Mistakes

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This exchange from a Q&A session Steve Jobs held at WWDC 1997 is a classic. You’ve probably seen it before. But it’s one of those clips that never gets old, and is always worth revisiting. Jobs’s whole response is gold, and, in hindsight, he lays out that the sort of thinking that has guided Apple in the 18 years since. Consider this bit:

STEVE JOBS AT WWDC 1997

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“Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because at least some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes, we’ll fix them! I think what we need to do is support that team.”

…

The way to build a great anything — a product, a company, a book, a blog, an app, a service, a movie, anything — is not to obsess over not making mistakes. That leads to paralysis. Try to avoid mistakes, sure. But recognize that you’ll inevitably make some, and create a culture and work ethic where mistakes get identified and fixed.

I have interacted with people who do not know what intelligence "is", they associate mistakes with a supposed lack of intelligence,

crazy! isn't it?

- But the craziest thing is the length of shenanigans some people wilfully conjure just to hide the fact that they do make mistakes.
Crazy!

Apple’s Former Marketing Chief On Working With Steve Jobs, Seminal Product Launches

Allison Johnson: We Have Enough Companies Like Apple from 99U on Vimeo.

via theLoop

Computer History Museum: The Very First ‘Stevenote’

28-year-old Steve Jobs introduces the original Macintosh to the Boston Computer Society — so early in his career, he felt the need to introduce himself.

via DaringFireball

Mr Jobs

You cannot say he was not a thinker.


via LoopInsight

Bill Gates Talks About Steve Jobs

OK - 2 Letters from Steve • David Gelphman

David Gelphman:

During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs … I didn’t have any direct contact. Until…

In March 2010, just a couple of weeks before the iPad was due to be released publicly, I had a reason to contact Steve. A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible. She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.

There was no way I was going to take the iPad with me unless Steve personally approved it. …

via DF

Steve Jobs building NeXT

via TheLoop

Oh, Steve On Stickers & Stupid Journalists

iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn’t decline || Kontra

counternotionsDOTcom

Suppose you were the CEO of Apple in 2005 when a couple of intergalactic visitors with time-warping technology offered you this bet:

Design and manufacture a small mobile device that seamlessly combines the functionalities of a cellular phone, a web surfer, an audio/video player and a small PC, and your company will double its market cap and establish a third mass-market computing platform after Windows and Macintosh.

Would you take it?

Before you say, “Are you nuts, why wouldn’t I?” ponder just a few of the issues involved:


…

Often, the anything-but-Apple choir doesn’t quite appreciate the immensity of the risks Apple took with the iPhone.

So it’s 2005, will you still take the bet? Steve Jobs did

---- Go read.


via >>>> loopinsightDOTcom

Steve Jobs on the File System by Ole Begemann

Steve Jobs pretty much describing the basic idea for iOS in 2005.

… why is the file system the face of the OS? Wouldn’t it be better if there was a better way to find stuff? …

via >>> DF

Billion Dollar Hippy || BBC Documentary

Thoughts on Life

Steve Jobs Interview from 1995 || Computerworld

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

@NYTimes: A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

60 Minutes • Steve Jobs

CBS News • Steve Jobs • revelations from a tech giant

Stephen Fry on Steve Jobs:

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme — the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.

Thank you!

Remembering Steve Jobs @appleDOTcom

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Letter from Steve Jobs

Joe Nocera's What Makes Steve Jobs Great

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Most of the articles written in the past few days about Jobs’s resignation have tended to focus on the iPhone and the iPad. But if you take the long view, they’re just the icing on the cake.

Have we forgotten already that Jobs virtually invented the personal computer, with the introduction of the Apple II, when he was barely 21?
…


Adrian Slywotzky's Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth:

… so common in this week's media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and "going with your gut," the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple's success.

…

Creativity and innovation NOT market share.

Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 1996 Keynote Speaker: Steve Jobs

via -----> DF

The Creation Of The Computer Mouse

TNYorker:


As the creation story goes, Steve Jobs got the idea for the modern mouse after visiting Xerox PARC in 1979.


“I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off [Jobs], and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like,‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue,” Hovey told Gladwell.