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The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story's opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off, big-time. As with the Apple IPO, a celebration was planned at the San Francisco office of the lead underwriter at 7 a.m., when the shares were to go on sale. The plan had originally been for the first shares to be offered at about $14, to be sure they would sell. Jobs insisted on pricing t..
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Walter Isaacson |
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late 1986, Jobs flew to New York to accompany Mona to it. They grew increasingly close, though their friendship had the complexities that might be expected, considering who they were and how they had come together. "Mona was not completely thrilled at first to have me in her life and have her mother so emotionally affectionate toward me," he later said. "As we got to know each other, we became really good friends, and she is my family. I do..
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Walter Isaacson |
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There never was a good war or a bad peace."4"
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Walter Isaacson |
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The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. "This is the most important moment in my entire life," he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to begin. "I'm really nervous. You're probably the only person who knows how I feel about this." Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered "Good luck."
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Walter Isaacson |
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Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-admiring wife of France's socialist president Francois Mitterrand asked a lot of questions, through her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and technology. After Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about ov..
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Walter Isaacson |
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The good men may do separately," he wrote, "is small compared with what they may do collectively."
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Walter Isaacson |
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Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a simple partnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a "statement of withdrawal..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. "I make 50 cents for showing up," he liked to joke, "and the other 50 cents is based on performance." Since his return in July 1997, Apple stock had gone from just under $14 to just over $..
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Walter Isaacson |
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So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi- Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge c..
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Walter Isaacson |
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In 1482, the year he turned thirty, Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan, where he would end up spending the next seventeen years.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.
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Walter Isaacson |
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I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
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Walter Isaacson |
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It's easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They've clearly fallen from their dominance. They've become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he's really not. He's a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making gr..
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Walter Isaacson |
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To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born--on February 24, 1955--the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeep..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Apple's stock went up a full point, or almost 7%, when Jobs's resignation was announced. "East Coast stockholders always worried about California flakes running the company," explained the editor of a tech stock newsletter. "Now with both Wozniak and Jobs out, those shareholders are relieved."
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Walter Isaacson |
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With Reed in Kenya, 2007: "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my"
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Walter Isaacson |
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special trip to Japan with
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Walter Isaacson |
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Laurene, Eve, Erin, and Lisa at the Corinth Canal in Greece, 2006: "For young"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Eve in Foothills Park, Palo Alto: "She's a pistol and has the strongest"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.
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Walter Isaacson |
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In the meantime, he rejected a friend's offer to help him get a job at an insurance company, dismissing it as "an eight hour day of mindless drudgery." As he told Maric, "One must avoid stultifying affairs."8"
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Walter Isaacson |
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I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth--rocks."20"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Jobs's engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. "Steve is very much Zen," said Kottke. "It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus." Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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We should not make the mistake of blaming capitalism for all existing social and political evils, nor of assuming that the very establishment of socialism would be sufficient to cure the social and political ills of humanity,
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Walter Isaacson |
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Baby You're a Rich Man Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs's attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them
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Walter Isaacson |
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I'm deeply grateful to John and Ann Doerr, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Leon Wieseltier, and Ken Auletta, all of whom provided invaluable support along the way. Alice Mayhew, who has been my editor at Simon & Schuster for thirty years, and Jonathan Karp, the publisher, both were extraordinarily diligent and attentive in shepherding this book, as was
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Walter Isaacson |
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In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will,"he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sal..
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Walter Isaacson |
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people should consider themselves citizens of the world.
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Walter Isaacson |
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At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. "No," he replied, "because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. "Do you want to see something neat?" When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and scr..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks
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Walter Isaacson |
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Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things--that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the pre..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn't know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it
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Walter Isaacson |
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Simon & Schuster for thirty years, and Jonathan Karp, the publisher, both were extraordinarily diligent and attentive in shepherding this book, as was Amanda Urban, my agent. Crary Pullen was dogged in tracking down photos, and my assistant, Pat Zindulka, calmly facilitated things. I also want to thank my father, Irwin, and my daughter, Betsy, for reading the book and offering advice. When the original version of this book came out, it caus..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Ada byla tworca konceptualizacji komputera (...), maszyny, ktora by przechowywala, manipulowala, przetwarzala, modyfikowala wszystko, co da sie wyrazic symbolicznie
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Walter Isaacson |
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ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with
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Walter Isaacson |
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It reinforced my sense of what was important--creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.
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Walter Isaacson |
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had been his most productive in terms of creating new products. But his
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Walter Isaacson |
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We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that's not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on th..
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Walter Isaacson |
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There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. "Steve, this is your workbench now," he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage."
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Walter Isaacson |
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If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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He was particularly good at apprehending movement, from the motions of a flapping wing to the emotions flickering across a face.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year's Eve 2009. He was at home in Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson. His wife and their three children had taken a quick trip to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join them. He was in a reflective mood, and we talked for more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to ..
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Walter Isaacson |