowdon, Christopher 161 social distancing 75–6 social diversity 241–2 social media 10, 230–31, 231, 282 Soeters, Joseph 249 soldiering 193 Spirit Level Delusion, The (Snowdon) 161 Spirit Level, The (Pickett and Wilkinson) 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 sports impact on stock market 126–9, 134 mood and emotions 128–9 spurious correlations 122, 127, 141 St Paul’s 159 Start with Why (Sinek) 93, 270 statements 13, 59–88 accepted as facts 12 are not facts 87–8 death panel episode 80–81 inaccuracy 59–63 misrepresentation 74–6 choosing words carefully 71–5 lack of sources 81–2 misportrayal 69–71 misrepresentation 74–6 smarter thinking 283–5 that can never be facts 82–8 examining evidence 84–6, 88 exploring alternative explanations 86 twin biases 83–4 verifying as facts 73 statistical literacy 262–3, 264, 281 statistical significance 100–101, 120, 122, 137 statistics 161 Bayesian inference 23–4 Staw, Barry 107–8, 166 stock market 95–7 brokers 96–8 frequent trading 97–101 sentiment 127, 128 sport, impact on 126–9, 134 traders 96–8, 125–6, 128 trading floor 125–6 stories 104–5, 108 Strange, Angela 85–6 striatum 30 Sun Tzu 11 Sunday Times Rich List 108 superlatives 85, 86 survey papers 222 sustainability 8–9, 215, 267 sustainable investments 54, 83–5 System 1 thought process 29 System 2 thought process 29 systematic reviews 222, 233 Taber, Charles 36–7 Taleb, Nassim 106, 274 targets 49–50 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 192–4 Taylor, General Maxwell 237 tech industry 157 TED 9, 205–6 Telegraph, The 215 10,000-hours rule 6, 64, 66, 104 chasing dreams 64–6 claim 59–61 disheartening 66 evidence 62–3 Tesla 152 test groups 139 natural experiments 185–6 randomized control trials (RCTs) 174–5, 177 test samples 99 theory of everything 199, 200, 204 Theranos 20–21, 219, 226 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) 29 thinking smarter data 286–8 evidence 288–9 example of 290–92 facts 285–6 individuals 213–34 organizations 235–58 preliminaries 283 shortcuts 289 societies 259–82 statements 283–5 studies 289–90 Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Kennedy) 244 Thomson Reuters 132 TikTok 20 time-series studies 30, 31 tolerating failure 250–51 Tolstoy, Leo 216–17 Tonight Show, The 40 traders 96–8, 125–6, 128 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 4–5 traits 149–50, 166 Trevithick, Richard 171 Trouble with Europe, The (Bootle) 213–14 Trump, Donald 6–7, 271 trust 153 Trust across America 153 trustworthy companies 153 truth 12, 13, 21–6 Tsoutsoura, Margarita 241 twin biases 56, 66–7, 73, 83–4, 106, 199 Twitter (later X) 230–31 2-4-6 brainteaser 33, 260, 261 UBS 250 unexplained components of instruments 178–9 United States of America (USA) death panels 80–81 healthcare 80–81 universal statements 85 universality 199, 201 unnatural experiments 186–7 US Military Academy 202–3 USSR 235, 244 see also Cuban Missile Crisis vaccination 267–8 Venkateswaran, Anand 4 verification 220 Vigen, Tyler 122 Vioxx 220 Vogue diet 40 Vogue magazine 40 voluntary choice inputs 149, 166 voting 247 Wakefield, Andrew 221 Walker, Matthew 71–3 Wall Street Journal 84, 219 Wason, Peter 33, 260, 261 water intoxication 47 weight loss 40–41 Welch, Jack 71, 85, 86 West Point 202–3, 204, 206 The Whole Pantry app 17–18 Whole Pantry, The 18, 273 Why We Sleep (Walker) 71–3, 270 Wikipedia 200 Wilkinson, Richard 160–61, 162–3 The Spirit Level 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 work-life balance 156 Wright Brothers 200 wrongful convictions 24–5 Xinyi (fictional name) 116–19 data mining see data mining see also Fixit (fictional company) Yeh, Robert 208–9 Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina 271–2 Founded in 1893, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide.

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As a biography focusing only on Jobs, Isaacson’s book was fascinating and deserved its popularity. The problem arises when you turn a single anecdote into a general rule. A Harvard Business Review article by Isaacson was titled ‘The real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs’, with the strapline ‘Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate’;5 HBR’s editorial promised readers ‘Yes – you, too, can be like Steve Jobs.’ You can’t change whether you’re adopted, so Isaacson instead glorified Jobs’s management principles, such as his focus and simplicity, declaring them as a blueprint for all bosses to follow.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

“insanely great” This is how Steve Jobs famously referred to the Macintosh at its launch event in 1984, and subsequently to many new products; see also Jessie Hartland, Steve Jobs: Insanely Great (New York: Schwartz & Wade, 2015); Billboard Staff, “Steve Jobs: A Collection of His Classic Quotes,” Billboard , last modified October 5, 2011. the iPod wasn’t the first Daryl Deino, “Five Portable Mp3 Players That Arrived Before the iPod,” Examiner.com , May 25, 2013, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.examiner.com/​list/​five-portable-mp3-players-that-arrived-before-the-ipod . Between 2002 and 2013 more than ten billion songs “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” Apple press information, Apple.com, February 25, 2010, accessed June 7, 2016, https://www.apple.com/​pr/​library/​2010/​02/​25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.html.

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,” AppleInsider, October 11, 2007, accessed June 7, 2016, http://appleinsider.com/​articles/​07/​10/​11/​ipod_classic_the_last_hurrah_for_hdd_based_ipods ; MacNN staff, “iPod Classic May Be a ‘Stopgap’ Device,” MacNN, October 11, 2007, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.macnn.com/​articles/​07/​10/​11/​ipod.classic.teardown/ . “Thoughts on Music”…“DRM Free”…“create a truly interoperable music marketplace” Memorandum by Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Music,” originally published on Apple’s website, February 6, 2007, accessed March 30, 2016, http://web.archive.org/​web/​20080517114107/​; http://www.apple.com/​hotnews/​thoughtsonmusic. the numbers hadn’t increased much “Apple’s iTunes Store Passes 35 Billion Songs Sold Milestone,” MacDailyNews, May 29, 2014, accessed March 30, 2016; http://mac -dailynews.com/​2014/​05/​29/​apples-itunes-store-passes-35-billion-songs-sold-milestone-itunes-radio-now-has-40-million-listeners/ .

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To understand how profound the consequences of these differences are, look no further than Apple—and its checkered history. Figure 5: Traditional Versus Networked Products DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT NETWORKS: AND, WHEN STEVE JOBS FAILED Ask anyone about Apple’s unprecedented successes—its “i-triumphs”—of the past decade and you’ll hear about superb products, beautiful designs, and cool marketing. The same formula is generally considered key in media markets and many other businesses, from cars to clothes and hotels. But Apple had followed this formula for the better part of two decades in its battle with Microsoft for global leadership in personal computers—and lost.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

The destruction of the environment, the rise of nationalism, the health and obesity crisis, the fact that millions of people lack basic necessities like water or a decent education. Or even just making people’s lives better through good design, great products, and useful services. There is a famous story that shows how Steve Jobs used this tactic to motivate Apple engineers to speed up the start time of an early Mac. In his article “Saving Lives,” published in 1983, Andy Hertzfeld, one of the computer scientists on the original development team during the 1980s, writes: One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the most was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple of minutes, or even more, to test memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder.

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If these types of workers are in an organization, they move with fluidity and ease, nailing projects with a smile on their face. Getting the coveted raises and promotions. Many of them are able to handle multiple projects at once. Juggling dual roles and responsibilities while making each project thrive, much like Steve Jobs juggled the roles of being a leader at both Pixar and Apple. Yet the forces of overwhelm dare not touch them. These superstar workers are often able to get in the zone at ease, displaying remarkable focus and creativity. And producing great work at dizzying speeds, like how Elton John released four albums in a single year and became responsible for 5 percent of all the music sold globally that year.

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They bury them out of modesty or a desire to appeal to the status quo. But remember this: In most cases anyone can imitate your business. But nobody can imitate your business if it’s built based on YOUR STORY. When your values infuse your business, you’ve given a special life to your creation. Steve Jobs infused Apple with values of aesthetics in an era when personal computers were ugly. Oprah infused her talk shows with the values of love and healing in an era when talk shows were using scandal and family gossip to gain viewers. If you’re a founder or leader, you of all people can’t ignore that you have deeply held personal foundational values that are driving you.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

Many of these people have never worked anywhere else. A lot of them aren’t very good. But here, they’re in charge. And I’m stuck working under them. Eight The Bozo Explosion Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a “bozo explosion,” by which a company’s mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course they prefer to hire bozos. As Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Jobs at Apple, puts it: “B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” That’s the bozo explosion, and that’s what I believe has happened at HubSpot in the course of the last seven years.

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We were getting in on the ground floor of what would become a huge new market. In the 1980s Silicon Valley technology companies were boring places where engineers worked in drab office parks writing software or designing semiconductors and circuit boards and network routers. There weren’t any celebrities, other than Steve Jobs at Apple, and even he wasn’t such a big deal back then. In the early 1990s the Internet era began, and Silicon Valley changed. The new companies were flimsy, based on hype and grandiose rhetoric and the promise of making a fortune overnight. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s was followed by the dotcom bust, and then came a period when Silicon Valley felt like a ghost town.

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Then he will pause, as if he has just said something incredibly profound and wants to give you a moment to let it sink in. Then he repeats the line, and a ballroom full of marketing people cheer. But when I meet them together it occurs to me that their different personalities are probably why their partnership works. There’s a yin-and-yang quality, like the one between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the co-founders of Apple. Halligan is the Jobs figure, the corporate visionary, the guy who thinks about sales and marketing. Shah is like Woz, the nerdy software programmer. Shah is wearing scruffy jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, his usual attire. He has dark hair and a dark beard, flecked with gray.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

“Just One More Bubble”: “If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again,” New York Times, June 5, 2005. Chapter 35: Mobile from George Lucas: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 240. Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997)

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individual songs via Apple: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 402–3. $7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.

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Thirty-five MOBILE It was clear to almost all that Apple Computer’s time had passed. Microsoft dominated the personal computer. Upstarts dominated Internet services. Computer manufacturers like Dell made fortunes from machines that ran Windows, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system. In comparison, Apple’s world in 1997 was not just niche but a dying niche. Steve Jobs’s company had lost the war. Jobs himself had been a founder in absentia for twelve years, having been fired in 1985. His failure with the launch of the Macintosh, underwhelming in its initial sales, had been the final death knell. Apple’s story then became a classic tale of an enigmatic, iconoclastic founder making way for seasoned business leadership.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

“Just One More Bubble”: “If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again,” New York Times, June 5, 2005. Chapter 35: Mobile from George Lucas: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 240. Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997)

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individual songs via Apple: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 402–3. $7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.

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Thirty-five MOBILE It was clear to almost all that Apple Computer’s time had passed. Microsoft dominated the personal computer. Upstarts dominated Internet services. Computer manufacturers like Dell made fortunes from machines that ran Windows, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system. In comparison, Apple’s world in 1997 was not just niche but a dying niche. Steve Jobs’s company had lost the war. Jobs himself had been a founder in absentia for twelve years, having been fired in 1985. His failure with the launch of the Macintosh, underwhelming in its initial sales, had been the final death knell. Apple’s story then became a classic tale of an enigmatic, iconoclastic founder making way for seasoned business leadership.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)
by Richard Newton
Published 11 Apr 2015

He told Forbes magazine: “If there were moments I was stubborn in my life it was because I was really… REALLY believing in something that I wanted to see become a reality and every now and then people around me didn’t totally get it.” Selling and persuasion. That’s what it takes to put your vision into someone else’s head. At Apple they had a name for it. The Reality Distortion Field was the label they gave Steve Jobs’ pressure-selling charisma and its effect on those around him. You’ll have noticed something else about the list of successes a few paragraphs earlier. It’s how often they failed. And that’s the corollary of trying to innovate (or deviate) from the norm.

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It’s about crafting a life in the woods with Robin Hood rather than inside the castle with the Sheriff of Nottingham’s henchmen, joining Princess Leia’s rebels not Vader’s idiot stormtroopers. It’s about having a gleeful laugh and a gleam in your eye and learning the life-grabbing, Anti-Nice behaviour of Steve Jobs, Picasso, Peter Pan, Muhammad Ali and Houdini. In The Pirates of the Caribbean, James Norrington is the essentially decent, noble, honourable, and duty-driven Royal Navy captain whose decisions (and therefore whose life) is led according to rules made by the Admiralty in London. He sacrifices his personal happiness to do the “right” thing.

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To move against the forceful tide of our conditioning. It’s to be liberated from an attitude designed for different days. The choice in the end is a stark one: to be a servant to the Machine or a servant to your own creative potential. It’s what you call a “no-brainer”. …And one more thing, as Steve Jobs would say. At the same time as the Machine forces us into the corner where we can only work in ways it cannot, we are increasingly aware of the need to find satisfaction from our labour. Our ancestors worked to live: to provide a roof to live under and to put bread and water on the table. But now we, for all our financial hardships in recent years, are living an abundant life.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

Microsoft, which came late to the PDA/smartphone platform business by licensing Windows-based mobile operating systems, had some success in the enterprise market before smartphones became consumer oriented and the touchscreen-based Apple iOS and Android systems rose to dominance. While Apple’s Macintosh was a technical success at its launch in 1984, it helped Microsoft far more than Apple itself (by showing the dominant operating-system company the way to a user-friendly graphics-based operating system). Apple Computer was struggling as a company in the mid-1980s, and co-founder and Macintosh team leader Steve Jobs lost a boardroom battle, was isolated from Apple’s management, and elected to resign from the firm. In 1985 Jobs formed NeXT, a computer platform development company focused on the educational and business markets.

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Within months of its initial launch at the beginning of 1975, the Altair 8800 had itself been eclipsed by dozens of new models produced by firms such as Applied Computer Technology, IMSAI, North Star, Cromemco, and Vector. THE RISE OF APPLE COMPUTER Most of the new computer firms fell almost as quickly as they rose, and only a few survived beyond the mid-1980s. Apple Computer was the rare exception in that it made it into the Fortune 500 and achieved long-term global success. Its initial trajectory, however, was quite typical of the early hobbyist start-ups. Apple was founded by two young computer hobbyists, Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Wozniak grew up in Cupertino, California, in the heart of the booming West Coast electronics industry.

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Despite being a failure in commercial terms, the Xerox Star presented a vision that would transform the way people worked on computers in the 1980s. STEVE JOBS AND THE MACINTOSH In December 1979 Steve Jobs was invited to visit Xerox PARC. When he made his visit, the network of prototype Alto computers had just begun to demonstrate Xerox’s office-of-the-future concept, and he was in awe of what he saw. Larry Tesler, who demonstrated the machines, recalled Jobs demanding, “Why isn’t Xerox marketing this? . . . You could blow everybody away!” This was of course just what Xerox intended to do with the Xerox Star, which was then under development. Returning to Apple’s headquarters at Cupertino, Jobs convinced his colleagues that the company’s next computer would have to look like the machine he had seen at Xerox PARC.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

These planes helped the United States win the cold war, of course, but their bigger impact was organizational: for the next half a century, whenever a company wanted to go bold, skunk was often the way innovation got done. Everyone from Raytheon and DuPont to Walmart and Nordstrom has gotten in on the skunk game. In the early 1980s, to offer another example, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs leased a building behind the Good Earth restaurant in Silicon Valley, stocked it with twenty brilliant designers, and created his own skunk works to build the first Macintosh computer.3 The division was set apart from Apple’s normal R&D department and led by Jobs himself. When people asked him why they needed this new facility, Jobs liked to say: “It is better to be a pirate than join the Navy.” The question is why.

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We’re taught that when you are given a choice you have to choose only one option. But why choose? All through graduate school I was told to either go to school or start a company. It was binary or bust. But not for me. In my case, the answer was both and then some. I started three companies while in graduate school. I started eight more before I was forty. Steve Jobs juggled both Apple and Pixar. Elon Musk runs three multibillion-dollar successes: Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Branson, well, alongside his Virgin Management group, has started over five hundred companies, including eight billion-dollar companies in eight different industries. This multiple-choice approach—if properly managed—can create tremendous momentum.

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v=G-0KJF3uLP8. 31 “About Blue Origin,” Blue Origin, July 2014, http://www.blueorigin.com/about/. 32 Alistair Barr, “Amazon testing delivery by drone, CEO Bezos Says,” USA Today, December 2, 2013, referencing a 60 Minutes interview with Jeff Bezos, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/12/01/amazon-bezos-drone-delivery/3799021/. 33 Jay Yarow, “Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter Is Out,” Business Insider, April 10, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-shareholder-letter-2014-4. 34 “Larry Page Biography,” Academy of Achievement, January 21, 2011, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0bio-1. 35 Marcus Wohlsen, “Google Without Larry Page Would Not Be Like Apple Without Steve Jobs,” Wired, October 18, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/10/google-without-page/. 36 Google Inc., 2012, Form 10-K 2012, retrieved from SEC Edgar website: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312513028362/d452134d10k.htm. 37 Larry Page, “Beyond Today—Larry Page—Zeitgeist 2012,” Google Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist Minds, May 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Zuckerberg and Moskovitz urged Morin to join Facebook, but it was hard to leave Apple’s beautiful headquarters for a start-up crazytown in downtown Palo Alto. Once Moskovitz and Ezra Callahan visited Morin at Apple’s sprawling Infinite Loop campus. “This place is pretty nice,” they told him. “But one day we’ll be bigger.” Really? Morin thought. Come on! Morin tried to get his bosses at Apple excited about Facebook. His dream was for Apple to make a social operating system. Instead of organizing your system around files, why not around people? Maybe Apple could buy Facebook, as the basis of this new system. The matter came before CEO Steve Jobs. No go. Jobs was open to buying companies, but why join forces with a college-only site of a few million people when MySpace had fifty million?

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* * * • • • THERE WAS MORE than the usual move-fast imperative for Facebook to introduce its platform in a hurry. That January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to astonishment and acclaim, had introduced the iPhone. The announcement had created a frenzy, and people marked their calendars for the time in June when they would actually be able to buy one. In theory, the iPhone would not provide competition for Facebook’s platform. Steve Jobs had brushed off criticism that Apple was not allowing software developers to write applications directly to its operating system. In any case, Apple wanted nothing to do with social networks. But Facebook was wary of Jobs’s intent to close the iPhone to software developers.

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In brainstorming the event, Morin had a single template in mind: Steve Jobs’s celebrated Apple keynotes. To produce the graphics for Mark’s speech, Facebook used Ryan Spratt, who had worked so much on Jobs’s slides that Apple eventually gave him an office. To help conceptualize the message, Morin tapped Stone Yamashita Partners, a consultancy with extensive Apple experience. All of this would require something that Mark Zuckerberg had never done: keynoting a glitzy public event. Zuckerberg, of course, couldn’t be expected to match the glib elegance of Steve Jobs. “He’s an amazing communicator now, but in that time period he was still learning,” says Morin, perhaps overly kind in his current assessment.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Like many entrepreneurs, Adam admired Steve Jobs and all that he stood for—wild ambition, ruthless drive. But he warned that some aspects of Jobs’s revolution had come with a price. “Look where that got us: in a terrible recession,” Adam said. “The future is community.” America was preparing to reelect a former community organizer as president. Occupy Wall Street took over a park in lower Manhattan, and a sense persisted that the old world order no longer served humanity’s needs. WeWork was premised on the idea that even the most iconoclastic entrepreneurs couldn’t build a business without help. With Jobs having left Apple to deal with pancreatic cancer, Adam seemed eager to position his company as a rising star of the new economy and himself as a candidate for America’s next entrepreneur in chief.

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But the company was beginning to form itself in Adam’s image. For all his bluster, he could be an inspiring leader, pushing WeWork employees beyond their limits for the good of the cause and the promise of riches down the line. They compared his aura to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do. After several workers installed a large stone table in a Manhattan WeWork, one employee noticed smears of blood left behind by one of the workers, which felt poetic.

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“Children are ready to start creating their life’s work when they’re five.” It was only a matter of time before the first WeGrow-educated entrepreneurs would need their own WeWork office. WeGrow made more sense to the company’s employees than a wave pool, but only slightly. What did they know about educating children? Steve Jobs had once asked his most senior employees to come up with a list of Apple’s top ten priorities, then said the company could manage only three. The Neumanns didn’t seem to share that sense of focus—apartments, wave pools, schools—and it was becoming difficult to see how the company could possibly develop an expertise in the range of businesses it was entering while still maintaining the growth of its core office-leasing operation.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Founded in June 2010 and focused on low-end Android smartphones, the company sold twenty million handsets in 2013, recording annual revenues of more than $5 billion. Lei Jun, one of the founders, is seen as a Chinese Steve Jobs. That’s not just because he’s been heavily inspired by Apple’s design, marketing and supply chain management, but also because of Xiaomi’s intense focus on performance, quality and customer experience—characteristics that Lei Jun wants to make available to everyone at affordable prices. Xiaomi offers a curated Apple smartphone experience with the software development, speed and processes of Google Android, all at a low price. The company currently outsells Apple in China and is closing in on Samsung. Its products are available in four Asian countries and the company plans to expand to ten more emerging markets, including India and Brazil.

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We are information-enabling everything. An information-enabled environment delivers fundamentally disruptive opportunities. Even traditional industries are ripe for disruption. CHAPTER TWO A Tale of Two Companies In one of the most iconic moments in modern business history, Steve Jobs rocked the world in January 2007 with his announcement of the Apple iPhone, which debuted six months later. Literally everything in high tech changed that day—indeed, you might even call it a Singularity—as all existing strategies in consumer electronics were instantly rendered obsolete. At that moment, the entire future of the digital world had to be reconsidered.

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Unfortunately for Nokia, a small Israeli company called Waze was founded around the same time. Instead of making a massive capital investment in in-road sensor hardware, the founders of Waze chose instead to crowdsource location information by leveraging the GPS sensors on its users’ phones—the new world of smartphones just announced at Apple by Steve Jobs—to capture traffic information. Within two years, Waze was gathering traffic data from as many sources as Navteq had road sensors, and within four years it had ten times as many sources. What’s more, the cost of adding each new source was essentially zero, not to mention that Waze’s users regularly upgraded their phones—and thus Waze’s information base.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley
by Atsuo Inoue
Published 18 Nov 2021

Son would turn 50 in August 2007 and – according to his life plan – he was determined to spend his fifties bringing his business aspirations to completion, with preparations in this respect having steadily been made, dating back to two years prior to the Vodafone acquisition and the unveiling of Apple’s iPhone. At the time Son had placed a lot of time and thought into what he would do if he entered the mobile phone market, and the conclusion he reached was he would require a secret weapon. And who did Son think of asking to forge such a technological weapon? None other than Steve Jobs, and he wasted no time in getting the ball rolling, ringing the Apple founder up for a teleconference. Steve Jobs may have possessed the charisma required to make Apple an international concern, but despite being the company’s founder he had occasionally been estranged due to his rather intense personality and verbal clashes.

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Each company has played a major role in the Internet in its unique way.’ It follows on that the third chapter would be mobile internet. ‘What was amazing about Steve Jobs was that he had invented the Apple II and opened up the first chapter of the information revolution along with Bill Gates but eventually he got fired by Apple and had a hard time. But – true genius that he was – he picked himself up, dusted himself off and once again completely redefined the future of humankind.’ Like Son says, there is no doubt that Steve Jobs was a bona fide genius, creating the platform during his second coming for each mobile service provider to accelerate and expand their own products’ growth.

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It was the start of an arms race within the nascent computer industry and the two had just developed a way for BASIC to run on an Altair. Gates was only 19 at the time whilst Allen was 22. Allen quit his job at Honeywell and Gates dropped out of Harvard to move to Albuquerque and start Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were also at the forefront of the emerging computer industry (they would go on to found Apple Computer Company in 1976), while Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems) and Larry Ellison (Oracle) could also be said to be Son’s contemporaries. The digital information revolution was calling and all of these individual Damascus moments would lay the groundwork for it to become a reality.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

This crisis of our elites explains not only the scarcity of trust bedeviling most advanced democracies but also the populist ressentiment on both left and right, against the traditional ruling class. Yet it also feels as if we are all losing touch with something more essential than just the twentieth-century establishment. Losing touch with ourselves, perhaps. And with what it means to be human in an age of bewilderingly fast change. As Steve Jobs used to say, teasing his audience before unveiling one of Apple’s magical new products, there’s “one more thing” to talk about here. And it’s the biggest thing of all in our contemporary world. It is the digital revolution, the global hyperconnectivity powered by the internet, that lies behind much of the disruption. In 2016, I participated in a two-day World Economic Forum (WEF) workshop in New York City about the “digital transformation” of the world.

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Lick-lider,1 is considered a father of the internet—chose to name his new science after kybernetes. Networked technology, Wiener initially believed, could steer or pilot us to a better world. This assumption, which Wiener shared not only with Bush and Licklider, but with many other twentieth-century visionaries—including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the cofounders of Apple—was based on the conviction that this new technology would empower us with agency to change our societies. “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984,’” promised the iconic Super Bowl XVIII advertisement about the transformative power of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s new desktop computer.

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This will be the greatest question of the twenty-first century and Bezos has both the financial resources and the intellectual discipline to confront this astonishingly complex issue. I sense that Bezos is only now really breaking into his stride as a public figure. Like Steve Jobs, he is a man of superhuman ambitions and abilities. With Apple, Amazon—which Jeff Bezos founded in 1994—remains the most remarkable American company of the last half century. But if Bezos wants to be remembered by future generations, he should worry about jobs rather than e-commerce. Building the “Everything Store” is one thing; fixing the future is quite another.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

Like other hands-on CEOs before him, Kalanick views his company’s offices not only as a reflection of the company’s values and aspirations, but as an extension of his own personality. Steve Jobs was the same way. Six months before his death he sat down on a couch next to me in his Palo Alto living room and proudly showed me a bound book of architectural drawings for the new Apple corporate campus he wouldn’t live to see. Months later he personally worked with an arborist to pick the apricot trees for the project. Kalanick, a few years younger than Jobs was when he returned to Apple for his second and final run, was communicating that to understand Uber’s work space was to understand Uber itself.

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But the place he sought entry into is an unreal world, as removed as one can be from the pedestrian life of Uzbek hacks in Queens. Indeed, though Kalanick blanches at acknowledging any influences, obsessing over the “kerning” of a logo is exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple. And he was revered for it. Kalanick never met Jobs, but everyone in Silicon Valley can recite the lines from the hymnal of how Jobs wouldn’t rest until every font, typeface, and finely beveled edge had reached perfection. The Apple CEO was a master at instilling cognitive dissonance, persuading customers to overlook (usually fixable) defects in his products as well as the troubling working conditions of the contractors who made them.

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All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else’s idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber’s iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many, repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns—privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity—Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else’s rules.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

So at least in the sense of being aware of and responsive to its environment, I think we would have to conclude that Apple is indeed conscious. Self-Awareness Apple is certainly aware of many aspects of itself and its corporate identity. From financial statements to market-share data, it constantly monitors many measures of its own performance. Apple executives (especially the late Steve Jobs) have not been shy about sharing Apple’s self-image as a company that makes “insanely great” products, and Apple’s advertising and public relations efforts are remarkably sophisticated and effective in reporting to the world at least some aspects of how Apple sees itself. I will probably never forget, for instance, Apple’s iconic “1984” Super Bowl commercial, which I showed to the first class I ever taught at MIT, in February 1984.

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The goal of this secretive internal training facility is to teach Apple managers the company’s proprietary way of managing, which Steve Jobs felt was quite different from what is taught in traditional MBA programs. For instance, course work at Apple University includes lessons in how Apple formulated its own retail strategy from scratch and how it took an unusual approach to commissioning factories in China.6 Given all these factors, it’s clear that in a variety of sophisticated ways, Apple is conscious in the sense of being self-aware. Goal-Directed Behavior Like any for-profit corporation, Apple needs to make a profit to survive.

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But just as you can speculate what it would be like to be other people and animals, you can at least speculate about what it might be like to be Apple. For instance, people can’t live without eating food, and if they don’t get enough, they feel hungry. Apple can’t live without making money, and if it doesn’t get enough, perhaps it feels something like hunger, too. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO, for example, Apple had only about 90 days of cash left, and perhaps the company felt something like deep hunger pangs, perhaps even panic, at that point. But if Apple sometimes feels hunger for profits, I think it probably feels something closer to lust for creating innovative products.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

In particular, the relationships among team members either enable results when a team “gels” or, on the other extreme, hinder results when factions within the group undermine its ability to operate at a high level. Relationships, from this point of view, are a means to an end—and are not on par with the need to deliver results. The chief designer at Apple, Jony Ives, tells a story about Steve Jobs that illustrates this point.36 Jobs believed that a key to his success was staffing his teams with highly talented people. His role as a leader was then to push them to achieve more than they thought possible. At one point, Jobs was unhappy with the product that Ives and his team were developing.

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They need their companies, as companies, to be equally innovative—workplaces that are challenging commonly accepted ways of operating. They understand that their legacies will be based not on the products they create but on their ability to build creative and agile organizations that endure over time. Steve Jobs will always be recognized for his innovative products but the true test of his leadership will be if Apple can continue to innovate and grow for the next 50 years. Does the company he created have the people, cultures, and processes needed to do so? At this point, the jury is still out. There is another motive that drives many of these leaders to create new types of organizations—a motive more personal and self-centered.

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See Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002), 30. 34Amanda Little, “An Interview with Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard,” Grist, October 23, 2004. 35Megan Hustad, “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Self-Awareness on Aisle 5?” Fortune, March 8, 2013. 36Ian Parker, “How an Industrial Designer Became Apple’s Greatest Product,” February 23, 2015. 37Jay Yarow, “Jony Ive: This Is the Most Important Thing I Learned from Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, October 10, 2014. 38Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 39There is a great deal of research on the impact of social cohesion on performance.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different applications,4 Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform the iPhone into an iBrick.5 The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with Apple’s permission.)

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See, e.g., ModMyiFone, Main Page, http://www.modmyifone.com/wiki/index.php/ (as of Sept. 30, 2007, 16:17 GMT) (containing code and instructions for modifications). 5. See Posting of Saul Hansell to N.Y. Times Bits Blog, Saul Hansell, Steve Jobs Girds for the Long iPhone War, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/steve-jobs-girds-for-the-long-iphone-war/ (Sept. 27, 2007, 19:01); Jane Wake-field, Apple iPhone Warning Proves True, BBC NEWS, Sept. 28, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7017660.stm. 6. See John Markoff, Steve Jobs Walks the Tightrope Again, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 12, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/technology/12apple.html. 7. Posting of Ryan Block to Engadget, A Lunchtime Chat with Bill Gates, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/a-lunchtime-chat-with-bill-gates-at-ces/ (Jan. 8, 2007, 14:01).

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It was a technical and design triumph for Jobs, bringing the company into a market with an extraordinary potential for growth, and pushing the industry to a new level of competition in ways to connect us to each other and to the Web. This was not the first time Steve Jobs had launched a revolution. Thirty years earlier, at the First West Coast Computer Faire in nearly the same spot, the twenty-one-year-old Jobs, wearing his first suit, exhibited the Apple II personal computer to great buzz amidst “10,000 walking, talking computer freaks.”2 The Apple II was a machine for hobbyists who did not want to fuss with soldering irons: all the ingredients for a functioning PC were provided in a convenient molded plastic case.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

They also shaped its improvement path. We can see this in the iPhone 12, which was released in 2020 and was the company’s first 5G device. Irrespective of Steve Jobs’s brilliance, there was no amount of money that Apple could have spent to release the iPhone 12 in 2008. Even if Apple could have devised a 5G network chip back then, there were no 5G networks for it to use, nor 5G wireless standards through which to communicate to these networks, and no apps that took advantage of its low latency or bandwidth. Were Apple able to make its own ARM-like GPU back in 2008 (more than a decade before ARM itself), game developers (who generate 70% of App Store revenues) would have lacked the game-engine technologies required to take advantage of its superpowered capabilities.

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The move was widely ridiculed at the time, especially by market leaders Microsoft and BlackBerry. Apple also chose to focus on consumers, rather than appealing to large enterprises and small-to-medium businesses, which represented the majority of smartphone sales from the mid-1990s through the late 2000s. Even more radical was the iPhone’s price: $500–$600, compared to $250–$350 for competing smartphones, such as the BlackBerry (which were often free to the end user, too, as they were provided by an employer). Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs believed that its $500 device offered superior value—more than a $200 or $300 device ever could—even if the latter was available for free.

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A similar value proposition will exist for Facebook’s avatar suite (or perhaps, those of Google or Twitter or Apple). If customized avatars are essential to user expression in 3D space, then few users will want to create a new, detailed avatar for every virtual world they use. The services that accept the avatars a user has already invested in will be able to offer a better experience for said user. Some people even argue that the inability to use a consistent avatar means that no avatar can truly represent the user—just as we wouldn’t say that Steve Jobs had a uniform if he could only sometimes wear jeans and a black mock turtleneck, and occasionally needed to wear chambray pants and a gray turtleneck depending on the venue.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

A fine example of successful CEO behavior between the two extremes is Steve Jobs, cofounder and returned CEO of Apple. Jobs has a long-standing reputation as a visionary designer. He was the cocreator of the Apple II, the forerunner of the Apple Macintosh, and after he left Apple in 1985, the company fell into a succession of disastrous strategies and fratricidal politics. Since his triumphant return as CEO in 1997, Apple has produced a string of design hits including the iMac series, the iPod, and the iPhone. Given his reputation and track record, most people would assume that Jobs functions as Apple’s analogue to Laliberté and Lazaridis, chief designer as well as the company’s leading advocate of validity.

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The master of configuration is Steve Jobs, who created an activity system for the iPod, including iTunes and Apple stores. The system made iPod a compelling product, exceedingly hard to replicate and highly profitable. (See figure 7-2.) For a manager, the configuration step is to ask how your insight and new solution fit into the larger scheme of the business in which you operate. The activity system you create may relate only to your department or project. But even within that limited sphere, you can build a model to test and verify. FIGURE 7-2 Apple’s iPod activity system Source: Apple Activity System developed and copyright by Heather Fraser and Mark Leung, 2008.

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James Hackett of Steelcase acquired the design firm IDEO to infuse design thinking across the entire Steelcase organization. 5 Between the extremes represented by Laliberté and Lazaridis at one end and Hackett and Lafley at the other, there are numerous intermediate alternatives. Steve Jobs, for instance, cofounder and returned CEO of Apple Inc., is probably the CEO most widely viewed as a design thinker, thanks to elegant, customer-pleasing products like the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, and iPhone, among many others. But he is not the solitary design genius of popular imagination. It was Apple’s designers, led by Jonathan Ive, who realized those innovative products. Jobs played a different, equally crucial role: he created an organization that placed “insanely great” design at the top of its hierarchy of values, and he gave the green light to spend the resources necessary to make lasting successes of his designers’ innovations.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

: “Ballmer Laughs at iPhone,” YouTube, September 18, 2007, 2:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U. 152 “When [the iPhone] first came out in early 2007”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 501. 152 “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC”: John Markoff, “Phone Shows Apple’s Impact on Consumer Products,” New York Times, January 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd-apple.html. 162 Steve Jobs made a “nine-digit” acquisition offer: Victoria Barret, “Dropbox: The Inside Story of Tech’s Hottest Startup,” Forbes, October 18, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/#3b780ed92863. 162 84% of total revenue for Facebook: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2016 Results,” November 2, 2016, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx. 163 “grand slam”: Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 164 $6 billion: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s App Store Sales Hit $20 Billion, Signs of Slower Growth Emerge,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-app-store-sales-hit-20-billion-signs-of-slower-growth-emerge-1452087004. 165 “Jobs soon figured out”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 501. 165 Facebook’s offer to publish: Henry Mance, “UK Newspapers: Rewriting the Story,” Financial Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0aa8beac-c44f-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3znzgrkTq. 166 “we only have the faintest idea”: Peter Rojas, “Google Buys Cellphone Software Company,” Engadget, August 17, 2005, https://www.engadget.com/2005/08/17/google-buys-cellphone-software-company. 166 “best deal ever”: Owen Thomas, “Google Exec: Android Was ‘Best Deal Ever,’ ” VentureBeat, October 27, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-best-deal-ever. 166 Android founder Andy Rubin: Victor H., “Did You Know Samsung Could Buy Android First, but Laughed It Out of Court?”

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v=eywi0h_Y5_U. 152 “When [the iPhone] first came out in early 2007”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 501. 152 “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC”: John Markoff, “Phone Shows Apple’s Impact on Consumer Products,” New York Times, January 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd-apple.html. 162 Steve Jobs made a “nine-digit” acquisition offer: Victoria Barret, “Dropbox: The Inside Story of Tech’s Hottest Startup,” Forbes, October 18, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/#3b780ed92863. 162 84% of total revenue for Facebook: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2016 Results,” November 2, 2016, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx. 163 “grand slam”: Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 164 $6 billion: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s App Store Sales Hit $20 Billion, Signs of Slower Growth Emerge,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-app-store-sales-hit-20-billion-signs-of-slower-growth-emerge-1452087004. 165 “Jobs soon figured out”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 501. 165 Facebook’s offer to publish: Henry Mance, “UK Newspapers: Rewriting the Story,” Financial Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0aa8beac-c44f-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3znzgrkTq. 166 “we only have the faintest idea”: Peter Rojas, “Google Buys Cellphone Software Company,” Engadget, August 17, 2005, https://www.engadget.com/2005/08/17/google-buys-cellphone-software-company. 166 “best deal ever”: Owen Thomas, “Google Exec: Android Was ‘Best Deal Ever,’ ” VentureBeat, October 27, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-best-deal-ever. 166 Android founder Andy Rubin: Victor H., “Did You Know Samsung Could Buy Android First, but Laughed It Out of Court?”

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CHAPTER 7 PAYING COMPLEMENTS, AND OTHER SMART STRATEGIES The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. — Friedrich von Hayek, 1988 IN 2007, STEVE JOBS WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF WHAT WAS PERHAPS the greatest tenure as a CEO in US corporate history. But throughout that year, his failure to fully appreciate a basic insight from economics threatened to stall his company’s momentum. How Steve Jobs Nearly Blew It Early in 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a product that deserves the label “iconic.” Its groundbreaking design and novel features, including multitouch screen, powerful mobile Internet browser, accelerometer, and GPS made it an instant hit, with rapturous reviews and sales of over 6 million handsets in its first year.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
by John Doerr
Published 23 Apr 2018

At the same time, he served as lead outside director on Apple’s board, which for anyone else might have presented a conflict. It drove Steve Jobs crazy, especially after Android emerged to challenge the iPhone. Steve harangued Bill forever to choose Apple and leave Google, but the Coach refused: “Steve, I’m not helping Google with their technology. I can’t even spell HTML. I’m just helping them be a better business every day.” When Steve persisted, the Coach said, “Don’t make me choose. You are not going to like the choice I’m going to make.” And Steve backed down because the Coach was his one true confidant. ( He “kept Steve Jobs going,” as Eric Schmidt told Forbes .

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Soon he was my first call whenever I backed a new entrepreneur. It became our MO: Kleiner invests, Doerr sponsors, Doerr calls Campbell, Campbell coaches the team. We ran that game plan again and again. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the most amazing nonhostile takeover of a public company ever, without putting up a penny. Steve asked for the resignations of all but one of Apple’s directors, and then he called Bill Campbell to join his new board. The Coach refused to be paid for this work; he was giving back to the Valley that had done so much for him. When a few companies prevailed upon him to accept stock, he funneled the proceeds into his philanthropic organization.

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Objective: Win the Indy 500. Key result: Increase average lap speed by 2 percent. Key result: Test at wind tunnel ten times. Key result: Reduce average pit stop time by one second. Key result: Reduce pit stop errors by 50 percent. Key result: Practice pit stops one hour per day. Less Is More As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.” In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five. It may be tempting to usher more objectives inside the velvet rope, but it’s generally a mistake. Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distract us into chasing the next shiny thing.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Hamilton Nolan, “Hubris, High Socks, and other Habits of the Most Powerful People in the World,” Gawker, December 13, 2012, http://gawker.com/5968116/hubris-high-socks-and-other-habits-of-the-most-powerful-people-in-the-world; Chris Benner, “Win the Lottery or Organize: Traditional and non-Traditional Labor Organizing in Silicon Valley,” Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 12, 1997/1998, December 8, 1997; Jack Ewing, “Amazon’s Labor Relations Under Scrutiny in Germany,” New York Times, March 4, 2013; Brad Stone, “Amazon May Get Its First Labor Union in the U.S.,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 17, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-17/amazon-may-get-its-first-labor-union-in-the-u-dot-s. 126. Tian Luo and Amar Mann, “Survival and Growth of Silicon Valley High-tech Businesses Born in 2000,” Monthly Labor Review, September 2011, pp. 16–31. 127. Timothy Noah, “Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator,” New Republic (blog), October 6, 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/95877/steve-jobs-job-creator. 128. John Markoff, “Silicon Valley Reacts to Economy With a New Approach,” New York Times, April 21, 2001; Robert D. Hof, “Venture Capital’s Liquidators,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 03, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-12-03/venture-capitals-liquidators. 129.

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Such thinking, notes the leftist economist Thomas Piketty, has been used in the contemporary setting to “justify the extreme inequalities and to defend the privileges of the winners.”27 This self-regard has been reinforced by public perception.28 In 2011, over 72 percent of Americans had positive feelings about the computer industry, as opposed to a mere 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas.29 Even during the Occupy protests in 2012, few criticisms were hurled by the “screwed generation” at tech titans. Indeed, when Steve Jobs, a .000001 percenter worth $7 billion and a rugged capitalist of the classic type, passed away, protestors openly mourned his demise.30 Unlike the grandees of Wall Street or the energy industry, the tech Oligarchs have so far experienced relatively little of the criticism commonly directed at Wall Street or energy executives for their huge compensation levels.

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Even more pronounced were their differences with their rivals in Europe and Asia, who were trapped by rigid corporate structures.43 What they relied on were not long established ties, notes analyst Anna Lee Saxenian, but “the social and technical networks” that provided funding and the critical pool of expertise.44 This networked system, which included a large number of specialized firms, was also markedly more supportive of younger entrepreneurs, among them the then twenty-something Steve Jobs. This helped consolidate the Valley’s supremacy over its traditional rival, the greater Boston area. By 1990, the Valley accounted for 39 of the nation’s fastest growing electronics companies, compared to just four along Boston’s Route 128. Over the ensuing decade, Valley firms, largely through the application of software, also overcame what had once been considered insurmountable competition from Japan.45 The great hope promised by this emerging, post-industrial information economy was perhaps best stated by futurist Alvin Toffler.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

As the number of overall computer science degrees picked back up leading into the dot-com boom, more men than women were filling those coveted seats. In fact, the percentage of women in the field would dramatically decline for the next two and a half decades. APPLE UPSETS THE NERD CART As women were leaving the tech world, a new type of tech hero was taking center stage. In 1976, Apple was co-founded by Steve Wozniak, your typical nerd, and Steve Jobs, who was not your typical nerd at all. Jobs exuded a style and confidence heretofore unseen in the computer industry. He had few technical skills—Wozniak handled all that—yet Jobs was a never-before-seen kind of tech rock star.

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Page’s reasons were never clearly spelled out, but insiders report that over the years Mayer had become a sharply polarizing figure whose colleagues either loved her or couldn’t stand her. Mayer often had a strict vision she would try to implement, and it often rubbed people the wrong way. Of course, being prickly and uncompromising has been a lauded attribute for male leaders in tech. “Steve Jobs had a very top-down thing going on for him, and that worked for Apple,” Laura Holmes said. “Did it work better for Apple because he was a man? I don’t know, so it’s kind of hard to say.” In June 2012, about a year after she was moved out of the inner circle, Mayer arranged a meeting with Sergey Brin. The quirky Google co-founder wheeled into her office on Rollerblades (twenty minutes late, in typical Brin fashion), and Mayer told him the news: she was leaving Google to become CEO of Yahoo.

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The first computer in my childhood home was an Apple II, and my mom, a schoolteacher with no technical background, used it with pride. Inside the industry, Jobs could have become an example of all that the tech industry could gain by bringing in a more diverse workforce. His vision and understanding of the consumer marketplace demonstrated what could be changed when different voices were added to the product development cycle. Unfortunately, the industry took the wrong lesson from Jobs’s achievement and only succeeded in creating a new stereotype, one that—once again—favored men over women. Looking at the hypercool Steve Jobs, investors noted his supreme self-confidence and fearlessness of risk and decided that those were keys to entrepreneurial achievement.

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions
by Brett Stern
Published 14 Oct 2012

Calvert: These are the things that an inventor really needs to learn and work out before taking that big step of sending a patent application to the USPTO—hopefully as the prelude to starting up their own business. 1 www.uspto.gov/inventors/independent/eye/201206/index.jsp 2 www.uiausa.org CHAPTER 23 Steve Wozniak Co-Founder Apple Computer A Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for more than thirty years, Steve Wozniak helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products, the Apple I and II, and influenced the popular Macintosh. In 1976, Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer Inc. with Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. The following year he introduced his Apple II personal computer, featuring a central processing unit, a keyboard, color graphics, and a floppy disk drive. The Apple II was integral to launching the personal computer industry.

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He spent a lot of his own time to make his class great. He contacted companies and found engineers who would let students like myself go in and work on projects such as programming a computer to control streetlights. When Steve Jobs and I were first starting Apple, we went to the world’s first computer trade show out in Atlantic City, called PC ’76. We were just introducing the Apple I, even though we had the Apple II designed and working. There were a bunch of little companies with two young kids like us—with no money and ideas that maybe these microprocessors could make the start of a business. It was the garage-style entrepreneurship that you see nowadays with kids going into writing apps for iPhones and the like.

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Another mentor whom I didn’t meet until I was just about to launch Keen in 2002 was Steve Jobs. When I was flying through San Francisco airport, I was sitting there working on my Mac and a guy comes up to me and he’s like, “Hey, what do you use your Mac for?” And I say that I am putting together a footwear company and I’m laying out the catalog, and he’s like, “Oh, here’s the latest operating system.” You know, it wasn’t even out yet. And I’m like, “Oh, you must work for Apple.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” Stern: He handed you a CD with the OS. Keen: Yeah. And he said, “I’m the head of marketing at Apple.” I said, “Oh, do you know Steve? I’d been a Mac user since 1986.”

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

Digital Journalism 3, no. 3 (November 7, 2014) 398–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411. Donn, Jeff. “Eric Trump Foundation Flouts Charity Standards.” AP News, December 23, 2016. https://apnews.com/760b4159000b4a1cb1901cb038021cea. Dormehl, Luke. “Why John Sculley Doesn’t Wear an Apple Watch (and Regrets Booting Steve Jobs).” Cult of Mac, February 19, 2016. https://www.cultofmac.com/413044/john-sculley-apple-watch-steve-jobs/. Dougherty, Conor. “Google Photos Mistakenly Labels Black People ‘Gorillas.’” New York Times, July 1, 2015. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-mistakenly-labels-black-people-gorillas/. Dreyfus, Hubert L.

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And these eminent scientists worked on the dumbwaiter to outer space for an entire six months. Everybody in tech knew Minsky, and everyone relied on him. Steve Jobs famously got the idea for a computer with a mouse and a GUI from Alan Kay and his team at Xerox PARC. When Jobs left Apple in 1985 and John Sculley took over, Kay told Sculley they needed to go out and find sources of new technology. They weren’t going to be able to turn to PARC for Apple’s next big move, Kay said. “That led to us spending a lot of time on the East Coast, at the Media Lab in MIT, where we worked with people like Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert,” Sculley said in a 2016 interview.7 “A lot of that technology we ended up putting into a concept video Alan and I produced, called ‘Knowledge Navigator.’

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Vincent, “Twitter Taught Microsoft’s AI Chatbot to Be a Racist Asshole in Less than a Day.” 4. Plautz, “Hitchhiking Robot Decapitated in Philadelphia.” 5. Unless otherwise indicated, quotes from Minsky in this section are taken from Minsky, “Web of Stories Interview.” 6. Brand, The Media Lab; Levy, Hackers. 7. Dormehl, “Why John Sculley Doesn’t Wear an Apple Watch (and Regrets Booting Steve Jobs).” 8. Lewis, “Rise of the Fembots”; LaFrance, “Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?” 9. Hillis, “Radioactive Skeleton in Marvin Minsky’s Closet.” 10. Alba, “Chicago Uber Driver Charged with Sexual Abuse of Passenger”; Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber”; Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 11. 

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

I had successful surgery in early July 2001, but my recovery was very slow. It took me nearly a year to recover fully. During that time, Apple shipped the first iPod. I thought it was a sign of good things to come and reached out to Steve Jobs to see if he would be interested in recapitalizing Apple. At the time, Apple’s share price was about twelve dollars per share, which, thanks to stock splits, is equivalent to a bit more than one dollar per share today. The company had more than twelve dollars in cash per share, which meant investors were attributing zero value to Apple’s business. Most of the management options had been issued at forty dollars per share, so they were effectively worthless.

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Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, by Nick Bilton (New York, Portfolio, 2013), is worth reading because of Twitter’s outsized influence on journalists, an influence out of proportion with the skills of Twitter’s leadership. No study of Silicon Valley would be complete without a focus on Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) was a bestseller. I was lucky enough to know Steve Jobs. We were not close, but I knew Steve for a long time and had several opportunities to work with him. I experienced the best and the worst. Above all, I respect beyond measure all the amazing products created on Steve’s watch. This bibliographic essay includes only the books that helped me prepare to write Zucked.

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It is part of a larger philosophical approach, human-driven technology, which advocates returning technology to the role of being a tool to serve user needs rather than one that exploits users and makes them less capable. With its focus on user interface issues, humane design is a subset of human-driven technology, which also incorporates things like privacy, data security, and applications functionality. We used to take human-driven technology for granted. It was the philosophical foundation for Steve Jobs’s description of computers as a “bicycle for the mind,” a tool that creates value through exercise as well as fun. Jobs thought computers should make humans more capable, not displace or exploit them. Every successful tech product used to fit the Jobs model, and many still do. Personal computers still empower the workers who use them.

Buyology
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 14 Jul 2008

In fact, as the results of our brain-scan study would show, the most successful products are the ones that have the most in common with religion. Take Apple, for example, one of the most popular—and profitable—brands around. I’ll never forget the Apple Macromedia conference I attended in the mid-nineties. Sitting in a packed convention center in San Francisco among ten thousand cheering fans, I was surprised when Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO, ambled out onstage, wearing his usual monkish turtleneck, and announced that Apple was going to discontinue its Newton brand of handheld computers. Jobs then dramatically hurled a Newton into a garbage can a few feet away to punctuate his decision.

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Well, we’re about to take a look at one of the most fascinating brain discoveries of recent times, one that plays an enormous role in why we’re attracted to the things we are. The place: Parma, Italy. The unwitting codiscoverers of this phenomenon? A species of monkey known as the macaque. 3 I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING Mirror Neurons at Work IN 2004, STEVE JOBS, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Apple, was strolling along Madison Avenue in New York City when he noticed something strange, and gratifying. Hip white earphones (remember, back then most earphones came in basic boring black). Looping and snaking out of people’s ears, dangling down across their chests, peeking out of pockets and purses and backpacks.

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“It involves interior exploration, quests for a transcendent goal, overcoming barriers and 08/08/2009 10:45 43 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html physical or spiritual healing.”3 Go Steelers. Most religions also have a clear vision. By that I mean that they are unambiguous in their mission, whether it’s to reach a certain state of grace or achieve a spiritual goal. And of course, most companies have unambiguous missions as well. Steve Jobs’s vision for Apple dates back to the mid-1980s when he said, “Man is the creator of change in this world. As such he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them.” Twenty years and a few million iPods later, the company still pursues this vision, and will doubtlessly continue to do so twenty years from now.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

However that plainly joyous note, composed after an apparently sleepless night spent exploring the system, testifies to just how powerful such a prospect must have seemed. The Altos remained in use at Xerox PARC throughout the 1970s. Steve Jobs’s famous pilgrimage to PARC wasn’t to come until December 1979. It would be another half decade before the Alto’s most important design features, including the bitmapped display, windows, and the mouse, were brought to market as Apple’s first Macintosh computer in early 1984. (Xerox did attempt to introduce a graphical computer system incorporating some of Alto’s capabilities in 1981; called the Xerox Star, it was marketed to businesses rather than to personal users, was expensive, and had to compete with dedicated word processing systems; thus it was never a commercial success.)

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Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper, 1999). 16. This episode (and Apple’s subsequent development of the technologies) is recounted in detail in Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (New York: Penguin, 1994), 77–103. For video of Tesler describing the demo in 2011, see Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune, August 24, 2014, embedded YouTube video, http://fortune.com/2014/08/24/raw-footage-larry-tesler-on-steve-jobs-visit-to-xerox-parc/. 17. Michael Shrayer was an Altair owner for whom the blinking LEDs were simply not satisfactory—he quickly managed to make the computer the centerpiece of his own TV Typewriter unit, and a year later released what is generally regarded as the first word processing program for a microcomputer, Electric Pencil.

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One project of exceptional promise in this regard (researched and written contemporaneously with Track Changes) is Tom Mullaney’s forthcoming The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History; see also Nanette Gottlieb, Word-Processing Technology in Japan: Kanji and the Keyboard (London: Routledge, 2000). 10. Please see the Author’s Note regarding trackchangesbook.info, a website I have set up in anticipation of such instances. 11. As recounted in Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” New York Times, October 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html. She writes: “I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter. I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco. Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited.

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

In his 1989 book The Alexander Complex: The Dreams That Drive the Great Businessmen, Michael Meyer examined the lives of six empire builders, including five Forbes 400 members—Steve Jobs, Ross Perot, biotech billionaire Robert Swanson, Ted Turner, and the late shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig—to try to divine what drove them to spectacular success. They “live in the grip of a vision38,” concludes Meyer. “Work and career take on the quality of a mission, a pursuit of some Holy Grail. And because they are talented and convinced they can change the world, they often do.” Meyer refers to Apple founder39 Steve Jobs, for one, as a “visionary monster,” and other accounts seem to bear that out. In The Silicon Boys, for example, David Kaplan recounts a telling anecdote about Jobs.

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Certainly no one that morning, not even Gates, realized the full implications of what was at stake: that his deal with IBM would not only reshape the computer industry and have an impact on billions of consumers around the world, but would help bring about a seismic shift in the accumulation of wealth in America. The high-tech landscape was changing fast in 1980. Apple Computer, a three-year-old start-up2 founded by a couple of hippies from northern California, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, was in the process of racking up $139 million in sales. Later that year, Apple would go public with the most successful stock offering since that of the Ford Motor Company in 1956. An impatient IBM3 wanted to break into the burgeoning personal-computer market, and it was going into overdrive to take advantage of a new sixteen-bit microprocessor chip developed by Intel, a company founded by Gordon E.

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Started a $40 million leadership school for poor African girls in 2007 New Media Moguls (Cable, Internet, Digital) Source of wealth Peak net worth in billions (year) Comment Sergey Brin Google $14.10 (’06) Built a better search engine Mark Cuban37 dot-coms; sports $2.30 (’06) Signed up Dan Rather as the face of hard news on his HDNet channel on satellite television Barry Diller38 InterActive Corp., a Web holding company $1.60 (’03) One of the highest compensated CEOs in the U.S. with a $457 million pay package in 2005 and $232 million in 2006 Charles Dolan39 Cablevision Systems $3.20 (’00) Declared a special dividend in 2006, netting $580 million. In 2007, took his company private Stanley Hubbard Satellite TV $1.80 (’96) Pioneered first satellite TV in 1993 Steve Jobs Apple Computer; animated movies $4.90 (’06) The man behind Apple, the Mac, iPod, iPhone, Pixar. Highest paid CEO in U.S. in 2006 with $647 million pay package John Malone40 Cable TV $3.40 (’99) Monster cable TV deal maker now pushing satellite TV Craig McCaw41 McCaw Cellular $7.70(’00) Cellular pioneer trying for a comeback with wireless access after 2000 telecom wipeout Rupert Murdoch42 Media/Internet $11.00 (’00) “I just want to live forever—I enjoy myself too much.”

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

.: Island Press, 2012), 3. 38 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/learner/medium. 39 The Media Lab’s website includes a comprehensive overview of the Lab’s funding model, current research, and history. http://media.mit.edu/about/about-the-lab. 40 Olivia Vanni. “An Ex-Apple CEO on MIT, Marketing & Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Steve Jobs,” BostInno.com. April 8, 2016. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2016/04/08/apples-steve-jobs-and-john-sculley-fight-over-ceo/. 41 To select just a few biologically inspired projects at the Media Lab as of May 2016, Kevin Esvelt’s Sculpting Evolution group is studying gene drives and ecological engineering; Neri Oxman’s Mediated Matter group is experimenting with microfluidics and 3D-printing living materials; and Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group has created a fabric with “living nanoactuators” that use bacteria to open or close vents in the material in response to the wearer’s body temperature. 42 Malcolm Gladwell.

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.: Krause Publications, 2007), 155. 22 Henry Ford, My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 73. 23 David Gartman, “Tough Guys and Pretty Boys: The Cultural Antagonisms of Engineering and Aesthetics in Automotive History,” Automobile in American Life and Society, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/D_Casestudy3.htm. 24 Elizabeth B-N Sanders, “From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches,” Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections, 2002, 1–8. 25 Quoted in Drew Hansen, “Myth Busted: Steve Jobs Did Listen to Customers,” Forbes, December 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2013/12/19/myth-busted-steve-jobs-did-listen-to-customers/. 26 Sanders, “From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches.” Conclusion 1 And the less said about the “blood-vomiting game” of 1835 the better. 2 Sensei’s Library, “Excellent Move,” last edited May 31, 2016, http://senseis.xmp.net/?

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The culture isn’t so much interdisciplinary as it is proudly “antidisciplinary”; the faculty and students more often than not aren’t just collaborating between disciplines, but are exploring the spaces between and beyond them as well. It is an approach that began with Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte. The Media Lab emerged from the Architecture Machine Group that Negroponte cofounded, in which architects at MIT used advanced graphical computers to experiment with computer-aided design and Negroponte (along with Steve Jobs, out in Silicon Valley) envisioned an age when computers would become personal devices. Negroponte also predicted a massive convergence that would jumble all of the disciplines together and connect arts and sciences together as well—the Media Lab’s academic program is called “Media Arts and Sciences.”

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
Published 4 Mar 2014

He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person.

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One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO but succeeded as a wartime one. John Chambers had a great run as peacetime CEO of Cisco but has struggled as Cisco has moved into war with Juniper, HP, and a range of new competitors. Steve Jobs, who employed a classical wartime management style, removed himself as CEO of Apple in the 1980s during their longest period of peace before coming back to Apple for a spectacular run more than a decade later, during their most intense war period. I believe that the answer is yes, but it’s hard. Mastering both wartime and peacetime skill sets means understanding the many rules of management and knowing when to follow them and when to violate them.

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I believe Jobs’s greatest achievement as a visionary leader was in getting so many super-talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina, and in getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. It’s difficult to imagine any other leader being so compelling that he could accomplish these goals back-to-back, and this is why we call this one the Steve Jobs attribute. THE RIGHT KIND OF AMBITION: THE BILL CAMPBELL ATTRIBUTE One of the biggest misperceptions in our society is that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is to be selfish, ruthless, and callous.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

He was about to move to London to take a job with a startup that projected Web streams on walls at tech conferences. It sounded stupid, but I congratulated him all the same. This was his dream vacation in America—his “techie pilgrimage” around Silicon Valley. So far Francis had visited Steve Jobs’s old house; the garage where Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer; the Xerox PARC laboratory, where many modern features of consumer computers, such as the graphical user interface, had been invented with government support; the Hewlett-Packard campus; and the Googleplex, which was a stone’s throw from Jeannie’s place.

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“Part of the seduction is, if you just keep your head down and don’t cause any trouble, there’s some half-million-a-year, giant-paying job waiting for you,” Gregg says. “Look at Michael Moritz. He was a Silicon Valley reporter. Now he’s one of the richest people in the world.” Moritz came up at the same time as Gregg and wrote an important early eighties profile of Steve Jobs for Time magazine—and subsequently the first book about Apple’s history, titled The Little Kingdom. Moritz parlayed the connections he made as a journalist to a partnership at Sequoia Capital, which in turn landed him a seat on the board of Google and eventually a personal net worth of more than $3 billion. Since Gregg left the business in 2002, a new problem had emerged.

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It cost $70 to be listed alongside these fine companies, inclusive of a custom-made pitch video. I passed. The Lifograph website also featured a number of blog posts, almost half of which were about Steve Jobs. One post was authored by Manny Fernandez, a small-time investor whom I would be pitching at the San Jose event. Manny did not waste his readers’ time by padding his Jobsian advice with an introductory paragraph. Instead, he plunged straight into a numbered list of tautologies. 1. BE A LEADER Steve Jobs was a college dropout, but he was a leader. He was able to rally up investors and employees to create an amazing product. Leadership is something you develop over time.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

Tsuji’s Tokyo home in the late seventies: Ibid., 87. 5: PLUGGING IN AND DROPPING OUT “The Sony Walkman has done more”: William Gibson, Time Out, October 6, 1993, 49. Steve Jobs was on his worst behavior: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 146. Jobs was, to put it mildly, a Sony fanboy: Alan Deutschman, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 29. He took it apart piece by piece: George Beahm, Steve Jobs’s Life by Design: Lessons to Be Learned from His Last Lecture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 29. “He didn’t want to be IBM”: Ibid., 29

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The portable transistor radio transformed music culture by freeing young listeners from the shackles of parental approval, letting them mainline rock and roll in the privacy of their own rooms. “It opened my world up,” says the engineer Steve Wozniak, who went on to play the role of Ibuka to Steve Jobs’s Morita at Apple Computer. “I could sleep with it and hear music all night long.” They listened to newfangled forms of music with titles that mystified the grown-ups, like 1954’s “Rock Around the Clock”—the first song with “rock” in its title. Through their musical choices over the years to come, young Americans would construct the soundtrack for an ideological rebellion, most obviously in the form of the protest rock that sustained student activists of the sixties.

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His personal tastes might have been a little peculiar, but in wanting to escape into his own private world, he was far from alone. 5 PLUGGING IN AND DROPPING OUT The Walkman 1979 The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. —WILLIAM GIBSON STEVE JOBS WAS on his worst behavior as he toured the factories of Japan in 1983. He desperately needed a supplier of 3.5-inch floppy-disk drives for his newest creation, a revolutionary personal computer system he called the Macintosh. Yet he wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with formally dressed CEOs and their salaryman underlings.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

The reason why people harass teenagers into suicide is because a bunch of White dudes with no sense of the human experience decided that they would build anonymity into the Internet as a feature rather than a bug! You nerds have blood on your hands! “Fuck Steve Jobs and fuck your worship of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was no more than nothing! His only distinction was that, unlike every other awful CEO in tech, he had a mild sense of design. His jeans were rubbish! His turtle necks were awful! He owed seven percent of Disney! Apple was a company run by a bully surrounded by cultists so indoctrinated that they didn’t realize they were being bullied. In the end, all the sycophancy killed their god!

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No one knew much about her, which reminded Christine of the Eleusinian Mysteries, shrouded in darkness. And there was good ol’ Steve Jobs, better known as Hades. And not just because he was dead and rotting in the dank recesses of the netherworld, doomed for an uncertain term to watch projected images of impoverished factories workers on the rocky walls of oblivion. Basically, Steve Jobs was Hades because Hades was a total unyielding dick. The defining aspect of Steve Jobs was the marriage of his innate dickishness with gauzy Bay Area entitlement. This blessed union birthed a blanket of darkness which settled over the Western world. Steve Jobs grew up reading The Whole Earth Catalog, a publication dedicated to the proposition that by spending your money in the right way, you could become the right kind of person.

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But because The Whole Earth Catalog emerged from the Bay Area after the death of several utopian ideals, the stench of its message was masked by patchouli, incense and paperback editions of gruel-thin Eastern spirituality. It was a new kind of marketing, geared towards the insecure bourgeois aspirant. Steve Jobs sucked it in and shit it out and transformed himself into Hades. The one god that can’t be escaped. His promise was simple: you have a choice. You can die ugly and unloved, or you can buy an overpriced computer or iPod and listen to early Bob Dylan and spin yourself off the wheel of Samsara. Your fundamental uncreativity will be masked by group membership.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

an iPhone 5c: Ng, Alfred. “FBI Asked Apple to Unlock iPhone Before Trying All Its Options.” CNET, March 27, 2018. https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-asked-apple-to-unlock-iphone-before-trying-all-its-options. not just one iPhone: Grossman, Lev. “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Inside His Fight with the FBI.” Time. Time Magazine, March 17, 2016. https://time.com/4262480/tim-cook-apple-fbi-2. the side of privacy: Cook, Tim. “Customer Letter.” Apple. Accessed February 16, 2016. https://www.apple.com/customer-letter. “To me, marketing is about values”: “Best Marketing Strategy Ever! Steve Jobs Think Different / Crazy Ones Speech (with Real Subtitles).”

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These improvements have helped the iPhone maintain its position at the top of the phone market. And even if people buy the iPhone less frequently, we both agreed, Apple will be fine. “As a user, I’m kind of happy with where things are with Apple right now,” Wozniak said. “What if their sales and market share dropped in half? So what. They’re still a huge company; it’s not going to go away.” But Apple isn’t interested in coasting on the iPhone’s success. It wants to build a car. It wants HomePod and Siri to succeed. It has bigger plans for the Steve Jobs Theater than showing trailers for shows on Apple TV+, a service meant to make more money from iPhone users (“Because they’re in a billion pockets, y’all,” as Oprah put it).

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Hands on the Wheel Imagine, if you will, a beaming Tim Cook taking the stage at Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater for the company’s biggest announcement since the iPhone. The theater, a subterranean auditorium on the outskirts of Apple’s Cupertino campus, was built for big announcements. And Cook, looking out at the one thousand assembled press, partners, and employees, has brought the goods. Turning toward the audience, Cook starts off with a nod to the past. “Any company would be fortunate to have one revolutionary product. But here at Apple, we’ve been lucky enough to build three,” he might say. “The Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone have all changed lives in profound ways.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time
by George Berkowski
Published 3 Sep 2014

I’ll go through a brief history of how apps came about, and then explore three core reasons that allow apps to deliver a great mobile experience – things you’ll need to keep in mind when developing your own billion-dollar app. A brief history of the app The term ‘app’ has been around for a long time. An app (or application) and a software program are the same thing. Thanks to Apple, though, the word has been adopted by the mobile world, and means either a smartphone app or a tablet app. This wonderful app ecosystem almost didn’t happen at all, according to Walter Isaacson, the biographer of the famed Steve Jobs. When Apple was developing the iPhone, Jobs was initially not too enamoured with the idea that third-party developers should be able to create software to run directly on his beautiful, sleek device – and potentially mess it up.

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Chapter 36 Unicorns do Exist Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Steve Jobs uttered these poignant words in 1995 during an interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs’s personal journey was particularly trying. At the time, Apple was in turmoil, and Jobs would only return to Apple a year later in 1996. What Jobs says next in the interview is particularly powerful: … shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it versus make your mark upon it.

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Whether you’re a newcomer to mobile technology, a gifted developer, seasoned entrepreneur or just intrigued by what it takes to build a billion-dollar company in this day and age, this book is for you. It’s not just a theory My bookshelves are piled high with books brimming with great advice about how to build a great business, about how to cross chasms and be an effective executive. Biographies of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, investor Warren Buffett, Google cofounder Larry Page, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and businesswoman and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg peer down over my desk. But, as I reread these books, I keep finding business strategies that no longer work, or principles that, although only a few years old, seem to be already outdated in the fast-moving world of mobile technology.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

The way the Valley really worked was that a tiny number of unofficial, supersocial, superpowered women connected everyone, creating companies, even whole technological movements. Histories of Silicon Valley always mention captains of industry like Steve Jobs, as they should, but you never see the names of the women who probably did as much to design the place. Linda Stone, aka GNF of the North in the Little Hunan, later became a well-known executive at both Apple and Microsoft at different times, but she also had an outsized and intangible early influence on the evolution of Silicon Valley. A list of accomplishments doesn’t really capture her role. Linda got Apple into making “content,” in those days still distributed on compact disks (remember CD-ROMs?)

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VR starts to feel good when certain perceived latencies get down to around 7 or 8 milliseconds. 7.   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/virtually-there/ 8.   A second generation came out that produced much smoother and finer data. 9.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8KVOe_y08 Chapter 14 1.   Apple famously fired Steve Jobs, and the whole Mac team quit. Then Apple almost died until he came back, and then it became the world’s most valuable company. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are shown such deference today. 2.   Patricof was one of the people who didn’t do well, ultimately, from VPL. I feel bad about it. What I hear is that he never invested in VR again. 3.   

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What if Silicon Valley, the place I might have the best shot at earning a living, turned out to be a place that pulled me away from the female world, from any hope of catching hold of a trace of who my mother had been? Flustered, I managed to say, “Are all the suits so bad? I have a friend who works for Steve Jobs at Apple and seems to think he has good ideas.” “Oh yeah, I worked with Steve at Atari, where he tried to be an engineer. The guy used to brag about how he’d optimize this chip, but I never saw him get anywhere. At least he learned his place.” What a curious society. Status was attached to technical attainment more than to money.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Amazon was booming, having been led since its inception by Jeff Bezos, who had transformed the company from the plucky bookselling firm started in his garage to the world’s dominant e-commerce company. Mark Zuckerberg stayed firmly in control of Facebook, by far the most successful new tech company started in the twenty-first century. Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation. What these startups-turned-juggernauts had in common was not lost on venture capitalists: driven founders with a gift for salesmanship. It didn’t take long for a handful of influential new venture capital firms—Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz—to begin openly marketing themselves as “founder-friendly.”

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Financial startups vying to be the next generation of Wall Street giants were determined to democratize investing and expand opportunity to the underserved. The bombast was in part an outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s hippie roots, after the utopian ideals of the 1960s influenced some early leaders like Steve Jobs. But in a highly competitive market, that jargon was also necessary to lure talent. Skilled software engineers and managers had an abundance of tech companies to choose from; some could expect offers of $300,000 a year from the Googles and Apples of the world. To land top recruits, companies needed to offer more than just a salary. It was a shift from many other corners of the business world. Wall Street traders tend not to preach how they chose Goldman Sachs over UBS because one bank is better at expanding access to credit for the disadvantaged; they often do, however, say one offered better compensation.

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In 2006, Son’s rehabilitated SoftBank expanded into the mobile industry, spending roughly $15 billion to buy Vodafone’s business in Japan—a distant third-place carrier. By negotiating directly with Steve Jobs, he landed exclusive distribution rights for the iPhone, quickly vaulting his mobile phone company into the top tier. By 2012, the itch had returned. Son yearned to become a force in the United States again. He turned back to his mobile phone playbook and started trying to buy both Sprint and T-Mobile—a move to compete against AT&T and Verizon. He announced a $21.6 billion deal in late 2012 for 70 percent of Sprint. Apple’s Tim Cook and others assured him that a deal to buy T-Mobile as well would pass muster with U.S. regulators, he told others.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

Roman cuisine doesn’t shine in terms of imagination and variety, at least not when compared with other regional Italian cuisines such as those of Naples or Sicily. The point is that it was an insider’s remark – and a fact that most Italians don’t even know. A crowd in the showroom at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters gathers to try out new products. “In his fight against time and his illness, Steve Jobs not only wanted his new office in the ‘spaceship’ to be ready but he wanted the kitchen to be up and running, and it had to be under the management of an Italian chef.” Food is an obsession in the Bay Area. On the one hand it’s part of a broader culture regarding the body.

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MICHELE MASNERI is a Rome-based journalist and author who writes about culture and society. He has worked with Vogue Italia, Domus, AD, Wired US. He is the design editor at Il Foglio, for which he was the Silicon Valley correspondent, and his reports from California were included in the collection Steve Jobs non abita più qui (“Steve Jobs No Longer Lives Here”, Adelphi, 2020). His latest book is a biography of the Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, Stile Alberto (Quodlibet, 2021). THERANOS AND THE STARTUPS In 2003 nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded the startup Theranos after leaving Stanford University. Her concept was a revolutionary device that would be easy to transport and able to carry out complex medical tests using a single drop of blood.

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Her concept was a revolutionary device that would be easy to transport and able to carry out complex medical tests using a single drop of blood. She attracted large numbers of investors who believed the technology would change the face of healthcare, simplifying costly procedures and giving countless patients faster access to routine tests. In 2014 Theranos was valued at $9 billion, and Holmes, with her black polo-neck reminiscent of Steve Jobs, ended up on the cover of a number of prestigious magazines. Then an investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed the truth about Holmes’s promises: the equipment did not work, the data were unreliable and the figures had been massaged. Her reputation and the company’s valuation collapsed.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Selling to the masses is what Hustlers were born to do. The Hustlers: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? —Bill Gates, 1976 Real artists ship. —Steve Jobs, 1983 162 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE If J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart are obscure talismans even among the best-informed computer users, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are iconic, triumphal nerds.20 Jobs at his height was perhaps the most intriguing businessperson in the world, and one of the few people to have built multibillion-dollar companies in two different industries, with Apple computers and Pixar animated films.

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Gates has been admired for his strategy and condemned for his ruthlessness, but much like the Plutocrats before him, he was never defined by vision. Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, on the other hand, has been known to create a “reality distortion effect” around himself because of the intensity of his vision for computing. He worked for early electronic games pioneer Atari in the late 1970s and visited Xerox PARC, where he saw the work infused with Engelbart and Kay’s Aquarian vision. This spirit resonated with Jobs, who at one point had taken a personal pilgrimage to India and lived in an ashram. But even more so, the meme of participation entered his head on those visits to PARC. The Apple II, released in 1977, was unique in having a graphics capability and a soundboard built in.

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In reaction to the buttoned-down, all-business attitudes of the Plutocrats, the Aquarians of the 1960s and 1970s—people like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay—expand on the more openended ideas of the Patriarchs, and develop the paradigm of visual, personalized, networked computing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hustlers—Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs—commodify this personalized vision, putting a distinctive, “new economy” stamp on computing. Building on the installed base of all these users as the new millennium looms, the Hosts— World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and open-source guru Linus Torvalds—link these disparate personal machines into a huge web, concentrating on communication as much as technology, pushing participation to the next level.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

The idea was to try to create a device that combined the Palm Pilot—at that time basically a combination calendar, Filofax, address book, and day planner, with note-taking capabilities and a wireless Web-based text browser—with a 3G cell phone. That way when you called up a phone number in the Palm Pilot address book, you could just click on it and the cell phone would dial it. And with the same device you could surf the Internet. Jacobs approached Apple to see if they were interested in partnering with Qualcomm on this, using the Apple Newton, their Palm competitor. But Apple—this was just before Steve Jobs came back—turned them down and eventually killed the Newton. So Jacobs went to Palm and together they ended up making the first “smartphone”—the Qualcomm pdQ 1900—in 1998. It was the first phone designed not just to relay text messages, but to combine digital wireless mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet with a touchscreen and an open operating system that eventually ran downloadable apps.

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The early device they created was rather clunky: it had none of the easy user interfaces and beautiful design that Steve Jobs’s Apple iPhone would eventually offer in 2007, and it came out before there was the Internet bandwidth to do many things. So Qualcomm went back to concentrating on making everything inside the smartphone. Qualcomm gets its improvements by using software and hardware techniques to more densely pack and compress bits, and Jacobs believes it can improve further—maybe another thousandfold—before it reaches its limit. Most people think that they can watch Game of Thrones on their cell phone because Apple came out with a better phone. No, Apple gave you a larger screen and better display, but the reason it is not buffering is because Qualcomm and AT&T and others invested billions of dollars in making the wireless network and phones more efficient.

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AT&T’s reputation was on the line—and Jobs would not have been a happy camper if his beautiful phone kept dropping calls. To handle the problem, Stephenson turned to his chief of strategy, John Donovan, and Donovan enlisted Krish Prabhu, now president of AT&T Labs. Donovan picks up the story: “It’s 2006, and Apple is negotiating the service contracts for the iPhone. No one had even seen one. We decided to bet on Steve Jobs. When the phone first came out [in 2007] it had only Apple apps, and it was on a 2G network. So it had a very small straw, but it worked because people only wanted to do a few apps that came with the phone.” But then Jobs decided to open up the iPhone, as the venture capitalist John Doerr had suggested, to app developers everywhere.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The deal proved to be a disappointment when the market for how-to computing manuals was quickly oversubscribed, but its magnitude alerted an industry that remained notoriously conservative about using new technologies that there might be a market for books about personal computing. Brockman had come to San Francisco in the spring of 1983 to attend the West Coast Computer Faire, an annual computer hobbyist exhibition. (It had been at the first Faire, held in 1977, that a twenty-two-year-old Steve Jobs and his twenty-six-year-old partner, Steve Wozniak, had introduced the Apple II.) Brockman’s literary agency was focused on scientists and technology writers. Now he embarked on a strategy of trying to find and represent star programmers, selling their work to the new software publishing industry. He had recently added an image of a floppy disk to the logo on his company stationery.

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* * * * * * Brand kept his hand in a growing array of outside activities, including several nonprofit board seats and his lecturing position at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, where he went at the end of 1984 for his twice-annual face-to-face stint with his students. It was there that Steve Jobs played an indirect role in plunging Brand even more deeply into the emerging digital universe. Phelan had accompanied Brand to the La Jolla campus, and one day they were about to sneak off during lunch to a secluded skinny-dipping spot known as Black’s Beach when they were cornered by a roly-poly man on a mission. In 1969, Brand had met Larry Brilliant while Brilliant was training to be a doctor in San Francisco and Brand was organizing the Hunger Show. Brilliant had later befriended Steve Jobs when the young computer entrepreneur was on a spiritual pilgrimage in India while Brilliant was there working on the international effort to eradicate smallpox.

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Many of the things that Brand has attempted in the past six decades would fail, but some have succeeded spectacularly. He has retained an uncanny ability to stumble into trends early, and sometimes to create them. One of the most important roles he has played, first for the counterculture generation and more recently for millennials, is as a model for how to live one’s life. Steve Jobs fastened onto the Brand approach in recounting his own life in his influential 2005 Stanford commencement address. He found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog. It captured the sensibility that emerged on the western edge of the continent during the sixties. The back cover of the 1974 edition of the publication was a photograph of the kind of open road a hitchhiker might find while waiting in the morning sun on a California highway.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

It wasn’t the way Steve Jobs would have done it. In the spring of 2013, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple Inc., Tim Cook, decided the company needed to borrow $17 billion. Yes, borrow. Never mind that Apple was the world’s most valuable corporation, that it had sold more than a billion devices so far, and that it already had $145 billion sitting in the bank, with another $3 billion in profits flowing in every month. So, why borrow? It was not because the company was a little short, obviously, or because it couldn’t put its hands on any of its cash. The reason, rather, was that Apple’s financial masters had determined borrowing was the better, more cost-effective way to obtain the funds.

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Icahn says he doesn’t consider his buyback push and the subsequent payouts an indictment of Cook, who has been at Apple’s helm since Steve Jobs died in 2011. “Tim Cook is doing a good job with the business,” Icahn told me back in 2013. “I think he’s good at running the business whether he does what I want or not. I’m not against the management of this company….They’ve just got too much money on their balance sheet,” he said. “But Apple is not a bank.” It’s a statement that has more truth and resonance than even Icahn, the original wolf of Wall Street, might imagine. True, Apple isn’t a bank—at least not in name. But in many ways, it acts just like one.

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There are thousands of examples that one could cite, but here’s a particularly telling one: Less than a year after Apple introduced the iPod, the company’s stock began to fall steadily.33 That was because the product that would kick-start the greatest corporate turnaround in history initially disappointed, selling under 400,000 units in its debut year. Thankfully, Steve Jobs didn’t give a fig. He stuck with the idea, and today more than 1.9 billion Apple devices have been sold. Whether Tim Cook’s Apple will be remembered in the same way is still an open question, since despite the enormous dividends, Cook’s strategy has been very much of the downsize-and-distribute kind, in which profits are handed out to investors to allay concerns over the company’s lagging stock price.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

The information was also compiled from conversations with Podolny when he was at Yale, interviews, firsthand experience, and written accounts, including: Jessica Guynn, “Steve Jobs’ Virtual DNA to Be Fostered in Apple University,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-oct-06-la-fi-apple-university-20111006-story.html; Brian X. Chen, “Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples-internal-training-program-.html; Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works (New York: Business Plus, 2012).

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As a scholar of status in organizations, now Podolny was tipped as a future university president himself. But in 2008, after just three years at Yale, Podolny abruptly resigned to reframe his own career. Steve Jobs had quietly courted Joel Podolny. Faced with the return of his cancer and the need to set Apple up to prosper without him, he convinced Podolny to join the company. Jobs wanted his legacy to be a team of executives who could “think different,” in the words of the company’s iconic advertising campaign. He hired Podolny to be the head of Apple University, where he needed to instill the importance of mental flexibility and of holding convictions but being ready to relinquish them for new perspectives.

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There is a risk, however, that just because someone has reframed successfully, they believe they can do it again and again. There can be a vainglory attached to reframers, who wear their achievement like a golden crown and reapply the new frame where it does not fit. The best innovators are aware of this and work to minimize it. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google all enjoyed reputations for stubbornness but at the same time actively sought out alternative views that contradicted their own. They understood the shortcoming of relying on a single frame and the value of being exposed to alternative ones. One of the most notorious examples of a successful reframer becoming too attached to a frame is Albert Einstein.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

The first batch of two hundred Apple I computers was assembled by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’s famous garage in Los Altos in 1976. Production didn’t stray far for a few years. During the 1980s, Apple was manufacturing most of its Macs in a factory in Fremont, California. But in 1992 Apple shut down the factory and shifted production first to cheaper parts of California and Colorado, then to Ireland and Singapore. All other American companies followed the model. As James Fallows once put it, “Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba.

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Two of the jobs created by the multiplier effect are professional jobs—doctors and lawyers—while the other three benefit workers in nonprofessional occupations—waiters and store clerks. Take Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech. (Incidentally, Apple is among Tim James’s clients: when Steve Jobs died, James was commissioned to make the family’s condolence book.) In essence, in Silicon Valley, high-tech jobs are the cause of local prosperity, and the doctors, lawyers, roofers, and yoga teachers are the effect.

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It is a mix of color science, computer science, and mathematics. He starts with equations and ends up with the amazingly colorful stories that have made Pixar the industry leader. Pixar’s creative genes run deep. The studio was founded by the iconic Star Wars director George Lucas and then acquired by Apple’s Steve Jobs and later by Disney. Since the beginning, the company’s identity has been an intense dialogue between art and technology. At first the technological side was dominant. In its early years, Pixar was mostly a computer hardware company. Its Pixar Image Computer was designed to perform graphic design for hospitals and medical research facilities, but at $135,000 it was too expensive to become successful.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice
by Julian Guthrie
Published 31 Mar 2014

“Stick to radiators.” 5 Woodside, California Early Spring 2000 “I’M TALKING ABOUT GREATNESS, about taking a lever to the world and moving it,” Larry said, walking the grounds of his new Woodside property with his best friend Steve Jobs. “I’m not talking about moral perfection. I’m talking about people who changed the world the most during their lifetime.” Jobs, who had returned to Apple three years earlier, enjoyed the conversational volleying and placed Leonardo da Vinci and Gandhi as his top choices, with Gandhi in the lead. Leonardo, a great artist and inventor, lived in violent times and was a designer of tanks, battlements, ramparts, and an assortment of other military tools and castle fortifications.

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Chris is coming back to lead this team. He’s an exceptionally good tactician, and we need a good tactician. I know he’s intense. He’s also disciplined and decisive. He is the best sailor on this team. You can’t vote our best sailor off the team.” Sidelining Dickson, Larry said, was like the time in the 1980s when the Apple board replaced Steve Jobs with John Sculley. “How dumb was that?” Erkelens could see the level of dissension and unhappiness. It certainly wasn’t the Braveheart freedom speech Larry probably wanted, inspring his troops to pick up their swords and prepare for battle. Then another sailor raised his hand and said, “I thought we were here to have fun.”

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—Kirkus Reviews “From the opening scene in this book—and scene is the appropriate word for its cinematic beginning—the reader is swept along on heart-thumping rides on swift, dueling sailboats, past an assemblage of characters worthy of Dreiser, past the shoals of deceit worthy of Dickens, and coming to rest on the formidable character of billionaire Larry Ellison, who has the will-to-win of his best friend, Steve Jobs, and of a mechanic, who made winning possible. Julian Guthrie writes as if with a magic wand, holding the reader spellbound.” —Ken Auletta “Surely the most comprehensive book ever written about an America’s Cup challenge, The Billionaire and the Mechanic will surely be must reading for any yacht-racing aficionado.”

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

In 2001, Napster had already disrupted the music business, and there was no safe, easy, legitimate way to buy music online. While Apple’s Steve Jobs set out to recruit music companies and artists to offer their songs for sale on iTunes, Sony announced it would go forward with a proprietary format called Pressplay. Apple announced a rival technology called FairPlay. Both Pressplay and FairPlay protected the digital rights of any song bought online. But there was a critical difference. Sony’s Pressplay would only play authorized, protected files, but Apple’s FairPlay would protect files bought in their store, and also play any file in a user’s existing library. This made Apple’s platform more valuable, because users did not have to start from scratch to build a music library.

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In a recent interview, Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer and former Xerox PARC researcher, told Malcolm Gladwell: “They just could not seem to see that they were in the information business… Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.” Apple founder Steve Jobs paid a visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. He was inspired. Xerox PARC engineer Larry Tesler reported to Gladwell: “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time. He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’” Jobs went back to Apple, and the rest is history. Xerox may have learned its lesson. Today, the company is focused on moving from being a copier company to a services company.

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As resources accumulate, this constellation of capabilities and goals begins to coalesce into a working model, and possibly a new and innovative offering. The bottom line is that entrepreneurs focus on things that are within their direct control and try to make things happen. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. We have a tradition of making heroes out of entrepreneurs: people like Richard Branson of Virgin Media, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. And indeed, they are amazing people. But they can also be intimidating. The deification of entrepreneurs can lead to a feeling of helplessness, the idea that we as individuals aren’t smart enough or visionary enough to pull it off. But the powerful message here is that anyone can be an entrepreneur.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

The list of Xerox's inventions is extraordinary: the graphical user interface, computer-generated bitmap images, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors, object-oriented programming, Ethernet cables, and workstations for DARPAnet.54 Yet the company did little with these innovations. It took Steve Jobs and Apple to license them and bring products to the public. Likewise, AT&T and RCA were extremely innovative companies, but other companies ultimately developed their key technologies, such as the transistor. AT&T and RCA stuck to phones and radio, and became the antithesis of originality.55 There is a reason why big companies are so bad at implementing new ideas. Steve Jobs rarely recommended books, but he liked The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. His 1997 book was embraced by Silicon Valley and called one of the six best business books ever by The Economist.56 Christensen's theory was that because successful companies cannot disrupt themselves; they leave themselves vulnerable to competition from upstarts because they abandon the lower end of the market.

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We often think in the U.S. that people or companies create success, but what Silicon Valley shows us is that often it's communities of people across a region.”3 If Noyce thought Shockley was God in the early 1950s, Steve Jobs idolized Noyce in the 1970s. When Apple was starting, Noyce was already a legend with Intel. “Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Jobs said. “He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continued, “You can't really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”4 Although Jobs worshipped Noyce, he failed to give his own Apple employees the same freedoms that allowed Noyce's best innovations to flourish. In 2014 it came to light that Jobs had been preventing employees from moving to other companies.

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Mike McPhate, “California Today: Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce,” May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/california-today-silicon-valley.html. 4. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2011/1212/Robert-Noyce-Why-Steve-Jobs-idolized-Noyce. 5. Jim Edwards, “Emails from Google's Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin Show a Shady Agreement Not to Hire Apple Workers,” March 23, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3. 6. Barry Levine, “4 Tech Companies Are Paying a $325M Fine for Their Illegal Non-compete Pact,” May 23, 2014, https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-paying-a-325m-fine-for-their-illegal-non-compete-pact/. 7.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

Totic and Montulli joined OSAF as volunteers around the same time that Kapor began to hire for other jobs, filling out the organization’s roster as it moved into the spotlight. The team was heavy with Apple alumni, who perhaps found in Kapor’s vision an echo of Steve Jobs’s change-the-world fervor. Taking on the job of Chandler’s product manager was Chi-Chao Lam, a veteran but still boyish Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had worked at Kaleida Labs, the ill-fated mid-1990s joint venture between IBM and Apple, then founded a pioneering Web-based advertising network. Pieter Hartsook, a longtime Macintosh trade journalist and industry analyst, signed on to handle OSAF’s marketing and PR.

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Mitch Kapor had always figured that the organization would depend on both paid employees and altruistic volunteers, and in Andy Hertzfeld it already had one high-profile example of the latter. The flurry of OSAF news coverage that followed Gillmor’s column filled Kapor’s inbox with encouragement and offers of help. Steve Jobs called Kapor—it was the two men’s first conversation in a decade—inviting the OSAF team down to Apple to talk about how they might collaborate. Kapor took special note when Lou Montulli’s name turned up in the signature of an email to OSAF’s just-opened “dev” mailing list—a message suggesting that OSAF look again at Mozilla’s toolkit for building its user interface.

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With Denman preparing for a paternity leave, OSAF brought in Bryan Stearns, an experienced programmer who had worked with Denman two decades before on the original Macintosh team, and Stearns took over the detail view. Alec Flett, a longtime Netscape developer who had taken some time off programming to work as a school-teacher, and Grant Baillie, a veteran of Steve Jobs’s Next who most recently had worked at Apple on its email program, joined in January. The new faces represented reinforcements for the long haul, but in the short term they each had to take some time to figure Chandler out. Brooks’s Law had not been repealed. Chandler was now 1.5 million lines of code, most of which had been incorporated from other projects like wxWidgets and Twisted.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

Adobe Flash Player is a browser app that delivers Internet content to users, including audio/video playback and real-time game play. Flash could have been used by app developers on Apple’s iPhone operating system—but Apple prevented this by making its iOS incompatible with Flash and insisting that developers use similar tools created by Apple itself. Developers and users responded with dismay, and some observers called the policy an anti-competitive gambit that might be subject to governmental sanction under antitrust regulations. The furor grew so heated that, in 2010, Apple’s Steve Jobs felt compelled to defend the policy in an open letter—a highly unusual step for a CEO to take.

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Ironically, while Microsoft stopped retail sales of XP in 2008 and of Vista in 2010, XP’s market share in 2015 was above 12 percent, while that of Vista was below 2 percent.10 By contrast, when Steve Jobs returned to the leadership of Apple in 1997 after his years developing the ambitious but unsuccessful NeXT computer, he made a crucial decision that honored the end-to-end principle and helped lead to Apple’s subsequent success. At NeXT, Jobs and his team had developed an elegant new operating system with a clean, layered architecture and a beautiful graphical interface. Now, planning a successor to Apple’s Mac OS 9 operating system, Jobs faced a hard choice: he could merge the NeXT and Mac OS 9 software code, thereby producing an operating system that would be compatible with both systems, or he could jettison Mac OS 9 in favor of NeXT’s clean architecture.

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Inevitably, the market came crashing down. Beginning in March 2000, trillions of dollars’ worth of paper valuations vanished in a matter of months. Yet amid the rubble, certain companies survived. While Webvan and Pets.com disappeared, Amazon and eBay survived and thrived. Steve Jobs, who had lost Apple to mistakes he made earlier, recovered, returned to Apple, and built it into a juggernaut. Eventually, the online world emerged from the depths of the 2000 downturn to become stronger than ever. Why were some Internet-based businesses successful while others were not? Were the differences a matter of random luck, or were deeper design principles at work?

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Feb 2019

“It was interesting,” Julie summarized, “but it certainly didn’t seem like this was something on which we would spend any real amount of time.” Three years later, Apple released the iPhone, sparking the mobile revolution. What many forget, however, was that the original “revolution” promised by this device was also much more modest than the impact it eventually created. In our current moment, smartphones have reshaped people’s experience of the world by providing an always-present connection to a humming matrix of chatter and distraction. In January 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone during his famous Macworld keynote, the vision was much less grandiose. One of the major selling points of the original iPhone was that it integrated your iPod with your cell phone, preventing you from having to carry around two separate devices in your pockets.

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As Grignon then explained to me, Steve Jobs was initially dismissive of the idea that the iPhone would become more of a general-purpose mobile computer running a variety of different third-party applications. “The second we allow some knucklehead programmer to write some code that crashes it,” Jobs once told Grignon, “that will be when they want to call 911.” When the iPhone first shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner—and this was absolutely fine with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their first smartphone during this period.

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Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 18. “The mass of men lead lives”: Thoreau, Walden, 4. They honestly think: Thoreau, Walden, 5. CHAPTER 1: A LOPSIDED ARMS RACE “It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made!”: “Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation (HD),” YouTube video, 51:18, recorded January 9, 2007, posted by Jonathan Turetta, May 13, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ. “The killer app is making calls”: “Steve Jobs iPhone 2007.” “This was supposed to be an iPod”: Andy Grignon, phone interview by the author, September 7, 2017. “a moment can feel”: Laurence Scott, The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (New York: W.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph
by Ryan Holiday
Published 30 Apr 2014

To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work.

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Because you’re never going to find that kind of perfection. Instead, do the best with what you’ve got. Not that pragmatism is inherently at odds with idealism or pushing the ball forward. The first iPhone was revolutionary, but it still shipped without a copy-and-paste feature or a handful of other features Apple would have liked to have included. Steve Jobs, the supposed perfectionist, knew that at some point, you have to compromise. What mattered was that you got it done and it worked. Start thinking like a radical pragmatist: still ambitious, aggressive, and rooted in ideals, but also imminently practical and guided by the possible.

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—JAMES ALTUCHER, investor and author of Choose Yourself “If there’s such a thing as a cargo-pocket handbook for Jedi knights, this is it. Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way decants in concentrated form the timeless techniques for self-mastery as employed to world-conquering effect by philosophers and men of action from Alexander the Great to Marcus Aurelius to Steve Jobs. Follow these precepts and you will revolutionize your life. As Mr. Holiday writes, ‘It’s simple, it’s just not easy.’ Read this book!” —STEVEN PRESSFIELD, author of The War of Art and Gates of Fire “Beautifully crafted. Anyone who wants to be better should read this.” —KAMAL RAVIKANT author of Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It and Live Your Truth “Inspired by Marcus Aurelius and concepts of Stoicism, Ryan Holiday has written a brilliant and engaging book, well beyond his years, teaching us how to deal with life’s adversities and to turn negatives into positives.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

“They tell us we’re cute, we have a cute little lifestyle business,” Fried says. “Our employees have longer tenure with the company. Our people are happier. They spend time with their families. They get to enjoy the summer months. People tell me, ‘Steve Jobs could not have made Apple if he took Fridays off.’ Well, I’m not trying to make Apple. And I don’t care what Steve Jobs did.” In 2017, Fried and Hansson got into a prolonged Twitter debate with Keith Rabois, a well-known venture capitalist and minor Silicon Valley oligarch who insists workaholism is the only way to be successful. (To refresh your memory, Rabois is the guy who got in trouble at Stanford for shouting homophobic slurs.

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“Power to the people” was the slogan of 1960s, and it was also the motto of the people who led the personal computer revolution in the 1970s. Instead of sharing a mainframe, which was controlled by Big Brother, everyone could have their own computer. This was an incredibly radical idea, with huge implications for society. Wozniak and his Apple co-founder Steve Jobs were long-haired hippie-hackers who built their first personal computers as members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pack of amateur kit-computer hobbyists. Wozniak was steeped in the people-first “HP Way.” Jobs was an LSD-taking, commune-dwelling hippie who often went barefoot and who was influenced by Stewart Brand, a proponent of psychedelic drugs who hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

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Previously, the kings of tech were the wizards who invented new products and built companies, like Hewlett and Packard, or Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Jobs and Wozniak at Apple. But now the power brokers include venture capitalists—like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Ventures. They don’t actually run tech companies. They’re just investors. Nevertheless, their profession is depicted as glamorous, and they rank among the biggest celebrities in Silicon Valley. Wired once lionized Andreessen on its cover, calling him “The Man Who Makes the Future.” Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs; they want to be the next Marc Andreessen.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

NOTES PROLOGUE: NEVER GET HIGH OR YOUR OWN SUPPLY At an Apple event: John D. Sutter and Doug Gross, “Apple Unveils the ‘Magical’ iPad,” CNN, January 28, 2010, www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/27/apple.tablet/. Video of the event: EverySteveJobsVideo, “Steve Jobs Introduces Original iPad—Apple Special Event,” December 30, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN-5zmvjAo. In late 2010, Jobs: This section of views from tech experts comes from: Nick Bilton, “Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent,” New York Times, September 11, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-was-a-low-tech-parent.html. Many experts both: These snippets come from interviews with, among others, game designers Bennett Foddy and Frank Lantz, exercise addiction experts Leslie Sim and Katherine Schreiber, and reSTART Internet addiction clinic founder Cosette Rae.

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Social Interaction PART 3 THE FUTURE OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (AND SOME SOLUTIONS) 10. Nipping Addictions at Birth 11. Habits and Architecture 12. Gamification Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply At an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad: What this device does is extraordinary . . . It offers the best way to browse the web; way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone . . . It’s an incredible experience . . . It’s phenomenal for mail; it’s a dream to type on. For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games, and navigate thousands of apps.

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Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, bought hundreds of books for his two young sons, but refused to give them an iPad. And Lesley Gold, the founder of an analytics company, imposed a strict no-screen-time-during-the-week rule on her kids. She softened her stance only when they needed computers for schoolwork. Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes?

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston
Published 22 Aug 2023

He showed Bricklin and Frankston what he considered to be the front runners: a Commodore PET, a Radio Shack TRS-80, and an Apple II. The last of these Fylstra had bought directly from Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s founding partners, and quite aside from the machine’s technical merits, he was convinced that Apple was destined for greater things. Accordingly, Bricklin borrowed Fylstra’s square, beige Apple II and set to work on a new prototype.22 It was on that Apple II that Bricklin’s electronic spreadsheet came to life—and where his wildest ideas went to die. Out went the heads-up display and in came the Apple’s monochrome monitor. Out went the mouse and in came the Apple’s “game paddle,” a kind of primitive joystick for playing games like Pong.

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Its disappearance as an artifact worthy of note has been so complete that it is difficult to say with any certainty, but the sheer pace of technological change may well have had something to do with it. During the 1970s, electronics, computing, and software were evolving so rapidly that the calculator was caught up in a jumble of cause and effect. For a flavor of that foment, consider that Apple’s co-founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, met at HP during that company’s push into calculators. The Steves’ early microcomputers, the Apple and Apple II, helped spark the home-computer revolution, which in turn gave Dan Bricklin the opportunity to perfect the first computerized spreadsheet. Mitch Kapor, who had worked for Bricklin’s publisher, stole the spreadsheet crown with his own program, Lotus 1-2-3, and with it gave the IBM PC one of its first killer apps.

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Then, in 1959, Fairchild’s Robert Noyce combined two breakthroughs—an improvement in chip fabrication pioneered by his colleague Jean Hoerni, and his own novel process* for depositing electrical circuits directly onto silicon chips—to transform the integrated chip from a hand-soldered curiosity to a mass-produced commodity.6 The Japanese semiconductor industry leaned heavily on Noyce’s “planar” technique, and Sasaki’s own rise at Sharp owed much to his licensing of it.7 “Rocket” Sasaki was a formidable figure in his own right.8 He had persuaded Rockwell, an American semiconductor firm, to gamble on a new type of low-power, high-density microchip and had negotiated an exclusive contract to buy Rockwell’s production of such chips.9 These metal-oxide semiconductor large-scale integrated chips—MOS LSI, for short—powered Sharp’s handheld QT-8D and QT-8B calculators and helped make them persuasive alternatives to Canon’s Pocketronic.10 Sasaki would go on to become a doyen of Japan’s electronics industry, with both Apple’s Steve Jobs and Masayoshi Son of Japan’s giant SoftBank conglomerate happy to call him a mentor.11 For now, though, Sasaki had bad news for his guests. Sharp’s deal with Rockwell forbade the Japanese company from buying chips from anyone else, even the one and only Robert Noyce.12 But perhaps Sasaki could help in another way.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of reengineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation. They chose to invent new businesses rather than reengineer old ones, they adapted and improvised endlessly and they carried employees and customers along with them on a wave of enthusiasm. Direct approaches make a distinction between means and ends that often does not exist in reality.

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The attempt to define the quality of artistic endeavor by predetermined rules had the effect—and the intention—of freezing creative innovation. In consequence, little work of enduring merit emerged.14 What is true of art is also true of other areas of human endeavor. What made Henry Ford or Walt Disney or Steve Jobs great businessmen was that they modified the rules by which their success, and the success of others in their industry, were measured. They changed our appreciation of what is good and bad in personal transport, in children’s entertainment, and in computing. They sold us products we had not imagined.

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No one will be buried with the epitaph “He maximized shareholder value,” not just because the objective is an unworthy intermediate goal rather than a high-level objective but because, even with hindsight, no one can tell whether the goal of maximum shareholder value was achieved. If shareholder value was indeed maximized at ICI or Boeing, it was maximized obliquely. The epitaph on men such as Henry Ford, or Bill Allen, or Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs reads instead: “He built a great business, which made money for shareholders, gave rewarding employment and stimulated the development of suppliers and distributors by meeting customers’ needs that they had not known they had before these men developed products to satisfy them.” Approaching high-level objectives in an oblique manner, they achieved many supporting goals.

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon?
by Robert X. Cringely
Published 1 Jun 2014

They just forgot about the content.” Steve Jobs had this exactly right when he said this in 1995, just two years after Gerstner came aboard to save IBM. The IPod and ITunes marked a Apple’s business started by people throughout Apple asking questions like “Why?” Apple was selling lots of iMac’s with CD burners. Why? People were ripping a lot of music. They were creating mixes of music, burning them on CDs for their personal CD players. Back in the 1990s portable music players were modestly popular items (especially the SONY Walkman) but they didn’t work very well. By asking a lot of questions Apple came up with the idea of the IPod and ITunes, a success that altered forever three industries—music, consumer electronics, and computers.

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Why IBM Can’t Change: What is IBM’s current answer to the question “Why?”? They don’t have an answer. They haven’t had one for decades. What would Steve Jobs say about IBM? Steve was hardly an ideal boss himself, but there’s no denying he knew how to effect corporate change in a way that kept Apple ahead of market trends and grew the company’s market cap by more than 500 times (50,000 percent!) during his tenure as CEO. I spoke with Steve about IBM in my film Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview and he put it in a very useful context for this chapter: “If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox—so you make a better copier or a better computer, so what?

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It gets people to talk. It gets them to share ideas. It leads to brainstorming. When the collective intelligence of the employees of a company is focused on a problem or an idea, powerful things can happen. This has not happened in IBM for years. In the years that followed my video interview with Steve Jobs in 1995, IBM’s Global Services division became the cash engine of the corporation. But when other companies got into the IT outsourcing business IBM began to face serious competition. For a few years IBM resisted change, and tried to sell the IBM name and reputation. In a competitive market PRICE SELLS.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

When we think about the economy, for example, we’re conventionally plied with statistics—potential demographic shifts or changing interest rates—that invariably affect the business cycle. Alternatively, we seek out individual stories—how Steve Jobs managed to lead Apple to the top of the tech heap, for example—and ask how they apply to the broader economy. From these two strategies, we try to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how the economy works. And in some cases that strategy works. But without a sense of what’s happening in the middle, we’re often left without the whole picture. Was Apple’s success the result of Jobs’s legendary understanding of consumer desires or of the fact that Apple’s engineers and marketing departments were so thoroughly integrated into the design process?

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Man’s knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton’s theory of gravity changed mankind’s outlook on the world.6 The same process applies to the great inventions of the last few years—even though we may be inclined to give credit to the apparent genius of one person. The iPhone didn’t emerge sui generis out of Steve Jobs’s head. No team at Apple could have invented such a device in 1975, if only because the constituent ideas that merged to place a graphically integrated handheld device into the adjacent possible hadn’t yet been invented.

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Americans now celebrate, more than nearly anything else, an individual’s capacity to resist the pressure to put on airs. You might be poor or lonely; you may have lost your job or your marriage. But what’s important is that you not lose yourself. That’s reflected in the personalities who have become our role models: Steve Jobs for steering Apple in its own direction; Paul Farmer for taking the road less traveled in Haiti; Aung San Suu Kyi for standing up to dictators in Burma. Our heroes remain steadfast in what they believe despite overwhelming pressure to change or back down. That’s why the struggle to “be yourself” resonates with television audiences.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

Force #1: Saved Time In “The Original Macintosh,” a collection of online anecdotes about the creation of that fabled machine, Apple computer scientist Andy Hertzfeld recounted a typical Steve Jobs story. It’s typical, because, in this story, like in so many others, Jobs was frustrated. The issue was speed. The first Mac was supposed to be a very fast computer. And it was, at least on paper. Built around Motorola’s 68000 microprocessor, the system was actually ten times faster than the Apple II. But it had limited RAM, making it necessary to upload extra info via floppy discs. And this was especially true during startup—which would occasionally drag on for minutes.

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Because of the convergence of high bandwidth 5G connections, augmented reality eyewear, our emerging trillion-sensors economy, and, to stitch it all together, powerful AI, we have gained the ability to superimpose digital information atop physical environments—freeing advertising from the tyranny of the screen. Imagine stepping into a future Apple Store. When you approach the iPhone display, a full-sized AR avatar of Steve Jobs materializes. He wants to give you a tour of the product’s latest features. Avatar Jobs is a little too much, so with nothing more than a voice command, he’s replaced with floating text—and a list of phone features hovers in the air in front of you. After you’ve made your selection, eschewing the iPhone for a new pair of AR iGlasses, another voice command is all it takes to execute a smart contract.

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Musk delivered this promise at the end of an hour-long keynote to five thousand aerospace executives and government officials. The presentation was primarily an update about SpaceX’s megarocket, Starship, which was designed to take humans to Mars. The fact that Musk now wanted to use his interplanetary starship for terrestrial passenger delivery was the transportation industry equivalent of Steve Jobs’s famous line that (almost) ended his demos: “Wait, wait… There’s one more thing.” The Starship travels at 17,500 mph. It’s an order of magnitude faster than the Concorde. Think about what this actually means: New York to Shanghai in thirty-nine minutes. London to Dubai in twenty-nine minutes.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

Soon, DJI will be moving to a new headquarters that reflects the ambitions of its founder, Frank Wang, a press-shy product genius who was inspired by Steve Jobs’ dictum: design the product first and see how the market responds. DJI’s new flashy home in Shenzhen is a futuristic twin skyscraper designed by Foster & Partners, the same architect as for Apple’s orbit-like base in Cupertino. The plush building features cantilevered floors, a sky bridge where drones will be tested, and even a robot-fighting ring. The Apple of Drones DJI has positioned itself as the Apple of drones. Rumors have popped up that Apple would buy DJI as the iPhone maker mulls an entry into the drone market.

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CHAPTER 3 ________________ GAINING FAST: CHINA’S NEXT TECH TITANS The next group of up-and-comers is right behind China’s BAT and leading the future for smartphones that rival Apple, internet-connected smart homes, superapps for speedy on-demand takeout lunches, plus 15-second video thrills and AI-fed news. XIAOMI: The Apple of the East Chinese tech entrepreneur Lei Jun is sometimes called the Steve Jobs of Apple. An entrepreneur celebrity in China much as Jobs was in Silicon Valley, he launched China’s smartphone maker Xiaomi in the spirit of Jobs and copied his products and style down to blue jeans and black T-shirt attire and stage presentations for new iPhones and iPads, even once teasing an introduction with the adopted line “Just one more thing.”

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But in the span of little more than a decade since I wrote Silicon Dragon,1 which was the first chronicle of China’s emerging Silicon Valley, the world’s second-largest economy and its expanding tech empire can no longer be underestimated. Today, young people in China looking for role models think of Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma (founders of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, respectively) more than they do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs of Apple. High-tech China is inventing the next new thing at a rapid clip in frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, biotech, green energy, robotics, and superfast mobile communications. China also is angling to get ahead in fifth-generation wireless standards, which is being compared in impact to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.2 Large sweeps of the Chinese economy—transportation, commerce, finance, health care, entertainment, and communications—are being reimagined and reshaped by China’s assertive effort to forge ahead by leveraging technology.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
by Stephen Witt
Published 15 Jun 2015

Although the group behind Ogg denied infringing on Brandenburg’s patents, with a few careful words Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers, and the format sunk into obscurity. The second was Apple. Like Brandenburg, Steve Jobs disapproved of file-sharing, and was seeking to create a legal paid alternative. He was building a music application called iTunes, whose calm, white interface and slick, expensive iconography promised to cleanse the world of sin. The design flaws of Winamp would be swept away, the file-sharers of Napster would be given moral instruction in the virtues of paid distribution, and—Apple’s representatives were insistent on this point—the mp3 format would be abandoned. Jobs wanted everyone to use AAC.

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The brain trust was replaced by Jean-Bernard Lévy, a respected, sober-minded businessman tasked with stopping the bleeding. Needing an immediate influx of cash, Lévy organized the sale of Vivendi’s water utility and environmental engineering assets, and began looking for other things of value to sell. Word got around. In 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made an unsolicited bid to take Universal off of Vivendi’s hands. He wanted their back catalog. He wanted his own music label. Most of all he wanted Morris. Morris was interested, but the decision wasn’t his to make. Vivendi rebuffed the offer. Even with their creditors demanding liquidity, and even with music industry revenues beginning to decline sharply, they saw UMG and Morris as key, irreplaceable assets.

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In fact, Morris’ aggregate return on invested capital during the first decade of the 2000s was splendid, and when you added it all up, B still looked a lot better than A. No one at the other major labels could say the same. Perhaps it was for this reason that, as word began to spread of his upcoming force-out, Steve Jobs began to call more frequently. Soon there was an offer on the table. Leave Vivendi, said Jobs. Come to Apple. We’ll start our own iTunes imprint. We’ll go after artists aggressively, and you’ll run the greatest music label the world has ever seen. Jobs was looking to rewrite the economics of the business from a blank slate. Historically, recording industry deals were determined by major labels bidding against one another for the right to represent the artists.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

In works like Collaborative Circles and Powers of Two, researchers have shown how genius is rarely solitary: John Lennon and Paul McCartney relied on each other to compose timeless Beatles hits; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque used their brushes side by side to create Cubism; biologists James Watson and Francis Crick worked intensely together to discover the double helix and DNA. Tech is no different. Apple is famously associated with Steve Jobs, but, in its early days, the computer company wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the other Steve—Jobs’s partner and programming virtuoso Steve Wozniak. The same is true with Google. The Stanford graduate supervisor of Larry Page and Sergey Brin has remarked on the near total mind-meld of the search engine founders. And a garage in Palo Alto, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley and now an official California state landmark, did not belong to a lone inventor but to two men: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who founded HP.

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Since the 1930s, this special strip of California has produced entrepreneurs whose work has in turn inspired other entrepreneurs to push technology forward. These include a young Steve Jobs who, when asked why he spent so much time hangingaround the semiconductor pioneers of the 1960s, spoke reverently of their magic. “[I] wanted to smell that second wonderful era of the valley, the semiconductor companies leading into the computer. You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before,” the Apple founder told the historian Leslie Berlin. Bitcoin must also be understood by what came before and, in particular, a group of technologists known as cypherpunks.

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But in true Silicon Valley fashion, Brian thought it best to think big, and he had Coinbase’s board behind him. However, first he would have to inspire Coinbase’s own employees. Giant and far-flung business visions are usually associated with Valley and tech CEOs who have outsize personalities. Steve Jobs is the archetype. Even as the late Apple CEO introduced some of the most profoundly disruptive technology the world has ever seen, he nourished a cult of personality with his distinct appearance and a stage presence worthy of P. T. Barnum. Elon Musk, who runs both the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, likes to share extravagant plans for living on Mars and building high-speed tunnels between US cities.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

Bob Borchers was the Senior Director of iPhone Product Marketing370 at Apple during the iPhone’s development and when it launched. Bob was in the original iPhone tutorial video on the Apple website when the iPhone was launched. What was remarkable about that video was not so much that it was an iPhone tutorial, or that it featured Bob, but that it was not starring Steve Jobs. Apple is famous in the industry for hiding most of the personalities in the company behind very closed doors. Only select people are anointed to be the face that represents the company. At that time, it was (of course) mostly Steve Jobs. A friend who worked there explained it to me.

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But Be’s impact on computing platforms is huge, if for no other reason than that it collected, either as employees or as avid users and developers, so many of the people who later went on to form Android.21 Be was a late entrant to the desktop computing wars, coming along in the early 1990s with a new OS that attempted to compete with the entrenched Microsoft and Apple desktop systems. It didn’t fare well. Be tried various things along the way. They sold their own computer hardware (the BeBox). They ported BeOS to PC and Mac hardware and attempted selling the OS. They were almost acquired by Apple (in fact, they got an offer, but while Be’s CEO was stalling as a negotiating ploy, Steve Jobs swooped in and convinced Apple to buy his company, NeXT Computer, instead). In 1999, they went through an underwhelming initial public offering (IPO).22 Then in 2000, when nobody was buying Be’s hardware or OS, the company tried what the team called a “Focus Shift,” building an OS for an Internet appliance device, which people also didn’t buy.

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A very simple example is that the sum of all integers up to some given integer x can be solved by adding x to the sum of all integers up to (x –1). Recursion is a powerful technique, but can be tricky to think through, and to ensure that it will actually terminate. 130 Taligent was a company formed by Apple and IBM with the goal of providing a new operating system, at a time when Apple was trying to come up with a successor to the aging MacOS. Taligent eventually failed and Apple continued its attempts internally before eventually acquiring Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer and adopting NeXTSTEP OS instead. 131 Continuous Integration, or CI, is the practice in software development of integrating all of a team’s changes as often as possible for building and testing.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

There was no need to save money using thin concrete walls. The Steve Jobs Building, named after Jobs’s death, is crafted of steel and glass, wood and brick, and Jobs obsessed over every detail. (It is easy to forget that the building also had an architect: Peter Bohlin, who designed the Apple stores.) Huge, beautiful steels were chosen after Jobs had pored over samples from across the country and selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas. He insisted that the girders were bolted rather than welded.4 And like all good designers, Steve Jobs cared about function as well as form. “Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” says Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president.

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Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (London: Bantam, 2014), chap. 2. 3. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 486. 4. Ibid., pp. 430–432. 5. The first Ed Catmull quotation is from Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 430. The second is from Catmull with Wallace, Creativity, Inc., p. ix. 6. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 430–432. 7. Julie Jargon, “Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club: Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain; Getting Mr. Scovie to Go Through His Boxes,” The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122505999892670159. 8.

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They added old-fashioned shutters and windows; they erected pitched roofs over the flat ones; they put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls, and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences. Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. • • • Steve Jobs, one suspects, would not have approved of the gnomes. Jobs, like Le Corbusier, loved simplicity and clean modern lines—although unlike Le Corbusier, Steve Jobs had a gift for making things that people loved. Jobs is most famous for his work on computers, phones, and tablets, galvanizing outstanding designers for three decades to produce some of the most beautifully crafted technology in the world.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

• • • THE BIG TECH COMPANIES didn’t just benefit from the economic collapse of knowledge. They maneuvered to shred the value of knowledge, so that old media would come to helplessly depend on their platforms. There was a precedent for this strategy. When Apple created the iPod, it created a device with the capacity to hold thousands of digitized songs—ideal for amassing pirated music, which was flowing freely at that moment. Steve Jobs could have easily designed the iPod to make it inhospitable to stolen music. But he initially refused to build the iPod so that it would block unlicensed content. At the same time Jobs’s device enabled piracy, Jobs himself decried digital thievery.

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“This was a way to be of use to communes without actually having to live on one,” he would later joke. His truck never quite took off, but the core concept morphed into something much bigger and more resonant. He created the Whole Earth Catalog, which was really more like an entirely new literary genre—or what Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation.” During its four years of existence, the Whole Earth Catalog sold 2.5 million copies and won a National Book Award. The subtitle of the catalog was “access to tools.” There were plenty described in its pages, though it didn’t actually sell any, except from a storefront that Brand operated in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley.

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The engineers had indeed begun to develop machines that were a decade ahead of their time, and too radical for the corporate suits at Xerox to fully comprehend. Their most legendary prototype was a computer with many of the elements that would later appear in the Macintosh—no coincidence, because Steve Jobs was enraptured by the innovations he witnessed in a highly mythologized visit to PARC in the winter of 1979. But what made Brand’s article so influential is that he took the impulses of the engineers and translated them into pithy phrases—and these pithy phrases, in turn, gave direction to the work of the engineers.

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing
by Rachel Plotnick
Published 24 Sep 2018

Parker, “Buttons, Simplicity, and Natural Interfaces,” Loading ...2, no. 2 (2008). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/33/. 52. Russell Brandom, “Death of the Button,” Kempt, September 30, 2009, http://www.getkempt.com/gadgetry/the-death-of-the-button.php. 53. Jennifer Hoar, “Apple’s Steve Jobs Hates Buttons,” CBS News, July 25, 2007. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/apples-steve-jobs-hates-buttons/. 54. Adam Clark Estes, “Steve Jobs Didn’t Want Apple Devices to Have an Off Switch,” Wire, October 24, 2011, http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/10/isaacson-jobs-60-minutes-interview/44028/. 55. P. Jackson and J. Lethem, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 499. 56. 

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The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009. Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. New York: Knopf, 1986. Hoadley, G. L. “Home Electrics.” New Science and Invention in Pictures 9, no. 1 (1921): 67. Hoar, Jennifer. “Apple’s Steve Jobs Hates Buttons.” CBS News, July 25, 2007. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/apples-steve-jobs-hates-buttons/. Holden, Edward S. Real Things in Nature: A Reading Book of Science for American Boys and Girls. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Holden, Edward S. The Sciences: A Reading Book for Children. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1903. Hool, George A.

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However, designers and usability experts have begun to slowly acknowledge users’ difficulties with these buttons, with some vocal observers contesting the definition of a “push button” in the digital age. They suggest moving away from button designs altogether, which they view as “sadly inflexible” and “not natural” because they restrict users’ interactions to two conditions or spur more confusion than desired.51 Some have even proclaimed a “death” of push buttons on the near horizon.52 Apple’s Steve Jobs famously derided physical buttons, with the popular press once declaring that Jobs’ trademark button-less turtlenecks and iPhones and mice free of hardware buttons stemmed from an alleged “pathological fear and loathing of buttons.”53 Jobs once described his distaste for mechanical buttons as having to do with a psychological discomfort about the on-off binary that buttons present.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

As then, the sudden liberation of industrial technology inspires exuberant imagination and some sweeping predictions (including here). The leaders of the Maker Movement echo the fervor of Steve Jobs, who saw in the personal computer not just the opportunity to start a company but also a force that would change the world. But don’t forget: he was right. Indeed, Jobs himself was inspired by his Maker upbringing. Writing in Wired,12 Steven Levy explained the connection, which led to the original Apple II in 1977: His dad, Paul—a machinist who had never completed high school—had set aside a section of his workbench for Steve, and taught him how to build things, disassemble them, and put them together.

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“It gave a tremendous sense of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment,” he told [an] interviewer. Later, when Jobs and his Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak, were members of the Homebrew Computer Club, they saw the potential of desktop tools—in this case the personal computer—to change not just people’s lives, but also the world. In this, they were inspired by Stewart Brand, who had emerged from the psychedelic culture of the 1960s to work with the early Silicon Valley visionaries to promote technology as a form of “computer liberation,” which would free both the minds and the talents of people in a way that drugs had not. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes Brand’s role in the origins of what is today the Maker Movement: Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with The Whole Earth Catalog.

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Then, in 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter, the first real desktop laser printer, which, along with the Mac, started the desktop publishing phenomenon. It was a jaw-dropping moment, combining in the public imagination words that had never gone together before: “desktop” and “publishing”! Famously, Apple’s printer had more processing power than the Mac itself, which was necessary to interpret the Postscript page description language that was originally designed for commercial printers costing ten times as much. But Steve Jobs wanted the Mac desktop publishing suite not just to match the quality of commercial printers, but to exceed them. Desktop tools could be better than traditional industrial tools, he believed, and he started by cutting no corners.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

—and get excited and show other people and say, ‘Look, this is easy, you just put this command in and you do this.’” Here was this high school kid, running programs on this little computer Wozniak had built. Steve Jobs’ reaction was more pragmatic—he hired Chris Espinosa as one of the company’s first employees. Like the other teen-age software specialist, Randy Wigginton, he would earn three dollars an hour. Steve Jobs was concentrating full-time on building up the Apple company to get ready to deliver the Apple II the following year and make a big splash in the marketplace. Jobs was a brilliant talker who, according to Alan Baum, “worked his tail off . . . he told me about the prices he was getting for parts, and they were favorable to the prices HP was paying.”

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Woz and his friends were preparing a different kind of computer than the previous bestsellers, the Altair, Sol, and IMSAI. Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula felt that the Apple’s market went well beyond hobbyists, and to make the machine look friendlier. Jobs hired an industrial designer to construct a sleek, low-profile plastic case in a warm beige earth color. He made sure that Woz’s layout would be appealing once the lid of the case was lifted. The Apple bus, like the S-100 bus, was capable of accepting extra circuit boards to make it do interesting things, but Woz had taken some advice from his friend Alan Baum and made it so that the eight “expansion slots” inside the Apple were especially easy for manufacturers to make compatible circuit boards for.

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Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder, and Woz published the routines for his 6502 “monitor,” which enabled you to look into memory and see what instructions were stored, in magazines like Dr. Dobbs. The Apple ad even said, “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.” While the selling was going on, Steve Wozniak began working on an expanded design of the board, something that would impress his Homebrew peers even more. Steve Jobs had plans to sell many computers based on this new design, and he started getting financing, support, and professional help for the day the product would be ready. The new version of Steve Wozniak’s computer would be called the Apple II, and at the time no one suspected that it would become the most important computer in history

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

In fact, we’re so used to this competitive edge that we think it will always be this way. But what if it isn’t? In 2007, when Steve Jobs upended the mobile phone market by introducing the iPhone, Nokia’s market valuation was $110 billion, $6 billion more than Apple. A dozen years later, Apple’s valuation had grown nearly 80 percent, and Nokia’s was down more than two-thirds. With China charging ahead and other autocracies close behind, what if the United States is on the verge of becoming the Nokia to China’s Apple? From Beijing to Moscow to Tehran, our adversaries are now developing—or in some cases have already developed—new digital weapons of war that will revolutionize their ability to do us harm.

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Still fewer likely dwell on where so many of these supply chains lead. More often than not, the answer is the warehouses and factory floors of China. A few decades ago, many tech companies did manufacture their devices in the United States. Apple’s Steve Jobs boasted that the early Macintosh was “a machine that is made in America.”33 At the turn of the twenty-first century, iMacs were still being produced in Elk Grove, California, only a couple hours’ drive from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.34 Times have changed. Manufacturing as a share of American gross domestic product has dropped to its lowest level in more than seventy years.35 Over the past four decades, more than seven million American manufacturing jobs were lost36—over a third of the entire manufacturing workforce—including five million just since 2000.37 Onetime American hardware giants like Lucent, Motorola, and General Electric have disappeared or seen their global dominance eroded.

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Workers aged twenty-two to forty-four make up 61 percent of the American information technology workforce, compared to less than 49 percent of the overall workforce.43 At Apple, the median employee is—by tech standards—a comparatively mature thirty-one. At Google, the age is thirty. Facebook’s average employee is twenty-eight years old.44 “Is 27 the Tech World’s New Middle Age?” read one Fast Company headline.45 This cult of youth is reflected in the legends built around Silicon Valley’s iconic founders. Mark Zuckerberg, a decade and a half after he dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, is still just thirty-six years old—and looks even younger. Bill Gates wasn’t even old enough to drink legally when he founded Microsoft at age nineteen. Steve Jobs launched Apple at twenty-one.

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
by John Seabrook
Published 4 Oct 2015

Who would have imagined, as one label head put it, that “your enemy could become your friend”? One factor in the evolution of the labels’ thinking was Apple, which had proved to be an unsatisfactory business partner. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory of sales revenues; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Music had been an important part of Apple’s business when Steve Jobs first negotiated the iTunes licenses, back in 2002—the music helped sell the iPod.

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Neither service would license to the other one, which crippled them both. With the sense of urgency mounting, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, stepped into the breach with a cool proposal—the iTunes music store. Roger Ames, head of Warner Music Group, saw Jobs’s presentation as the future. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. One by one, his fellow leaders signed on to Jobs’s plan. Finally, Jobs went to see Doug Morris himself, and won the record man over with his charm. “When I met Steve, I thought he was our savior,” Morris told writer Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs. Morris called Jimmy Iovine at Interscope to get his impression.

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As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.” Lundin says, “Denniz was an arrangement genius.” He adds, “like Steve Jobs, he knew what to take out. ‘You can get rid of that, that. Keep it simple.’ ” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Some of the new crop of hyped-up companies may eventually turn into Cheshire cats, disappearing and leaving behind only the grins of those who got out before the bubble burst.24 CHAPTER 5 Darkness Rises Before he died, Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he intended to devote his remaining time on earth to annihilating Google’s Android phone system, which he believed that Eric Schmidt—a man he’d invited to sit on his board, and whom he considered to be a close friend—had wantonly copied from Apple’s iPhone. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”1 He didn’t get the chance, obviously, though he certainly tried, filing one patent infringement lawsuit after another, to no avail.

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When it happens in Silicon Valley, however, it typically also means that one or both companies are trying to prevent their top talent from absconding to a competitor—and taking their proprietary information, ideas, and secrets along with them. In 2011, court documents revealed that in 2007, after Steve Jobs called Google to complain that a recruiter was trying to hire one of his people, Schmidt wrote an email to HR saying, “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple….Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly.”37 While at Google, Schmidt instituted a “Do Not Call” list of companies that could not be tapped for talent, something that was legally dicey, since it basically undermined the ability of individuals to look for work.

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Rob Copeland and Eliot Brown, “Palantir Has a $20 Billion Valuation and a Bigger Problem: It Keeps Losing Money,” The Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018. 23. Foroohar, “Money, Money, Money.” 24. Rana Foroohar, “Another Tech Bubble Could Be About to Burst,” Financial Times, January 27, 2019. Chapter 5: Darkness Rises 1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 2. Dan Levine, “Apple, Google Settle Smartphone Patent Litigation,” Reuters, May 16, 2014. 3. Shanthi Rexaline, “10 Years of Android: How the Operating System Reached 86% Market Share,” MSN News, September 25, 2018. 4. Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017. 5.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

That was the question that popped into my head as I read Cory Doctorow’s impassioned anti-iPad diatribe at Boing Boing. The device that Apple calls “magical” and “revolutionary” is, to Doctorow, a counterrevolutionary contraption conjured up through the black magic of the evil wizards at One Infinite Loop. The locked-down, self-contained design of the iPad—nary a USB port in sight, and don’t even think about loading an app that hasn’t been blessed by Steve Jobs—manifests “a palpable contempt for the owner,” writes Doctorow. You can’t fiddle with the damn thing. The original Apple II came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. . . .

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In this view, the attention economy of the digital realm does not operate separately from the cash economy of the real world. The attention economy is just a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy. Many share in the work, few in the profit. STEVE’S DEVICES January 10, 2007 IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE the pleasure Steve Jobs must get from singlehandedly upstaging the entire Consumer Electronics Show. When he introduced Apple’s “revolutionary mobile phone” at Macworld in San Francisco yesterday—the gadget is called (surprise!) iPhone—the euphoric press coverage drowned out everything happening in Vegas. There was just one moment during Jobs’s slick two-hour presentation when he went off script, but it was a telling one.

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The rest of us are free to gain admission by purchasing a ticket for $500, but we’re required to remain in our seats at all times while the show is in progress. User-generated content? Hah! We’re not even allowed to change the freaking battery. In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet. Which is, of course, why the iPhone, like the iPod, is an exquisite device. Steve Jobs is not interested in amateur productions. TWITTER DOT DASH March 18, 2007 AND SO AT LAST, after passing through Email and Instant Messaging and Texting, we arrive in the land of Twitter. The birds are singing in the trees—they look like that robin at the end of Blue Velvet—and the air is so clean you can see yourself in it.

Ego Is the Enemy
by Ryan Holiday
Published 13 Jun 2016

It is not a path to great things. Take Steve Jobs. He was 100 percent responsible for his firing from Apple. Due to his later success, Apple’s decision to fire him seems like an example of poor leadership, but he was, at the time, unmanageable. His ego was unequivocally out of control. If you were John Sculley and CEO of Apple, you’d have fired that version of Steve Jobs too—and been right to do so. Now Steve Jobs’s response to his firing was understandable. He cried. He fought. When he lost, he sold all but a single share of his stock in Apple and swore never to think of the place again.

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A few days after being fired by the American Apparel board of directors, Dov Charney called me at 3 A.M. He was alternately despondent and angry—genuinely believing himself to be totally blameless for his situation. I asked him, “Dov, what are you going to do? Are you going to pull a Steve Jobs and start a new company? Are you going to make a comeback?” He got quiet and said to me with an earnestness I could feel through the phone and in my bones, “Ryan, Steve Jobs died.” To him, in this addled state, this failure, this blow was somehow the same as death. That was one of the last times we ever spoke. I watched with horror in the months that followed as he wreaked havoc on the company he had put everything into building.

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What we find when we study these individuals is that they were grounded, circumspect, and unflinchingly real. Not that any of them were wholly without ego. But they knew how to suppress it, channel it, subsume it when it counted. They were great yet humble. Wait, but so-and-so had a huge ego and was successful. But what about Steve Jobs? What about Kanye West? We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers. But no one is truly successful because they are delusional, self-absorbed, or disconnected. Even if these traits are correlated or associated with certain well-known individuals, so are a few others: addiction, abuse (of themselves and others), depression, mania.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

Uber’s method of identifying fraudsters made use of digital surveillance techniques common to Silicon Valley’s largest companies. That practice ran against some of Apple’s long-espoused principles, specifically an individual’s right to privacy. Steve Jobs had valued consumer privacy, but his successor, Tim Cook, was a fanatic. He believed Apple’s users should have complete control of their private digital lives. And if an Apple customer decided to wipe their iPhone clean of data, no one else—individuals, family members, companies, law enforcement—should be able to find a trace of that data on the device afterwards.

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Cue strode into the room, followed by a few of his lieutenants from the App Store. Flanking Cue was Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing. Since 1997, Schiller had worked for Apple reporting directly to Steve Jobs. Under Jobs, Schiller promoted the revamped iMac in 1998, an egg-shaped blast of color that came in bright orange, lime green, deep turquoise, and other colors. He promoted the iPod in all of its various iterations, helping to create a record-breaking hit. The two Apple execs, both in their early fifties, had a combined net worth in the hundreds of millions. Cue hammered Kalanick from the start.

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The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer. With the rise of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Snapchat, venture capitalists looked everywhere to fund the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Evan Spiegel—the newest brilliant mind who sought, in the words of Steve Jobs, to “make a dent in the universe.” And as more money flowed into the Valley from outside investors—from hedge funds and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and Hollywood celebrities—the balance of power shifted from those who held the purse strings to the founders who brought the bright ideas and willingness to execute them.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design
by Giles Colborne
Published 14 Sep 2010

If I can summarize the main points without leaving out important details, then I know I’ve made it complete. For the Flip camera, the description is ”take and share video.” For a newspaper home page, it’s ”a summary of the most important events right now.” Even a complicated device like the iPhone can be described by its core components: Steve Jobs introduced it as ”a widescreen iPod…, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.” When I’ve done that, I make sure I set some constraints on the actions to focus me on making them as simple as possible. So for the Flip, that would be ”take video instantly and share it effortlessly.”

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Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop…. But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.” —Steve Jobs (quoted in Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything by Steven Levy) As Luke Wroblewski, former Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!, says, ”Your first design may seem like a solution, but it is usually just an early definition of the problem you are trying to solve.”

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In my experience, roughly the first third of any project is spent trying to figure out what’s really important. It’s a nerve-wracking time, as complexity seems to spiral and there’s no solution in sight. Sticking with it is the first and most important step in achieving simplicity. Don’t rush into design. Understanding what’s core takes time. vision Download from WoweBook.com . —Steve Jobs Download from WoweBook.com Share it In 2002, Alan Colville was a product manager at Telewest, a British cable TV company. He’d been charged with upgrading the set top box software, a job that touched on every part of the company’s workforce, from software developers to call centers. As he described it: People at the company were pretty cynical about new projects and change was seen as a bad thing.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

Years earlier, it had struck a deal with Apple to preload YouTube’s app on every iPhone (outside of China), which practically guaranteed YouTube millions of eyeballs. In exchange, Apple took a small cut of YouTube sales and, since the deal occurred under Steve Jobs, a design obsessive, Apple dictated the design of YouTube’s iPhone app. (Jobs died in 2011.) YouTube staff felt that Apple didn’t add new app features YouTube wanted fast enough, or sometimes ignored them entirely, and with internet usage quickly shifting to phones, YouTube worried about being at the mercy of Apple’s whims. Kamangar’s troops lobbied him to ask Apple to relinquish the out-of-the-box iPhone slot for control of the app, betting that consumers would download YouTube all on their own.

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With Facebook and iPhones ascending, Page worried that Google might be headed down the same path. He read books on successful, innovative CEOs. He visited Steve Jobs, Apple’s ailing founder, who told him Google’s strategy was “all over the map.” Google had to “put more wood behind fewer arrows,” is how Page put it to underlings. He nixed dozens of projects and invested in priorities, like his prized mobile unit, Android. Once ruled by committee, Google would now be ruled more like Apple. Page’s aphorisms, Larry-isms, were enshrined. Everyone should be “uncomfortably excited,” should possess “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

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Harper was one of YouTube’s “coolhunters”—a team tasked with curating videos that appeared on YouTube.com and keeping their fingers on the site’s pulse. Right before joining Google, YouTube had cut a deal with Verizon Wireless to put its video player on select mobile phones; app stores weren’t yet a thing. The carrier wanted a handpicked selection, not the site’s normal free-for-all. Apple wanted the same thing for its new device, the iPhone; during a meeting, Steve Jobs had scolded the YouTube crew, “Your videos are shit.” So YouTube hired another alum from the music service Rhapsody, Mia Quagliarello, as an editorial director. She recruited Joseph Smith, or Big Joe, as everyone called him, a graveyard-shift video screener who posted his own YouTube clips and was remarkably adept at spotting budding viral hits before they exploded in popularity.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

In late 2011 Apple had 60,400 direct employees, Google had 31,353 employees around the world, and Facebook had a mere 3,000. Even Apple, a manufacturing company, hasn’t done all that much to promote employment growth. As Timothy Noah wrote in the New Republic after the death of Steve Jobs, “His surname to the contrary, he did not create a lot of American jobs.” Noah cited data from the University of California Irvine Personal Computing Industry Center, which showed “the number of people worldwide involved in making and selling Apple’s iPod (which includes Apple employees and non-Apple employees) totaled a mere 41,170.

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The beauty of the Internet, from an economic perspective, is not that it created jobs for those who built it, but that it functions as a powerful platform on which all sorts of new businesses, and ways of doing business, can be rolled out. A lot of the value of these companies derives from what they allow other consumers and businesses to do. Apple’s well-told story—the comeback of Steve Jobs, the iMac, and then the iterations of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad—is perhaps the best ever case study in corporate turnaround and reinvention. The ability to create new economic ecosystems lies at the root of the tale. Apple launched the iTunes Store in April 2003 with a single product: songs selling for 99 cents. In seven years the iTunes ecosystem has evolved into a business far larger than the 10 billion songs that have been downloaded and has extended to audiobooks, movies, ringtones, apps, and e-books.

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Data on Airbnb’s growth, size, and fundraising was taken from press release at the company’s media site: http://www.airbnb.com/home/press. Chapter 13. Supersize Nation: Scale, Scope, and Systems 1. Data on the number of Apple, Google, and Facebook employees come from the companies’ SEC filings. See also Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod,” http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2011/Innovation JobCreationiPod.pdf. Timothy Noah’s comments can be seen at http://www.tnr.com/blog/timothy-noah/95877/steve-jobs-job-creator. 2. Data on Amazon.com’s revenues can be seen at http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2011/06/30/why-us-companies-arent-so-american-anymore; information on LivingSocial and HomeAway’s expansion can be found at the companies’ websites; Lynn Cowan, “HomeAway IPO Opens at 34% after Pricing Well,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2011, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/homeaway-ipo-opens-up-34-after-pricing-well-2011-06-29. 3.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

Jassy, who shadowed Bezos: Max Nisen, “Jeff Bezos Runs the Most Intense Mentorship Program in Tech,” Business Insider, October 17, 2013. If someone isn’t prepared: Stone, The Everything Store, 177. A few years later he left Amazon: Sarah Nassauer, “Wal-Mart to Acquire Jet.com for $3.3 Billion in Cash, Stock,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2016. Apple’s Steve Jobs was famous: Ira Flatow interview with Walter Isaacson, “ ‘Steve Jobs’: Profiling an Ingenious Perfectionist,” Talk of the Nation, NPR, November 11, 2011. In 2015, the New York Times ran a long piece: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015.

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It’s now a direct competitor with Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music. As Steve Boom, the vice president of Amazon Music, told The Verge: “I see us as one of the top global streaming services. I expect us to grow faster than everybody else.” And wouldn’t it be nice, thought Bezos, if his company could make ordering products, listening to Amazon Music, and watching Amazon Video easier for its customers. That led to the introduction in 2014 of the Amazon Echo with its AI voice assistant, Alexa. The Echo has sparked nothing less than the biggest shift in personal computing and communications since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. The Echo uses artificial intelligence to listen to human queries, scan millions of words in an Internet-connected database, and provide answers from the profound to the mundane.

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With his S-team, the signal that Bezos seems to be sending to the world is that if something were to happen to him or if he retired (although no one believes that will happen anytime soon), Amazon has a deep bench of all-pro players who could step in and drive the company. Of course, it is unclear whether any of these talented executives have the vision, intuition, and genius of a Jeff Bezos. His leaving would doubtless be a negative for the company in the same way that Apple is still struggling to find its creative way after the death of Steve Jobs. That said, the message being sent to Wall Street—and bought into by some stock analysts—is that Amazon and its AI flywheel will keep rolling ahead even without Bezos. The amount of trust Bezos has in his S-team allows him to delegate tremendous amounts of autonomy to these executives and helps explain why Bezos has been able to manage a multi-industry business as large and complex as Amazon.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

How could a company, universally acclaimed for unmatched product elegance, make such an unmitigated gaffe? Some pointed to a bitter and public divorce between Apple and Google. Steve Jobs had considered Google Android to be a direct rip-off of Apple’s iOS operating system. Could Apple Maps have simply been a crudely devised and poorly executed act of revenge against a powerful former ally? We think not. In our view, Apple made a huge mistake, but it was strategically motivated and not part of a petty Silicon Valley vendetta. Although Google and Apple historically had lots of good reasons to be allies, they were destined to become the rivals they now are.

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Some years will pass before people look back and try to understand how they ever could have lived without such a device. Scoble tells audiences it’s like seeing the first Apple IIs as they rolled off the assembly line in 1977: They were like nothing people had seen before, but you couldn’t do much with them. Decision makers at HP and Atari weren’t interested in cutting a deal with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for rights to market their new computer—the new, highly personalized devices were obviously too radically different to sell in significant quantity. Yet, it turned out a lot of people wanted them and the Apple II kicked off a 20-year explosion of invention and productivity that we now remember as the PC revolution.

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Newton today is remembered as Apple’s most titanic flop. It makes the more recent Maps gaffe seem like a mere speed bump. The device, named for the man who discovered gravity, almost took Apple down. Steve Jobs, of course, returned to Apple, and in less than a decade took it from near-death to become the world’s most valuable company. Arguably, his defining moment was the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. What people barely noticed was that Newton’s core technologies were used in the iPhone, and the device was in fact a greatly refined PDA. A lot happened between the death of the Newton and the rise of the iPhone: ten more years of Moore’s Law making technology more powerful, smaller and less expensive; ten more years of Metcalfe’s networks growing exponentially.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

John Torode started an airplane company, Vashon Aircraft, at seventy. Billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, who spent ten years in college and worked as a ski instructor, founded energy drink maker Redbull at forty. And let’s not forget the greatest innovator of recent times: Steve Jobs. While not technically a late bloomer, his unparalleled second act, in which he launched the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad at Apple, came after he was forty-five. Can you imagine getting your big break in Hollywood at fifty-two? That’s what happened to Morgan Freeman. After years of toiling in community theater and small stage productions, he broke through in Driving Miss Daisy, with eighty-one-year-old Jessica Tandy—who, by the way, received her first Academy Award nomination for the film.

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Her acceptance into prestigious Stanford University was accompanied by a President’s Scholar award and a stipend for a research project of her choosing. Her summer job upon completing her freshman year at Stanford was at the Singapore Genome Institute. At eighteen, she applied for her first patent, a wearable drug-delivery patch. Exceptionally gifted, Holmes was also exceptionally driven. Her business hero was Steve Jobs, the prodigy who cofounded Apple and later led it to glory. She quickly adopted Jobs’s tropes and mannerisms. She wore black turtlenecks. She steepled her hands. Her slow-blinking stare, it was said, could bore holes through your eye sockets. She also took on Jobs’s less admirable traits. She ran Theranos like a police state, obsessed with preventing employees from talking about their work with each other.

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I swung my flashlight around for the source and soon found it—a Rottweiler in the lumberyard next door. Then it hit me. The security guard in the lumberyard next door was not another person, but a dog. The implication was sobering. I was twenty-five years old, a Stanford graduate. In a few months, Steve Jobs, also twenty-five, would take Apple public, change the computer industry, and become fabulously rich. I, on the other hand, was poor and stuck, and my professional colleague was a dog. That was me at twenty-five. Then everything changed for me. At twenty-six, my brain woke up—yes, it felt like that—and I managed to win a job as a technical writer at a research institute.

Wall Street Meat
by Andy Kessler
Published 17 Mar 2003

First thing the next morning, we were up and at ’em, and off to an analyst meeting for Apple Computer. Arriving a few minutes early, we put our stuff down on seats in the back row of what was a rather small room. Within a few minutes, an entourage from Apple walked in and began mingling in the room. John Sculley, the ex-CEO of Pepsi whom Apple founder Steve Jobs had hired to turn around Apple, came over and talked to Bob and me. “Hi, I’m Bob Cornell and this is Andy Kessler.” I think we chatted about the stock market and Apple’s stock being down as well as IBM’s new PC AT machines. When the meeting started, John Sculley went over Apple’s outlook, their new products and financials.

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Bob shot me a smirk before asking in that deep booming voice out of his small body, “John, can you tell me about the management line-up at Apple?” Sculley looked a little agitated, then launched into a speech 16 Right 51% of the Time about some recent problems and turf wars in the company between various groups, and how he was brought in to run the company. He ended with the bombshell “I’ve got to run this company as I see fit and I need to lead this company and therefore, there is no place in Apple Computer for Steve Jobs.” That brought a hush to the crowd. There were a few more questions about future product direction and licensing the Mac operating system, which John Sculley deflected to Jean-Louis Gassee, who was the head of such things at Apple.

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There were a few more questions about future product direction and licensing the Mac operating system, which John Sculley deflected to Jean-Louis Gassee, who was the head of such things at Apple. Feigning ignorance of their strategy and even the English language, the Frenchman didn’t answer any questions. The meeting broke up, but management stuck around. Although I wanted to ask Monsieur Gassee about product issues, such as what chips they used, he stood in a corner, shrugging his shoulders, doing his best Inspector Clouseau imitation, repeating “I dieu nut kneeaauuww.” Sculley’s “no place for Steve Jobs” line was on the front page of every paper the next morning. Bob and I went to see several other companies, as well as to an Intel analyst meeting.

Game Over Press Start to Continue
by David Sheff and Andy Eddy
Published 1 Jan 1993

When Bushnell did, he clashed with the Warner management on most issues. He says he wanted Atari’s new computer, the 800, to blow the inferior Apple II out of the water (partly as revenge, after he passed up on the opportunity to be a founding partner in Apple). However, while Steve Jobs was encouraging developers to write programs for the Apple II, Atari threatened to sue anyone who tried to make software for the 800. If customers wanted a spreadsheet or word processor for the 800, they had to buy Atari’s. Meanwhile, outside developers came out with software for the Apple II—VisiCalc spreadsheet, for one—that sold millions of the machines. Bushnell also disagreed with Warner’s handling of the videogame business.

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He named it “Pong,” after the sonar-like “pongs” that sounded each time the ball made contact with the paddle. In the fall of 1972, Bushnell placed “Pong,” the first commercial video-arcade game, with a coin box bolted to the outside, in Andy Capp’s tavern, a popular Sunnyvale pool bar that holds a place in Silicon Valley lore rivaled only by the garage in which Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer. Set beside a pinball machine, “Pong” was an oddity, a dark wood cabinet that held a black-and-white TV screen on which cavorted a white blip like a shooting star in a black sky. One of the bar’s patrons stood over the machine, examining it. “Avoid missing ball for high score,” read the only line of instructions.

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Uemura modestly says that the plan worked so well because “we were lucky.” But Genyo Takeda, a friend of Uemura, says, “He was so much an amateur that when Yamauchi told him to make this thing, he didn’t know that it could not be done.” There were more practical and aesthetic decisions along the way. Steve Jobs’s obsession to design the perfect mouse for the original Macintosh was no greater than Yamauchi’s attention to the details of the controllers. Should there be one or two or more buttons? Should the system’s casing have round or square edges? What color should the system be—a computer-like gray or beige, or a more playful color?

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

There are plenty of stalls in Shanghai or Shenzhen where you can find alleged Rolex wristwatches complete with impressive-looking authenticating holograms that crumble the first time you try the winding mechanism. There are what look something like Apple iPods but which are not produced in the Shenzhen factory that assembles those sold by the company Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started in 1976. More worrying for Apple was the way in which Samsung was able to replicate not just the iPhone but also the iPad. Apple claimed that they are copyright infringements, rather than fakes. For a designer, authenticity has taken on a paradoxical aspect. An authentic design might be understood as a design which is more than merely not a fake.

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The ubiquity of the car has tended to innoculate us to its significance, but we do not have to consider a car as a piece of art to understand the huge impact it has had on the world. It is, for better or worse, the peak of the industrial culture that gave birth to the practice of modern design. Yet its power is waning. The Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford, who was no more comfortable a personality than Steve Jobs, used to be the model of the modern corporation, with its company towns, its own orchestra, its own company uniform. Apple and Google have supplanted Ford and IBM as the model corporations that others seek to emulate. And while there are now companies around the globe who have managed to make cars more profitably, and more effectively, than Ford, they are essentially in the business of refining a mature product that may have a limited future.

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But we still simply don’t really know enough to understand the balance between the resources consumed by disposability and the resources saved by the versatility of appliances rendered immaterial by digitalization. In the 1960s, the critic Reyner Banham, the pop artists and the architect Peter Cook dreamed of an utterly guilt-free, liberated disposable future, unmonumental and unmaterialistic. It is just possible that Apple and Steve Jobs have given it to us. A new generation of what we still call video games allows enthusiasts to wallow in blood-splattered gore, but they are also a way for those with gentler interests to listen to music, to communicate, to explore the texture of the city. And in their complex modelling of space, architecture and urban form, they require of their creators both the literary and dramatic imagination of a scriptwriter and also the spatial perspective of an architect.

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
by David Robertson and Bill Breen
Published 24 Jun 2013

Having seen how some of the business world’s most popular strategies for unleashing innovation almost destroyed their company, the LEGO Group’s leaders instead built a clear framework for guiding every kind of innovation effort, from improving today’s offerings to inventing tomorrow’s markets. The LEGO system for managing innovation also stands in stark contrast to Apple’s (or at least to the way that Apple’s is portrayed in the business press). Where Apple’s innovation management system was built around the brilliant but often difficult Steve Jobs, with Jobs the final arbiter of when a product was good enough to take to market, the LEGO system is far more decentralized. The Apple model, while inspiring, is hard to follow: find a peerless innovator, promote him to the top of the company, and give him the power to make the big decisions.

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As for the designers, they gradually discovered they were more creative with a smaller inventory. Though the idea runs counter to the notion that great design requires maximum freedom, LEGO designers found that the tighter range of components gave them even more definition and sufficient direction to come up with successful ideas. Apple’s designers made a similar discovery when Steve Jobs insisted that the iPhone needed only a single, minimalist control button. Jobs’ obsession with simplicity forced his designers to overcome complexity and innovate with less, which resulted in one of the past decade’s most iconic designs. Concluded Knudstorp: “Innovation flourishes when the space available for it is limited.

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.§ Rejecting many more ideas than he accepted, Godtfred kept the number of different LEGO shapes and colors in check during the first twenty years of the brick’s existence. His laserlike focus on doing just a few things extraordinarily well—such as designing solely for the brick—foreshadowed a key leadership lesson from another serial innovator, Steve Jobs, who famously quipped, “Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”5 Knowing what to leave out—even when it’s really good—can sometimes deliver far better results. Take, for example, the LEGO Universal Building Set of 1977. The set consisted of just a few dozen shapes in only seven colors. Even so, its simplicity and utility made it a bestseller.

Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM
by Paul Carroll
Published 19 Sep 1994

By 1985, W ren had left the PC applications business in frustration. H er replacem ent decided it was unprofitable and killed it. W ith problem s mounting, Estridge was losing his sense of humor. Among other times, he blew when he saw an Apple C om puter poster that showed Kapor, Bill Gates, and F red Gibbons of Software Publish­ ing saying innocuously nice things about Apple’s new Macintosh in early 1984. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had come up with a cute idea, putting the three up on the stage at a gathering in Hawaii to introduce the Mac to his employees. (As it happened, Estridge was staying at the hotel on vacation and bum ped into Jobs in the lobby.

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The value of an outside perspective can’t be overestimated, espe­ cially in the com puter business, where the technology changes so fast that letting a m anagem ent problem fester for even six months can leave a company with a line of products a whole generation behind competitors. W hen Apple ran into trouble in the mid-1980s, cofounder Steve Jobs might have run it into the ground if not for venture capitalist Mike Markkula. Markkula, a com puter industry veteran, knew enough to figure out quickly what the problems were and still owned enough of the company that he had the incentive to move fast, even if it meant hurting his friend Jobs. Markkula leaned on Apple’s new president, John Sculley, to do something about Jobs in 1985, and Apple recovered quickly. W hen H ewlett-Packard ran into milder problems in the early 1990s, cofounder David Packard suddenly reappeared on the scene, w andering the halls to figure out what the problems were and helping right the company.

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Overseas, the main Japanese companies prospered, but IBM em bar­ rassed most of its European com petitors— ICL in England, Bull in France, Olivetti in Italy. In the PC business, IBM blew by pioneer Tandy, which eventually quit the market, and almost put wordprocessing giant W ang out of business. Upstarts like Kaypro shot into view but faded nearly as fast. Even Apple, so totally identified with the personal com puter, ran into trouble so fast that cofounder Steve Jobs was shown the door. By the late 1980s, IBM executives would talk and talk and talk about how m uch they’d changed. But the will to change was long gone. The problem s showed up most startlingly in software, where IBM made a big share of its profits and considered itself to be the world leader in technology but w here Microsoft, a company that consisted of only a handful of kids in 1980, snatched the PC market from IBM.

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

Still, there’s a subtler, more pervasive kind of institutional narcissism that creeps into the members of the company itself, and that can, over time, lead not just to arrogance but to the collapse or at least corrosion of the very qualities the group celebrates in itself. Steve Jobs was famous for his lack of concern for what consumers were thinking at the same time he was making them products they couldn’t resist. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” the late Apple chief said. Some of that was true: A decade ago you probably couldn’t have envisioned the iPad, but once you saw one you’d practically kill to own it. But that same institutional arrogance led Jobs and Apple to make we-know-better choices that hurt them in the long run: sealing the iPhone and iPod case so that batteries couldn’t be replaced, requiring customers to use AT&T exclusively in the first few years of the iPhone’s release, force-feeding users the much-reviled first version of the Apple Maps app and deleting Google’s far better one when they upgraded.

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But that same institutional arrogance led Jobs and Apple to make we-know-better choices that hurt them in the long run: sealing the iPhone and iPod case so that batteries couldn’t be replaced, requiring customers to use AT&T exclusively in the first few years of the iPhone’s release, force-feeding users the much-reviled first version of the Apple Maps app and deleting Google’s far better one when they upgraded. A federal court’s 2013 ruling that Apple was guilty of fixing prices on e-books only weakened Apple’s hand and strengthened Amazon’s in a ferociously competitive market—a blunder that a humbler company might not have committed. Said Lawrence Buterman, a Department of Justice lawyer, after the ruling, “Apple told publishers that Apple—and only Apple—could get prices up in their industry.” Later Apple—and pretty much only Apple, among the makers of e-readers—paid the penalty for that.

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Dwight Eisenhower led the Allies to victory during World War II, and for that he was rightly celebrated. But if you don’t think he quietly enjoyed wearing an explosively beribboned uniform and a title like Supreme Allied Commander, you don’t know much about human nature. It is the same confidence—sometimes arrogance—that has allowed inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk to press on in improbable ventures against extraordinary odds and create things that improve the world in big and meaningful ways, even if they make few friends doing it. Still, the heroic narcissist, the ingenious narcissist, the courageous narcissist are not the most common breeds.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

See also “The Square People, Part Two,” New York Times, May 17, 2014. 2 Edward Luce, “America Must Dump Its Disrupters in 2014,” Financial Times, December 22, 2014. 3 Nick Cohen, “Beware the Lure of Mark Zuckerberg’s Cool Capitalism,” Observer, March 30, 2013. 4 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2008). 5 For more on Apple, Steve Jobs, and Foxconn, see my TechCrunchTV interview with Mike Daisey, who starred in the Broadway hit The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: “Apple and Foxconn, TechCrunchTV, February 1, 2011. 6 Lyn Stuart Parramore, “What Does Apple Really Owe Taxpayers? A Lot, Actually,” Reuters, June 18, 2013. 7 Jo Confino, “How Technology Has Stopped Evolution and Is Destroying the World,” Guardian, July 11, 2013. 8 Alexis C.

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Silicon Valley is transforming itself into a medieval tableau—a jarring landscape of dreadfully impoverished and high-crime communities like East Palo Alto, littered with unemployed people on food stamps, interspersed with fantastically wealthy and entirely self-reliant tech-cities designed by world-famous architects such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,82 is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.83 Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.” Elon Musk should take note.

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It’s a sixties nostalgia fantasy hosted by space cadets like Birch who appear to have seceded from both time and space. To borrow some of Apple’s most familiar marketing language, everybody now is supposed to “think different.” Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy in a world where the supposedly most different kind of thinkers—those who have escaped their traditional silo—are branded as the new rock stars. The only convention is to be unconventional and work for uncompanies, join unclubs, or attend unconferences. But today’s technology hipsters aren’t quite as cool as they imagine. Steve Jobs, the founding father of Silicon Valley’s “reality distortion field” and the original tech hipster, who idolized Bob Dylan and spent a summer in an ashram, also outsourced the manufacturing of Apple products in Foxconn’s notorious 430,000-person Shenzhen factory.5 And Jobs ran an astonishingly profitable company that, according to the US senator Carl Levin, has been cleverly avoiding paying the American government a million dollars of tax revenue per hour.6 Rather than “Think Different,” “Think Irresponsibly” might have been the mantra of the Apple accountants who organized this unethical and possibly even illegal scheme to avoid paying American tax.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

If we also consider that over 800 million mobile phones are sold every year, which will all be able to receive music, and study the growth of new technologies and their application in the last century, the industry should be confident.” The jury is still out on Jenner's solution, but EMI and Universal became the first major labels to begin selling MP3s without DRM encryption in 2007. That February, Apple's Steve Jobs made a plea to all the record companies to abolish DRM completely, saying it was “clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.” John Kennedy, the CEO of the IFPI (the International Federation of Phonograph Industries), summed up the music industry's new position on the Pirate's Dilemma it faced: “At long last the threat has become the opportunity.”

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Andrew Orlowski, “Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead—Peter Jenner,” The Register, November 3, 2006. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/03/peter_jenner/. Peter Jenner, As quoted in Beyond the Soundbytes, The MusicTank Report (Executive Summary) (London: MusicTank, August 2006). Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Music,” Apple.com, February 6, 2007. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/. Richard Hillesley, “Internet Killed the Video Star?” Tuxdeluxe.org, April 27, 2007. http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/170. Adrian Bowyer, interview by author, June 10, 2006. Stephanie Dunnewind, “Teachers are reaching out to students with a new class of blogs,” Seattle Times, October 14, 2006. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003303937_teachblog14.html.

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This power shift changes the way we think about our business, industry, and our viewers. We have to build our businesses around their behavior and their interests,” she said. “All of us have to continually renew our business in order to renew our brands because audiences have the upper hand and show no sign of giving it back.” Steve Jobs of Apple backed up Disney's sentiment, telling Newsweek, “If you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it.” Trolling Deep If suing customers for consuming pirate copies becomes central to a company or industry's business model, then the truth is that that company or industry no longer has a competitive business model.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou
Published 13 Apr 2015

Advertising Age named it the 1980s Commercial of the Decade, and it continues to rank high on lists of the most influential commercials of all time. 7 Afterwards, Apple’s internal team calculated the amount of free airtime that the commercial garnered. They estimated that the total value was about $150 million worth of derived airtime. Within three months of the commercial’s appearance, Apple would sell $155 million worth of Macintoshes, establishing itself as the revolutionary computer company on the block. The second extraordinarily successful Apple marketing campaign to resonate with people was the “Think Different” campaign. This commercial ran in 1998, not long after Apple’s Founder, Steve Jobs returned to the board at the end of 1996. 8 At the time, Apple was a struggling company, and a dying brand.

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In fall 2011, he was a moderate Foursquare user. On the day of Steve Jobs passing, many people flooded the Apple Store in Palo Alto to lay down flowers and leave commemorative messages on the walls. Mario was at the Apple store and decided to check-in on Foursquare. Unexpectedly, he unlocked a new badge that was titled “Jobs” with the subtext, “Here’s to the crazy ones. #ThankYouSteve“ As far as we know, this is a badge that can only be earned in a few places, in a very narrow window of time. As you may expect, this was a huge surprise for Mario (not detracting from the somber event of Steve Job’s passing) that motivated him to check-in on Foursquare at more places and further compelled him to often talk about this experience to the point where I am now sharing it in this book.

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When Steve Jobs wanted to recruit Pepsi executive John Sculley into Apple as the new CEO, he famously said, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Boom! That was a powerful FOMO Punch that prompted Sculley to think he would miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime if he “wasted” the rest of his career at Pepsi. He later remembers, “I just gulped because I knew I would wonder for the rest of my life what I would have missed.”13 (Ironically, Sculley’s lasting legacy would likely be known as the guy who fired Steve Jobs and ran Apple into the ground - just for Steve Jobs to return and resurrect).

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

Having somebody who you totally trust, who’s totally committed, who shares your vision and yet has a little bit different set of skills, and also acts as a check on you—and just the benefit of sparking off of somebody who’s got that kind of brilliance—it’s not only made it fun, but it’s really led to a lot of success.” In a 1985 Playboy interview, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs talked about the importance of both his partner Steve Wozniak’s differing interests and their shared lack of a vision. “Neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere,” Jobs said. “Woz was motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of work, which was the disk drive that made the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company . . . I don’t think it would have happened without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.”

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The great irony, of course, is that the history of modern entrepreneurship is littered with the stories of founders whose success we roundly celebrate today but whose loved ones worried in the beginning about the same thing that Jim did—that they’d waste their lives—but only if they did take that leap in pursuit of their ideas. When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college in 1972 and 1975, respectively, to go on to found Apple and Microsoft, you can be sure their parents weren’t high-fiving and sleeping soundly those first years, just as Mark Zuckerberg’s parents weren’t a generation later when he left school to start Facebook. Or Evan Williams’s parents, when he left the University of Nebraska after a year and a half to work in the nascent tech startup sector before eventually founding Blogger and Twitter and then Medium.

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Find Your Co-founder “It seems unlikely”: Paul Graham, “The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups,” Paulgraham.com, October 2006, http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html. “My best business decisions”: “Buffett & Gates on Success,” University of Washington, 1997, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPh0_zEykU&feature=youtu.be&t=2583. “Neither of us had any idea”: David Sheff, “Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs,” Playboy, February 1985, available at Atavist, http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs. “Starting a startup”: Graham, “The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups.” 6. Fund the Business, Part 1: Bootstrapping “i thought of a way”: Rebecca Aydin, “How 3 Guys Turned Renting Air Mattresses in Their Apartment Into a $31 Billion Company, Airbnb,” Business Insider, September 20, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-airbnb-was-founded-a-visual-history-2016-2.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Even before she finished her master’s degree, Magdalena had gone to seven job interviews and received seven offers. Her first interview had been with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. The founders invited double-e students to the LOTS computer center to hear a pitch about their three-year-old company. If the students liked what they heard, they could stay and be interviewed. Jobs, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and jeans, told Magdalena and the other double-e students that working for Apple would be like “an extension of college.” Magdalena was one of sixteen students who showed up for the interview. She loved the idea of working for Apple. Jobs had dropped out of college and spent time studying Hinduism and Buddhism in India.

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The top floor was old, and the floor was slanted—a marble would roll from one end of the kitchen to the other—but it had a treasured view of the landmark CITGO sign near Fenway Park. They each paid $500 a month, and often did the dishes while singing along to their favorite song, “Push It,” by Salt-N-Pepa. Sonja had taped a picture of Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs up on the fridge. She thought he was “the cat’s meow.” Her father had been right—there was life after high school. During her teenage years in Charlottesville, Virginia, some of the girls had her disinvited to prom because she was “too straight.” She didn’t drink or do drugs and didn’t believe in casual sex.

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It was here that the “traitorous eight” had left the manic but brilliant William Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel. Here a marijuana- and hot-tub-loving Nolan Bushnell had met Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine to fund Atari. Here Arthur Rock, at first reluctantly, had provided funds and advice to a scruffy and “very unappealing” Steve Jobs to build Apple. Here venture capitalist Tom Perkins and scientist Bob Swanson had started Genentech. It was on Sand Hill Road that Dave Marquardt’s early investment in Microsoft had yielded a bonus of a new red Ferrari, and where Larry Ellison incubated a start-up called Oracle, getting a loan from VC Don Lucas to keep the relational database company going.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

Each person who visited saw a different set of links in the box—the Washington Post links their friends had shared on Facebook. The Post was letting Facebook edit its most valuable online asset: its front page. The New York Times soon followed suit. The new feature was one piece of a much bigger rollout, which Facebook called “Facebook Everywhere” and announced at its annual conference, f8 (“fate”). Ever since Steve Jobs sold the Apple by calling it “insanely great,” a measure of grandiosity has been part of the Silicon Valley tradition. But when Zuckerberg walked onto the stage on April 21, 2010, his words seemed plausible. “This is the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web,” he announced. The aim of Facebook Everywhere was simple: make the whole Web “social” and bring Facebook-style personalization to millions of sites that currently lack it.

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This leads to the final way in which the future of media is likely to be different than we expected. Since its early days, Internet evangelists have argued that it was an inherently active medium. “We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on,” Apple founder Steve Jobs told Macworld in 2004. Among techies, these two paradigms came to be known as push technology and pull technology. A Web browser is an example of pull technology: You put in an address, and your computer pulls information from that server. Television and the mail, on the other hand, are push technologies: The information shows up on the tube or at your doorstop without any action on your end.

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Like the music service Pandora, LeanBack viewers can easily skip videos and give the viewer feedback for picking the next videos—thumbs up for this one, thumbs down for these three. LeanBack would learn. Over time, the vision is for LeanBack to be like your own personal TV channel, stringing together content you’re interested in while requiring less and less engagement from you. Steve Jobs’s proclamation that computers are for turning your brain on may have been a bit too optimistic. In reality, as personalized filtering gets better and better, the amount of energy we’ll have to devote to choosing what we’d like to see will continue to decrease. And while personalization is changing our experience of news, it’s also changing the economics that determine what stories get produced.

Competition Demystified
by Bruce C. Greenwald
Published 31 Aug 2016

The diagram in figure 4.5 was produced by and for John Sculley and the rest of Apple management in the early 1990s. It was intended to describe the structure of the information industry, but the result was too complicated to be useful. Apple went everywhere and nowhere. For the year ending September 2003, its sales were still down more than 40 percent from 1995 and it earned no operating income. For all of Steve Jobs’s brilliance and the elegance of Apple’s product design, it seems consigned to always push uphill against the advantages of Microsoft and Intel. In the PC industry, Apple is going nowhere. FIGURE 4.5 The Apple vision In the approach we recommend here, the central question is whether, in the market in which the firm operates or is considering entering, competitive advantages exist.

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By concentrating on operating efficiency in an environment without competitive advantages, Compaq grew larger than Apple and enjoyed some profitable years. Apple floundered (table6.3). Even with a marketing genius of Steve Jobs’s caliber, Apple’s unfocused pursuit of broad but illusory competitive advantages denied it the benefits of specialization and clarity of managerial focus. As we have seen, Compaq’s revival was short-lived. It could not sustain the cost discipline that returned it to profitability, and ultimately it was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard. TABLE 6.3 Compaq and Apple, 1991 and 1997 Compaq Apple Sales in $ billions, 1991 $ 3.6 $6.3 Sales in $ billions, 1997 $24.6 $7.1 Average operating margin 10.2% 1.7% CHAPTER 7 Production Advantages Lost Compact Discs, Data Switches, and Toasters PHILIPS DEVELOPS THE COMPACT DISC Philips N.V., a multinational conglomerate based in the Netherlands, has a long history in the consumer electronics business.

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Identifying the sources of competitive advantages should help predict their likely sustainability, a necessary step for both incumbents and potential entrants when formulating their strategies. The three-step procedure for assessing competitive advantage is depicted in figure 4.1. THE STEPS IN PRACTICE: A LOOK AT THE FUTURE OF APPLE COMPUTER Now let’s use this procedure to look at Apple Computer. We will review its past and forecast its likely future. In its history, Apple has chosen strategies that have involved it in almost every important segment of the personal computer (PC) industry. The visionaries at Apple, first Steve Jobs, then John Sculley, then Jobs in his second tenure, have at times sought to revolutionize not simply the PC industry itself, including most of the hardware and software segments, but also the related areas of personal communications and consumer electronics.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

He notes, “The doctor must be particularly alert for the famous ‘last minute’ of an appointment when the patient, on his way out the door, looks over his shoulder and says ‘By the way, my wife says I should tell you about this pain I have in my stomach.’”6 Levy’s MIT colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee agree with pattern recognition and complex communication as uniquely human traits, and they add a third: ideation. “Scientists come up with new hypotheses,” they write. “Chefs add a new dish to the menu. Engineers on a factory floor figure out why a machine is no longer working properly. Steve Jobs and his colleagues at Apple figure out what kind of tablet computer we actually want. Many of these activities are supported and accelerated by computers, but none are driven by them.” There is a common thread in all these thinkers’ categories, and it has everything to do with the codification mentioned earlier.

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The intent is never to have less work for those expensive, high-maintenance humans. It is always to allow them to do more valuable work. Wheels for the Mind We are not the first to think that machines should be designed and built to make people more capable, not to make them redundant. For example, when he was a young man, Steve Jobs shared some of the philosophy behind his work at Apple, starting with the observation that what “really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders.” Jobs had seen a study that compared various species in terms of their efficiency of locomotion; it showed, for example, that the condor used the least energy to move a kilometer.

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Meanwhile, employment of interior designers is projected (by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) to expand by 19 percent from 2008 to 2018, faster than most other jobs. Before we leave the subject of taste, we shouldn’t neglect to mention Steve Jobs again. It might strike you as odd that, in a book about the encroachment of computers into knowledge work, the name of Apple’s iconic founder would come up in the chapter devoted to stepping aside. But note that whenever Jobs’s genius is mentioned, the emphasis is on his sensibilities—his taste. No one denies he had strong technical knowledge, but according to his cofounder, Steve Wozniak, “Steve didn’t ever code.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

Part of the answer was the timing: the publisher wisely dropped it into the market just weeks after Jobs’s death, allowing the news media narrative of his death to interact with the talk about the book. Interestingly, the Steve Jobs narrative makes it appear that Jobs, a real human being with quirks that no one would program into a robot, was totally indispensable for Apple Computer. Jobs’s own story therefore became appealing to people who worry about their own possible obsolescence. He founded the company but was forced out, the story goes, because drab managerial types could not tolerate his eccentricities. When Apple began to fail, he was called back and breathed new life into the company, which is today one of the most successful in the world. The Steve Jobs narrative is a fantasy for people who don’t quite fit into conventional society, as many people with inflated egos but modest success in life may see themselves.

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See also boycott narrative anger at oil crisis of 1970s, 256 animal spirits: business confidence and, xvi; Keynes’s idea of, 138 Animal Spirits (Akerlof and Shiller), 64 Anthropology: creation myths in, 15; economists learning from, 78 Apple Computer: Siri and, 8, 206–7, 287; Steve Jobs and, 208–9 Arab oil embargo of 1973, 256 archetypes, Jungian, 15 ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) models, 295, 322n9 Aristotle, 174–75 Arkright, Frank, 193 Arkwright, Richard, 193 artificial intelligence, in narrative economics research, 276, 287 artificial intelligence narrative, 196, 197f, 199, 211. See also robots Atari, 203 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 50 autism spectrum disorder, narrative disruption in, 66 Automata (Hero of Alexandria), 175 automated assistants, 8. See also Siri (Apple) automation narrative: difference from labor-saving machinery narrative, 199; as epidemic around 1955–66, 199–202; mutated in recessions of early 1980s, 204; with new catchphrases in 2000s, 205; offices and, 204; percentage of articles containing automation, 197f; post–World War II, 196; robots and, 191; second scare during 1980s, 202–4; surge in fears beginning around 2016, 206–8; third spike in concern around 1995, 204–5; unemployment and, 199–200, 204.

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Historian Yuval Noah Harari describes this narrative as leading toward a “growing fear of irrelevance” of ourselves and worries about falling into a “new useless class.”23 If they grow into a sizable epidemic, such existential fears certainly have the potential to affect economic confidence and thus the economy. Of Jobs and Steve Jobs The story of Steve Jobs is a remarkable narrative that ties into the fear of job loss to mechanization. His story was told in many books that appeared around the time of the 2007–9 world financial crisis. Particularly notable was the 2011 book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which sold 379,000 copies in its first week on sale,24 became a number-one New York Times best seller, and has over 6,500 reviews on Amazon with an average ranking of 4.5 stars out of 5.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

But arguably the most important thing that Amazon did was to turn its e-commerce application into a cloud computing platform on which the bulk of Silicon Valley startups operate; as the cloud model has matured, large, established enterprises have migrated to it as well. The lessons of this business transformation alone could fill a book (and will be the subject of a later chapter in this one). Apple led the generational shift from the personal computer to the smartphone, and from the web to mobile apps. The iPhone is the platform where most cutting-edge applications are first launched. While Apple’s flood of innovations seems to have slowed since the death of Steve Jobs, it remains a dominant player in the mobile market, and its design leadership continues to challenge us to “think different” about the possibilities of the future.

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Hickey defines that as a market in which products are sold on the basis of what they mean, not just what they do. The annual turnover of new models was one way that Detroit soaked up the enormous postwar productive capacity of America’s factories. Turning the computer into an “art market” is also a perfect explanation of what Steve Jobs accomplished when he returned to Apple in 1997. “Think Different” was a powerful statement that buying from Apple was a statement about who you are. Yes, the products were beautiful and useful, but just like the automobile when it was the ultimate object of consumer desire, the Mac, and later the iPhone, became a statement of identity. Design was not just a functional improvement, but a way of making a statement.

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ie=UTF8&node=1600 8589011. 81 income and demographics: Sizing the Internet Opportunity (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004). 82 till the end of 1993: “Robert McCool,” Wikipedia, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool. 82 opposed to the idea of third-party apps on the iPhone: Killian Bell, “Steve Jobs Was Originally Dead Set Against Third-Party Apps for the iPhone,” Cult of Mac, October 21, 2011, http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-dead-set-against-third-party-apps-for-the-iphone/. 81 skeptical of the peer-to-peer model: Stone, The Upstarts, 199–200. 86 “how the world *does* work”: Aaron Levie, Twitter update, August 22, 2013, https://twitter.com/levie/status/370776444013510656.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

A Builder Personality Tour through Silicon Valley Let’s see these personalities in action by taking a quick spin through the heart of Silicon Valley. Take a look at how each Builder Personality has shaped the structure, growth trajectory, and culture of four iconic companies.7 Apple’s Driver Our first stop is on everybody’s short list of startup-to-standout success stories. Leaving aside how revolutionary Apple 1.0 was in transforming the computer industry when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs got started, consider the stamp the prodigal Jobs himself left on this company after his return in 1997 to spearhead the stunning revival of the company. His personality—born to build, an intuitive decision maker, with a controlling and often abrasive management style—shaped that company’s entire destiny.

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Starting a business, much less building it into a large and durable enterprise, is never easy, and it’s often a lonely endeavor. It’s no surprise many builders—perhaps you included—choose to embark on that adventure with cofounders. That’s a decision that immediately puts the issue of Builder Personality front and center—for both of you. Just take a look at this partial list of cobuilders: Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Microsoft: Bill Gates and Paul Allen Ben & Jerry’s: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield Intel: Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce P & G: William Procter and James Gamble Airbnb: Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia Google: Sergey Brin and Larry Page Rent the Runway: Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss Warby Parker: Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider Pinterest: Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra Eventbrite: Julia Hartz and Kevin Hartz HP: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard These builder partnerships cut across industry, geographic, gender, and cultural lines.

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See, for example, Kim Masters, “Jessica Alba’s Tears on Her Way to Building a $1 Billion Business,” Hollywood Reporter, October 3, 2014, www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/jessica-albas-tears-her-way-736714; Celia Fernandez, “Jessica Alba Talks $1 Billion Empire,” Latina, May 22, 2015, www.latina.com/entertainment/celebrity/jessica-alba-talks-honest-company-empire; and Clare O’Connor, “How Jessica Alba Built a $1 Billion Company, and $200 Million Fortune, Selling Parents Peace of Mind,” Forbes, June 15, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2015/05/27/how-jessica-alba-built-a-1-billion-company-and-200-million-fortune-selling-parents-peace-of-mind/#154765441f0c. 2. For more about Jack Dorsey and his trajectory, see, for example, Biography.com, s.v. “Jack Dorsey,” last updated October 14, 2015, www.biography.com/people/jack-dorsey-578280#creation-of-twitter; and Nicholas Carlson, “Jack Dorsey Is Not Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, November 29, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-is-not-steve-jobs-2014-11. 3. Unless otherwise noted, material in this chapter relies on interviews we conducted with Derek Newell, Nate Morris, Katherine Hays, Jim Hornthal, James Currier, Angelo Pizzagalli, Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield, Jenny Fleiss, Christina Seelye, Greg Titus, Umair Khan, Doris Yeh, Aaron Levie, and Marsha Firestone between the spring and fall of 2015.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

GM’s OnStar, for example, which started in 1996 as a concierge service, is now in more than 12 million vehicles and hosted more than 1.5 billion customer interactions last year. A lot of Silicon Valley executives think that the legacy car companies today look a lot like IBM did in 1985. That year, Big Blue employed more than 400,000 people (more than three times the size of Apple today). Digital Equipment Corporation, its nearest rival, had a quarter of its employee base. Apple itself was in a tailspin, having just fired Steve Jobs in one of the most infamous board decisions in history. Personal computers were an admittedly low-volume market at the time, but the IBM PC dominated it. Compatibility with its PCs was an industry mandate. It had clear market superiority.

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THE IMPLOSION AND THE REBOUND Then along came the internet and file-sharing sites, and the entertainment industry responded calmly and methodically, in a studied effort to create its own legal online alternatives. Just kidding, they freaked out—there were lawsuits, congressional inquiries, kids getting hauled into court, and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich delivering the names of 335,000 nefarious copyright infringers (who I assume were also Metallica fans?) to Napster’s office. Then Steve Jobs came to the rescue of the music industry, sort of. You didn’t even have to buy a whole album in order to listen to one or two hits—you could just buy the songs, for a dollar a pop! The labels signed up in droves, because they recognized a very familiar business model—keep pushing the hits. Ultimately, of course, the dollar-a-song model wouldn’t last.

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More former “movie stars” like Will Smith are going to start debuting new projects on SVOD libraries. And more former “movie producers” like Jeffrey Katzenberg are going to start launching subscription-based short-form video series with top-shelf production values, instead of lashing themselves to the masts of splashy sink-or-swim blockbusters. STEVE JOBS VERSUS PRINCE Today more than 30 million people in the United States pay for a music streaming service, and those services now represent more than half of the US music business. All that listening and discovery is having all sorts of positive ancillary effects—retail sales are up this year after fifteen years of decline.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Another 4,750 are in the Philippines, which, with a population of just 92 million compared to China’s 1.3 billion, has in relative terms been a much bigger beneficiary of Steve Jobs’s genius. This is a point worth underscoring, because some American pundits and politicians like to blame their country’s economic woes on China’s undervalued currency and its strategy of export-led growth. In the case of the Apple economy, that is less than half the story. Now come what might be the surprises. The first is that even though most of the iPod jobs are outside the United States, the lion’s share of the iPod salaries are in the United States. Those 13,920 American workers earned nearly $750 million. By contrast, the 27,250 non-American Apple employees took home less than $320 million.

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But the super-elite also bask in a culture that, at least until the 2008 financial crisis, was happy to regard them as the heroes of our age. Their virtue need not manifest itself in any of the traditional Judeo-Christian values—Steve Jobs, who currently dominates the iconostasis, was an egotistical jerk who often treated employees, family (including his daughter), and ordinary mortals who dared to e-mail him with cruelty or disdain. But we do need them to succeed in business because of their sheer superiority to everyone else—part of the appeal of the Jobs story is his second coming at Apple, when he showed up the mediocrities who had ousted him. Most important of all, the plutocrats, and their chorus in the popular culture, are keen to believe they are not engaged on an entirely selfish mission.

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On the other hand, what fraction of families in the United States or Canada would have the wherewithal to get for their child a Mandarin tutor three days a week for four years? How do you think about that? And were we perpetuating privilege? Or were we recognizing merit?” Getting into the “right” college is just a start. As the baby boomers aged into the commencement address generation, their standard advice to graduates was, as Steve Jobs memorably enjoined, to “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition,” to “love what you do,” and never to “settle.” Drew Faust, in her third commencement address as president of Harvard University, urged the graduating students to adopt her “parking space theory of life”: “Don’t park ten blocks away from your destination because you think you’ll never find a closer space.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

The highest-profile case of stock option payola involved the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. After ducking media inquiries about whether Apple’s board had improperly changed the dates of its stock option grants, Apple finally admitted to the SEC that between 1997 and 2002, there were 6,428 separate instances where the dates of Apple stock options had been altered. Steve Jobs had been personally involved in picking “favorable” dates for backdating options, Apple confessed. Nonetheless, Apple’s internal report cleared Jobs of wrongdoing. Initially, Apple said Jobs had not profited personally, but it later turned out that Jobs had made a whopping profit, getting $295.7 million from selling half the shares that he’d been allowed to buy for $75 million.

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-China Trade Deficit: $2 Trillion Wal-Mart may have been the prime mover in pushing the China trade and driving American jobs to China, but almost everyone was in the game: Target, Costco, Best Buy, an army of mass retail chains, plus big manufacturers such as Boeing, which has contracted with the Chinese and Japanese to make parts for the new 787 Dreamliner jet, as well as other U.S. multinationals such as Apple with its iPhones and iPads made in China or Hewlett-Packard and Cisco importing components for laptops, printers, cellphones, and Internet switching gear. Apple’s longtime CEO, Steve Jobs, won praise for creating jobs in America from Republican leaders like Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, but in fact, Apple under Steve Jobs had only forty-three thousand employees in the United States, while it indirectly employed seven hundred thousand at its overseas suppliers, mainly in China. As The New York Times reported, Apple overlooked sweatshop conditions and fatal explosions at supplier plants in China, not just because Chinese labor was cheap, but because state-subsidized Chinese suppliers jumped to meet Apple’s tight deadlines by rousting workers out of bed at midnight and reportedly working them fifteen hours a day.

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Initially, Apple said Jobs had not profited personally, but it later turned out that Jobs had made a whopping profit, getting $295.7 million from selling half the shares that he’d been allowed to buy for $75 million. Worse, Apple disclosed to the SEC that it had fabricated—that is, totally made up—a fictional meeting of the board of directors in October 2003 that supposedly approved 7.5 million options for Jobs. That meeting never took place, Apple admitted; in fact, the options had been approved on December 18, 2001, when they would have cost Jobs more. Apple’s whitewash of Steve Jobs met with catcalls of corporate hypocrisy. “They pretty much admitted he was directly involved in the fraud,” asserted New York University finance professor David Yermack.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Published 16 May 2016

“You’re also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two.” You might ask: What drew tens of millions of people to watch as Steve Jobs, live, unveiled some new Apple device? Of course, partly it was the cool technology, the warm charisma of the man. But something else was at work, I think. What Jobs was unveiling atop those black stages over the years as we waited for him was nothing less than whole new worlds, connected landscapes that emerged entirely from ideas Apple was secretly developing. He wasn’t merely introducing a phone; he was changing how we were going to experience life. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs began in his famous speech introducing the first iPhone, in 2007.

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Hillis has a magnetic intellectual charisma, as you may have guessed by now. An afternoon with him resembles nothing so much as lingering in a mental theme park: roller coasters of big ideas (a ten-thousand-year clock!) mixed with smaller, sugary treats (how to design a better fence post). No wonder he fit in at Disney. Critics accused Steve Jobs of having a “reality distortion field” in which the Apple founder’s charisma bludgeoned the boundaries of the practical. Hillis, by contrast, has a sort of “reality enhancement field” in which much of the world as seen through his eyes is filled with possibility. From an early age, Hillis had been interested in the dream of a thinking robot.

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At one point, a phreaker named John Draper figured out that the little plastic whistles stuffed as children’s toys inside boxes of sugary Cap’n Crunch cereal produced the 2,600-hertz tone nearly perfectly. The hack made him a legend, and he became known, inevitably, as Cap’n Crunch. An article about Draper in Esquire in 1971 had inspired two teenagers named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start their first company in order to build and sell little blue phreaking boxes. Woz later recalled nervously meeting the Cap’n one day in California. He was a strange, slightly smelly, and extremely intense nomadic engineer. “I do it for one reason and one reason only,” the Cap’n huffed to the writer of that Esquire article, who was a bit baffled as to why a grown man would find whistling into phones so appealing.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
Published 15 Feb 2013

The same is true of examples of the way the three kinds of thinking work together. Now I can see them not only in my own experience but everywhere I look. Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985? He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter—the first laser printer ever—he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was.

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From a neuroscience point of view, managing emotions depends on top-down control from the frontal cortex. If you can’t control your emotion, you have to change your emotion. If you want to keep a job, you have to learn how to turn anger into frustration. I saw in a magazine article that Steve Jobs would cry in frustration. That’s why Steve Jobs still had a job. He could be verbally abusive to his employees, but as far as I know, he didn’t go around throwing things at them or slugging them. I learned my lesson in high school. I got in a fight with someone who was teasing me, and I had horseback riding taken away for two weeks.

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. [>] About fifty thousand people: Gareth Cook, “The Autism Advantage,” New York Times, December 2, 2012. [>] see sidebar: Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy, Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism, updated and expanded edition (Overland Park, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company, 2008). [>] an interview with Steve Jobs: Brent Schlender, “Exclusive: New Wisdom from Steve Jobs on Technology, Hollywood, and How ‘Good Management Is Like the Beatles,’” Fast Company, May 2012. [>] Aspiritech: Carla K. Johnson, “Startup Company Succeeds at Hiring Autistic Adults,” Associated Press, September 21, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/startup-company-succeeds-hiring-autistic-adults-162558148.html. [>] it expanded: http://www.walgreens.com/topic/sr/distribution_centers.jsp. [>] “keep on knockin’”: Savino Nuccio D’Argento interview. [>] John Fienberg: John Fienberg interview.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

And if you don’t want to, then I’ll make a decision about that.” Page and Brin agreed to Doerr’s Magical Mystery Tour of high-tech royalty: Apple’s Steve Jobs, Intel’s Andy Grove, Intuit’s Scott Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and others. Then they came back to Doerr. “This may surprise you,” they told him, “but we agree with you.” They were ready to hire a CEO. One person, and one only, had met their standards: Steve Jobs. This was ludicrous for a googolplex of reasons. Jobs was already the CEO of two public companies. In addition, he was Steve Jobs. You would sooner get the Dalai Lama to join an Internet start-up. Doerr and Mortiz kept pressing, and the founders reluctantly agreed to keep considering.

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But as one person in particular began to understand what Google was up to, a bitter rivalry was born. That person was Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO. Since Jobs’s original meeting with Page and Brin—the one where the Google kids had decided that he would meet their CEO requirements—the relationship between the two companies had blossomed. The Google founders were entranced by Jobs’s vision and decisiveness, and Jobs was excited by the opportunity to hook up with a business whose activities were entirely complementary to Apple’s—there seemed to be no competitive overlap. The two firms embarked on a potentially glorious, industry-changing alliance in which the veteran Jobs would lend his expertise and wisdom to the smarty-pants Internet kids and the two firms together would take down Microsoft.

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From Kleiner Perkins came a recommendation for a thirty-five-year-old Iran-born executive named Omid Kordestani. He was working for Netscape, which had recently been purchased by AOL, and was looking for a new job. As the engine rooms of the tech boom hadn’t yet begun taking water, Kordestani had plenty of choices. One of the most enticing was Apple, newly revitalized with the return of Steve Jobs. Kordestani took a breakfast meeting with Jobs, who gave him a dizzying, messianic pitch. But Kordestani preferred a start-up. He was sufficiently experienced in Silicon Valley ways to know that scruffy former grad students recommended by top VCs were more likely to deliver treasures than even the wizard of Cupertino.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Steve Jobs, Apple’s “Think Different” ad, 1997 Samuel Sternberg CHAPTER 44 Quebec Jumping genes While attending the 2019 CRISPR Conference in Quebec, I am struck by the realization that biology has become the new tech. The meeting has the same vibe as those of the Homebrew Computer Club and the West Coast Computer Faire in the late 1970s, except that the young innovators are buzzing about genetic code rather than computer code. The atmosphere is charged with the catalytic combination of competition and cooperation reminiscent of when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs frequented the early personal computer shows, except this time the rock stars are Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang.

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“For days I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, because it affirmed to me why I do what I do, which is to try to make sure that people can push humanity forward.” Push humanity forward? Yes, sometimes it’s the rebels who do so. As Zayner speaks, his flat tones and crazy excitement remind me of a day when Steve Jobs sat in his backyard and recited from memory the lines he had helped craft for Apple’s “Think Different” commercial about the misfits and rebels and troublemakers who are not fond of rules and have no respect for the status quo. “They push the human race forward,” Jobs said. “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

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Individual freedom and independent thinking are crushed by electronic surveillance and total information control. Orwell was warning about the danger that a Franco or Stalin would someday control information technology and destroy individual freedom. It didn’t happen. When the real 1984 actually rolled around, Apple introduced an easy-to-use personal computer, the Macintosh, and in the words that Steve Jobs wrote for its ad, “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” That phrase contained a deep truth. Instead of computers becoming an instrument for centralized repression, the combination of the personal computer and the decentralized nature of the internet became a way to devolve more power down to each individual, thus unleashing a gusher of free expression and radically democratized media.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

A narrative. A tale. If you don’t like the story, you can change the story. Even better, you can drop it altogether and write a new one. “In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles,” author Anaïs Nin writes, “one has to learn to discard.”25 Discarding happened involuntarily for Steve Jobs, who in 1985 was forced out of Apple, the company he had cofounded. Although his dismissal stung at the time, looking back on it, Jobs says it was the “best thing that could have ever happened to me.” Getting fired unshackled Jobs from his own history and forced him to return to first principles. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.

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Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 2000). 25. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann, vol. 4, 1944–1947 (New York: Swallow Press, 1971). 26. Shellie Karabell, “Steve Jobs: The Incredible Lightness of Beginning Again,” Forbes, December 10, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/shelliekarabell/2014/12/10/steve-jobs-the-incredible-lightness-of-beginning-again/#35ddf596294a. 27. Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing (New York: New Directions, 1964), 20. 28. The discussion on Alinea draws on the following sources: Sarah Freeman, “Alinea 2.0: Reinventing One of the World’s Best Restaurants: Why Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas Hit the Reset Button,” Eater.com, May 19, 2016, https://chicago.eater.com/2016/5/19/11695724/alinea-chicago-grant-achatz-nick-kokonas; Noah Kagan, “Lessons From the World’s Best Restaurant,” OkDork (blog), March 15, 2019, https://okdork.com/lessons-worlds-best-restaurant; “No. 1: Alinea,” Best Restaurants in Chicago, Chicago Magazine, July 2018, www.chicagomag.com/dining-drinking/July-2018/The-50-Best-Restaurants-in-Chicago/Alinea. 29.

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“Art training alone,” the study suggests, “can help to teach medical students to become better clinical observers.”58 Life, it turns out, doesn’t happen in compartmentalized silos. There’s little to be learned from comparing similar things. “To create,” biologist François Jacob said, “is to recombine.”59 Decades later, Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”60 Put differently, it’s easier to “think outside the box” when you’re playing with multiple boxes.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

* * * — back in 2005, when Thiel was still trying on a new identity as a master of the universe, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at his alma mater. To this day, Jobs’s Stanford University address is revered, both as a window into the Apple founder’s psyche and a distillation of the rebelliousness of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and 2000s. Everyone in tech has watched it at least once; many know it nearly by heart. “Truth be told, I never graduated from college,” Jobs began. “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.” After explaining his decision to drop out from Reed College in the early 1970s before starting Apple, Jobs revealed that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had been contemplating his death.

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Tolkien, whom he read and reread obsessively—so much that he’d later brag he’d memorized the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. He also played video games, including Zork, a crude, choose-your-own-adventure game that he played on a Tandy TRS 80 that Klaus brought home. The computer revolution was happening just miles to the south, where Apple Computer, a company founded by another American prodigy, Steve Jobs, now had more than $100 million in sales. Klaus had been an early adopter, urging his coworkers at the California gold mine to use computers, and his son picked up his interest in technology. Peter programmed a little, but what really grabbed him were visions of the future.

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From that point on, Thiel was going to do what he wanted, and no VC—no matter how respected or experienced—was ever going to be able to control him. 6 GRAY AREAS Around the time of Thiel’s coup at PayPal, Silicon Valley’s mythology was defined, more or less, by a single person: Steve Jobs, who’d created the personal computer in the early 1980s, built Pixar in exile, and came back to introduce the iMac and iPod, transforming Apple into the greatest consumer products company of all time. Jobs, the story went, had succeeded thanks to his countercultural bona fides—he was a proud hippie, a Zen Buddhist, a phone phreaker—and his willingness to train all of that weirdness on a profit-making enterprise.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Henry Ford would have spent his life producing ever more comfortable horse buggies if he had listened to the good burghers of Dearborn. It is notable that Apple, perhaps the world’s most successful high-tech company at the moment, and one that has kept ahead of every wave of innovation, has had no truck with open innovation. Steve Jobs is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to an imperial CEO: egocentric, control-obsessed, and supremely self-confident. “A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he says.11 As well as solving problems that people don’t know they have, Apple believes in doing as much as possible inhouse. It is true that they have decided to allow outsiders to design apps for their iPhones and iPods, but they subject them to the strictest possible rules.

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In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more inner-directed and self-obsessed than the usual corporate types, but they almost always require business partners and social networks in order to succeed. The history of high-tech startups is largely a history of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Steven Balmer (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google). Ben & Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start a business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as several other partners.

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The Japanese opened the first front by inundating Western markets with better, cheaper, more reliable goods through “lean” production based on teamwork, which avoided both the alienation and the waste of Sloan’s system. Michael Milken, the junk bond king, and Michael Jensen, the leading theoretician of shareholder value, opened the second front, demonstrating that Sloanism had allowed many American firms to be hijacked by managers more interested in their pay and perks than in shareholder value. Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs opened the third front, demonstrating that you can succeed in business without growing a giant bureaucracy. The reengineers opened the final front, ripping apart all the old Sloanist functional departments such as “marketing,” “production,” and “research” and pushing workers into cross-functional teams, forcing them to use computers to bridge the gaps.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

As we look forward into the future, we must also take the time to look around. 9 ★ OUR GLOBAL AI STORY On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stepped up to a microphone in Stanford Stadium and delivered one of the most memorable commencement speeches ever given. In the talk, he retraced his zig-zagging career, from college dropout to cofounder of Apple, from his unceremonious ouster at that company to his founding of Pixar, and finally his triumphant return to Apple a decade later. Speaking to a crowd of ambitious Stanford students, many of whom were eagerly plotting their own ascent to the peaks of Silicon Valley, Jobs cautioned against trying to chart one’s life and career in advance.

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The prevailing American attitude was that people like Wang Xing could copy the look and feel of Facebook, but that the Chinese would never access the mysterious magic of innovation that drove a place like Silicon Valley. BUILDING BLOCKS AND STUMBLING BLOCKS Silicon Valley investors take as an article of faith that a pure innovation mentality is the foundation on which companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are built. It was an irrepressible impulse to “think different” that drove people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos to create these companies that would change the world. In that school of thought, China’s knockoff clockmakers were headed down a dead-end road. A copycat mentality is a core stumbling block on the path to true innovation.

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Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.” Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac—new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers—if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence, Rhode Island. You read Macworld. Even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore, waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long lead times of a print magazine back then. Yes, if Apple had a major product announcement, or fired Steve Jobs, it would make it into The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the university computer store. But that was basically the extent of the channels available to you. When I left college and came to New York in the early nineties, the technology channels began to widen ever so slightly.

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And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader. If Facebook is any indication, it would seem that top-down control is a habit that will be hard to shake. From Henry Ford to Jack Welch to Steve Jobs to Zuckerberg himself, we have long associated corporate success with visionary and inspiring executives.

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In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people live-blogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs or Tim Cook speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at the technological site Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceed anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers such as John Gruber and Donald Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user-interface issues. The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews in The New York Times, or Dow-Jones’s extended technology site, AllThingsD.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

The 3.0 and 4.0 corporations are a new breed of hybrid companies that have two main characteristics: They function as a business, and they are inspired and energized by a social mission (in 4.0 companies, the mission is more strongly embodied). This is not just a marginal feature of the business community. Think about what inspired visionary founders like Steve Jobs at Apple; Eileen at Eileen Fisher Inc.; Luiz, Guilherme, and Pedro at Natura; Judy and Michelle at BALLE; and Hal at the Sustainable Food Lab. These ventures are exemplars of an emerging “new essence” of what it means to run a successful enterprise. In this emerging business paradigm, success is defined not only by profit, but also by its relevance to the larger eco-system and its practical contributions toward bridging the ecological, social, and spiritual divides.

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See also World Bank, “Jobs Are a Cornerstone of Development, Says World Development Report 2013,” press release, October 1, 2012, www.worldbank.org/en/news/2012/10/01/jobs-cornerstone-develop ment-says-world-development-report (accessed December 9, 2012). 19. Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009). 20. Steve Jobs, Apple founder and late CEO, commencement speech, Stanford University, 2005, www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA (accessed December 9, 2012). 21. Communities in Vermont operated with such a shared bond after the storm-caused flooding in 2011. See Nina Keck, “Neighbors Help Each Other Deal with Vermont’s Flood,” NPR, September 14, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/09/14/140458332/neighbors-help-each-other-get-past-vermont-flood-waters (accessed December 9, 2012). 22.

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The third attack happens in the workplace in the form of management incentives, tying bonus payments to targets, and other best practices that are taught in business schools and that, as research tell us, kill creativity in the organization.19 These practices poison all real creativity because they disconnect what we do for a living (our work) from what we really care about (our Work or passion). All great inventors, creators, and entrepreneurs, all great social activists, share the same inner journey and source of satisfaction: loving what you do and doing what you love. That, according to the late Steve Jobs, arguably a good example of a Working entrepreneur, “is the only way to do great work.”20 It is recognizing the connection to this deep source of knowing that can help us in moments when all other navigation instruments fail. 4. Relinking work and entrepreneurship. The essence of 4.0 is to provide an institutional context that allows us to relink work (jobs) with Work (purpose).

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
Published 3 Aug 2015

We do not all bring the same social skills, and group effectiveness depends on building up social capital between group members through earning trust and helping one another. It all takes time. An important implication of these findings is that since highly effective teams are rare and valuable, not easily or quickly replicated, keeping them together, once formed, is worth a lot. Exhibit A was Apple’s top team under Steve Jobs. The conventional view of Apple’s success is that it derived from Jobs’s genius and dictatorial management, but Jobs knew that wasn’t nearly enough. He worked extraordinarily hard to assemble and keep a highly effective top team, which is an extremely difficult feat in a successful company. As the company prospers, other firms try to lure away its executives, usually with higher-level, higher-paying, more highly visible roles, and the temptation can be overwhelming.

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Yet in the emerging world of work, the abilities that the humanities nurture are precisely those that the economy will increasingly value. It isn’t just because an appreciation of the humanities will help technologists create better, friendlier, more appealing technology, though that is emphatically true. It was one of Steve Jobs’s favorite themes—that his education at Reed College, a rigorous liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, led directly to the superior look, feel, and experience of Apple products. He named his son Reed. But now we see also how the humanities bestow another advantage. Far more than engineering or computer science, the humanities strengthen the deep human abilities that will be critical to the success of most people, regardless of whether they work directly in technology.

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Digital media can help sustain strong relationships that were established face-to-face in the real world, but cannot create such strong relationships. It’s the way we’re wired. It may seem ironic that few people have ever understood that fact better than one of the greatest digital geniuses, Steve Jobs. “Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings,” reports Walter Isaacson in his Jobs biography. He quotes Jobs: “‘There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

This view of AI does not diminish it. As Steve Jobs once remarked, “One of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders.” He used the example of the bicycle as a tool that had given people superpowers in locomotion above every other animal. And he felt the same about computers: “What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”1 Today, AI tools predict the intention of speech (Amazon’s Echo), predict command context (Apple’s Siri), predict what you want to buy (Amazon’s recommendations), predict which links will connect you to the information you want to find (Google search), predict when to apply the brakes to avoid danger (Tesla’s Autopilot), and predict the news you will want to read (Facebook’s newsfeed).

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Arithmetic was such an important input into so many things that, when it became cheap, just as light had before, it changed the world. Reducing something to pure cost terms has a way of cutting through hype, although it does not help make the latest and greatest technology seem exciting. You’d never have seen Steve Jobs announce “a new adding machine,” even though that is all he ever did. By reducing the cost of something important, Jobs’s new adding machines were transformative. That brings us to AI. AI will be economically significant precisely because it will make something important much cheaper. Right now, you may be thinking about intellect, reasoning, or thought itself.

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In the case of bookkeepers, the arrival of the spreadsheet diminished the returns to being able to perform many calculations quickly on a calculator. At the same time, it increased the returns to being good at asking the right questions in order to fully take advantage of the technology’s ability to efficiently run scenario analyses. PART FOUR Strategy 15 AI in the C-Suite In January 2007, when Steve Jobs paced the stage and introduced the iPhone to the world, not a single observer reacted by saying, “Well, it’s curtains for the taxi industry.” Yet fast forward to 2018 and that appears to be precisely the case. Over the last decade, smartphones evolved from being simply a smarter phone to an indispensable platform for tools that are disrupting or fundamentally altering all manner of industries.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

The clean design of Apple’s devices has contributed a lot to this ambiguity. For its co-founder Steve Jobs, this quest draws on the precepts of Zen Buddhism — a philosophy that advocates simplicity and asceticism.30 The aesthetic results are polished temples with minimalist decoration. ‘Steve Jobs was not Buddhist, but he was very much inspired by the simplicity of Zen, and how he thought about Apple’s design’, says Erick Rinner, an investment professional who practises meditation.31 Jobs described how he had always found Zen Buddhism ‘aesthetically sublime’.32 After all, Apple’s first marketing brochure in 1977 declared that ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’

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Foote, ‘A Brief History of Cloud Computing’, Dataversity, 17 December 2021, and Nilesh Shinde, ‘Decoding the Cloud Computing timeline’, Atos, 2 November 2021. 28 Keynote by Bela Loto, Director of Maison de l’informatique responsable, at the Good Planet Foundation conference on the role of digital in environmental damage and climate change (‘Dégâts environnementaux, dérèglement climatique: la face cachée du numérique’), Paris, 29 February 2020. 29 Interview with Frédéric Bordage, Founder of GreenIT.fr, 2018. Apple’s market cap in 2020 was $2 trillion. In 2015, it spent $1.8 billion on advertising. Apple no longer realises this information. See ‘Apple mysteriously stopped disclosing how much it spends on ads’, Business Insider, 25 November 2016. 30 View the talk by the researcher James Auger, ‘Means and Ends’, on ‘superlative objects’ at the 2021 #MiXiT21 conference. 31 Interview with Erick Rinner, managing partner of Milestone Investisseurs and non-executive director of Potential Project, 2020. 32 ‘How Steve Jobs’ love of simplicity fueled a design revolution’, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2012. 33 Interview with Erick Rinner, 2020. 34 To this trio of professionals we can add engineers, who have improved the internet network.

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Under Jobs’ influence, ‘The trend became about simplifying what was turning into an increasingly complex technological world’, Rinner continues. ‘In the digital world, everything is clean and perfectly in place. There are no bad vibes, and that’s dangerous because that’s not real life!’33 That is, the sophistication of Steve Jobs and his search for aesthetic harmony has contributed to feeding billions of consumers with the illusion that the digital world is harmless for the planet.34 Yet all dematerialised enterprises over the last 5,000 years tell another story. While it may not seem obvious how writing fits in, its invention by the Mesopotamians would become the very first tool for dematerialising people themselves.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

Operating assets therefore represent only around 3 per cent of the estimated value of Apple’s business. Apple shares have been listed on NASDAQ since 1980, when the corporation raised $100 million from investors. Even then, the purpose of the issue was not to obtain money to grow the business. As with most flotations of technology companies, the reason for bringing the company to market was to give early investors and employees of the business an opportunity to realise value. Forty members of Apple staff became (paper) millionaires that day, and Steve Jobs’s wealth was estimated at over $200 million. Mike Mark-kula, who had invested $80,000 to enable Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak to start making computers, was similarly enriched.

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We need mechanisms for transferring wealth over time, and trade in securities is one such mechanism: I will describe the full variety in Chapter 9. We can buy a share in Exxon Mobil’s business and oil reserves now, and sell it when we age, and we can do this without disturbing Exxon Mobil’s investment plans. We can create financial assets such as Apple shares, based on future earnings, and trade them in a similar way, with similar effect. By this means we can thank Steve Jobs for his efforts by giving him a share of Apple’s future profits as well as its current ones. The institutions that traditionally dominated the investment channel were: the investment bank, which searched for those in need of capital; the financial adviser – stockbroker, bank manager, insurance agent – who provided both search (fresh opportunities) and stewardship (continuing guidance) on behalf of individual savers; and investment institutions – principally insurance companies and pension funds and some other pooled investment funds – which engaged in stewardship as they gathered and placed substantial sums through the investment channel.

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But trading in financial markets, and innovation in business, are directed to the search for profit opportunities that have not been taken. The efficient market hypothesis at once captures an important aspect of reality – the absence of easy profits – and neglects an equally fundamental one: that the search for profits that are not easy is the dynamic of a capitalist system. Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Steve Jobs were not attempting to exploit arbitrage opportunities but trying to change the world (as were many less successful entrepreneurs). The wise investor will think twice before rejecting the efficient market hypothesis. Yet the volume of trading we observe in securities markets today would be wholly inexplicable if the hypothesis that all information relevant to security valuation is already in the price were true.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
by Lawrence Ingrassia
Published 28 Jan 2020

the person on the other end of the line asked. “I’m calling for Steve Jobs.” Masinter, a Dallas real estate developer then in his mid-thirties, replied with a swear word and hung up. Later that day, he got a call from Stephen Gordon, the founder of Restoration Hardware, a fast-growing retailer Masinter had invested in and advised on its retail strategy. “Hey, by chance did Steve Jobs call you, or someone from Steve’s office?” Gordon asked. Masinter responded with the same swear word and added, “Come on, man, that’s not even funny.” Told that indeed it was Jobs trying to reach him, and that the Apple CEO wanted to set up a meeting, Masinter wondered aloud, “Why would he want to meet with me?

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At the end of the discussion, he basically told me it was the worst presentation he’d ever seen,” Masinter recalls. But Jobs added, “I’ll give you a second chance. I’m not encouraging you to do it, but if you want, we’re going to give you another shot.” In retrospect, Masinter suspects, it was classic Steve Jobs: “I think he was truly measuring us. And we stood our ground.” Masinter returned for a follow-up meeting with a slightly tweaked proposal that still included malls as the best location for many of Apple’s new stores. Jobs didn’t bother attending the meeting himself and instead dispatched underlings, but afterward he made the mission clear, Masinter recalls: “Go find amazing real estate in the right places, but it must without compromise be able to afford us the opportunity to build something on brand and very special, and don’t dare bring back anything that wouldn’t pass that test.”

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Masinter’s idea was that new brands could rent and share space with other new brands for two to twelve months, in an uncluttered, minimalist store with a stylish design sensibility, staffed by trained sales associates carrying iPads to help customers out—much like, well, Apple Stores. “I learned so much about design and design execution from Steve Jobs,” Masinter explains. “I adapted it in everything I do today. Don’t think that I didn’t hearken back to all the lessons I learned from him when I was thinking about Neighborhood Goods.” After getting home from his bike ride and jumping into his pool to cool off, he called Andy Dunn, the cofounder of Bonobos, who responded, “Wow, that’s a pretty good idea!

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

There are, of course, exceptions: corporations with the soul of artisans, some with even the soul of artists. Rohan Silva once remarked that Steve Jobs wanted the inside of the Apple products to look aesthetically appealing, although they are designed to remain unseen by the customer. This is something only a true artisan would do—carpenters with personal pride feel fake when treating the inside of cabinets differently from the outside. Again, this is a form of redundancy, one with an aesthetic and ethical payoff. But Steve Jobs was one of the rare exceptions in the Highly Talked About Completely Misunderstood Said to Be Efficient Corporate Global Economy.

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The northern Levant was since ancient times dominated by traders, largely owing to its position as a central spot on the Silk Road, and by agricultural lords, as the province supplied wheat to much of the Mediterranean world, particularly Rome. The area supplied a few Roman emperors, a few Catholic popes before the schisms, and more than thirty Greek language writers and philosophers (which includes many of the heads of Plato’s academy), in addition to the ancestors of the American visionary and computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs, who brought us the Apple computer, on one of which I am recopying these lines (and the iPad tablet, on which you may be reading them). We know of the autonomy of the province from the records during Roman days, as it was then managed by the local elites, a decentralized method of ruling through locals that the Ottoman retained.

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Or, even better, how to dare to look our ignorance in the face and not be ashamed of being human—be aggressively and proudly human. But that may require some structural changes. What I propose is a road map to modify our man-made systems to let the simple—and natural—take their course. But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it. Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Mar 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “It was staggering”: Jewel, Never Broken, 231. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Which ones do I tell”: Jason Fell, “How Steve Jobs Saved Apple,” NBC News, October 30, 2011, nbcnews.com/id/wbna45095399. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Deciding what not to do”: Jason Fell, “How Steve Jobs Saved Apple,” Entrepreneur, October 27, 2011, entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jobs-saved-apple/220604. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I just wasn’t sure”: Jewel, Never Broken, 270. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “glass cube in the sky”: Paul Jarvis, “Working Remotely on an Island: A Day in the Life of a Company of One,” Penguin UK, penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/04/working-remotely-on-an-island-company-of-one-paul-jarvis.

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This same effect applies to many different fields: obsessing over quality often demands that you slow down, as the focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness. In the context of knowledge work, perhaps the most famous example of quality demanding slowness is Steve Jobs’s triumphant return to Apple. When Jobs started as interim CEO in 1997, the company had just come off a quarter in which its sales fell 30 percent. Jobs quickly assessed that Apple’s problem was connected to its sprawling product lines. (In response to retailer demands, the company had developed numerous different variations of its core computers, including a dozen different versions of its once-vaunted Macintosh.)

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When they couldn’t provide a clear answer, he made the decision to simplify their product line down to only four computers: a desktop and laptop for business users and a desktop and laptop for casual users. There would be no confusion about which Apple machine was right for you. Equally important, this simplification allowed Apple to focus its efforts on quality and innovation: making its small number of products stand out. This was the period, for example, in which Apple’s colorful, bulbous iMac and whimsical clamshell iBook were released. The decision to trade complexity for quality worked. During Jobs’s first fiscal year, when his plan was still being implemented, Apple lost over a billion dollars. The next year, it turned a profit of $309 million. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” Jobs explained.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

Myth: The Advantage of Youth Think of a successful founder of a business. Who is the first person who comes to mind? Unless you have spent the past few minutes Googling around for how to create a Tony Fadell poster, it is probably someone like Steve Jobs. Or Bill Gates. Or Mark Zuckerberg. One feature these world-famous founders all have in common is the stage of life at which they founded their business empires. They were all young. Jobs started Apple when he was twenty-one years old. Gates began Microsoft at nineteen. Zuckerberg created Facebook at the age of nineteen. It is not a coincidence that so many young people come to mind when we think of successful entrepreneurs.

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Paul Graham, the brilliant essayist and founder of Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, wrote a fascinating and provocative essay arguing that people who have failed a lot can actually have an edge in entrepreneurship. In the essay, called “The Power of the Marginal,” Graham notes that “great new things often come from the margins.” Graham points to the examples of the founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak, Graham writes, “can’t have looked good on paper” when they started their now-iconic company. At the time, they were “a pair of college dropouts” and “hippies” whose only business experience consisted of creating blue boxes to hack into phone systems. Graham suspects that stories such as that of Jobs and Wozniak—successful founders who didn’t look good on paper—may not be mere anomalies.

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Jim Lewis named his firstborn James Alan, while Jim Springer named his James Allan. Had Mr. Lewis and Mr. Springer never met each other, they might have assumed their parents played big roles in creating some of their tastes. But it appears those interests were, to a large degree, coded in their DNA. Steve Jobs, who was adopted, had his own epiphany in the importance of genetics when he met, for the first time, his biological sister, Mona Simpson, at the age of twenty-seven. He was struck by how similar they were, including having both risen to the top of a creative field. (Simpson is an award-winning novelist.)

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

v=h-FbTqJW6eg. 2 Gates, B., How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (London, Allen Lane, 2021), p. 41. 3 Ibid., p. 79. 4 See Koelsch, J., ‘Chinese firms position for an energy transition copper supercycle’, Baker Institute Blog, 5 April 2021, http://blog.bakerinstitute.org/2021/04/05/chinese-firms-position-for-an-energy-transition-copper-supercycle/: ‘For instance, every thousand battery electric vehicles (BEVs) produced can require approximately 83 metric tonnes (MT) of copper (well more than triple conventional vehicles at 23 MT), while wind turbines incorporate 3.6 MT of copper per megawatt (MW) of output, photovoltaic cells 4-to-5 MT per MW, and flywheels for pumped hydropower 0.3-to-4 MT per MW.’ 5 Azadi, M., Northey, S.A., Ali, S.H. et al., ‘Transparency on greenhouse gas emissions from mining to enable climate change mitigation’, Nature Geoscience, 13 (2020), 100–4. 6 ‘CRU/CESCO-WRAPUP 1 – As copper projects rev up, deficit still seen’, Reuters, 8 April 2010. 7 Lipton, E., Searcey, D., ‘How the US lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy’, New York Times, 21 November 2021. 8 Isaacson, W., Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 37. 9 Brennan, The Bite in the Apple, p. 85. 10 Ibid. 11 Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 39. 12 McNish, The Big Score, p. 26. 13 ‘Controversial investor makes Burma centrepiece of Asian plan’, Inter Press Service News Agency, 10 December 1996. 14 Larmer, M., ‘At the crossroads: mining and political change on the Katangese-Zambian copperbelt’, Oxford Handbooks Online, July 2016, www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935369.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935369-e-20?

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.* Despite the criticisms, however, Yuma was close to Kabila and momentum had been building in Kinshasa for a change in the country’s 2002 mining code, which had been formed in the middle of a civil war – in order to secure more of the cobalt revenues for the Congo. In early March of 2018 a number of small private planes landed in Kinshasa N’djili International Airport. They carried the chief executives of some of the largest miners in the country: Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Mines, a legendary stock promoter who had been university friends with Steve Jobs from Apple; Glasenberg of Glencore; Mark Bristow, the tough-talking South African head of gold producer Randgold; and Steele Li, the head of China Molybdenum, which had just bought up one of the DRC’s largest copper and cobalt mines. It was not easy to summon this group of leaders to one place, and only a few countries could manage it: China being one, and the DRC the other.

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To go from drilling holes to building an economic mine is a process requiring relentless optimism, hard work and hope. The man behind this discovery had those qualities in spades: Robert Friedland, a billionaire Canadian-American miner and film producer, whose credits included Crazy Rich Asians. A university friend of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Friedland had made his career discovering, developing and then selling mines in far-flung corners of the world. He had helped discover one of the largest nickel deposits in Canada in the early 1990s, and then the giant Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in Mongolia a decade later. And here off a dusty road in the Congo he had found a third.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny
Published 30 Apr 2016

In modern times, Edison is most often compared to the late Steve Jobs. Most readers know Jobs as the person who not only founded Apple Computer but who, upon his return to Apple in 1997, oversaw the creation of jaw-dropping innovations such as the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. What often goes unappreciated is that Jobs, like Edison, experienced plenty of failure on the way to success. When Jobs stepped down in 2011 as CEO of Apple in order to fight an unsuccessful battle against cancer, Nick Schulz penned a brilliant article, “Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure.” Schulz wrote: Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s.

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George Gilder, Knowledge and Power (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2013), 5. 9. Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 216. 10. Nick Schulz, “Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure,” National Review online, August 25, 2011. 11. Dawn Kawamoto, Ben Heskett, and Mike Ricciuti, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple,” CNET, August 6, 1997. 12. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 184. 13. Robert L. Bartley, The Seven Fat Years (New York: Free Press, 1992), 142. 14. Isaacson, The Innovators, 185. 15.

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The Clintons are maybe who President Obama was talking about when he famously uttered, “You didn’t build that.”6 The Clintons are extraordinarily rich not because Bill discovered a cure for cancer, or because Hillary has a knack for resuscitating companies that are on the proverbial deathbed, or because both excel as Ford, Rockefeller, and Steve Jobs did at mass-producing former baubles of the rich. No, the Clintons are rich for having been lucky enough to make a profession of politics in the richest, most innovative country on earth. Without a hint of hyperbole, the wealth they enjoy is the result of the federal government confiscating it from its actual creators.

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care
by Jonathan Bush and Stephen Baker
Published 14 May 2014

Even more important, the people at the hospital would be carrying out great and heroic work, rescuing lives. That’s what attracted them to medicine in the first place. It has to be a lot more fulfilling than shuttling through patients for overpriced MRIs and colonoscopies. This specialization is already happening. Consider the case of Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple Inc. In 2009, he was fighting pancreatic cancer and desperately needed a liver transplant. A billionaire, Jobs had the wherewithal to shop. Traveling on a private jet, he visited hospitals around the country and got himself on various liver transplant waiting lists. Then one day in June of that year, he got the call that Methodist University Hospital in Memphis had access to the liver of a young car-crash victim.

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And they’re engaged in radical and unusual behavior. They’re busy making money in health care by building something new and appealing to shoppers. For me, they’re much like the wildcatters who stormed to fortunes in oil, and the hackers, like the Steve Jobs, who outraced the staid leaders of technology and helped to build a new information economy. These people, to quote Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial, are the “crazy ones.” These crazy ones are committed to health and their patients, of course, but I’ve noticed that most of them don’t mind talking about money. It’s a subject that is broached only in hushed tones and inscrutable bills in the great research hospitals.

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I reached the conclusion not long ago that anger, either white hot or smoldering, is a fundamental fuel for entrepreneurs. They don’t have to be angry all of the time, of course; that would be no fun for anyone. But it helps if deep down they nurse some wound, grievance, or perhaps a sense of injustice. The anger gets them stoked. I think Steve Jobs was often angry. I often see myself as friendly and humorous. Sometimes I am, but in thinking through phases of my life for this book, I realized that during many of my most productive stretches, I was seething, and also terrified of impending failure. This combination of fear and anger, along with a good bit of luck, served me well during those difficult months.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

By finally creating its own mobile app for users, Facebook devised not only a better user experience but also a new tool for grabbing voluminous amounts of data from a user’s mobile device. Pilfering Your Data? There’s an App for That An Apple iPhone commercial in 2009 famously introduced us to the phrase “there’s an app for that” as a means of demonstrating there is an iPhone application for every possible human need. A bold statement at the time, but perhaps Steve Jobs was right. Since its launch in 2008, there have been more than sixty-five billion downloads from Apple’s App Store, generating revenues of over $10 billion in 2013 alone. To compete with Apple, Google launched its own app store known as Google Play, and each company hosts more than a million separate applications available for download.

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Think of the design of an iPhone 6, an Eames lounge chair, a Ferrari 458 Italia, or a Leica T camera—products that are meant to delight. Not only are these tools functional, but they are beautiful, created by people who had a close and deep understanding of their customers and their needs. When one watched Steve Jobs onstage describe his latest products, there was no doubt that each and every one was imbued with the love of its creators. So where’s the Steve Jobs of security? What might Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, bring to the problem of our growing cyber insecurity? What would his firewall or antivirus program look like? Thus far, we have no idea, and that is a huge problem. It is a problem because when security features are not designed well, people simply don’t use them.

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In the early days of hacking, it was the telephone system that was the target of hackers’ attention as so-called phone phreaks manipulated the network to avoid the sky-high costs of long-distance calls. Let’s not forget two hackers who spent part of their youth back in 1971 building “blue boxes,” devices capable of hacking the phone network and making free calls: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. The pair sold blue boxes to students at UC Berkeley as a means of making money that would effectively help fund their other small start-up, the Apple computer company. As time passed, other notable hackers emerged, such as Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen. Mitnick famously broke into the Digital Equipment Corporation’s computers at the age of sixteen and went on to a string of such cyber intrusions, earning him the FBI’s ire and the distinction of being “America’s most wanted hacker.”

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research
by Michael Shearn
Published 8 Nov 2011

When these managers then enter a new business, they often run into problems because they don’t have that support network, and many fail to perform. In addition, most of these managers are great cost cutters but fail when it comes to growing the business. There are very few cases where a manager is good at both cutting costs and building the business such as Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. When he returned to Apple in 1997, Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. Jobs was able to cut costs to keep Apple out of bankruptcy and then rebuilt its entire product line and organization. When you learn that an outsider has joined to lead the business, respond with extreme caution. RHR International, a Chicago-headquartered management consultant, states that 40 percent to 60 percent of high-level corporate executives brought in from outside the company will leave within two years.

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Although, the skyscraper will generate huge returns for its investors over long periods of time, the flipped five-story building, although profitable to the lone hyena, will generate more limited returns for outside investors. Tan explains further: “How did Apple catapult from $5 billion in market capitalization in early 2003 to a market cap of $220 billion?” Tan contrasts Apple with Palm, which brought out the pioneering Palm Pilot product. Why was Palm, with a $90 billion market cap at its peak, bought out in 2010 by Hewlett-Packard, as Seng Hock asks, “for a mere $1.2 billion?” The difference was that Apple was run by a Lion manager: Steve Jobs. Most competent early-stage companies do not cross the chasm to an established business because they lack the lion manager’s infrastructure—the teamwork, the know-how, the necessary institutional structures, and the culture.

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Country Risks You need to understand the risks of doing business in each of the countries where a business earns more than 10 percent of its revenue. For example, Brazil has a complicated tax code and archaic employment laws. (The cost of hiring someone is usually about 100 percent of that person’s base salary, per month, in addition to the base salary.) Apple does not have any stores in Brazil, even though Brazil is one of the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world: When CEO Steve Jobs was asked why he did not operate in Brazil, he said the “crazy, super-high tax policies” were too much for his company.9 Be careful extrapolating the past success of a business in a foreign market into the future. You need to consider that the government policies for foreign investment can easily change.

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck
by Jon Acuff
Published 6 Apr 2015

It springs them up from the depths, back into the light, fueled by a decision never to experience that low again. Or to help make sure other people don’t end up there either. Is there anyone who doubts that being fired from his own company didn’t fuel Steve Jobs? Having lost his baby, having been pushed out by his own board in 1985, is there anyone who doesn’t think he licked his wounds and started planning a triumphant return? Would Apple have been Apple without Steve’s underdog moment that came full circle when he came back to Apple in 1996?1 Hard to say, but his Career Bump did impact him and the company. What’s fascinating is that even the bumps that aren’t work related can lead to new career adventures.

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Jamie Chavez Blog, “Be Regular and Orderly in Your Life so That You May Be Violent and Original in Your Work” (September 15, 2011), http://www.jamiechavez.com/blog/2011/09/be-regular-and-orderly-in-your-life-so-that-you-may-be-violent-and-original-in-your-work/. 4. Jacquelyn Smith, “Steve Jobs Always Dressed Exactly the Same. Here’s Who Else Does,” Forbes (October 4, 2012), http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/10/05/steve-jobs-always-dressed-exactly-the-same-heres-who-else-does/. 5. Michael Lewis, “Obama’s Way,” Vanity Fair (October 2012), http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama. Chapter 15 1. The Shawshank Redemption, Directed by Frank Darabont (USA Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994), DVD. 2.

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We compare the manicured Instagram feeds of our friends to the messy reality of our own lives and come up lacking. We think everyone else has it all figured out so we pretend to as well. If we ever investigated the lives of anyone successful we’d realize they never accomplished what they have all alone. Star quarterbacks have linemen. Steve Jobs didn’t design the iPhone by himself. Oprah doesn’t run the cameras. We all need people to help us and the only way they can, especially casual relationships, is if we give them information. Not all of the information. The best way to end a casual relationship is to turn a fire hose on it. But just tell them the truth.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder
Published 8 Sep 2014

Facebook allowed us to see See “The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,” by Johan Ugander et al. (arXiv preprint, 2011, arXiv: 1111.4503). Pixar famously put The idea was Steve Jobs’s. I first heard of this anecdote in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine (Edinburgh, UK: Canongate, 2012). See BuzzFeed’s “Inside Steve Jobs’ Mind-Blowing Pixar Campus,” by Adam B. Vary, for more details. Vary mind-blowingly interviews Craig Payne, a senior Pixar manager: buzzfeed.com/adambvary/inside-steve-jobs-mindblowing-pixar-campus. “the strength of weak ties” See “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Mark S. Granovetter, American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80.

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Conquerors, tycoons, martyrs, saviors, even scoundrels (especially scoundrels!)—their lives are how we’ve told our larger story, how we’ve marked our progression from the banks of a couple of silty rivers to wherever we are now. From Pharaoh Narmer in BCE 3100, the first living man whose name we still know, to Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela—the heroic framework is how people order the world. Narmer was first on an ancient list of kings. The scribes have changed, but that list has continued on. I mean, the 1960s, power to the people and so on, is the perfect example: that’s the era of Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, Hendrix, not “Guy at Party.”

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Anyone who tells you otherwise, from the cupcake-shop owner down the street to the CEO in the boardroom, is lying. Part of it is the “… is always right” thing—nobody likes a person with that much power. But by far the biggest cause of frustration is that people don’t understand and can’t articulate what they actually need. As Steve Jobs said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” What he didn’t say is that showing them, especially in tech, means playing a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey with several million people shouting advice. If you are, say, a car company and people don’t like some part of your product, they mostly tell you indirectly, by not buying it.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

They absolutely refused, they wouldn't do 174 The ArrIval of the Real User it, we could not sell them on the concept of the mouse, we showed them the re- port, we showed them the mouse, and what they did instead was to put a little finger-sensitive tablet on the keyboard. . . which was useless, it was so bad that finally they gave it up, but they wouldn't use the mouse. . . they said people don't want that extra thing on their desk. . . that was just really difficult to understand, in the same company. . . it was just crazy. . . . It wasn't until Apple picked it up. . . . I mean, it was the real change from there, Steve Jobs saw the technology at PARC and pIcked it up right away. The mouse attracted Steve Jobs's attention during Larry Tesler's demon- stration of the Alto at PARC, and when Tesler moved to Apple a few months later, the mouse moved with him. This last move, at the end of the bootstrap- ping process, was the one that made a star out of the mouse, to the extent that many still believe that Apple invented the mouse. Although Apple never claimed such an invention, some of its employees still occasionally say that "we're the ones who perfected the mouse by getting rid of these extra buttons" (Bruce Tagliazini, quoted in Card and Moran 1988, 524).

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(Johnson et al. 1989, 25-26) The "other" personal computer revolution that redefined the idea of the per- sonal computer was indeed partly the result of the computing philosophy that had led to the Star and that had invented a personal user for the computer. The final stages of product development and marketing of the interface for the per- sonal computer, however, occurred at Apple, not at Xerox. Apple and The End of the Bootstrapping Process The fairy-tale story of the founding of Apple Computer by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, beginning with the Apple I and the meetings of computer hobbyists at the Home Brew Computer Club in a Palo Alto burger joint, is often told and need not be repeated here. It is necessary, however, to trace the path followed by Douglas Engelbart's innovations as they reached their terminus in the form in which they now are employed, a form very different from the one Engelbart had envisioned for them.

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It is necessary, however, to trace the path followed by Douglas Engelbart's innovations as they reached their terminus in the form in which they now are employed, a form very different from the one Engelbart had envisioned for them. And the incorporation of those innovations into the Apple computer via their further development at Xerox PARC forms the con- clusion of that story. It also registers the ultimate translation of the conception of the user. At Apple, the user finally became "everybody," conceived this time as indeed everybody-as consumers of a commercial product, not candidates for coevolutionary change or as "Sally." In November 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, and Larry Tesler dem- onstrated the latest implementation of Smalltalk on the Alto. In Tesler's words: I70 The Arrival of the Real User "I was about the only person there interested in personal computers, so they said, 'you can talk to these people from Apple'" (Rogers 1983, 89).

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

A draft of that campaign read: “True enough, there are monster computers lurking in big business and big government that know everything from what motels you’ve stayed at to how much money you have in the bank. But at Apple we’re trying to balance the scales by giving individuals the kind of computer power once reserved for corporations.” Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs was a huge Stewart Brand fan.37 He was just a kid in the late 1960s when the magazine and commune culture were at their peak of popularity and power, but he read the Whole Earth Catalog and absorbed its culture into his own worldview. So it wasn’t surprising that the original Apple ad campaign that hinted at computers as corporate and government monsters was left in the Dumpster while Brand’s view of personal computers as a technology of freedom prevailed.

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It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs. It did not take long for EFF to find its calling: lobbying Congress on behalf of the budding Internet service providers that came out of the NSFNET network and pushing for a privatized Internet system, where the government stayed pretty much out of the way—“Designing the Future Net” is how EFF’s Barlow described it. 103.

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On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road. The kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: stay hungry, stay foolish. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself,” said Steve Jobs at a commencement speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc. 38. By some accounts, BZ was deployed in Vietnam to psychologically paralyze North Vietnamese fighters. It was also tested on American soldiers, whose harrowing experiences later inspired the cult classic horror film Jacob’s Ladder.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Like an ansible, with its keyboard and screen, the Blackberry could do calls, but its main function was email. We had to get into the 21st century for the Apple iPhone. * * * In 2007, when Apple was already making mega-money with its iPod, Steve Jobs was persuaded to ‘do’ a phone that would handle everything the iPod did, plus make calls, send emails and texts, and access the internet. To do that Apple turned the humble phone into what Apple did best – computers. Safari-enabled, the iPhone wasn’t really a phone at all – it was a pocket computer. A year later, in 2008 – the year of the global economic crash – Apple added the App Store – which is the beginning of what we think of as a truly smart phone: a phone that is globally connected, and that can be customised (personalised) by the user.

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Rather than accept that it needed its skilled workforce of computer-literate women, it decided to merge Britain’s existing computer companies into one giant company, International Computers Ltd, to provide massive mainframe computers that just a few highly trained men could operate. By the mid-1970s, when the long-awaited man-friendly product was finally ready, the computing world had moved on – and specifically moved on to the USA: Steve Jobs showcased his Apple 1 in 1976. Massive mainframe was out. Desktop was in. In a panic, the British Government stopped funding ICL, effectively murdering the UK’s homegrown computing industry. Britain after the war had a giant lead in computing technology, and could have held that lead, and developed it into software programming.

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Le Guin, 1966 The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham, 1957 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932 Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999 ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (short story), Philip K. Dick, 1966 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018. The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Scott Galloway, 2017 Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, 2015 How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, 2014 The Art of Electronics, Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, 1980 (NOTE: I only bought this because I thought it said Winifred Hill – and girls don’t do circuits, do they?

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

He knew TUTOR, he had discovered the online community, the notesfiles, the TERM-talks, the games, and the sheer presence of people online. “I thought PLATO was one of the coolest things I had ever seen,” Brodie says. Back at Stanford, September 1979, and Apple Computer’s Apple II personal computer sales were booming. The next big wave of microcomputers, from the Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, and IBM PC, was still months or years away. Steve Jobs had not yet made his visit to Xerox PARC—that would happen in December. Silicon Valley was ignorant of PLATO, focused instead on things PLATO users would have considered trifling. Silicon Valley start-up visionaries would not wake up to the online world for years to come.

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When asked about this what-if scenario, George Pake remarked, “I think that the whole push toward distributed computing would not have been as strong as it was.” The “Personal Dynamic Media” article might not have appeared in publication in 1977. Perhaps most crucially, there probably would have been no reason for Steve Jobs to visit Xerox PARC in 1979, only to be blown away by what he saw, taking ideas back to Apple, then subsequently coming out with the Lisa desktop computer, followed, famously, by the Macintosh, which changed the world. What would Silicon Valley look like today had Alpert and Bitzer and PLATO moved there in 1970? It is easy to speculate. What is certain is that much of the fabled history of the Valley might not have transpired, or might have transpired in quite different ways.

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A good tech visionary knows that half his job is selling, and Bitzer was a master salesman: cool, confident, and knowing just what rabbit to pull out of his bag of tricks depending on the situation. Thus on occasion he had begun demoing games, notesfiles, pnotes, TERM-talk, and Talkomatic. Like Steve Jobs and Apple would do years later with the iPhone, the sheer volume and variety of applications created on PLATO were dazzling in demo settings. But still, not everyone was happy with the games or the gamers. “I would get a lot of reports,” Bitzer says. “You know, ‘We ought to do something about this.’

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

Visionary Charisma: Belief and Confidence Visionary charisma makes others feel inspired; it makes us believe. It can be remarkably effective even though it won’t necessarily make people like you. Steve Jobs was notoriously feared inside Apple and had many detractors both within and without, but even these detractors readily admitted to his being both visionary and charismatic. One recent attendee to a Steve Jobs presentation told me: “He spoke with such conviction, such passion, he had all of our neurons screaming, Yes! I get it! I’m with you!!!” Why is visionary charisma so effective and powerful? Because of our natural discomfort with uncertainty.

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Eventually, the behaviors become instinctive. Countless well-known charismatic figures worked hard to gain their charisma, increasing it step by step. But because we come to know them at the peak of their charisma, it can be hard to believe these superstars weren’t always so impressive. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, considered one of the most charismatic CEOs of the decade, did not start out that way. In fact, if you watch his earliest presentations, you’ll see that he came across as bashful and awkward, veering from overly dramatic to downright nerdy. Jobs progressively increased his level of charisma over the years, and you can see the gradual improvement in his public appearances.

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If you’re mentioning the fact that there is untapped potential in your customer base, liken yourselves to “bounty hunters” or “treasure hunters” searching for “hidden gold.” Make even numbers and statistics personal, meaningful, and relatable for your audience. Steve Jobs did this masterfully when he gave his audience two ways of measuring iPhone sales: “Apple sold four million iPhones so far,” he said. “That amounts to selling twenty thousand iPhones every single day.” He did even better with memory cards: “This memory card has twelve gigabytes of memory. That means it holds enough music for you to travel to the moon and back.”

Dead Companies Walking
by Scott Fearon
Published 10 Nov 2014

There’s a fixed number between a stock price and zero, and that’s as much as you’re going to get out of those positions. For long investments, however, there is no such limit. The people who bought in early on one of the most stunning and successful corporate turnarounds in recent history, Apple, know how profitable long investments can be. Actually, Apple has come back from the dead several times in its history. But its most impressive revival came after Steve Jobs took the company away from what had been its core business for decades, the personal computer. First, he reinvented how consumers bought, listened to, and shared music with the iPod. Then, a few years later, he turned cellular phones into Star Trek–level computing devices with the iPhone.

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With more and more Americans being diagnosed with diabetes every year, it had a chance to be a blockbuster, Prozac-level product. Cygnus’s offices were in a business park east of the 101 freeway between a granite quarry and a go-kart track. Interestingly, it shared a parking lot with NeXT Computer, the company Steve Jobs started after he was booted from Apple. I was at Cygnus a total of five times between 1994 and 2002. It’s rare that I visit a company that often if I don’t own its stock. But I was excited by Cygnus’s idea and I wanted to keep up with how it was faring. Every time I went down there, I got the same story from the various executives I met with: the watch was almost ready.

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The business media loves to laud idiosyncratic visionaries who disrupt their industries by introducing unconventional new products or services. Steve Jobs famously eschewed market research and claimed that he and his team built the first Mac computers for themselves, not their customers. Jobs was also famous for bragging that consumers didn’t know what they wanted until he showed it to them. This self-centered approach worked out for him and a few other uniquely gifted innovators. But for every Steve Jobs, there are countless corporate leaders who have lost everything trying to remake their customers’ habits. In 2012, JCPenney’s (stock symbol: JCP) management team famously “fired its customers” by eliminating coupons and stocking more expensive brand-name merchandise.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

It would be Xerox, with the help of various Engelbart alumni, that would turn his ideas into reality by improving it, over time, with the benefit of newer technology and an emphasis on simplicity. In 1979, they’d demonstrate their work in a now notorious private demo for an ambitious tech entrepreneur called Steve Jobs – who raced back to his company, Apple Computer, and ordered his people to begin copying it. But it would be a while until the rest of the planet, including Jobs, caught up with Engelbart’s genius completely. The mouse wouldn’t become available to the wider public until 1983 and his astonishing vision of the internet would take even longer to actualize.

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Engelbart was treating his people like ‘laboratory animals’: ‘Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the Knowledge Workshop’, Thierry Bardini and Michael Friedewald, History of Technology (2003), 23, pp. 191–212, at p. 206. who raced back to his company, Apple Computer: Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson (Abacus, 2015), pp. 96–7. Engelbart recalled meeting Jobs in the 1980s: ‘Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy’, Tia O’Brien, Mercury News, 3 March 2013. Fred Turner, would archly note that: ‘Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world’, Carole Cadwalladr, Guardian, 5 May 2013.

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Twenge et al., PLOS ONE (July 2012), 7(7); ‘Fitting In or Standing Out: Trends in American Parents’ Choices for Children’s Names, 1880–2007’, Jean M. Twenge et al., Social Psychological and Personality Science (2010), 1(1), pp. 19–25. They write of the largest place of worship in America, Lakewood Church in Houston: The Narcissism Epidemic, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell (Free Press, 2010), pp. 248, 249. Steve Jobs . . . Travis Kalanick: Wozniak on Steve Job’s Resignation, Bloomberg, 24 August 2011, video, from 08:46 [Wozniak: ‘He must have read some books that really were his guide in life and I think Atlas Shrugged might have been one that he mentioned back then.’] www.bloomberg.com/news/­videos/b/­d93c1b72-31e2-41de-ba4a-65a6cb4f4929.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

October 2008 was the first month where the iPhone outsold the BlackBerry, selling 6.9 million units to BlackBerry’s 6.1 million.11 And there was no looking back. Business at Apple was booming. “Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said at the time. Jobs, who rarely skipped a chance to take a shot at the competition, proudly announced, “We sold more phones than RIM.”12 Still, at the time RIM continued to hold a big lead in the overall smartphone market. In the two years since the iPhone was released, RIM had sold 23 million smartphones compared to Apple’s 13 million.13 So Lazaridis and Balsillie had reason to stay the course.

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You can use your web tools . . . and you can publish your apps to the BlackBerry without writing any native code.”17 The problem was that Balsillie’s pitch wasn’t new. In fact, it was eerily similar to the one Steve Jobs had given to developers three years earlier. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2007, just before the launch of the original iPhone, Jobs announced support for Web apps as Apple’s solution to the growing developer demand for a way to create applications for the iPhone. Developers were not enthused, with one popular tech blogger calling Jobs’s presentation a “shit sandwich.”18 Jobs changed his tune a year later with the announcement of an iPhone SDK and the App Store, but needless to say, when Balsillie made the same Web-app pitch, developers were not impressed.

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“iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” press release, July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 15. Zach Spear, “App Store Daily Download Rates Now Double December Volumes,” Apple Insider, January 16, 2009, http://appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/16/app_store_daily_download_rates_now_double_december_volumes.html. 16. App Store and Google Play statistics can be found at http://www.statista.com. 17. Quoted in Erick Shonfeld, “RIM CEO Jim Balsillie To Steve Jobs: ‘You Don’t Need An App For The Web,’” Techcrunch, November 16, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/rim-ceo-balsillie-jobsapp-web/. 18.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

Seizing on Kramer’s promising idea, Apple Computer’s engineers incorporated a scroll wheel, sleeker materials and, of course, more advanced memory and software. In 2001 – twenty-two years after Kramer’s idea – they debuted the iPod. Steve Jobs would later say: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. Kramer’s original invention Apple’s subsequent iPod Kramer’s idea did not come out of nowhere, either.

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We surround ourselves with things that have never existed before, while pigs and llamas and goldfish do not. But where do our new ideas come from? CHAPTER 2 THE BRAIN ALTERS WHAT IT ALREADY KNOWS On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs stood on the MacWorld stage in his jeans and a black turtleneck. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he declared. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Even after years of speculation, the iPhone was a revelation. No one had seen anything like it: here was a communication device, music player and personal computer that you could hold in the palm of your hand.

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Looking through his collection, Buxton points to the many devices that paved the way for the electronics industry. The 1999 Palm Vx introduced the thinness we’ve come to expect in our devices today. “It produced the vocabulary that led to the super thin stuff like today’s laptops,” Buxton says. “Where are the roots? There they are, right there.”2 Step by step, the groundwork was being laid for Steve Jobs’ “revolutionary” product. The Jesus phone didn’t come from a virgin birth after all. A few years after Jobs’ announcement, the writer Steve Cichon bought a stack of timeworn Buffalo News newspapers from 1991. He wanted to satisfy his curiosity about what had changed. In the front section, he found this Radio Shack advertisement.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

A mere handful of years after the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, grumbling about even that company started to surface. “Apple is sacrificing innovation on the altar of shareholder value,” warns the headline of a piece written by a prominent business columnist. The article chastises Apple for “fiddling with updates of existing products” instead of focusing on coming up with the next game-changing revolution in personal technology.9 A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission shows corporations mentioned some form of the word “innovation” (defined by Webster’s as “the introduction [presumably in the near future] of something new,”) 33,528 times in 2012, a 64 percent increase from five years before.

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Attributed to a 2011 speech by United States president Barack Obama and garlanded with the requisite multimedia slide show/report, they are part of an overall package designed to convey the sense of concerted purpose the White House brings to “winning the future.” The White House isn’t alone in naming future as a priority. In 2005, six years before the Obama speech and two years before Steve Jobs was to unleash the awesome power of the iPhone on an eager world, British Prime Minister Tony Blair opined in a speech that the world was “fast forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed.” He then asked the all-important question: “How do we secure the future for our party and for our country?”

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“Contemporary life is overloaded with visions of the future,” note two professors of philosophy in a column. “Whereas Friedrich Nietzsche bemoaned the surplus of historical sense, crushing old Europe under the weight of its past, we are now suffering from an obsession with what lies ahead.”31 “The word ‘innovation’ has become a buzzword and it’s been drained of much of its meaning,” notes bestselling Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.32 All around us, writes critic Thomas Frank, there are “TED talks on how to be a creative person.” There are “‘Innovation Jams’ at which IBM employees brainstorm collectively over a global hookup,” and “‘Thinking Out of the Box’ desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club.”33 Language matters.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life it is not necessarily all that useful; entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee. Interestingly, the likes of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel often seem certifiably bonkers; Henry Ford famously despised accountants – the Ford Motor Company was never audited while he had control of it. When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it.

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Copyright © Benoit Grogan-Avignon, with permission of Shutter Media Contrast this effect with the impression given by plain steel shutters. In a sensible world, the only thing that would matter would be solving a problem by whatever means work best, but problem-solving is a strangely status-conscious job: there are high-status approaches and low-status approaches. Even Steve Jobs encountered the disdain of the nerdier elements of the software industry – ‘What does Steve do exactly? He can’t even code,’ an employee once snootily observed. But compared to an eighteenth-century counterpart, Jobs had it easy. In the mid-eighteenth century, a largely self-taught clockmaker called John Harrison heard that the UK Government had pledged £20,000 – several million pounds in today’s currency – as a prize for anyone who could establish longitude to within half a degree* after a journey from England to the West Indies, and was determined to find a solution.

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A nervous and bureaucratic culture is closed-mindedly attaching more importance to the purity of the methodology than to the possible value of the solution, which leads us to ignore possible solutions not because they have been proven to be wrong, but because they have not been reached through an approved process of reasoning. A result of this is that business and politics have become far more boring and sensible than they need to be. Steve Jobs’s valedictory injunction to students to ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’ probably contained more valuable advice than may be apparent at first glance. It is, after all, a distinguishing feature of entrepreneurs that, since they don’t have to defend their reasoning every time they make a decision, they are free to experiment with solutions that are off-limits to others within a corporate or institutional setting.* We approve reasonable things too quickly, while counterintuitive ideas are frequently treated with suspicion.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

The first and fourth questions, specifically, requires groundbreaking and original thinking to remove an offering that is seen essential or adding an offering that has never been considered before. When Steve Jobs became CEO of Apple in 1997, he applied a similar process to reinvigorate Apple and bring it back to the main stream of the industry. First he entirely eliminated the printers and servers divisions of Apple. Second, to rationalise the wide range of products the company made, he drew a two by two matrix with the columns marked Personal and Professional, and the rows marked desktop and mobile. He challenged Apple engineers to decide the four products that will fit in the four quadrants of this matrix for the company to focus on.

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This led to the dramatic reduction of what is being offered and allowed the company to perform the third step of the Blue Ocean Strategy, to increase what really matters, which is the humancentric design and user friendliness of its products. The final step was to offer new products and services that were not traditionally seen as part of the industry’s offering. In this, Steve Jobs was particularly successful as he introduced the company into the music business (iPod and iTunes), phone business (iPhone) and tablet business (iPad). The technique can be extended to product design by rewording the four questions to be: 1. What features/parts of the studied product/process can be entirely eliminated?

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Chapter 5 Design Design / d z n/ Decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), by making a detailed drawing of it; Do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind. Oxford Dictionary “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Steve Jobs Design can mean different things in different contexts, from art to engineering to product design. In general, design refers to the clever arrangement of different components to work harmoniously to deliver a value or perform a task. The Design stage of the CDIO process refers to the cumulative and iterative process of bringing imagination a step closer to manifestation through the use of science, mathematics and common sense to convert resources and achieve prescribed objectives.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

My philosophy was—I’ve said this my whole career—you have to keep moving backwards, backwards into the organization. You can’t stay outside. You can’t be on the periphery. You have to move inside and drive it from where the original decisions are being made. With management. That’s what we did with Intel, with Apple, with all our clients. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak came into my office, they had Birkenstocks and cutoffs. Steve had a Ho Chi Minh beard and hair down his back. That actually never, ever bothered me, because I had worked with a lot of crazy people in the semiconductor industry. They were making “hobby” computers.

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California, thanks to several significant people, has changed the course of history, touched every part of this globe. I’ve been around this ball of dirt two and a half times, once as a military person, once as a civilian. I’ve seen the influences of California with my own eyes. It is the melting pot of innovation. What happens in San Francisco, ergo the world. But I think Steve Jobs’s message was completely lost. This era gives us such an opportunity to learn. But instead, the dumbing down of America started many years ago. And our cities, of course, feel it the worst because that’s where the population is at its densest. In its heyday, any Southern black family coming to live in Detroit could live from a single breadwinner—guys that stood on the front lines of the United Automobile Workers and made it possible for the first black kids to go to college.

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Psychedelics, dreams of free love and world peace, and science fiction gave the industry something it had been missing: spiritual ambition. Suddenly, through technology, engineers saw the future, new ways of connecting the world, sharing information, flattening hierarchy, shrinking not just microchips but the world. It was no longer enough to make calculators or the computers that ran the space program. People like Steve Jobs saw a world with a “hobby” computer in every home. The inventors of the internet imagined virtual libraries holding infinite information immediately accessible to all. So the action moved online. “Businesses” became “start-ups;” hardware was replaced by software; storefronts became websites. Yes, tech had its stumbles—the dot-com crash in the early 2000s was a shot to the industry’s solar plexus—but it never fell.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Apple has no problem with them. iTunes drives customers to buy more Apple hardware. Free as a business model? The gift economy? Apple is not generous. It charges a premium for its quality. Apple follows just a few Google rules. Lord knows, it innovates. And nobody’s better at simplifying tasks and design. How does Apple do it? How does it get away with operating this way even as every other company and industry is forced to redefine itself? It’s just that good. Its vision is that strong and its products even better. I left Apple once, in the 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned to the company, when I suffered through a string of bad laptops.

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Is there an anti-Google, one institution that has become successful by violating the rules in this book? I could think of one: Apple. Consider: Apple flouts Jarvis’ First Law. Hand over control to the customer? You must be joking. Steve Jobs controls all—and we want him to. It is thanks to his brilliant and single-minded vision and grumpy passion for perfection that his products work so well. Microsoft’s products, by contrast, operate as if they were designed by warring committees. Google’s products, though far more functional than Microsoft’s and built with considerable input from users, appear to have been designed by a computer (I await the aesthetic algorithm). Apple is the opposite of collaborative.

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The truth is a click away. Institutions are learning to acknowledge their mistakes and apologize. When he took office following predecessor Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal, New York Governor David Paterson preemptively admitted having an affair, among other peccadilloes. Apple had a near-disaster in the launch of its Mobile.me service and Steve Jobs admitted it publicly. This is honest talk, which comes in a human voice. Even in the machine age—the Google age—that voice will emerge and succeed over a filtered, packaged, institutional tone. The Cluetrain Manifesto (which you can read for free at Cluetrain.org) teaches this lesson in its 95 theses, which begin: Markets are conversations.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

And now we can all tweet about how wasteful government spending is. Even some of the leading technology companies—including Intel and Apple—received assistance from extraordinarily successful government grants and loans created to spark the field of computer technology. This sounds impossible to today’s mind-set. Apple, the same company that parks money offshore to avoid billions in taxes, took start-up money from the US government? That wasn’t in the movie. We think government blocks progress and innovation comes from people like Steve Jobs fighting it. That’s the story now, but in the recent past private and public interests were aligned behind an ambitious vision of the future.

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blog post went up on April 29, 2009. he wanted to buy the first copy: The man from Myanmar who gave me the first $20 was Ken Tun. Thanks, Ken! 10 billion people by 2050: Population projections come from the UN’s World Population Prospects report. his final user experience: Steve Jobs’s last words were reported by his sister, Mona Simpson (“A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” New York Times, October 30, 2011). ten years old in our species’ life span: Will MacAskill’s perspective on the age of humanity comes from a 2018 TED Talk called “What Are the Most Important Moral Problems of Our Time?” MacAskill is also cofounder of a movement called effective altruism, which seeks to maximize the altruistic impact people create in their lives.

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Other People are the cause of it and Other People will fix it and Other People will suffer the consequences if they don’t. Every single one of us has it in our minds that we’re separate from it all. Instead we blame others and pray for a Superman-like solution. That some genius figures out how to purify the air and the oceans and Warren Buffett and Oprah agree to pay for it. Or, even better, we learn that Steve Jobs’s previously unknown last product was a device that solves everything by giving every user total cosmic clarity. His last words, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow,” were also the first words of iUs, his final user experience. But hope isn’t a plan. When a Hail Mary is the strategy, you’ve already lost.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

X.com’s leaders took Bill Harris’s rocky tenure as evidence that such “supervision” was not only unnecessary, but counterproductive. For every Schmidt-like success, there seemed to be a John Sculley waiting in the wings. Sculley, the former CEO of PepsiCo, had been installed to lead Apple following the ouster of Steve Jobs—with mixed results. “We saw what had happened at Apple when they brought in the Pepsi executive,” David Sacks recalled. “We saw what had happened at Netscape when they brought in Jim Barksdale. And we saw that we were on a similar trajectory.” Musk, too, was skeptical that a wizened adult figure was needed to whip young companies into shape: The founder may be bizarre and erratic but this is a creative force, and they should run the company.… If someone’s the creative force, or one of the creative forces, behind a company, at least they understand which direction to go.

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Those guys are fucking bozos…” Jordan saw the questions for what they were: a Steve Jobs stress test. “I’ll cop to the first one,” Jordan said. “It took me ten years to find my way back here, but I’m back and I’m here to stay.” On the question of Disney, he pushed back, hard. “You’re wrong on Disney,” he said. Then he explained that Disney stores had higher consumer ratings than the Disney theme parks. “And we sell stuff!” Jordan said. Jobs seemed satisfied and pitched Jordan on Pixar. Jordan demurred; he had just been a CFO, and he was looking for something different. Jobs proposed he join Apple instead to head a new division. “I have this vision for Apple stores,” Jobs said, and proceeded to outline a reimagined shopping experience from the roots up.

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And some parts of the ship aren’t working that well. But it’s going in the actual right direction. Or you can have a ship that has everything buttoned down. The sails are full. Morale is great. Everyone’s cheering. And it’s heading straight for the reef. Musk admired Steve Jobs and studied the period of his departure from Apple. “That ship was sailing really well,” Musk observed of the interregnum between Jobs’s departure and return, “… towards the reef.” David Sacks remembered this as “a period of time when Silicon Valley didn’t have self-confidence in its own executives,” he said, arguing this approach resulted in disaster.

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry
by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler
Published 19 Nov 2009

That summer, I discovered that it was possible for an entrepreneur to encourage revolutionary ideas and foster a distinctive culture. xix INTRODUCTION That lesson became even more obvious when I returned to Apple for a second summer internship as a technical sales support person with an Apple partner. Although only one year had passed, Apple was an extraordinarily different place. Steve Jobs had been fired, and everything I enjoyed about Apple’s visionary culture had evaporated. While the environment was not as invigorating, I learned another critical lesson that would guide the rest of my career: the power of each customer exchange. If the exchange was executed as well as possible—if we made the customer truly successful—we had the opportunity to transform him or her into an Apple loyalist and evangelist.

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The lessons I learned as an entrepreneur were pivotal, as were those I learned working for somebody else. In 1984, I had a summer job at Apple writing some of the first native assembly language for the Macintosh. I had the opportunity to work on the most exciting and important project at Apple, and it was like getting paid to go to Disneyland. There were fruit smoothies in the refrigerators, a motorcycle in the lobby, and shiatsu massages. The very best part was being able to witness Steve Jobs walking around, motivating the developers. Steve’s leadership created the energy and spirit in the office. Apple encouraged the ‘‘think different’’ mind-set throughout its entire organization.

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Don’t be afraid to ignore rules of your industry that have become obsolete or that defy common sense. Creating an attractive user interface that people enjoy using is the key to building a truly great product. This seems so obvious, but it wasn’t the way in which software design was customarily approached. Steve Jobs is the master of building computer products that create customer excitement and loyalty. It’s also no coincidence that his products look like nothing else out there. Think differently in everything you do. Play #11: Have—and Listen to—a Trusted Mentor When we first started building salesforce.com, I was still working at Oracle, where I was creating a new software product called Internet File System and developing the company’s philanthropy program.

Shipping Greatness
by Chris Vander Mey
Published 23 Aug 2012

If some small thing goes wrong, skip over it and use the distraction as an opportunity to reiterate your core message. While you can certainly skip over small defects in your presentation, the best cure for problems is to not have them. The best demos take weeks of preparation. Steve Jobs was notorious for demanding in-depth rehearsals, and it shows in the output of Apple’s keynotes. In addition, Apple always thinks about how it can reduce the points of failure in a demo. Microsoft product managers think the same way and routinely have three laptops: their personal laptop, their demo laptop, and their backup demo laptop. This approach gives them multiple backup strategies and ensures a stable demo environment.

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For example, you may deliver a presentation to get funding. You may build decks to provide product updates. You might even pitch to convince people to work with your team. Clearly, building great decks and delivering a great presentation is a critical skill, but it is one that can take years to master. Steve Jobs–level presentations are the gold standard, but they are incredibly time-consuming to build, probably have more compelling content than you do, and are generally beyond the reach of most of us. The good news is, if you spend a lot of time going to presentation classes, studying speaking, getting coaching, and so on, you’ll find that there are some basic things you can do to help ensure that your presentation is great, and then you can continue the business of shipping.

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We can do that—and with that one button click, we’ll attach the name of the restaurant, your name, your wife’s name, and a picture. I bet you can see the slide right now. You would show a picture of your happy wife eating lobster and tell the story over it. You might even be able to expense your lobster dinner. You’ve created a story worthy of Steve Jobs, and you told it in less time than your audience would take processing the first sentence of the original pitch. In addition to eliminating buzzwords and acronyms, you accomplished five other things with this story: You made it personal and engaged with your audience. Dining at a restaurant is something most of us can understand.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Unsurprisingly, it was this last “private-specific” event that was of most interest when it came to generating a mini-biography. As anyone who has ever read a popular biography will know, more space is typically given to the unique events in a person’s life that are specific to them rather than a broader contextual look at where they fit within the wider society. Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, for example, focuses far more on Jobs’s work creating the iPhone than it does on what he saw on his drive to and from his Palo Alto home each day.21 But assuming that “public” or “general” observations are simply noise to be filtered out risks grossly simplifying a person’s life by viewing them as existing in a context-free void.

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If the chances behind an event are enormously remote, yet the event occurs nevertheless, may one not be forgiven for invoking a fatalistic explanation? . . . [A] probability of one in 5840.82 [makes it seem] impossible, from within love at least, that [our meeting] could have been anything but fate.26 Of course, as the late Steve Jobs might have said about fate: “There’s an app for that.” Serendipity’s creators proudly state, “Technology is changing the way we date. For the shy and single, it has been the biggest aid to romance since the creation of the red rose.” Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve MIT’s Serendipity project is not the first investigation of its kind.

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Thomas, Printer, between 1872 and 1880). 19 Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981). 20 Dormehl, Luke. “This Algorithm Can Tell Your Life Story Through Twitter.” Fast Company, November 4, 2013. fastcolabs.com/3021091/this-algorithm-can-tell-your-life-story-through-twitter. 21 Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 22 Kosinskia, Michal, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb. “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” PNAS, vol. 110, no. 15, April 9, 2013. pnas.org/content/110/15/5802.full. 23 Larsen, Noah. “Bloggers Reveal Personalities with Word, Phrase Choice.”

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

When you have it, you just have to scratch it. You really can’t help yourself. Being an entrepreneur may be something deep in the genes. John Doerr, the venture capitalist, described some of the greatest entrepreneurs he had invested in—including Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), and Steve Jobs (Apple)—as “geeks who couldn’t get dates.” Although I don’t know if that is actually true about those four guys, the spirit of the comment resonates. The world of the entrepreneur, even when they are teenagers, is typically not defined by being cool and fitting in but rather by their passion for technology, innovation, change, and a particular idea.

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Tim Bucher has learned the importance of chemistry in spades over the years. Tim is one of Silicon Valley’s most accomplished serial entrepreneurs. A former Sun engineer, co-founder of WebTV (sold to Microsoft), a former Apple executive (ran all of Macintosh engineering), and founder of Zing Systems (sold to Dell), Tim may be the only entrepreneur on the planet who has worked closely with Scott McNealy, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. My partner Jon Karlen led an investment in Tim’s Zing Systems, which developed a mobile music software platform to compete with the iPhone, and we had the pleasure of working closely with him and learning some of the secrets to his repeated entrepreneurial success.

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When they are asked what they want to be when they graduate from college, a large percentage of students reply, “Entrepreneur.” To have a dream and build it into a success is indeed fundamental to the American system of capitalist free enterprise. Some of our greatest cultural icons—from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs—have been entrepreneurs. Few, if any, students mention the goal of becoming a venture capitalist. Although the VC industry has gained prominence since my college days, most students I’ve talked to still don’t know what a venture capitalist is or how a VC firm operates. There are no Thomas Edisons among the VC ranks.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

With the ascendancy of Amazon, Apple, and other online emporia early in the twenty-first century, much of the Internet was occupied with transactions, and the industry retreated to the “cloud.” Abandoning the distributed Internet architecture, the leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs replaced it with centralized and segmented subscription systems, such as Paypal, Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Google cloud. Uber, Airbnb, and other sequestered “unicorns” followed. These so-called “walled gardens” might have sufficed if they could have actually been walled off from the rest of the Internet. At Apple, Steve Jobs originally attempted to accomplish such a separation by barring third-party software applications (or “apps”).

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But it will do doors—your front door and your car door and doors of perception.”6 Rupert Murdoch was one of the first people who appreciated this message, flying me to Hayman Island, Australia, to regale his executives in Newscorp and Twentieth Century Fox with visions of a transformation of media for the twenty-first century. At the same time, the Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel proclaimed Life after Television his guide to the digital future. I later learned that long before the iPhone, Steve Jobs read the book and passed it out to colleagues. Much of Life after Television has come true, but there’s still room to go back to the future. The Internet has not delivered on some of its most important promises. In 1990 I was predicting that in the world of networked computers, no one would have to see an advertisement he didn’t want to see.

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Silicon, then as now, was the foundation, the physical layer, underlying the entire edifice of information technology. I am reassured that Hot Chips lives on even though Google and others assert that “software eats everything.” Nick Tredennick, the designer of a favorite “hot chip” of yore, the Motorola 68,000 microprocessor behind Steve Jobs’s Macintosh computer, used to say that the industry seeks to exploit the “leading edge wedge.” Three overlapping design targets converged in this fertile crescent of chip design: zero delay (fast hot chips), zero power (cool low-energy devices), and zero cost (transistors going for billionths of a penny).2 Between the 1980s and 2017, chips have been migrating from the hot fast end toward the cool cheap end, a trend Dally has led.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models
by Barry Libert and Megan Beck
Published 6 Jun 2016

American Management Association website, http://www.amanet.org/news/10606.aspx. 5. Issie Lapowsky, “Ev Williams on Twitter’s Early Years,” Inc., October 4, 2013, http://www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/ev-williams-twitter-early-years.html. 6. “Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs’ Favorite Product Was the Team He Built at Apple,” Big Think, 2015, http://bigthink.com/think-tank/steve-jobs-as-prickly-team-builder-with-walter-isaacson. Principle 5, Customers 1. Lego Group website, “Mission and Vision,” http://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/lego-group/mission-and-vision. 2. Andrew O’Connell, “Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp on Leading through Survival and Growth,” Harvard Business Review, January 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/01/lego-ceo-jorgen-vig-knudstorp-on-leading-through-survival-and-growth. 3.

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Just as companies are portfolios of assets, leaders need to have access to and employ a portfolio of styles. Let’s take a look at how this played out for one great leader. Steve Jobs isn’t often remembered for his co-creative leadership style. He is more often remembered for his difficult personality, emotional outbursts, and perfectionism. When Jobs had a clear vision for a product, he was notoriously dogmatic about enforcing it. However, he also created open Apple platforms and drew in a developer network that earned $10 billion in 2014. Jobs had more than 450 patents and helped design multiple market-creating products, but when asked by his biographer, Walter Isaacson, about his greatest accomplishment, he said, “You know, making a product is hard, but making a team that can continually make products is even harder.

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In 2015, Fortune’s most admired companies were Apple, Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon.com, and Starbucks, and a growing percentage of the Forbes wealthiest individuals are technologists or network leaders. Apple, Google, Amazon.com, and Starbucks have made significant investments in digital technologies (if you’re unsure about Starbucks, consider its popular app and payment system). What’s more, they have responded with agility to market changes by changing their core beliefs about value and firm design. Apple, despite its reputation for maintaining tight control of its product line, opened its platform and created the Apple Developer Program, allowing anyone to develop apps for its products.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Children Now Have One’, NPR Education, 31 October 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774838891/its-a-smartphone-life-more-than-half-of-u-s-children-now-have-one; Zoe Kleinman, ‘Half of UK 10-year-olds own a smartphone’, BBC News, 4 February 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51358192. 56 ‘Most children own mobile phone by age of seven, study finds’, Guardian, 30 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/30/most-children-own-mobile-phone-by-age-of-seven-study-finds. 57 Nick Bilton, ‘Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent’, New York Times, 10 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-was-a-low-tech-parent.html; Chris Weller, ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Raised Their Kids Tech-Free and It Should Have Been a Red Flag’, Independent, 24 October 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-raised-their-kids-techfree-and-it-shouldve-been-a-red-flag-a8017136.html. 58 Matt Richtel, ‘A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute’, New York Times, 22 October 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html. 59 Nellie Bowles, ‘Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids’, New York Times, 26 October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/silicon-valley-nannies.html. 60 Nellie Bowles, ‘The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected’, New York Times, 26 October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-screens-schools.html. 61 This is amongst those who have devices.

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As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in 1818 when his friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, sent him instructions on how to make a kaleidoscope: ‘Your kaleidoscope spread like the pestilence at Livorno. I heard that the whole population were given up to Kaleidoscopism.’9 Fast-forward two centuries and I’m sure you know where I’m going. The revolution that Steve Jobs triggered in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone means that most of us now have a modern day kaleidoscope in our pockets. One that is far more powerful and used far more obsessively than David Brewster’s popular toy. Kaleidoscomania on steroids Two hundred and twenty-one. That’s the number of times we check our phones on average each day.10 This adds up to three hours and fifteen minutes of average daily use, almost 1,200 hours a year.11 Around half of teens are now online ‘almost constantly’.12 A third of adults across the globe check their phones within five minutes of waking up; many of us (we know who we are) do so if we wake up in the middle of the night too.13 Digital distraction has become so bad that in Sydney, Tel Aviv and Seoul, cities with particularly high smartphone usage, urban planners have taken drastic steps to manage public safety.14 ‘Stop/Go’ lights have been installed into the pavements so that pedestrians can see whether it is safe to cross without having to look up from their screens.

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Screen-free lives It’s with such insights in mind that some parents are actively promoting screen-free lives for their kids. Ironically it is Silicon Valley parents leading the way. They are one of the groups most likely to prohibit smartphone usage amongst their children and send them to screen-free schools. Steve Jobs notoriously limited how much technology his kids used at home, whilst Bill Gates didn’t allow his kids to get mobile phones until they were 14 and even then set strict screen-time limits.57 As early as 2011, the New York Times reported on the growing popularity of screen-free, experiential learning education systems such as Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley and other areas densely populated with tech executives and their families.58 Many self-respecting Silicon Valley parents nowadays go as far as to include in their nannies’ contracts a clause in which they promise not to use their phones for personal use in front of their charges.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple’s late chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility. But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AIs, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings.

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Or is the pattern mostly a function of distinctly human qualities? This is unknown, of course, but I suspect human nature plays a huge role. One piece of evidence is that those who are the most successful at the Siren Server game are also playing much older games at the same time. Before Apple, for instance, Steve Jobs famously went to India with his college friend Dan Kottke. While I never had occasion to talk to Jobs about it, I did hear many a tale from Kottke, and I have a theory I wish I’d had a chance to try out on Jobs. Jobs used to love the Beatles and bring them up fairly often, so I’ll use some Beatles references.

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There are legendary professors and we scramble to recruit their graduating students. But it’s also considered the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means. The list of top company runners who dropped out of college is commanding: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, for a start. Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, started a fund to pay top students to drop out of school, since the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed. Mea culpa. I never earned a real degree (though I have received honorary ones).

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

BYD and CK Telecom also want to climb the pyramid—and that’s what gives some Western businesspeople doing deals in the Sheraton Four Points a reason to drink. Think of the life cycle of a product like a pyramid. The top is brand: the worst Apple product stil enters the world blessed. Underneath that is design: users are picky in a maturing market, and they want a device to look cool from the hardware to the user experience to even what those in device circles cal the OBE or out-of-box experience. Apple excels at al three, which is a big reason no other gadget companies are mentioned in the same breath in the modern Steve Jobs era. Go down the pyramid another notch, and it gets considerably less sexy— engineering. This is the underlying technology that drives better, faster, smal er, cheaper gadgets.

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If the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) network and government research was as robust now as it was in earlier decades, the United States would be a leader in cleantech, and private and public market returns would have fol owed.2 This is a direct trickle down from Wal Street and the result of large pension funds, fund-of-funds, and endowments becoming the backers of VCs, not wealthy individuals and believers in the long-term benefits of true innovation. Wal Street lives its life quarter to quarter, and the ability to closely track stocks and funds online, on CNBC, and even on your smart phone encourages this. There are a few public-company CEOs who have the credibility and confidence to stand up to this pressure, among them Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry El ison of Oracle, but the list is short. If startups continue to act like public companies, Silicon Val ey is in big trouble. Publicly held tech companies talk a good game about their investments in R&D, or research and development, and indeed the investment in company-based R&D has soared.

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This new entrepreneur is a mishmash between the mom-and-pop traders and retailers associated with the old world, contented to make enough to feed his or her family and little else, and the modern venture-funded, al -about-growth entrepreneurs of Silicon Val ey. These entrepreneurs live in a shrunken, globalized world. They may be grappling with emerging market problems, but their role models aren’t someone in a nearby vil age. They are frequently names like Bil Gates, Steve Jobs, or even Donald Trump and Walt Disney. These entrepreneurs have an inkling of how modern venture capital works. They know tiny companies can become huge powerhouses quickly. They know high risk can be highly rewarded. They know David can beat Goliath. And this new global entrepreneur has three big advantages.

Team Geek
by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
Published 6 Jul 2012

In this situation, almost everyone makes the same rookie mistake: they ramble, rant, and rave. Fitz (while working at Apple) bought his mom a lemon of an iMac more than 10 years ago, and on the advice of a coworker sent a “short” email to Steve Jobs.[54] This email served as a rough prototype of how to effectively ask an executive for help: Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 To: sjobs@apple.com Subject: Terrible customer experience with our hardware—what can I do? I would deeply appreciate if you could advise me on what I can do to address this problem. This is embarrassing—both for Apple and for myself. I purchased an iMac for my mother last Mother’s Day—she is the Vice-Principal of a Montessori school in New Orleans and uses an old Macintosh at school.

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(And Unix itself was written by a small group of smart people at Bell Labs, not entirely by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie.) On that same note, did Stallman personally write all of the Free Software Foundation’s software? He wrote the first generation of Emacs. But hundreds of others were responsible for bash, the GCC tool chain, and all the rest of the software that runs on Linux. Steve Jobs led an entire team that built the Macintosh, and while Bill Gates is known for writing a BASIC interpreter for early home computers, his bigger achievement was building a successful company around MS-DOS. Yet they all became leaders and symbols of their collective achievements. And how about Michael Jordan?

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Sometimes it can be tricky to move into a management role over someone who has been a good friend and a peer. If the friend who is being managed is not self-managing and is not a hard worker, it can be stressful for everyone. We recommend that you avoid getting into this situation whenever possible. Antipattern: Compromise the Hiring Bar Steve Jobs once said: “A people hire other A people; B people hire C people.” It’s incredibly easy to fall victim to this adage, and even more so when trying to hire quickly. A common approach we’ve seen is that a team needs to hire five engineers, so they sift through their pile of applications, interview 40 or 50 people, and pick the best five regardless of whether they meet the hiring bar.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

Yet even before we could seriously question the durability of our new strategies and the sustainability of our new consumer culture, our attention was diverted by yet another surge of personal power that would push the self-centered economy to an even more commanding height. The iconic image of this next wave is that of a baby-faced Steve Jobs, dapper in his Beatles haircut and black tux, unveiling his Apple Macintosh before a hushed crowd of Apple shareholders in January 1984. Personal computers had been around since the late 1970s, but the Macintosh was the first machine that actually catered to the dimensions and desires of the average person, and its success would change everything.

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Bright young women and men who traditionally took positions in essential fields such as engineering or medicine or research are increasingly likely to opt for the faster returns of the financial sector.26 “Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry,” write Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, economists at the Bank of International Settlements and experts in the effects of financial sector expansion.27 “People who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.” Even many conservative economists who are generally content to let markets allocate talent worry about the financial sector’s warping effects on the job market. “The last thing we need is for the next Steve Jobs to forgo Silicon Valley in order to join the high-frequency traders on Wall Street,” writes Harvard economist Greg Mankiw. “That is, we shouldn’t be concerned about the next Steve Jobs striking it rich, but we want to make sure he strikes it rich in a socially productive way.”28 Mankiw’s point about striking it rich in “a socially productive way” is central here. In a truly efficient market, people and companies earn only as much as is necessary to induce them to deliver a particular service or product.

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Our entire sense of what was possible was being transformed by the rapid pace of technological change: if we were dissatisfied with the present, we could rest assured that some new product or experience or interaction—some new opportunity to narrow the gap between wanting and having, between desire and being—was only seconds away. The cheering for Steve Jobs and his toylike creation was utterly genuine and entirely understandable. We’d all been given a glimpse of the sort of power and freedom that would soon be available to the individual, and we could hardly wait to get started. Chapter 3 Power Corrupts In the early 1990s, just as the second wave of digital technologies was shoving the market into high gear, an aspiring behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago named Dilip Soman set out to study the effects of one of those technologies, consumer credit, on the human brain.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

They are known for their odd hours, casual style, and offbeat behavior—like when Larry Page and Sergey Brin rolled onstage on inline skates at the G1 mobile phone launch. Apple Computer captured this spirit in its famous 1997 ad as part of its “Think Different” campaign. The ad, narrated by the liberal actor Richard Dreyfuss, said, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in a square hole, the ones who see things different. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo.” The ad went on, flashing footage of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Oko Yono, Gandhi, and others. It was the first ad campaign approved by Steve Jobs after his return to Apple. Beyond their noncomformity, techies tend to be highly educated, a trait that correlates closely with liberal politics.

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Certainly he’s not known for his philanthropy, which has been virtually nonexistent—to the point that there is a spoof floating around on the Internet, The Complete Book of Steve Jobs’ Philanthropy, which is c08.indd 192 5/11/10 6:24:56 AM left-coast money 193 a PDF document consisting of fifty blank pages. But the man does have $5 billion, and one day—when he’s no longer obsessed with “i” this or “i” that—Jobs will turn inevitably to philanthropy. Chances are, that philanthropy will reflect his countercultural roots and Democratic sympathies. The great technology fortunes of the United States remain very new, and many are in the hands of relatively young people. Steve Jobs was born in 1955. Bill Gates is the same age, as is Eric Schmidt, the “grown-up” in Google’s high command.

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(In turn, conservative tax policy victories starting in the early 1980s have allowed them to keep more of this money.) In 1982, roughly 50 members of the Forbes 400 had college degrees. By 2006, 244 of those on the list had finished college and at least 132 had graduate degrees—or nearly a third of U.S. billionaires. That some of America’s richest people dropped out of college, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison, stands at odds with the broader trend. According to an analysis by Forbes, billionaires in the finance sector were the most educated group among the super-rich in 2006: 55 percent had graduate degrees. Attending an elite university seems to have much to do with getting rich, too.

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
by Martin Lindstrom
Published 23 Feb 2016

Some of the most powerful brands in the world make unconscious use of a Blue Script and Green Script. Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger and Apple CEO Steve Jobs once had a conversation about retail, during which Jobs told Iger that retailers should always ask themselves one question: If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it? Disney Stores may have a functional layout, but from an emotional perspective, Disney’s Green Script intent is to create the 30 happiest minutes in a child’s life. Enter an Apple Store and its architecture, simple wood and sparse, jewel-like product selection intentionally evoke the layout of a contemporary art museum.

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How do you reinvent yourself when the original version lives online forever? From my perspective, smartphones are squeezing creativity out of society, especially among younger generations. The Internet is analogous to junk food. It satisfies your appetite for 30 minutes, but an hour later you are hungry again. Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs once told a New York Times reporter that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,”8 an opinion seconded by Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine: “We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”9 Consider Russia, or China, where online media is controlled and monitored.

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If a young, observant gay male likes something, it’s probably all right, which is why the crowd flocking at Tally’s on opening night had a big percentage of young gay men in attendance, whom we hoped might serve as fashion arbiters for younger female consumers. Earlier, I brought up the question Steve Jobs asked Disney CEO Robert Iger: “If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it?” Tally Weijl 2.0—which was chic, trendy, colorful, and simultaneously child-like and sophisticated—had a lot to say. Instead of talking down to them, I wanted Tally to communicate directly to the girl who loved her teddy bear while also keeping her gaze trained on a future international catwalk.

No One Succeeds Alone
by Robert Reffkin
Published 4 May 2021

Leonard’s underlying motivation, we discovered, was to find a leadership position that would allow him to help transform our industry and create a better future for real estate agents. Ori was the one who thought of using an analogy to Apple, which had always had great tech talent but had only become wildly successful because they were guided by a well-respected visionary with strong opinions and the ability to advocate for their customers. With this in mind, Ori told Leonard, “We have some of the best software engineers from places like Google and incredible business minds from places like McKinsey and Goldman, but we need our Steve Jobs. We need someone like you to build trust with the real estate world and make sure we’re building technology that agents love.”

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In that moment, I saw in Leonard’s eyes that he’d committed to joining Compass. The week before Leonard started, Ori and I visited his beautiful home and he gave us the full tour. Above his desk—as hard as this is to believe—was a rare signed photograph of Steve Jobs. I remember looking at Ori after we both saw the photograph and smiling. Ori hadn’t just been perceptive—he’d also been lucky. Even though Leonard would never compare himself to Steve Jobs, he was deeply inspired by the type of difference Jobs had made. Still, Leonard’s deciding to come to Compass was a big risk for him. (I cannot overstate how unlikely it was that a one-year-old start-up was hiring the number one agent in the biggest city in America.)

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How the difficulties of my childhood helped me open the door to my future Turn your story into a beautiful narrative that inspires others We all have a story to tell about ourselves and our lives—and there is a story that the world is likely to tell about us if we don’t step up and tell it first. Think about Steve Jobs. You could think of his story as “unpleasant college dropout forces his opinions on the world” or as the story that most of us are familiar with: “passionate visionary uses his obsessions with design and technology to transform billions of lives.” When I was a senior in high school, you could have told quite different stories about me depending on your vantage point.

The Compound Effect
by Darren Hardy
Published 1 Jan 2010

I was always blown away when I received a check on the twenty-seventh of the month from him for next month’s payment. When I asked him about it, he said the obvious, “It’s the same money, but the surprise and good will it buys is immeasurable—why wouldn’t you?” This is one of the reasons why I admire Steve Jobs so much. Of all the sensational people we’ve featured on the cover of SUCCESS, Jobs is one of my favorites. Whatever your expectations are about the next Apple product launch, Jobs always has a little (or a lot of) something extra to WOW you. In the grand scheme of things, it might be only a minor addition, but even so, it’s better than expected and multiplies the impression and response from his customers and deepens their loyalty.

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Download the goal sheet at www.TheCompoundEffect.com/free Order your copy of Living Your Best Year Ever–A Proven System for Achieving BIG GOALS from www.SUCCESS.com/BestYearEver to guide you through the designing process as well as the achieving process all year long. CHAPTER 4 MOMENTUM I’d like to introduce you to a very good friend of mine. This friend, also close to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps, and every other superachiever, will impact your life like no other. I’d like to introduce you to Mo, or “Big Mo,” as I like to call it. Big Mo is, without doubt, one of the most powerful and enigmatic forces of success. You can’t see or feel Mo, but you know when you’ve got it.

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Rise & Shine My morning routine is my Jack Nicklaus pre-shot preparation; it sets me up for the entire day. Because it happens every morning, it’s locked in and I don’t have to think about it. My iPhone alarm goes off at 5 a.m. (confession: sometimes, 5:30 a.m.) and I hit the Snooze button. Then I know I have eight minutes. Why eight? I have no idea, ask Steve Jobs; he programmed it. During those eight minutes I do three things: First, I think of all the things I’m grateful for. I know I need to attune my mind to abundance. The world looks, acts, and responds to you very differently when you start your day with a feeling and orientation of gratitude for that which you already have.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

This gave her a clear view of every product and every team throughout the organized chaos of the entire company. She was also one of the few people who knew how Google’s systems worked. For decades now, startups have had an affinity for pirates. And it began—like so many things in tech—with Steve Jobs. When Steve was building the first Macintosh, he coined the phrase “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” The Mac team got on board, creating a homemade pirate flag with a rainbow Apple logo as an eye patch. In Silicon Valley, the pirate image stuck. It’s easy to be seduced by this image of the entrepreneur as pirate. Who doesn’t want to imagine themselves leaping across the rigging, cutlass in hand?

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And what if I did this?’ ” These conversations went long and deep, with questions like How would you like to see peer reviews work? And What do you need most from customer support, and when? “We didn’t just meet our users, we lived with them,” Brian says. “I used to joke that when you bought an iPhone, Steve Jobs didn’t come sleep on your couch, but I did.” As he was doing his home visits, Brian developed a clever method for extracting valuable feedback. Instead of just asking what people thought about the product as it existed now, he’d ask what they thought about the product he might build. “If I ask, ‘What can I do to make this better?’

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Nonetheless, the vast majority of tech CEOs have degrees in business or computer science. Brian, however, has a BFA in Industrial Design (from the Rhode Island School of Design). And design thinking is one of his superpowers. But just in case you think “design” means “making things pretty,” Brian would like to shift your thinking. “We have a different definition of ‘design.’ Steve Jobs had a famous quote: ‘A lot of people have the fallacy of believing design is how it looks. Design is how it works.’ Another way of saying that is: ‘Design is what it is.’ ” And Brian knows how to use design thinking to reimagine what something is—or could be. He can turn a commonplace conference-room brainstorm into an elevated exercise in inventing the future.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

.* In theory, marketers could sell all that data, associating it with your device ID, and then use it to target you on Facebook or on mobile ad exchanges. That doesn’t happen, for two reasons: First, companies like Apple have monopolistic control of their platforms, and as part of the app-approval process that allows a new app into Apple’s App Store, Apple can limit the use of this magical device ID.† In general, Apple has shown itself very protective of users (Steve Jobs was famously indifferent, to not say antagonistic, to advertising), and very keen on foiling any secondary market in targeting data. Second, app developers themselves jealously guard their data as their own, are reluctant to share it, and would rather monetize its power themselves rather than pursue the short-term upside of selling it, potentially to competitors.

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Bushnell announced a $700 prize for anyone who could design a hardware-software combo that would power the game, with a $1,000 bonus for every chip that was saved in manufacturing the circuit (chips used to be expensive). Jobs convinced his eventual Apple cofounder, Steve “Woz” Wozniak, to take on the project, stipulating it had to be done in four days to fit his social schedule (he had to go pick apples at a utopian commune). Woz worked like hell, with Jobs doing the manual labor of testing the designed circuits, and they made the deadline. Jobs, however, never told Woz about the bonuses, having mentioned only the base prize. He gave Woz $350, shortchanging his collaborator, who had made the entire thing possible, and used the stolen cash to finance his lifestyle. Steve Jobs was all smoldering ambition, ruthless will to power, and narcissistic amour propre; by all accounts of people who actually worked with him, he was a mediocre engineer who had good taste and knew how to recognize in others talents he didn’t posses, and got them to work like hell for him, while fending off competitors in the meantime.

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Amazon clearly fell into the former category. Jeff Bezos was a maniacal leader who would stop at nothing until his vision of the world was realized, and who had inspired, cajoled, or intimidated an army to implement that vision. Zuck looked over at Bezos in Seattle, or Larry Page from Google in Mountain View, or (in the past) Steve Jobs from Apple in Cupertino, and he saw more than just a tech company and a chief executive. He saw a reflection of himself among those men, and that was terrifying. Other players in the tech or media worlds could be outwitted, out-engineered, or otherwise co-opted or bought off, but not these alpha companies.

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
by Garson O'Toole
Published 1 Apr 2017

The article contained a controversial remark by Steve Jobs, the iconic entrepreneur and cofounder of Apple.1 Steve Jobs said that while it was being developed he kept in mind a quote from Pablo Picasso, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Jobs repeated the quip in front of the camera for a multipart PBS television program called Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires. (The interview was later released in its entirety as a full-length film called The Lost Interview.)2 Credit: Magnolia Pictures/PBS. “Good artists copy; great artists steal”: Steve Jobs misattributing a phrase to Pablo Picasso in The Last Interview.

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QI does not know whether the prominent literary critic Lionel Trilling made the statement above, but its appearance in Esquire catalyzed its wide dissemination with the attached ascription. By the 1960s and 1970s, the quote attributed to Eliot could be heard in the same circles as the quote by Trilling and several new iconic voices (which may explain what could have led to Steve Jobs’s confusion). In 1967 the Los Angeles–based music critic and lecturer Peter Yates published the book Twentieth Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound. In the work Yates claimed that he heard the prominent composer Igor Stravinsky employ an instance of the saying.

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Peter, which happens to be the source of a great many misattributed quotations, it turns out, included the saying and attributed the words to T. S. Eliot. However, like Gill, Peter wrongly used the version printed in the Atlantic Monthly.12 The last instance of the saying known to QI before PBS taped the Steve Jobs interview in 1995 is found in a 1986 instructional text about preparing computerized documents called LaTeX: A Document Preparation System. The work credits Stravinsky with a further evolved version of the quotation. By the second edition the footnote was deleted:13 “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.”

Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
Published 18 Sep 2017

My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years.

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Later in the book I will describe specific strategies for change, but the important thing to note here is that beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses. Over the years that followed, I found that most of the extraordinarily successful people I’ve met had similar big painful failures that taught them the lessons that ultimately helped them succeed. Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot.

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A culture and its people are symbiotic—the culture attracts certain kinds of people and the people in turn either reinforce or evolve the culture based on their values and what they’re like. If you choose the right people with the right values and remain in sync with them, you will play beautiful jazz together. If you choose the wrong people, you will all go over the waterfall together. Steve Jobs, who everyone thought was the secret to Apple’s success, said, “The secret to my success is that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.” I explain this concept in the next chapter, Remember That the WHO Is More Important than the WHAT. Anyone who runs a successful organization will tell you the same.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

They are valuable no matter your career stage. They are urgent whether you’re just out of college, a decade into the workforce and angling for that next big move, or launching a brand-new career later in life. Companies act small to retain an innovative edge no matter how large they grow. Steve Jobs called Apple the “biggest start-up on the planet.” In the same way, you need to stay young and agile; you need to forever be a start-up. WHY US? I (Reid) cofounded LinkedIn in 2003 with the mission of connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. More than 100 million members (at the time of the LinkedIn IPO in May 2011) and nine years later, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how professionals in every industry manage their careers: how they connect with trusted business contacts, find jobs, share information, and present their online identities.

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But you should at least orient yourself in the direction of a pole star, even if it changes. Jack Dorsey is cofounder and executive chairman of Twitter and cofounder and CEO of Square, a mobile credit card payments start-up. He’s known in Silicon Valley as a product visionary who prizes design and who takes inspiration from sources as varied as Steve Jobs and the Golden Gate Bridge. Both his companies have grown to towering heights (and multibillion-dollar valuations) while keeping Jack’s values and priorities intact. Twitter is still minimalistic and clean; the Square device is still elegant. His aspiration to make complex things simple and his value of design are part of the reason his companies have been so successful: they clarify product priorities, ensure a consistent customer experience, and make it easier to recruit employees who are attracted to similar ideas.

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No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. Athletes need coaches and trainers, child prodigies need parents and teachers, directors need producers and actors, politicians need donors and strategists, scientists need lab partners and mentors. Penn needed Teller. Ben needed Jerry. Steve Jobs needed Steve Wozniak. Indeed, teamwork is eminently on display in the start-up world. Very few start-ups are started by only one person. Everyone in the entrepreneurial community agrees that assembling a talented team is as important as it gets. Venture capitalists invest in people as much as in ideas.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

Foster thought that RBF was only “lurking in the background” of Apple Park (Norman Foster, interviewed by author, October 30, 2020), but he credited him afterward for inspiring the glass dome of the Apple Marina Bay Sands store in Singapore (Norman Foster, “Buckminster Fuller—File for Future,” provided to the author by Foster). “Here’s to the crazy ones”: “Apple—Think Different—Full Version,” YouTube, 1:09, Harry Piotr, September 30, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sMBhDv4sik. request of Jobs himself: Luke Dormehl, The Apple Revolution: The Real Story of How Steve Jobs and the Crazy Ones Took Over the World (London: Virgin, 2012), 395, and Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain (New York: Portfolio, 2008), 130.

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Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller Fuller died a month later, a half year before the release of the Macintosh, but his legacy at Apple endured. On September 28, 1997, a television commercial debuted during the network premiere of the animated film Toy Story. Steve Jobs had recently returned in triumph to Apple, and over a montage of luminaries—from Martin Luther King Jr. to Pablo Picasso—the actor Richard Dreyfuss offered a declaration of principles: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.” One of the seventeen icons was Buckminster Fuller, who had been featured at the request of Jobs himself.

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Barcroft had arrived without an appointment, and his entire plan depended on how confidently he handled himself now. Leaving Fuller in the car, he went inside and approached the receptionist. “I’ve got Bucky Fuller here for Steve Jobs.” The visit was a gamble, but he had reason to believe that it would pay off. Barcroft, a University of Denver graduate in his early thirties, hoped to produce a series of cable television programs featuring commentary from Fuller. A segment with one of the founders of Apple Computer would be a compelling proof of concept, but instead of calling ahead, Barcroft thought that he would have better luck by showing up unexpectedly with his famous guest.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

As such, Iribe and Mitchell made every effort possible to convince Bolas that Oculus was not another goose chase. At USC, which could afford a six-figure setup like the one Luckey wrote about on MTBS3D, Bolas was focused on pushing the limits of possibility; whereas, at Oculus, the focus would be on the possibilities of creating a consumer product. Or, to steal an analogy that Steve Jobs must have used at the dawn of Apple, the goal here wasn’t to build the most powerful mainframe possible; it was about empowering the masses with an affordable personal computer. “I genuinely believe that we can accomplish that,” Mitchell explained to Bolas and his Fakespace cofounder, Ian McDowall, during a last-minute, marathon dinner the three had in mid-July 2012.

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Largely because that same grandpa who had taught him that “Money is freedom and freedom is happiness” had also instilled the importance of responsibility and financial accountability. But managing one’s own finances was very different from managing an entire company. And while he was tempted to find out how different—by following in the footsteps of famous hackers-turned-tech-moguls like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg—he didn’t want to let ego guide his decision making. “I realize that the thing to do is to try and be the God, emperor, and CEO of everything,” Luckey told Edelmann. “But running a company is not my aspiration. There’s a lot of operational aspects to running a company that I don’t want to be in charge of—like I do not want to be in charge of making sure everyone gets paid on time.

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To a different audience, those words may have sounded overly ambitious. But to the three men in that room, it was familiar, transporting each of them back in time. Back to a dark, cluttered ground-floor apartment that they all remembered so well (albeit not always so fondly), where ten years earlier, younger versions of themselves—a trio of Danish Steve Jobs Fanatics—had just started a game company, Over the Edge Entertainment, that most agreed would fail. On top of all the risks typically associated with such an endeavor (cost, development cycle, etc.), these guys had made the bold decision to focus exclusively on Mac-based games, a segment that, at the time, made up less than 1 percent of the video game market.10 Or to put it even more starkly: of the one hundred best-selling games in 2002, none were made for the Mac.

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

Jobs did, as I would have.) The marvelous buildout by Woz to the Apple II was based to a large extent on Jobs’ perception of the home and personal market, which few others saw. (For my own experiences with this obtuseness, see Itty Bitty story in this book, 1975-7.) My influence on Steve Jobs? I do believe Steve Jobs based the entire style and persona of the Apple corporation on the attitude of my book Computer Lib—the attitude of creative defiance that I offered the reader, and that Jobs invited the Apple customers to share.* * Creative defiance has always been my attitude, and is the essence of Bohemianism.)

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The fact that he became the Bad Boy of Norwegian literature, and (some say) I became the Bad Boy of computerdom, is a strange coincidence that would not seem to follow from our friendship or what I responded to in him. But who can know. STEVE JOBS I feel I have a special relationship to Steve Jobs, though I have met him only once. I think of him as my dark younger twin. We are similar in several key aspects: • He understands users, as do I. • He is absolutely sure of his views, as am I. • He is absolutely sure of his abilities, as am I. • He is intolerant of stupidity, as am I. • He is basically a movie director. However, Jobs got leverage and I didn’t. (His friend Woz dropped the Apple I in his lap, but not everyone would have known what to do with it. Jobs did, as I would have.)

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(At this time lower case had just gotten to the Apple II—you had to buy a little circuit called a Paymar Adapter—but it meant that the Apple could now be used for text.) I worked with a wonderful woman, Laura McLaughlin, who started implementing JOT for the Apple in Applesoft Basic. Unfortunately there were undocumented problems in Applesoft Basic, making JOT impossible, so if it was going onto the Apple II it would have to be by other means. Chapter 13. TEXILE, 1981-88 My friend Steve Witham, who was working with me on a new version of JOT for the Apple II, agreed to come down to Texas with me. I would pay his expenses and he’d finish the software.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

He is engaged in a dialogue with his reality asking “why” and “why not” instead of “how” or “what.”52 The degree to which we’re able to design our reality is directly related to our quality of life, freedom, and wealth. Those that design reality have a higher quality of all factors in their life, and through designing their reality they enable others to do the same by creating more wealth. In designing my reality in the form of an iPhone, Steve Jobs and Apple created more power, freedom, and wealth for me than Rockefeller had. This leads to an upward spiral. As wealth is increasing, so is our ability to design our realities. PhD or Podcast? While it’s always been true that great work comes from those who freely choose it and that the ability to design our realities creates more freedom, it’s the changes we’ve seen over the past decade that made both of those radically more accessible and safer.

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Depending on who you listen to, between 5.1 and 7 trillion dollars in wealth evaporated by the end of 2008—the most ever in a single quarter.1 Protesters camped out in lower Manhattan asking why the federal government wasn’t imprisoning Wall Street bankers. While many viewed this as an isolated event, it is in fact one notable in a much longer trend. Yet, as Steve Jobs notes: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” 2 The ability individuals have right now to deliberately design their lives and realities is greater than at any time in history.

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If there was a better chance to be successful (on better terms) out there waiting for me, why wasn’t someone investigating my school for cruelly allowing me to graduate into this job market? What Are Jobs and Entrepreneurship? We hear the word “job” and imagine that someone is squirreled away in a cubicle, mindlessly filling out TPS reports for Proctor and Gamble. We hear the word “entrepreneur” and imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Those are all true characterizations, but these two concepts leave a wide berth in between. How do we clearly distinguish between “jobs” and “entrepreneurship?” In his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin defines a linchpin as: “[A]n individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create and make things happen.”

Getting Real
by Jason Fried , David Heinemeier Hansson , Matthew Linderman and 37 Signals
Published 1 Jan 2006

Innovation Comes From Saying No [Innovation] comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. —Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple (from The Seed of Apple's Innovation) Table of contents | Essay list for this chapter | Next essay Race to Running Software Get something real up and running quickly Running software is the best way to build momentum, rally your team, and flush out ideas that don't work. It should be your number one priority from day one.

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And what do you say to people who complain when you won't adopt their feature idea? Remind them why they like the app in the first place. "You like it because we say no. You like it because it doesn't do 100 other things. You like it because it doesn't try to please everyone all the time." "We Don't Want a Thousand Features" Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have.

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Set expectations and help reduce frustration, intimidation, and overall confusion. First impressions are crucial. If you fail to design a thoughtful blank slate, you'll create a negative (and false) impression of your application or service. You Never Get A Second Chance... Another aspect of the Mac OS x ui that I think has been tremendously influenced by [Steve] Jobs is the setup and first-run experience. I think Jobs is keenly aware of the importance of first impressions...I think Jobs looks at the first-run experience and thinks, it may only be one-thousandth of a user's overall experience with the machine, but it's the most important onethousandth, because it's the first one-thousandth, and it sets their expectations and initial impression.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
Published 2 Jan 2003

Two hundred cards went flying into the air and scattered across the wet ground. Romero decided it was time to move on. He soon found his next love: the Apple II computer. Apple had become the darling of the indie hacker set ever since the machine was introduced at a 1976 meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, a ragtag group of California techies. As the first accessible home computers, Apples were ideally suited tor making and playing games. This was thanks in no small part to the roots of the company’s cofounders, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak–or, as they became known, the Two Steves. Jobs, a college dropout with a passion for Buddhism and philosophy, took his first job at a start-up video game company called Atari in the mid11 seventies.

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They came from and evolved into all walks of life: Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who would write the first BASIC programming code for the pioneering Altair personal computer and form the most powerful software company in the world; game makers like Slug Russell, Ken and Roberta Williams, Richard “Ultima” Garriott; the Two Steves–Jobs and Wozniak–who turned their passion for gaming into the Apple II. They were all hackers. “Though some in the field used the term hacker as a form of a derision,” Lew wrote in the preface, “implying that hackers were either nerdy social outcasts or ‘unprofessional’ programmers who wrote dirty, ‘nonstandard’ computer code, I found them quite different.

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It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero’s antics out of his mind. He was on a mission. Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier’s check for $11,000. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator ol Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs’s earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Young, helpful sales clerks wear matching blue coats; there are shelves of books for sale, free pencils and erasers, reading maps of nearby neighborhoods, and towering walls of glasses with mirrors. Warby Parker stores now sit behind only Apple and Tiffany in retail sales per square foot, according to various sources, which is astounding, considering Warby Parker exclusively sells $100 glasses, compared with $1,300 laptops and $25,000 engagement rings. For all the growth of online commerce, the retail store remains more powerful than ever. The technology industry should know this, because its leading company, Apple, is the poster child for brick-and-mortar retail. Steve Jobs launched the Apple Store in 2001. Analysts called it a desperate move for the company, and one predicted the stores would be out of business in two years.

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Zen masters, monks, and mindfulness gurus are as in demand in Silicon Valley as personal trainers and java script coders, and Unterberg himself has consulted with Yahoo!, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and others (all entirely unpaid, as part of his Buddhist teaching). None of this is terribly new. After all, Steve Jobs, the great tech guru of our times, regularly practiced meditation, and much of Silicon Valley’s roots are tied into Northern California’s counterculture, when yogis, ashrams, and organic food went hand in hand with software design. It is easy to dismiss all of this mindfulness talk as a PR stunt by giant, publicly traded corporations looking to appear more human; a lifestyle trend that will probably pass like cold-pressed juicing, or worse, as pointless hippie bullshit driven by Bay Area baby boomers assuaging their guilt for selling out.

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Nearly every single startup founder, investor, and programmer I met with carried a well-worn paper journal that they used to take notes and make designs, despite having access to every available digital alternative. “This is my company!” one startup founder told me, cradling the black Moleskine notebook in his arms. The more I looked into this, the deeper it went. I read articles about the lives of technology industry leaders who spoke about their personal aversion to digital gadgets with their families. Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids play with the very iPads he created, Chris Anderson from Wired and The Long Tail set time limits on technology for his children, and Evan Williams, who cocreated the digital publishing platforms Twitter, Blogger, and Medium, lived in a technology-free house, with a huge library of books.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

By 2015, new revenue spigots enabled CBS to derive half its revenue from nonadvertising sources, including: the nearly $1 billion CBS got from retransmission consent fees paid by the cable companies and reverse compensation paid by local stations to carry network programs; the $1.5 billion CBS received from being able to syndicate and sell its programs internationally; the approximately $1 billion CBS received in 2015 from the sale of its archived programs to digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. Lucrative new revenue streams explain why network television, unlike financially ailing traditional media like newspapers, magazines, and radio, is not on life support. By contrast, the newspaper industry lost more than half its jobs between January 2001 and September 2016. Les Moonves has been hailed as the Steve Jobs of television. “For me, Les Moonves represents the North Star,” Michael Kassan says, calling him “a brilliant operator. You can never lose sight of the fact that he began his career as an actor.

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Greenberg calls to mind a famous description of Samuel Johnson: “temperamentally . . . always in revolt.” He looks it, driving to work attired completely in black, including a black leather jacket and black scarf in colder months, zooming between lanes on his powerful Ducati 1199 Panigale S motorcycle. His business hero was the late Steve Jobs, whom he describes as a fellow “rebel,” a “person I look to. He had no patience—neither do I—with people who get in the way of progress.” Like Jobs did, Greenberg has a passion for simple, beautiful artistic design; he is said to be the world’s largest individual collector of Chinese Buddhist art from the Wi and Wei dynasties.

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Either on Facebook, its Web site, e-mail, or IM, innovations like Nike’s FuelBand and its membership clubs create a one-to-one relationship between customer and brand, giving Nike a loyal customer base to share new products with and a vehicle to provide two-way communication between customer and brand. “When I come to New York, I ask to see him,” says marketing consultant and former Procter & Gamble CMO Jim Stengel. “I think he has the most forward-looking operation of anyone. I wanted to hire his agency when I was at P&G, but my clients would not agree.” Like his business heroes, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, Bob Greenberg does not lack for confidence. Unlike Jobs, he does not glare at or scream at underlings. Unlike Bezos, he does not have a high-pitched laugh. Unlike both, he does not treat his work as if it were a national security secret. However, like them, his self-confidence borders on messianic.

Unleashed
by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei
Published 1 Jun 2020

Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006), 71–72. 12. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, “The Feedback Fallacy,” Harvard Business Review, March–April 2019. 13. Walter Isaacson, “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs,” Harvard Business Review, April 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs. 14. Ibid. 15. Jolie Kerr, “How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross,” New York Times, November 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/style/self-care/terry-gross-conversation-advice.html. Chapter 4 1. There is too much good work in this area to properly honor, but thinkers and scholars who have inspired us recently include Modupe Akinola, Melinda Gates (yes, that Melinda Gates), Boris Groysberg, Denise Lewin Lloyd, Anthony Mayo, Lauren Rivera, and Laura Morgan Roberts.

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Other people tend to give you what you ask for, but rarely much more than that. They exert just enough energy to avoid feelings of failure or shame or whatever your management weapon of choice may be, but it’s often too risky around leaders in severity to innovate or deviate from expectations (even if it’s to exceed them). The counterexample, some would argue, is Steve Jobs. At times notoriously severe as a leader—arrogant, bullying, impatient—Jobs built the most sustainably innovative company of the last century. But we don’t see Jobs as a severity success story. From our perspective, Jobs was at his most effective when he paired high (if blunt) standards with unflinching devotion to the potential of his team.

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The argument for maximizing profits is perhaps obvious, but it can also be good business to leave enough room on the value range to delight loyal, buzz-generating customers. Apple’s pricing strategy is a good example of this approach. Apple deliberately prices its products below its customers’ sky-high WTP (but still well above cost), generating a form of customer devotion that approaches frenzy.9 Despite paying a handsome price premium by industry standards, almost everyone leaves an Apple store feeling like a winner. Meanwhile, Apple’s profits continue skyward. Our practical advice is to be like Apple and aim for the middle of the value range, even if you’re competing for a segment of the market that’s not particularly price sensitive.

Why Wall Street Matters
by William D. Cohan
Published 27 Feb 2017

One of the main reasons the Securities and Exchange Commission was created in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 was to provide investors, or potential investors, with more information about the companies that wanted their money and to try to thwart charlatans. The Apple prospectus resulted from regulators at the SEC making sure that Apple complied with disclosure rules in ways that were not required before the creation of the SEC. This is a good thing. Objectively speaking, we learn from the Apple prospectus that there would be no Apple, at least in its present form, without Wall Street. The prospectus explains that Apple had a relatively large group of early investors who supported the company from its inception in 1976, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two founders, “designed, developed and assembled the Apple I, a microprocessor-based computer consisting of a single printed circuit board.”

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Indeed, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, is said to be worth around $19 billion.) Of course, it doesn’t always work out the way the Apple IPO did. The landscape is strewn with corporate carcasses and with investors who bet wrong and lost. But betting wrong and losing is as important to the success of capitalism as is making a smart investment and making a fortune. The Apple IPO prospectus also revealed other ways, along with providing venture capital, that Wall Street helped the company achieve its early goals. As many companies do, Apple had arranged for a $20 million line of credit with a bank. Apple paid interest on its bank borrowings, based on the prime rate, which in September 1980 was 12 percent.

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Rock had a 1.3 percent stake in Apple. There were other venture capitalists, too, and together they owned another 8.7 percent of Apple before its IPO. As for Jobs, then twenty-five years old, and Wozniak, then thirty years old, they had stakes in Apple of 15 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. A. C. Markkula Jr., Apple’s chief marketing executive since May 1977 and also the chairman of the board of directors, had a 14 percent stake. Michael Scott, Apple’s short-lived first CEO, bought his stake of nearly 1.3 million shares for a penny a share when he joined Apple in May 1977. The venture capitalists backing Apple did so for one reason: They were hoping to make money.

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman
Published 6 Apr 2014

News & World Report, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting Jack Healey: human rights activist, former executive director of Amnesty International USA Thomas Heaton: seismologist, professor at California Institute of Technology, contributed to the development of earthquake early warning systems Peter Herbst: journalist, former editor of Premiere and New York magazines Danette Herman: talent executive for Academy Awards Seymour Hersh: investigative reporter, author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War Dave Hickey: art and cultural critic who has written for Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair Jim Hightower: progressive political activist, radio talk-show host Tommy Hilfiger: fashion designer, founder of lifestyle brand Christopher Hitchens: journalist and author who was a critic of politics and religion David Hockney: artist and major contributor to the Pop art movement in the 1960s Nancy Irwin: hypnotherapist Chris Isaak: musician, actor Michael Jackson: singer, songwriter, his 1982 album Thriller is the bestselling album of all time LeBron James: NBA basketball player Mort Janklow: literary agent, founder and chairman of the literary agency Janklow & Nesbit Associates Jay Z: musician, music producer, fashion designer, entrepreneur Wyclef Jean: musician, actor James Jebbia: CEO of the Supreme clothing brand Harry J. Jerison: paleoneurologist, professor emeritus at UCLA Steve Jobs: cofounder and former CEO of Apple Inc., cofounder and former CEO of Pixar Betsey Johnson: fashion designer Jamie Johnson: documentary filmmaker who directed Born Rich, heir to Johnson & Johnson fortune Larry C. Johnson: former analyst for the CIA, security and terrorism consultant Robert L. Johnson: businessman, media magnate, cofounder and former chairman of BET Sheila Johnson: cofounder of BET, first African American woman to be an owner/partner in three professional sports teams Steve Johnson: media theorist, popular science author, cocreated online magazine FEED Jackie Joyner-Kersee: Olympic gold medalist, track star Paul Kagame: president of Rwanda Michiko Kakutani: book critic for the New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism Sam Hall Kaplan: former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times Masoud Karkehabadi: wunderkind who graduated from college at age thirteen Patrick Keefe: author, staff writer for the New Yorker Gershon Kekst: founder of the corporate communications company Kekst and Co.

…

My talent is to know enough to ask the questions, and to know when something interesting happens. What I think is so exciting about curiosity is that it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what your job is, or what your passion is. Curiosity works the same way for all of us—if we use it well. You don’t have to be Thomas Edison. You don’t have to be Steve Jobs. You don’t have to be Steven Spielberg. But you can be “creative” and “innovative” and “compelling” and “original”—because you can be curious. Curiosity doesn’t only help you solve problems—no matter what those problems are. There’s a bonus: curiosity is free. You don’t need a training course.

…

You can’t simply design your own strategy, then execute it and wait to see what happens so you can respond. You have to anticipate what’s going to happen—by first disrupting your own point of view. The same skill, in a completely different context, is what creates products that delight us. The specific genius of Steve Jobs lay in designing a computer operating system, and a music player, and a phone that anticipate how we’ll want to compute, and listen to music, and communicate—and providing what we want before we know it. The same is true of an easy-to-use dishwasher or TV remote control. You can always tell when you settle into the driver’s seat of a car you haven’t driven before whether the people who designed the dashboard and controls were the least bit curious about how their customers use their cars.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

In fact, the attempts to reign in digital technologies are the consequence of a much longer trend—perhaps they fall under the very culture of control theorized by David Garland—but that trend did not start in Silicon Valley. So the worry that Apple and its tethered devices—Zittrain’s bugbear-in-chief—might be giving us a world in which we have no choice but to do the right thing is both too late and too misguided. We already inhabit that world, and challenging its logic would require challenging it everywhere, not just in the iTunes store. We find Apple’s model so appealing not because Steve Jobs hypnotized us—although that’s part of it—but because Apple has embraced a model that we already encounter almost everywhere in our daily lives. We are gaining very little by continuing to imagine “the Internet”—or “cyberspace”—as some unique conceptual territory that develops and operates in accordance with its own trends and inclinations.

…

But while trying to do justice to the role of the printing press in history, Eisenstein embraces a rather limiting view of print media, overemphasizing what she believes to be the inherent qualities of this technology: fixity (i.e., its ability to preserve texts that might otherwise get lost or badly damaged), ease of dissemination, and the tendency toward standardization. According to Eisenstein, the very technology of print endows texts with these new qualities—and the rupture is so significant that she elevates those qualities to the status of “print culture.” The latter gives us the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Big Mac, Steve Jobs, and LOLCats. Many scholars have noted the limitations of Eisenstein’s approach, which are extremely pertinent to the contemporary Internet debate. The first to ring alarm bells—in 1980, just a year after the book was published—was intellectual historian Anthony Grafton, who berated Eisenstein for pulling “from her sources those facts and statements that seemed to meet her immediate polemical needs.”

…

At worst, an attempt to illuminate the present by studying the past can turn into a fishing expedition, where the past becomes just a giant toxic aquarium, storing enough factoids and exotic characters to buttress any interpretation of virtually any contemporary trend or phenomenon. Wu’s argument in The Master Switch goes like this: There’s something peculiar about information industries, for they tend to be dominated (and intellectually ravaged) by “information emperors”—Steve Jobs–like personalities who strive for absolute control. The dictatorial rule of such emperors and several structural qualities of their information empires usually lead to what Wu calls “the Cycle,” which is the inevitable closing of the once open and innovative industries. It happens either because the information emperors are clever but ruthless businessmen or because they co-opt the government into giving them protection from competition.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

Seaside brought DPZ worldwide renown—it made the cover of The Atlantic; Time magazine selected it as one of the ten “Best of the Decade” achievements in design—and established Duany and Plater-Zyberk as leaders of the burgeoning New Urbanism movement. Even now, from its headquarters in Miami, DPZ is like the Apple or Harvard or Goldman Sachs of New Urbanism; it is the sterling name, the firm that draws the best and the brightest. If DPZ is akin to Apple, Duany is the movement’s Steve Jobs—a big-picture visionary whose bold ideas upended the status quo and whose conviction, not to mention oratory skills, have given him guru-like status within the architecture and New Urbanist worlds. Outspoken, passionate, and highly opinionated, Duany is prone to bold statements and ideas that hit him at any moment on matters both large and small.

…

In New York City, UBS: Charles V. Bagli, “Regretting Move, Bank May Return to Manhattan,” New York Times, June 8, 2011. Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox: A notable exception to the tech moguls’ fascination with cities is Steve Jobs, who lived and worked his whole life in the suburbs (he lived in a Tudor house in Palo Alto, and Apple’s headquarters were in nearby Cupertino). But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity. Another exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who has built Facebook’s headquarters into a massive campus in Menlo Park, but one that attempts to approximate urbanism, with a walkable commercial strip that includes a dry cleaner, gym, doctor’s office, and various eateries.

…

In 2010, the figure was 47 percent, a sharp and perplexing decline that has been discussed and dissected by millennial watchers and carmakers alike. The notion of a teenager opting to not get his driver’s license, to those of us who grew up in a different time, may seem sacrilege. But watch them fawn over their Apple products and you will see that this generation, as Steve Jobs encouraged them to do, “thinks different.” They don’t want cars, and they don’t want cul-de-sacs—two of the pillars on which suburban life depends. The price of oil is still rising. As energy prices have climbed, so has the cost of the suburban commute. In 2008, the average suburban household spent double on gas what it did in 2003.

The Narcissist You Know
by Joseph Burgo

Utterly lacking in humility, they announce again and again that they are the smartest, most insightful, most creative person in the room. And sometimes they actually are. THINK DIFFERENT People who worked closely with Steve Jobs had a special name for his uncanny ability to impose his vision upon others. With reference to an early Star Trek episode, his colleagues at Apple called it the reality distortion field. Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the Macintosh team, describes it as “a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”6 According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs “would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the truth.

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Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless versus the Rest of Us (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 60. 2. Ibid., 92. 3. http://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2014/01/bikram-choudhury-yoga-sexual-harassment. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 118. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 120. 9. Ibid., 119. 10. Ibid. 11. http://www.esquire.com/features/second-coming-of-steve-jobs-1286. 12. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 121. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Ibid., 246. 15. Ibid., 264–265. 16. Ibid., 266. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 257. 19. Ibid. 20. Nancy Newton Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2003), 1. 21.

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Early trauma leaves the growing child with a sense that something has gone terribly wrong with his or her development, often leading to the kind of defensive character structure epitomized by Steve Jobs. It comes as no surprise that psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg identifies adopted children as one of five groups at especially high risk of developing Narcissistic Personality Disorder.21 Despite his well-known obnoxious personality and problematic relationship with the truth, Steve Jobs has remained a hero to millions following his death. Bikram Choudhury continues to attract a following of devoted students who revere him while the lawsuits work their way through the courts.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

The evidence therefore suggests that following your passion is a poor way to determine whether a given career path will make you happy. Rather, passion grows out of work that has the right features. This was even true of Steve Jobs. When he was young, he was passionate about Zen Buddhism. He traveled in India, took plenty of LSD, shaved his head, wore robes, and seriously considered moving to Japan to become a monk. He first got into electronics only reluctantly, as a way to earn cash on the side, helping his tech-savvy friend Steve Wozniak handle business deals while also spending time at the All-One Farm. Even Apple Computer’s very existence was fortuitous: while Jobs and Wozniak were trying to sell circuit boards to hobbyists, the owner of one local computer store said he would buy fully assembled computers, and they jumped at the chance to make more money.

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There are other factors that also matter to your job satisfaction: See the information and references cited in “Predictors of Job Satisfaction,” 80,000 Hours, August 28, 2014, https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/job-satisfaction/job-satisfaction-research/#predictors-of-job-satisfaction. He traveled in India: See Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 39–50. while Jobs and Wozniak were trying to sell circuit boards to hobbyists: Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 35–36. it’s been found that professors: Daniel T. Gilbert et al., “Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 3 (September 1998), 617–38.

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People often want job satisfaction as an end in itself, but it’s also a crucial factor when thinking about impact: if you’re not happy at work, you’ll be less productive and more likely to burn out, resulting in less impact in the long-term. However, we need to be careful when thinking about how to find a job you’ll love. There’s a lot of feel-good misinformation out there, and the real route to job satisfaction is somewhat counterintuitive. On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stood in front of the graduating class at Stanford and gave them his advice on what they should do with their lives: You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

For example, in Myanmar, Facebook’s user base increased from 2 million in 2014 to 30 million in 2017.10 To build its user base even further, Facebook has been secretly working on a satellite called Athena, which it plans to launch into space to beam down internet to rural regions with no or limited internet connectivity using high-frequency millimeter-wave radio signals.11 Of course these aren’t the only tech titans. Apple, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, created the smartphone, setting in motion many of the dynamics we associate with our smartphone society. Apple vies for the title of world’s most valuable company and in September 2019 was worth more than $1 trillion. Its iPhone captures roughly 11 percent of the world smartphone market and is a key trendsetter in global phone and computer technology, particularly on the hardware side.

…

The powerful unions and social safety net that once protected workers and their families are a distant memory. As the gap between rich and poor yawns ever wider, anxiety about a “robot future” in which technology replaces the livelihoods of ordinary people abounds. The changes we’ve witnessed since Steve Jobs ever so casually pulled an iPhone out of his pocket at Apple’s 2007 Macworld meeting in San Francisco feel monumental and unprecedented—and they are.2 Yet a glance to the past shows that we’ve been here before. In their landmark study Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd described a similar moment of flux: 1920s America and its emergent love affair with the automobile.3 By the end of the roaring twenties, the automobile had become central to the lives of “Middletown” (actually, Muncie, Indiana) residents, an “accepted essential of normal living” and an “important criterion of social fitness.”4 Homes built during the period no longer contained formal parlors because unmarried daughters now socialized with their beaus on unchaperoned “dates” out in the car—a source of both fierce disagreement between parents and children and growing moral panic over “sex crimes” committed in automobiles.5 Young men whose families didn’t own a car were excluded from social clubs, and families were rumored to purchase cars to help their children fit in.

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Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that our smartphones are in many respects a mash-up of existing technologies and behaviors packed together in a novel configuration. Time magazine named the PC “person of the year” in 1982. Hardware, touch screens, radios, processors, antennas—much of the technology essential to our smartphones predates the advent of the actual smartphone. Steve Jobs’s team at Apple figured out how to refine and combine these technologies into one device, creating the iPhone.21 Many software concepts also predate the smartphone. For example, mobile payment systems spread widely in poor countries through cell phones. Kenyans developed the popular M-pesa mobile money transfer system, which lets users lacking bank accounts send cash to friends and family; in early versions senders deposited cash at an agent’s shop, then used a text message to send the funds.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

While innovators chase after the profits of success, almost all the value they create is captured by their customers. The late Steve Jobs may have made huge profits from his innovations, but his wealth was small in comparison with the value of the iPhone and its imitators to their users. In the long run, consumers benefited far more than he did. Motivating increased risk-taking that produces innovation is the key to growing middle- and working-class prosperity. Producers, like Apple and Microsoft, are always in danger of falling behind their competitors and earning less profit as a result. They must continually innovate and invest largely to stay even with competitors and earn the same profits rather than investing to earn additional profits.

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The notion that the growing success of America’s 0.1 percent is the cause of slower middle- and working-class wage growth is mistaken. Entirely independent forces drive the two phenomena. As the economy grows, it values innovation more. As such, successful innovators who achieve economy-wide success, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, grow richer than innovators have in the past. It’s simple multiplication. And they grow richer relative to doctors, schoolteachers, bus drivers, and other median-income employees whose pay is limited by the number of people, or customers, they can serve. At the same time, information technology has opened a window of new investment opportunities and increased the productivity of the most productive workers.

…

Success in the modern information-intensive economy often requires substantially less capital than the manufacturing-based economy. Information technology scales to economy-wide success without much need for capital. Successful innovators often have less need to share the value they have created with investors. With less need to share their success with investors, successful innovators, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, have grown richer than they would have had they needed to rely on investors. As a result, successful founders often look like large corporations of old. Their outsized success contributes to rising income inequality. Successful IT start-ups no longer need large networks of buildings filled with expensive, long-lasting equipment and inventory to serve customers.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Yes, I’ve mixed a metaphor or two. Another key is to make a working system of the future. This was ARPA’s and especially PARC’s main mission. Make something that works, not just for a demo, but for a group of people. Some of what I showed during my talk is what Steve Jobs saw, and the Macintosh was a result of his glimpse and also interpretations of that glimpse by him and others at Apple. But it missed a number of really important ideas. Many of Ted’s and Doug’s ideas have been missed. So, with all this working against someone like Ted, why bother having visions? Standard schooling is already trying to convert two-eyed children into standard children, that is, into blind children.

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Fig. 3.2A hard drive (location shown in circle) containing a Smalltalk image from the 1970s was retrieved from the digital trash heap The software computers are, in terms of virtual hardware, independent of the physical computers they run on. To bring this back to life, we emulated the virtual hardware in Javascript. It is faster than the actual PARC computers of 40 years ago! With this approach, we have a time machine that allows us to go back, back, back into the past and run the same software that both Bonnie and Steve Jobs saw. In Fig. 3.3, we see familiar forms: overlapping windows, iconic representations, and so forth. Windows are objects that are views of objects: tools and the kinds of resources that media authors use to create the writings of the future. They’re not stovepiped “apps.” You can bring any and all objects in the Smalltalk system to any of these projects.

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But in graduate school I had a considerable epiphany (below), and I made a new and much bigger plan. I would found the personal computing industry and world-wide hypertext. I figured this might take until 1967, when I would be thirty; at which point I would get back to my original plan. (Note that Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee were both 5 years old at this time, and they would have been eleven when I was thirty.) I expected to make a lot of money in the computer field by that time. Meanwhile I would simply accumulate notes for my other projects, which I could then pay to have typed into the software I was designing.

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

Now Amazon, Sony, and other players may fall behind Apple’s iPad and a wave of e-readers built using Google’s mobile Android operating system, which both offer book reading as one of dozens of applications. Apple, mimicking its iPod experience, has aimed for the high end, assuming that a color screen, a very fast response time, and the “cool” factor will help it grab market share in books the way it has in music. The iPad, at least initially, sold for twice the price of a Kindle, and electronic books in Apple’s iBookstore sell mostly for $14.99, a price that pleases many publishers but sets up a duel with Amazon. When Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive officer, presented the iPad to an audience of six hundred geeks in January 2010, he talked about consistency, simplicity, and a uniform interface.

…

But with tastes and technology evolving rapidly, the ones that hesitate may truly be lost and the ones that move aggressively may win the game. Look at Apple, the early computer company that has moved into music, music players, cell phones, and new electronic readers. In 2007 Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive officer, had to decide whether the company should introduce a new product that could drastically hurt the sales of a successful current product. For almost thirty years, Apple’s bread and butter was selling personal computers, related software, and peripherals. But in 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, a small music player that eventually would change the entire shape of the music industry.

…

Lee, Gina Blaber, Brady Forrest, Kenyatta Cheese, Matt Buchanan, Andrea Sheehan, Scott Beale, Ori, Mor Naaman, Kim Naci, Mike Sharon, Jason Brush, Derek Gottfrid & Nick Thuesen, Jeff Koyen, Peter Ng, Bruce Headlam, Rex Sorgatz, Chad and Summer, Jennifer Magnolfi, Kio Stark, Nick Kristoff, John & Deirdre, Bob and Jamie, Ryan B., Marc and Tiff, Max and Roisin, Andrei K., Kevin E., Morgan, Leanne Citrone, Michael Citrone, Wuca & Pillow, Terry Bilton, Sandra and David Reston, Eboo Bilton and Weter, Betty and Len Bilton, Stephen, Amanda, Ben and Posh Jacobs, Daniel Jacobs, Ivan & Elsa Marin, Nathalie Marin, Chris Marin, Andy, Carm, George Jr., George Sr., Sonia, Joe, Chela, Tony, Jim, Andrea, Stephanie, Jessica, Lindsay, Diego and Yvonne, Cesar and Beatriz Southside, Sam H., Ariel Kaminer, Vint Cerf, Larry and Sergey, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Smallest, But Not Least Pixel, Hip Hop, & Magnolia. Kthxbye! notes and sources The following sources represent a portion of the research and interviews used for this book. Additional links, reference papers, and interview quotes can be found online at nickbilton.com.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

Even back then, Camp was calling this proposed service by a name the world would soon know well: Uber. That was eight years ago. Much has changed since then—the president, for starters. But few changes have been as profound as those that were ushered in by those two groups of entrepreneurs sitting anonymously in the crowd that day. They had plenty of help. The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone seven months before Obama’s inauguration. Two months after it, Jobs announced that the iPhone would run software programs, called mobile applications, or apps, from other companies. Other significant technology trends were converging at the same time. The social network Facebook, founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, was skyrocketing in popularity and persuading internet users to establish their identities online.

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“It was very strange,” Surve says years later. Surve was happy just to have a comfortable place to sleep, but he ended up getting an education in the Silicon Valley startup scene as well. He spent lots of time that week on the couch with Gebbia and Chesky, talking about design and examining Apple’s new device, the very first iPhone. Surve hadn’t even heard of Steve Jobs, let alone the iPhone, and he was totally unfamiliar with the litany of motivational Jobs sayings that Gebbia and Chesky frequently quoted, such as “We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” With another guest staying at Rausch Street, Kat Jurick, Surve attended the pecha-kucha, and later in the week, Gebbia took him on a tour of the city, showing him sights like the famous winding block of Lombard Street and the farmers’ market outside the Ferry Building.

…

The tale starts with Logan Green, a young, introverted software engineer who grew up amid the transportation chaos that was Los Angeles in the 1990s. In high school, Green got a part-time job working for the celebrated video game entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and one of the first bosses of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Green went to the hippie-ish New Roads High School in Santa Monica and for years navigated the gridlocked city streets in his beat-up 1989 Volvo 740, commuting to Bushnell’s gaming company, uWink, in Playa del Rey. The drive was only six miles but could take more than half an hour. “I just recall having this feeling of seeing everyone stuck in traffic,” he told me years later.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

And, eight years in, Airbnb is still growing like a weed. As of this writing, the company was said to be adding 1.4 million users a week, and those 140 million “guest arrivals” were projected to grow to 160 million by early 2017. Investors were expecting the company to see $1.6 billion in revenue and to become cash-flow positive in 2016. The Steve Jobs Three-Click Rule One question frequently posed about Airbnb is why it took off when so many other similar sites already existed—Couchsurfing.com, HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, even Craigslist itself. Why did Airbnb succeed in popularizing short-term rentals while others did not? Much of the explanation lies in the product itself.

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The very first Airbnb product was simply the oddball idea and a WordPress website, but when it came time to get ready for the third launch, at the DNC in Denver, the founders had expanded their vision, going from a simple platform for housing supply for sold-out conferences to a website where you could book a room in someone’s home as easily as you could book a hotel room. But from the start, Chesky and Gebbia were emphatic about certain things regarding the website and the experience: specifically, it had to be frictionless, it had to be easy. The listings had to look beautiful. And, based on the famous three-click rule from Steve Jobs, a design hero of Chesky and Gebbia’s—when Jobs conceived the iPod, he wanted it to never be more than just three clicks away from a song—the founders wanted their users to never be more than three clicks away from a booking. In fact, what so many investors had seen as a red flag during those early pitch meetings—that Chesky and Gebbia were designers from RISD who lacked technical background—turned out to be one of their biggest assets.

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Sequoia’s Alfred Lin says that plenty of CEOs have similar connections to Chesky’s but aren’t as successful. “I think the network is very helpful, but the potential has to be there,” he says. “Sources” need not be living: Chesky took some of his most valuable lessons from biographies of two of his biggest heroes, Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, as well as historical figures like General George S. Patton, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, and scores of others; management tomes by the dozens (his favorite is Andy Grove’s High Output Management); and niche-industry sources like the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To say Chesky is a voracious reader doesn’t quite capture it.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

The Einstellung effect refers to our tendency to become stuck in our ways, to act or think in the same manner we’ve always acted or thought, even when we are presented with alternatives that are obviously better. The best innovators—people like Art Fry and Spence Silver, or Newton and Edison, or Steve Jobs—are skilled at overcoming the Einstellung effect. They follow the old Apple Computer slogan and “think different.” They do not develop an attitude. To see how the Einstellung effect matters to innovation, and to help finish the story of the sticky bookmark, we are going to revisit Peter McLeod, the neuroscientist from Oxford who showed us how the best cricket batsmen delay hitting the ball until the last split-second.

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Thinking like a kid is a big part of innovation. Behind every innovator is a playful, experimental childhood. When Steve Jobs was five or six years old, his adoptive father gave him a piece of his workbench and some tools and, according to Jobs, “spent a lot of time with me … teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.”32 Larry Page, cofounder of Google, has a similar story of growing up in a house full of computers and gadgets and having an older brother who showed him how stuff worked.33 Apple was established in 1976, and Google in 1996, but really they began long before. One of the most debated topics in the history of innovation is Joseph Priestley’s “discovery” of oxygen.

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Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, p. 82. 31. “Sticking Around—The Post-it Note Is 20,” BBC News, April 6, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/701661.stm. 32. Daniel Morrow, “Learning to Use Tools,” interview with Steve Jobs, Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories, April 20, 1995, http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html#tools; see also Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011). 33. Sergey Brin, Google’s other cofounder, had a childhood similarly devoted to exploring whatever he was curious about, as well as family members who were supportive and equally curious. See Virginia Scott, Google (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008), pp. 1–4. 34.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

The initial Alexa crew worked with a feverish sense of urgency due to their impatient boss. Unrealistically, Bezos wanted to release the device in six to twelve months. He would have a good reason to hurry. On October 4, 2011, just as the Doppler team was coming together, Apple introduced the Siri virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S, the last passion project of cofounder Steve Jobs, who died of cancer the next day. That the resurgent Apple had the same idea of a voice-activated personal assistant was both validating for Hart and his employees and discouraging, since Siri was first to market and with initial mixed reviews. The Amazon team tried to reassure themselves that their product was unique, since it would be independent from smartphones.

…

At the same time, he had seen plenty of examples of bad management and could admit that there was something familiar in the Times account. Bezos himself was the architect of Amazon’s culture and skeptical of the unoriginal way that human resources was run at many companies. Other Silicon Valley CEOs had varying levels of disinterest in getting involved in the muck of HR and culture building. Steve Jobs, for example, upon returning full-time to Apple in 1997, had addressed an audience of the company’s human resources employees in Cupertino and bluntly told them, “It seems to me you are all just a bunch of barnacles.” Bezos, on the other hand, dove into the tedious details of HR and tried to formulate mechanisms that would substitute for good intentions.

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“Then a customer would pay for that coat and they’d leave a review about the sleeves falling off in the first minute.” Gunningham, a member of the S-team, was in charge of global selling as well as FBA and the marketplace. He’d grown up on a ranch in Argentina, earned a mathematical sciences degree at Stanford University, and worked with Larry Ellison at Oracle and Steve Jobs at Apple before scoring a kind of high-tech hat trick by joining Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Colleagues said he was creative and empathetic—and a big thinker, in Amazon’s lexicon. Gunningham quickly recognized that the flood of Chinese merchandise would stir controversy among sellers in the West who would not be able to match the low prices.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
by Scott Belsky
Published 31 Mar 2010

You also don’t want to create too much structure around when you can and cannot generate new ideas. However, you must be willing to kill ideas liberally—for the sake of fully pursuing others. In a rare interview in BusinessWeek on Apple’s system for innovation, CEO Steve Jobs explained that, in fact, there is no system at Apple—and that spontaneity is a crucial element for innovation, so long as it is paired with the ability to say no without hesitation: Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

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As we examine the history of spectacular creations and the leaders behind these accomplishments, some obvious examples of Doers, Dreamers, and Incrementalists stand out. Bill Bowerman, the former track coach who developed Nike’s running shoes, partnered with Phil Knight to transform his vision into a business. In the leadership of Apple, one might call Jonathan Ive (chief designer), Tim Cook (chief operating officer), and Steve Jobs (chief executive officer) Dreamer, Doer, and Incrementalist, respectively. In the world of fashion, the Dreamer Calvin Klein had Barry Schwartz, Ralph Lauren had Roger Farah, and Marc Jacobs had Robert Duffy—three fashion visionaries paired with a world-class Doer as a partner.

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The same case can be made for all creative endeavors: our odds of success increase when we readily share ideas and seek out discoveries that have already been made by others in our industry. The examples set by Chris Anderson and Steve Kerr are refreshing, but they go directly against the grain of some of the most celebrated idea generators of the last era. Steve Jobs is notorious for extreme privacy around innovation at Apple—both with the public and even between teams within the company. Students across the creative disciplines have always been advised by their professors to share ideas carefully. Certainly, the thinking behind patents and idea protection in general holds some merit. Given our great passion for our ideas, and the potential value of the good ones, our desire to protect them is understandable.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

The space you use also has a significant impact on the products you create. One of my mentors, James Higa, who spent a big chunk of his career working for Steve Jobs through his time at Next, Apple, and Pixar, shared just how emphatic Steve was about planning the office space for each company. He would take the time to fly around the world to look at sample materials and reference structures, and even once pursued acquiring sculptures by renowned Japanese American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi so Apple employees could have a “daily encounter with beauty” in the lobby. Steve would also spend the energy required to bend the will of headstrong architects until they aligned with his vision.

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Your job is to make history more interesting and relevant when retold than when it happened. After all, the middle of a journey is a blurry, mundane landscape. To get through the tremendous voids of nothingness in between the milestones, provide guidance. You’re the narrator of this journey. People who worked with Apple founder Steve Jobs over the years often talked about how his “reality-distortion field” could alter his team’s perspective, assumptions, and limits to allow for new ideas. Perhaps Jobs believed in his vision so much so that the reality around him was distorted by the power of his conviction? When you’re articulating a vision and set of assumptions with such passion and confidence, reality starts to bend your way.

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It’s extremely difficult to halt all progress and start all over again, but the boldest projects have multiple such “resets.” Perhaps one of the most challenging and important consumer product creations of our lifetime was the iPod, and subsequently the iPhone. So I asked Tony Fadell—who, before creating the thermostat company Nest, was brought into Apple by Steve Jobs to lead the iPod project, and then iPhone—about how his teams worked their way around so many dead ends. Tony explained, “I think there are two kinds of resets, one which is product spec based, not meeting the customer needs, and the other which is engineering based, not having a way to implement the plan with the current team or current technology inside or outside the company.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

“we are calling it iPhone”: Rob Price and Mary Meisenzahl, “The First iPhone Was Announced 13 Years Ago Today—Here’s How Steve Jobs Introduced It,” Insider, January 9, 2020, accessed May 2, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-steve-jobs-first-iphone-10-years-ago-legendary-keynote-macworld-sale-2017-6. saw magic in the number three: Carmine Gallo, “Apple Is Obsessed With the Magical Number 3. It Will Transform Your Presentations, Too,” Inc., September 19, 2018, https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/apple-is-obsessed-with-magical-number-3-it-will-transform-your-presentations-too.html. “Just three stories”: Stanford, “Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address,” YouTube video, 15:04, March 7, 2008, accessed May 2, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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And it isn’t just me. Do you remember how Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007? “Today,” he told his audience, “we’re introducing three revolutionary products,” repeatedly referring to an iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device, before doing his big reveal. “These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.” Jobs, as speech coach Carmine Gallo has noted, saw magic in the number three. Two years earlier, speaking to graduating students at Stanford University in what has since become the most-watched commencement speech in history, the Apple CEO and cofounder began his address by telling the crowd he wanted to tell them “three stories from my life.

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When he saw sixty minutes had passed on his watch, he would stop midsentence, no matter where he was in his sermon, and say: “Brethren, the hour is up. Let us pray.” Don’t do that! Make sure your very last sentence is planned out and—at the very least—sounds like a fully formed final thought. Do try to come up with a “memorable” and ideally pithy phrase of your own at the end. As speech coach Dom Barnard reminds us, the late Steve Jobs of Apple used just four words to end his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Don’t go on too long. If abruptness is bad, tardiness is worse. Set a time to finish, and preplan an ending that allows you to wrap up on time without the need to rush. And if you do go over your time, per one speech coach, do not then end your speech by apologizing (“Sorry for taking up so much of your time…”).

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

By 2011, seasoned entrepreneur Yiming recognized that smartphones would profoundly change how humans received and interacted with information. Although no one could have foreseen such at the time, this seed of thought, planted at the very founding of the company, eventually manifested itself through the global success of TikTok. To quote Steve Jobs, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” To understand TikTok and the company behind it, ByteDance, we need to start at the beginning—in a small village in southeast China, Yiming’s hometown. * * * 2 Image: click farm equipment. Zombie phones stacked in racks and operated remotely using automated software. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Two large, high-profile companies starting in the same housing community at the same time has given Jinqiu Gardens a somewhat mythical status within China’s internet industry. Is this a dance agency? In picking the company’s name, Yiming made an unorthodox choice—English name first and work back towards the Chinese. After much brainstorming, the team came up with “ByteDance,” allegedly inspired by a famous Steve Jobs quote: “Technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” 42 The logic being that “byte,” the unit of information in a computer, was technological sounding, and “dance” represented the liberal arts.

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Chinese internet startups created around this time tended to focus exclusively on the massive and abundant opportunities already present in the local domestic market with little thought given to overseas. Choosing an English name first provides a reliable indicator that the company really was thinking “Global from day one”—one of ByteDance’s somewhat clichéd company slogans. Steve Jobs, whose quote inspired the name, had died just a few months before, sending shockwaves across China’s tech industry where he was widely revered. The “app economy” of internet services delivered through smartphone devices was Job’s brainchild and the infrastructure on top of which ByteDance would build its entire business.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry’, Smithsonian Magazine, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/edison-vs-westinghouse-a-shocking-rivalry-102146036/. 57 Essig, M. (2003), Edison and the Electric Chair, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton. 58 Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, p. 289. 59 Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, p. 289. 60 Isaacson, W. (2011), Steve Jobs, London: Little, Brown, pp. 422?55. Swaine, J. (21 October 2011), ‘Steve Jobs “Regretted Trying to Beat Cancer with Alternative Medicine for So Long” ’, Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html. 61 Shultz, S., Nelson, E. and Dunbar, R.I.M. (2012), ‘Hominin Cognitive Evolution: Identifying Patterns and Processes in the Fossil and Archaeological Record’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1599), 2130–40. 62 Mercier, H. (2016), ‘The Argumentative Theory: Predictions and Empirical Evidence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 689?

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The historian of science Mark Essig writes that ‘the question is not so much why Edison’s campaign failed as why he thought it might succeed’.59 But an understanding of cognitive errors such as the sunk cost effect, the bias blind spot and motivated reasoning helps to explain why such a brilliant mind may persuade itself to continue down such a disastrous path. The co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, was similarly a man of enormous intelligence and creativity, yet he too sometimes suffered from a dangerously skewed perception of the world. According to Walter Isaacson’s official biography, his acquaintances described a ‘reality distortion field’ – ‘a confounding mélange of charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’, in the words of his former colleague Andy Hertzfeld.

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Whatever your profession, the toxic combination of motivated reasoning and the bias blind spot could still lead us to justify prejudiced opinions about those around us, pursue failing projects at work, or rationalise a hopeless love affair. As two final examples, let’s look at two of history’s greatest innovators: Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. With more than a thousand patents to his name, Thomas Edison was clearly in possession of an extraordinarily fertile mind. But once he had conceived an idea, he struggled to change his mind – as shown in the ‘battle of the currents’. In the late 1880s, having produced the first working electric lightbulb, Edison sought to find a way to power America’s homes.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

[175] 2,617 times a day: “We touch our phones 2,617 times a day, says study | Network World.” 7 Jul. 2016, toreset.me/175. [176] In a 2016 blog post: “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Former... – Medium.” 18 May. 2016, toreset.me/176. [177] kids’ screen time: “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs limited screen time for... – Business Insider.” 10 Jan. 2018, toreset.me/177. [178] Cook: “Tim Cook – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/178. The Apple CEO. [179] Horvath: “Michael Horvath | LinkedIn.” toreset.me/179. The Strava co-founder. [180] RescueTime: “RescueTime.” toreset.me/180. [181] Unroll.Me: “Unroll.Me.” toreset.me/181. [182] (3% of people)?: “Sleep with your smartphone in hand?

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Be a little bit happier. Be more confident. Have more sleep, more sex and be less lonely. There’s no doubt that the internet is amazing; and the irony of someone who makes their living from digital communications bemoaning social media addiction is not lost on me. As, no doubt, it was not lost on Steve Jobs, or the host of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs who place strict limits on their kids’ screen time[177]. But if we don’t take control of our own performance that little beeping flashing minicomputer charging on the arm of our sofa will run the show for us. Prescription Here’s how you can say F.U. to Zuckerberg, Gates, Cook[178] and Horvath[179], and wrest back control of your life.

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Treat your state pension as a bonus: don’t rely on it. Leave a legacy. Remember The LAHs. And finally... Walter Isaacson[429] is a wise American journalist (ex-editor of Time magazine and CNN). He’s also written acclaimed biographies of some of the most talented people who have ever lived, including Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Every human being, he contends, is trying to find “where they fit in”: all “searching” for meaning in life and our place in it[430]. It took me more than 40 years to find mine. Running – we’ll touch on that in Part V – gave me hope, but there’s no higher purpose; digital PR gave me pride and is something I excel in, but it’s a means to an end; decluttering made me see clearly again, got my brain firing and opened up a host of possibilities.

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka
Published 21 Jan 2020

It takes a lot of money to look this simple. 1 - VII In a famous photograph21 from 1982, one that seems destined for future historians to analyze as a representation of the late-twentieth century, Steve Jobs sits on the floor of his living room. Jobs was in his late twenties at the time and Apple was making a billion dollars a year in revenue. He had just bought a large house in Los Gatos, California, close to both the Apple office and his parents’ home, but he kept it totally empty. In Diana Walker’s photo he is seen cross-legged on a single square of carpet, holding a mug, wearing a simple dark sweater and jeans—his prototypical uniform.

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Looking past the verbosity, it’s not just about form following function but an intimacy of cause and effect, design and purpose: everything at a human scale, integrated into one graspable system. According to Alexander, the quality “will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.” There was nothing so organic about Steve Jobs’s living room. It was empty and uncomfortable in its monkishness, austere to the point of showing off, as Jobs well knew during the photo shoot. I think the quality-without-a-name, or the spirit of minimalism, can more easily be found in the main area of the Eameses’ 1949 Case Study House No. 8 in Los Angeles, where the couple lived for most of their lives and that is now preserved as a museum.

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“impeccable without having reference …” Trow, George W. S. “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse.” New Yorker, May 22, 1978. the Instagram account … John Pawson’s Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/johnpawson/, c. 2018. “Minimal living has always …” Pawson, John. Minimum. London: Phaidon Press, 2006. In a famous photograph … Steve Jobs photograph included in Walker, Diana. The Bigger Picture. New York: National Geographic, 2007. “the second body” Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body. London: Fitzcarraldo, 2018. “way-it-should-be-ness” “The ‘Way-it-should-be-ness’ of the Eames Radio: Interview with Eames Demetrios.” Vitra Magazine, May 12, 2018. https://www.vitra.com/en-us/magazine/details/the-way-it-should-be-ness-of-the-eames-radio.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

The phreakers were a diverse group, including John Draper, who called himself Cap’n Crunch after learning that whistles given out with that breakfast cereal could be used to blow 2600 hertz, which allowed free calls. The technical puzzles of phreaking would attract future innovators up to and including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who sold blue boxes to make free calls while in college. The political divide in America at the end of the 1960s was the worst until the 2000s, and that helped push phreaking in a radical direction. The phone companies were very clearly part of the establishment, and AT&T was a monopoly to boot.

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“a harder time attacking Google’s Chrome browser”: Mudge and Sarah Zatko have released various findings from the lab in talks at Black Hat and other conferences. “I hate Adobe”: A large proportion of criminal and geopolitical malware depended on Flash vulnerabilities for years. The bad security was one of the reasons that Steve Jobs killed Apple support for it. In 2018, Flash is nearing end of life. “Gallagher gave him a shout-out”:Hugh Gallagher, “White Boy Rocks Harlem,” posted by zpin, YouTube video, 2:40, June 28, 2006, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv1ihFI5iKI. “In four years, the group found 1,400 vulnerabilities”: Figures disclosed by Project Zero and Google Chrome overseer Parisa Tabriz at her Black Hat keynote in 2018, covered here: Seth Rosenblatt, “Google’s ‘Security Princess’ Calls for Stronger Collaboration,” Parallax, August 8, 2018, www.the-parallax.com/2018/08/08/google-security-princess-parisa-tabriz-black-hat/.

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“Misha had followed the credo laid out by early hacker the Mentor”: The Mentor, “The Conscience of a Hacker,” Phrack #7, January 8, 1986, http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article. “participant Jordan Ritter”: In addition to Ritter and Fanning, others in my Napster book All the Rave who show up in this volume are John Perry Barlow, Yobie Benjamin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jan Koum, Kevin Mitnick, and Dug Song. Napster cofounder Sean Parker went on to serve as Facebook’s first president, coaching Mark Zuckerberg through dealings with venture capitalists and helping him keep voting control of the company as it moved toward becoming one of the most important in the world.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

Shubik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132. 9. First referenced in a blog post I wrote for Harvard Business Review called “If You Don’t Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will,” June 28, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/how-to-say-no-to-a-controlling/ 10. In 1993 Interview re: Paul Rand and Steve Jobs, dir. Doug Evans, uploaded January 7, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak, Steve Jobs shares how Paul Rand came up with the logo for NeXT. 11. Carol Hymowitz, “Kay Krill on Giving Ann Taylor a Makeover,” Business Week, August 9, 2012, www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-09/kay-krill-on-giving-ann-taylor-a-makeover#p2. 12. UNCOMMIT 1.

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The potential upside, however, is less obvious: when the initial annoyance or disappointment or anger wears off, the respect kicks in. When we push back effectively, it shows people that our time is highly valuable. It distinguishes the professional from the amateur. A case in point is the time the graphic designer Paul Rand had the guts to say no to Steve Jobs.10 When Jobs was looking for a logo for the company NeXT, he asked Rand, whose work included the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Westinghouse, and ABC, to come up with a few options. But Rand didn’t want to come up with “a few options.” He wanted to design just one option. So Rand said: “No. I will solve your problem for you.

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And of course Jesus lived as carpenter and then in his ministry lived without wealth, political position, or material belongings. We can see the philosophy of “less but better” reflected in the lives of other notable and diverse figures—both religious and secular—throughout history: to name a few, the Dalai Lama, Steve Jobs, Leo Tolstoy, Michael Jordan, Warren Buffett, Mother Teresa, and Henry David Thoreau (who wrote, “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; … so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real”).5 Indeed, we can find Essentialists among the most successful people in every type of human endeavor.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

(Robert Noyce also invented the integrated circuit but worked separately from Kilby; however, because he was already dead, he was ineligible for the prize.) There is, however, a bit of historical reverence in Silicon Valley for the three garages in which three major high-tech companies began: Hewlett-Packard (William Hewlett and David Packard, starting in 1938), Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, starting in 1976), and Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page, starting in 1998). None is open to the public, but all are popular brief stopping places for contemporary geek tours.54 More generally, there is a declining confidence in scientific and technological panaceas—not simply a declining faith in utopia.

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More generally, according to countless newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs, opinion surveys, and, not least, websites and Internet discussions, much of the world has for years now been experiencing “techno-mania” of an unprecedented intensity. Not only are endless high-tech advances all the rage, but those advances—especially computers, the Internet, the Web, cell phones, Skype, iPods, iPhones, and, most recently, iPads—are rapidly transforming the world, and generally for the better. By the time of his death in 2011, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs had become the foremost promoter of “techno-mania,” though hardly the only one.2 We are given to believe that Americans have never seen so much scientific and technological change in so short a time and have rarely been so optimistic about the future. Because of the contemporary “global economy”—also endlessly cited as supposedly unique—what happens in the United States eventually happens in the rest of the world too.

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Although the earliest reference I have found is in David Cushman Coyle, “Decentralize Industry,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 11 (July 1935), 321–338, he refers there to older forms of technology such as assembly lines and electrical power systems. See, for example, Newsweek’s cover story on Apple’s latest invention, the iPad, by Daniel Lyons and Nick Summers, “Think Really The Resurgence of Utopianism 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Different,” 155 (April 5, 2010), 47–51. The issue’s cover title was explicit: “What’s So Great About the iPad? Everything. How Steve Jobs Will Revolutionize Reading, Watching, Computing, Gaming— and Silicon Valley.” Similarly, Time’s cover story for 175 (April 12, 2010), 6, 36–43, was “Inside Steve’s Pad.”

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Later in the catalogue, Wiener’s other great work, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is reviewed. Wiener is described by the reviewer – presumably Brand – as “one of the founders of an n-dimensional world whose nature we’ve yet to learn. He is also one of the all-time nice men.” In a talk he gave in 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog “one of the bibles of my generation”, describing it as a Google in paperback form, idealistic and overflowing with incredible tools. Wired founder Kevin Kelly compared it to the modern-day blogosphere, calling it “a great example of user-generated content” thanks to Brand’s habit of encouraging readers to submit their own reviews and earn themselves a fee of $10.

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Most of the money Moore received the night of Stewart Brand’s Demise Party eventually went into founding the Homebrew Computer Club, a place for amateur and professional computer enthusiasts to tinker with personal computers. And so from the ashes of the Catalog rose a legendary phoenix. For it was at Homebrew that Steve Wozniak would meet Steve Jobs, and the two decide to found Apple Computers. Lee Felsenstein, designer of the first mass-produced portable computer the Osborne 1, also hung out there, as did the legendary telephone network hacker or “phreak” John “Captain Crunch” Draper. And it was to the Homebrew Computer Club that a 20-year old Bill Gates wrote his disgruntled “Open letter to Hobbyists”

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US Department of Defense Intelligence Analysis Program (DIAP), March 18. http://wikileaks.org/le/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf. Huxley, Aldous. 2004. The Doors of Perception. Great Britain: Vintage. Jobs, Steve. 2005. 2005 Commencement Address June 12, Stanford. http://www.roj.com.np/life-inspiration/steve-jobs-how-to-live-before-you-die/. Khatchadourian, Raffi. 2010. “No Secrets.” The New Yorker, June 7. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo. Flamingo. Knight Lightning. 1989. “German Hackers Break Into Los Alamos and NASA”, Phrack, March 29 http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?

The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
by Randy Komisar
Published 15 Mar 2000

I had bought the prejudice that company lawyers were people who couldn't hack it in a good law firm. Maybe Apple was a step backwards for me. If it didn't work out, would a good law firm still take me seriously? Yet everything in my gut told me I should go to Apple. Those were the mid-eighties, the glory days of the company Steve Jobs had energized with ideals and values. Though he had been forced out just before I arrived, his influence still bled in five colors throughout the organization. The Apple he created was about making the power of computing accessible to everyone, about freedom from the tyranny of technology and technologists, about changing education, about using technology to help the handicapped cope with the challenges of their disabilities.

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And I found myself able, by dint of both my eclectic experience and my training as a lawyer, to help them build viable enterprises around their brilliant ideas. Perhaps, I thought, I could find genuine satisfaction, some meaning, in practicing law after all. In 1985, I approached Lucasfilm, George Lucas's film studio and the home of Star Wars, for some work on the sale of Pixar, its animation division, to Steve Jobs. My firm ended up handling the technology side of that dealthe conveyance of the technology, the protection of intellectual property, and so on. At that time, Pixar was hardly the distinguished company Jobs later made of it, but the transaction was still fascinating: a project with two marquee names from two glamorous worlds, entertainment and technology.

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No one could know what might have happened if Apple had Page 110 gone ahead with that agreement and with licensing the operating system to other manufacturers. Sculley's Apple subordinated the company's big idea to the business model. That model was not the essence of Apple. It was simply that moment's best means of realizing value from the big idea. The business model can and should change over time, as the world changes. Ultimately, when the big idea was lost, the market and Apple's employees could no longer find a reason to support Apple's business. Their fanaticism faded to ambivalence. I was curious about whether Lenny was following the example of Sculley's Apple even before he'd been able to start the business.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

Indeed, America as a whole has a soft spot for risk takers willing to gamble almost everything in an effort to create new business opportunities. While in Europe schoolchildren are taught to revere poets and philosophers, in the United States schoolchildren are primed to lionize entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. The very term business hero has a distinctly American ring. And by hero, we generally mean “innovator,” regardless of what that innovation foretells for our futures, both individually and as a nation. For the question remains, innovation of what and for whom? Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase creative destruction to describe the process by which innovation creates new technologies, businesses, and jobs at the cost of the old.

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Think back to that scene in Girls where the heroine—a college graduate—gets turned down for a job frosting cupcakes because, well, she doesn’t express enough passion for frosting cupcakes. The skit is so funny because it rings so true. “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a sentiment we’ve all heard countless times. See, for example, Steve Jobs’s iconic commencement address at Stanford University: You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

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If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. “Don’t settle.” Okay, we know what this meant for Steve Jobs. But what does it really mean for the rest of us? That each and every one of us should throw off convention (and the advice of others) to become a self-made visionary of our own heroic futures? Yes, this is an enduring American fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. Most of us cannot begin to achieve this goal, which, if you think about it, is rather arbitrary.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

Charles Simonyi, by then in his early thirties, who was in charge of producing the word processing software for the Alto, left PARC to join Bill Gates, the twenty-seven-year-old chairman of Microsoft, a company that started out as a software supplier to the computer hobbyists in the Altair days of 1975, and is now the second-largest microcomputer software company in the world. Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple, then in his late twenties, visited PARC in 1979. He was given a demonstration of the Alto. Larry Tesler, the member of the PARC team that gave Jobs that demonstration, left PARC in 1980 and joined Apple's new secret project that Jobs promised would redefine the state of the art in personal computers. In 1983 Apple unveiled Lisa -- a machine that used a mouse, a bit-mapped screen, windows, and other features based on the Star-Alto-Smalltalk interface.

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Taylor is setting up another computer systems research center, this time under the auspices of the Digital Equipment Corporation, and is collecting people once again, this time for a research effort that will bring computing into the twenty-first century. Kay, at Atari, continued to steer toward the fantasy amplifier, despite the fact that their mother company was often described in the news media as "seriously troubled." It is fair to assume that he will continue to work toward the same goal in his new association with Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple and a computer visionary of a more entrepreneurial bent. The pioneers, although they are still at work, are not the final characters in the story of the computer quest. The next generations of innovators are already at work, and some of them are surprisingly young. Computer trailblazers in the past tended to make their marks early in life--a trend that seems to be continuing in the present.

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MITS had the usual problems associated with a successful start-up company. Roberts eventually sold it. In 1977, Commodore, Heathkit, and Radio Shack began marketing personal computers based on the interconnection method established by the Altair -- still known as the S100 bus. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started selling Apples in 1977 and now are firmly established in the annals of Silicon Valley garage-workshop mythology -- the Hewlett and Packard of the seventies generation. Gates and Allen became Microsoft, Inc. Their company sold over $50 million worth of software to personal computer users in 1983. Microsoft is aiming for the hundred-million-dollar category, and Gates still has a couple more years before he reaches the age of thirty.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

Used ubiquitously by global benchmarks like the Fortune 500, the yardstick of market capitalization appears to be the most common measure of greatness. After all, if the stock market is rational, the share price is the best possible measure of the value of the company. And higher the value, greater the company. Take Apple Inc. for instance. Apple is seen as the universally loved company that gave us fantastic products like the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Brought back from near collapse by its iconic founder, Steve Jobs, Apple’s products generate billions of dollars of revenue and is the world’s largest company by market capitalization. Similarly, in India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is India’s largest company by market cap.

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In his 1993 classic, Foundations of Corporate Success, Kay uses the IBAS—or innovation, brands and reputation, architecture, strategic assets—framework to analyse a company’s competitive advantages. This framework forms the final section of our checklist and can be found in more detail in Appendix 1. • What is the company’s track record on innovation? Apple’s legendary founder, Steve Jobs, said, ‘Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.’ Apple is renowned for its path-breaking innovative products starting from the Macintosh computers in the 1980s to today’s favourites like the iPhones and iPads. The world’s most famous prize for manufacturing excellence—the Deming Prize—is named after the American statistician, professor and author, W.

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It takes a new entrant into the Indian auto market many years, sometimes decades, to create a supply chain as efficient as this. That’s the power of architecture—it brings different companies together into a common network with a common goal in mind. Innovation ‘Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. (Steve) Jobs did both, relentlessly.’—Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs (2011). ‘Innovation is an obvious source of distinctive capability, but it is less often a sustainable or appropriable source because successful innovation quickly attracts imitation. Maintaining an advantage is most easily possible for those few innovations for which patent production is effective.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

ED: “This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.” The Incredible Strategic and Predictive Power of Steve Jobs “We went public one week after [Toy Story] went out. . . . Steve Jobs’s logic was that while he wanted us to go public—and he had some reasons for it which we were skeptical of, to be honest—he wanted to do it after the film came out to demonstrate for people that, in fact, a new art form was being born, and that was worth investing in. . . .”

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Related and Recommended Books Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon by Stephan V. Beyer. This book did not come up in the podcast, but it is the most comprehensive book related to ayahuasca that I’ve found. The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. This was one of the more impactful books that Dan read while living in the jungle. Steve Jobs had this book passed out to attendees at his funeral. The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami by Radhanath Swami Ibogaine Explained by Peter Frank Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad by James Oroc. Martin considers this a fantastic read because it looks at the 5-MeO-DMT experience from a Buddhist and Hindu perspective.

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It worked. He got a front-row seat to the highest levels of Google and soon became a fixture in those meetings. Cowboy Shirts Chris is known for wearing somewhat ridiculous cowboy shirts. They’ve become his signature style. Here’s a bit more context, from a Forbes profile of Chris by Alex Konrad: “Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck. Chris Sacca has his embroidered cowboy shirt. He bought his first one, impulsively, at the Reno airport en route to a speech, and the reaction prompted him to buy out half the store on his return.” He likes the brands Scully and Rockmount. A good place to look at a wide selection is VintageWesternWear.com.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

He wanted to be CEO of Apple. Cook, who since Steve Jobs’s death had shepherded Apple into the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, was gobsmacked by the request. “Fuck you,” Cook said, in Musk’s telling, before hanging up. (Apple declined to comment on the record.)*3 Whether or not this was an accurate recounting, it’s hard to imagine Musk was serious about wanting to be CEO of Apple. Rather, the story played into Musk’s vision of Tesla becoming on par with Apple. It also served a more immediate purpose: It told those senior managers hoping for salvation from Apple to think again.

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He and his wife were looking forward to an early retirement, enjoying some Florida sunshine. An unexpected call from Steve Jobs at Apple, however, changed the course of things. Blankenship joined the tech company ahead of the release of the first iPod, as Jobs was moving into a company-owned retail store strategy. He met with Jobs every Tuesday morning for three hours, plotting out what the Apple Store shopping experience would be like. He’d scout out locations across the country that were uniquely “Apple.” He helped open more than 150 of the company’s now-iconic stores before semi-retiring, settling this time into the world of consulting.

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He had cut his engineering teeth at Ford Motor after graduating from Purdue University in 1987, then departed in frustration with the automaker’s culture. He’d been assigned to study competing Lexus and BMW cars and in doing so realized it would be a long time before Ford could compete. He’d gone on to Segway, where he oversaw an electric scooter that was before its time, before he was recruited to Steve Jobs’s Apple. As Straubel watched Musk courting Field, he knew Field would be brought in with the promise that he could oversee Model 3 development. Straubel would need something new. The Gigafactory, then, would allow him to build his own empire. Just as he had solved the critical problem that made a lithium-ion-powered electric car work, he would tackle the biggest issue keeping electric cars from going mainstream: cost

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith. His plucky company would fight the tyranny of Big Brother. As Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, the Apple founder was a child of the counterculture. He practised Zen Buddhism, smoked pot, walked around barefoot and pursued faddish vegetarian diets. He embodied the ‘fusion of flower power and processor power’. Even as Apple grew into a multi-billion dollar corporation, Jobs continued to identify with computing’s early subversives and long-haired pioneers – the hackers, pirates, geeks and freaks that made the future possible.

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Together with GCHQ, the NSA had secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world. This allowed the US and UK to read much of the globe’s communications. Secret courts were compelling telecoms providers to hand over data. What’s more, pretty much all of Silicon Valley was involved with the NSA, Snowden said – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, even Steve Jobs’s Apple. The NSA claimed it had ‘direct access’ to the tech giants’ servers. While giving themselves unprecedented surveillance powers, the US intelligence community was concealing the truth about its activities, Snowden said. If James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had deliberately lied to Congress about the NSA’s programs, he had committed a felony.

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The zombies were the public, unaware that the iPhone offered the spy agency new snooping capabilities beyond the imagination of the original Big Brother. The ‘paying customers’ had become Orwell’s mindless drones. For anyone who thought the digital age was about creative expression and flower power, the presentation was a shocker, and an insult to Steve Jobs’s vision. It threw dirt on the hippy kaftan and trampled on the tambourine. The identity of the NSA’s analyst is unknown. But the view appeared to reflect the thinking of an agency that in the aftermath of 9/11 grew arrogant and unaccountable. Snowden called the NSA ‘self-certifying’. In the debate over who ruled the internet, the NSA provided a dismaying answer: ‘We do.’

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
by Reid Hoffman , Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh
Published 15 Jan 2014

Establishing a corporate alumni network, which requires relatively little investment, is the next logical step in maintaining a relationship of mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit in an era where lifetime employment is no longer the norm. Both companies and employees benefit from continuing the alliance. When a company is thriving, its alumni look good. For example, when Apple was struggling, no one wanted Apple alumni. Today, Apple alumni are sought after, even those who, like Reid, worked at Apple before Steve Jobs’s triumphant return in 1997. Meanwhile, when a company’s alumni are thriving professionally, that network becomes a valuable asset that helps the company. For example, much of McKinsey’s luster and business comes from its powerful alumni network, which provides network intelligence, candidate referrals, and even sales.

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The rationale for his dismissal: he was too distracted with his crazy ideas. Like many with the founder mind-set, Lasseter refused to give up on his dream. He joined George Lucas’s Lucasfilm, where he pursued computer animation as a member of Ed Catmull’s computer division. A few years later, Lucas sold the then-unprofitable division to Steve Jobs, who named the resulting company Pixar. And in 1995, Pixar partnered with Disney to release the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. In 2006, eleven years after Toy Story was released and twenty-three years after Lasseter was fired, Disney realized it had made a mistake by rejecting computer animation and ended up bringing Lasseter back.

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We want to help people develop different skill sets that can help them and us.” Here in Silicon Valley, Cisco’s Talent Connection program, which helps current employees find new opportunities within Cisco, increased employees’ satisfaction with career development by almost 20 percent.3 Foundational Jony Ive at Apple. Fred Smith at FedEx. Ginni Rometty at IBM. These are people whose lives are fundamentally intertwined with their companies. These are people on a Foundational tour of duty. Exceptional alignment of employer and employee is the hallmark of a Foundational tour. (We’ll discuss the concept of alignment in more detail in chapter 3.)

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations
by Nancy Duarte
Published 15 Nov 2008

Slides are thus stranded in a no man’s land where the general population doesn’t know how to effectively produce or deliver them. Yet when a presentation is developed and delivered well, it is one of our most powerful communication tools in the world. Just look at the tipping point Al Gore created for climate change because of his slide show, or the frenzied anticipation when Steve Jobs unveils new products. We can keep blaming the software for the putrid output, but in reality we need to take responsibility. As communicators, learning to create visual stories that connect with our audience is becoming imperative—especially in light of global competitive pressure. This book covers how to create ideas, translate them into pictures, display them well, and then deliver them in your own natural way.

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Using Visual Elements: Background, Color, and Text 145 Typesetting If you plan to use large words by themselves or combine them with an image, take the time to typeset the text. In the same way that grammar and punctuation errors can distract some of your audience, typographic laziness can irk those with right-brain tendencies. Case in point: Steve Jobs built typesetting features into the very first Mac because he considered his users and had the foresight to see the importance of typesetting. Smart and innovative people do their homework. And these are the people you want as clients. So spend a few moments typesetting. You never know who’s in the audience.

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Steve Weiss Sara Peyton Dennis Fitzgerald Suzanne Caballero O’REILLY Dan Brodnitz Judy Walthers von Alten Bert Decker Bob Horne Catherine Nunes Cliff Atkinson Jennifer Van Sijll Jerry Weissman Jim Endicott Ron Ricci Stephen Few Judy Hansen Andrey Webb Paula Breen Elaine Cummings Mark Sarpa Print HQ VISTAGE 3194 Barbara Bates Eastwick Ashley Wilkinson INFLUENCED THE BOOK Garr Raynolds WE ♥ OUR CLIENTS Sheri Benjamin Cathy Deb Donna John Marco Matt Ron Sandy FRIENDS They say that if you have just five deep friendships in life you’re a rich person. Well then, I’m filthy rich. Adobe Al Gore Apple Chick-Fil-A Cisco Citrix Department of Energy Electronic Arts Food Network Google Hewlett Packard HGTV Intel Intuit Logitech Kleiner Perkins Medtronic Microsoft Mozilla NetIQ NOAA Nortel Patagonia Pfizer SAP SunPower Symantec TiVo Vantage Point WebEx Wells Fargo William McDonough Nancy Duarte Principal/ CEO Duarte Mark Duarte CFO, Duarte You’ve been a beloved friend who loves me consistently no matter what.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

In the meantime, the creation of Loki bore fruit during an early-2007 meeting between Mike Shean and Bob Borchers, a Stanford-trained engineer and an executive at Apple. Nothing seemed to come of the meeting, but six months later Morgan got a call from Borchers. Borchers asked if it would be possible to run Loki on a MacBook for a demo. He did not elaborate, but Morgan knew that Apple would soon have one of its regular meetings in which senior executives would pitch new product ideas to Steve Jobs. Skyhook had created a version of Loki for Apple’s Mac computers a few months earlier, but it was not good enough for Borchers. He had seen Loki run as an add-on program for the Firefox Internet browser, but worried that Jobs might reject a browser-based program not running on Apple’s own browser, Safari.

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It was a good first step, but the new technology also needed a champion, a company that would back wireless networking with capital and prestige. It is not stretching the facts too far to say that the wireless Internet was born on a stage in New York City on July 21, 1999. Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, passed his company’s newest laptop computer through a hula hoop while it downloaded Web pages live from the Internet. The thousands of guests at the Macworld trade show responded with roars of rapturous laughter. Message received: Look, Ma—no cables. Apple’s new laptop computer would feature built-in Wi-Fi. In Austin, Texas, Michael Dell was unhappy. The founder of Dell Computer, at the time the world’s leading maker of personal computers, was well aware of the possibilities of wireless networking.

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He flew to the location with a Skyhook wardriving kit, rented a car, and drove throughout the area to make sure it was thoroughly mapped. The demo was a huge success. A few days later, Morgan checked the voice mail on his cell phone, listened for a few seconds, and hit the delete button. Obviously, it was a prank call. He knew one of Mike’s friends was a commercial voice-over artist and surely able to imitate Steve Jobs’s voice. Luckily, he had second thoughts and quickly undeleted the message. In fact, Jobs himself had phoned Morgan because he believed Skyhook could solve a nagging problem with its newest product, the iPhone. Given the remarkable capabilities of today’s iPhones, it is easy to forget that the original version, which went on sale in June 2007, suffered from some surprising limitations.

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
by Michael Sayman
Published 20 Sep 2021

I gravitated toward technology—a stereotypically male pursuit—and my sister took little interest in it. She definitely didn’t share my passion for anything and everything Apple. * * * — My lust for the Apple brand hit its apex when I was ten years old, on January 9, 2007, the day Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone. “Look! It’s happening!” I pulled my mom by the hand from the couch to the old Dell to watch the momentous event on YouTube. “The iPhone is launching!” My mom snickered and shook her head. My dad jumped in: “Apple products are so impractical—incompatible with everything! You really want that?” I nodded my head vigorously.

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Nor were the YouTube commercials I created, “commercials” for my website to YouTube and linked back to my Club Penguin blog. It still wasn’t working, so I knew I needed to come up with another way to make my Club Penguin blog a success. A year earlier, Apple had announced something new for the iPhone—the App Store. Now people could build apps on their iPhones and distribute them through the store. In launching the App Store, Steve Jobs had said anyone could make an app and sell it. I hadn’t given much thought to the announcement. But now, lying around my uncle’s house with plenty of time to think, I realized that I could make a mobile app to promote my Club Penguin blog!

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The game itself was still not available on mobile, so I figured this was my opportunity to grab all the Club Penguin searches at the App Store. It would be a way for me to make my mark on the Club Penguin world, sharing the kinds of tips that were popular on Club Penguin fan sites, including the one I’d launched myself. I had no idea how to go about making an app, but if Steve Jobs said it was easy, then I was going to figure out how to do it. I started Googling. By the end of January, I had a working app, and it felt valuable. Before I could submit it to the App Store, I had to purchase a developer license, which cost $100. So, I approached my parents, even though by that point things had gotten so bad they were in no position to help me.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

Kevin Roose, “Even More Sony Pictures Data Is Leaked: Scripts, Box Office Projections, and Brad Pitt’s Phone Number,” Splinter News, December 8, 2014. 41. Sam Biddle, “Leaked: The Nightmare Email Drama behind Sony’s Steve Jobs Disaster,” Gawker, December 9, 2014. 42. Seal, “An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga.” 43. Matthew Zeitlin, “Leaked Emails Suggest Maureen Dowd Promised to Show Sony Exec’s Husband Column before Publication,” Buzzfeed, December 12, 2014. 44. Margaret Sullivan, “Hacked Emails, ‘Air-Kissing’—and Two Firm Denials,” New York Times, December 12, 2014. 45. For two examples, see Biddle, “Leaked: The Nightmare Email Drama behind Sony’s Steve Jobs Disaster”; Zeitlin, “Leaked Emails Suggest Maureen Dowd Promised to Show Sony Exec’s Husband Column before Publication.” 46.

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The opinions of Pascal and some of her colleagues—often expressed in blunt, irreverent, or rushed ways, with the expectation that messages would be received in confidence—were exposed for all to see. For all those who wondered what happened behind the closed doors of a Hollywood movie studio, the airing of Pascal’s messages was a salacious gift. The unvarnished emails were revealing and often unkind. In the midst of heated negotiations over a Steve Jobs biopic with a screenplay by famed writer Aaron Sorkin, producer Scott Rudin called movie star Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat” with a “rampaging spoiled ego.” Pascal labeled Leonardo DiCaprio’s behavior “despicable.” Other Hollywood machinations leaked out into view, including Pascal’s attempts to get the fierce and often profane Rudin to help fend off a fight over acclaimed director David Fincher.41 Another email exchange between the two featured racially charged comments, as they joked that Pascal might ask President Barack Obama, whom she was about to see at a fundraiser, if he liked Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, or The Butler—all films with African-American stars.42 Other leaked emails included messages between Pascal and her husband, Bernard Weinraub, formerly a New York Times journalist.

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For two examples, see Biddle, “Leaked: The Nightmare Email Drama behind Sony’s Steve Jobs Disaster”; Zeitlin, “Leaked Emails Suggest Maureen Dowd Promised to Show Sony Exec’s Husband Column before Publication.” 46. Pascal’s dismissal was likely for reasons beyond just the email leaks. For examples of the news coverage, see Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, “Sony Hack Reveals Email Crossfire over Angelina Jolie and Steve Jobs Movie,” New York Times, December 10, 2014; Ben Fritz, “Hack of Amy Pascal Emails at Sony Pictures Stuns Industry,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2014; Amy Kaufman, “The Embarrassing Emails That Preceded Amy Pascal’s Resignation,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2015. 47. Aaron Sorkin, “The Sony Hack and the Yellow Press,” New York Times, December 14, 2014. 48.

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

CHAPTER 16.0 Fulfilling the Mission, One Customer at a Time Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a purpose. HELEN KELLER Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously asked the then-Pepsi executive John Sculley in the mid-eighties, “Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change the world?” Apple Computer is undoubtedly changing the world, but Comcate? The journey toward changing the world starts with a single person. . . . >> In late 2005 I received a phone call from Jack in Burgon Hills. If you recall, Jack was the resistant employee who didn’t want to change his ways while I oversaw one of the first eFeedbackManager implementations.

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For example, when I want to communicate the idea of “low-risk” I include a picture of a girl jumping into a pool where her mother will catch her. For “ease of use” I use an image of the Google homepage. Keep in mind that the presenters who come across as the most natural and relaxed are the ones who put in the most energy beforehand. Steve Jobs looks totally at ease on stage at the Macworld conferences, but according to many Apple insiders, he obsesses about it for weeks in advance. Never let yourself (or the audience) down. Take presentations seriously. meeting and find out who would be coming. In a perfect world, the first meeting would be the “c-level executive” (city manager), his or her assistant, and the IT director.

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The friends and family investment pool allowed us to recruit a person who would be willing to start at a base salary of $90K plus stock options, bonuses, and commissions. While this kind of salary package would put its recipient far above most American wage earners, it is actually pretty darn low when you’re talking about Alist CEOs. So we knew that we weren’t going to get the next Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, or Meg Whitman. Next, we had to spread the word as far and wide as possible. We posted the job opportunity on HotJobs.com and on the local universities’ alumni job boards. I received more than two hundred emails from serious people who fired in their resumes and cover letters. Most candidates didn’t seem to know my age.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

He quickly pulled up his sleeve and pointed to a Microma watch on his wrist and told me he wore it often to remind himself to never be that stupid again. Intel’s lesson: make the intellectual property, not the end product. The cool thing about a computer on a chip is you can start a computer company without knowing much about computers. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer without knowing that much. Wozniak had to write some software to get data on and off a floppy disk drive, which no one else had, and their Apple I became a hit. IBM knew lots about how to milk big bucks out of big computers, but nothing about microprocessors. So a stealth group in Florida contracted out the work, creating a Frankensteinlike IBM PC in 1981, using an Intel microprocessor, Microsoft software and a Western Digital disk controller.

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“Well, that VA hospital half a mile from here, at Willow and 101, is where Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Something may have spilled in the water.” “Not funny. Especially from you, Mr. Tech Investor.” “What do you mean?” “Everything you use today on your PC, Doug Engelbart demo’ed 30 years ago.” “Like what?” “Like the mouse.” “I thought that was Steve Jobs.” “Nope.” “OK, I was just kidding. Jobs stole it from Xerox PARC.” “Wrong again. It was Doug’s.” “What else?” “Hypertext.” “I thought that was that whacky Xanadu guy, Nelson something or other.” “Wrong again, sport Doug. Oh my god, here he comes!” Sharon exclaimed. “I just wanted to thank you for inviting me.

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A quick Web search the next day for Doug Engelbart pulled up a bunch of news stories. There was a picture of him getting some sort of medal from Bill Clinton. Hey, that’s pretty cool. It was for scientific achievement or some such thing. I scanned the article, and it wasn’t until the last paragraph that I read that Doug Engelbart invented the mouse. So, it really wasn’t Steve Jobs. Almost every other article described a meeting of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies’ Fall Joint Computer Conference held in San Francisco. Sounded like a real riproaring conference. I’m sorry I missed it. Except it was held on December 5, 1968. 120 Running Money At the time, Frisco was tripping at Haight and Ashbury, free love, cheap dope, flower children, hippies, war protesters, Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014