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Apple's "Think Different" commercial, 1997"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Although he was neither fully original nor correct in his description of a senso comune, he was right in his general view that the human brain receives visual and other stimuli, processes them into perceptions, then transmits reactions through the nervous system to the muscles. More important, his fascination with the connection between the mind and the body became a key component of his artistic genius: showing how inner emotions are manif..
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Walter Isaacson |
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The Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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In the middle of Lisa's eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were serious problems, and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother's house. So Jobs went on a walk with Lisa, asked about the situation, and offered to let her move in with him. She was a mature girl, just turning fourteen, and she thought about it for two days. Then she said yes. She already knew which room she wanted: the one right next to her father..
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Walter Isaacson |
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On Thanksgiving weekend of his senior year, Wozniak visited the University of Colorado.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse pa..
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Walter Isaacson |
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For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Einstein was filled with good humor and sagacity, both qualities lacking in Godel, whose intense logic sometimes overwhelmed common sense. This was on glorious display when Godel decided to become a U.S. citizen in 1947. He took his preparation for the exam very seriously, studied the Constitution carefully, and (as might be expected by the formulator of the incompleteness theory) found what he believed was a logical flaw. There was an inte..
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Walter Isaacson |
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to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company"
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Walter Isaacson |
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with a different confusing number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. "I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?" When he couldn't get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Picasso tenia un dicho: "Los artistas buenos copian y los artistas geniales roban","
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Walter Isaacson |
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Woz's father taught him something else that became ingrained in his childlike, socially awkward personality: Never lie. "My dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. That's the biggest thing he taught me. I never lie, even to this day." (The only partial exception was in the service of a good practical joke.)"
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Walter Isaacson |
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frogs have the ability to metamorphose, but as a salute to its roots in the (f)ederal (r)epublic (o)f (g)ermany. He said that "the"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983--a full year before the Mac was ready--and Jobs paid his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York to do publicity for it in his role as Apple's chairman and poster boy.
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Walter Isaacson |
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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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189be4d
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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 |