Steve Jobs, the former Apple CEO has died. He was 56 years old. He was an American computer entrepreneur and inventor.
The company he co-founded, Apple Inc, was incorporated as Apple Computer Inc in 1976. The word “Computer” was removed in 2007 because the company had started venturing into the Consumer Electronics market (launching products like the iPod, iPad and iPhone).
Steve Jobs also previously served as the chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios and he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006 (after Pixar was acquired by them).
Steve Jobs’ aim to develop products that are both functional and elegant earned him a devoted following. Author and business consultant Jim Collins once called Jobs the “Beethoven of business.”
Steve Jobs was a figure who made Silicon Valley the capital of technological innovation and related venture capital fortunes. Jobs’ creation of iTunes as an online way to purchase music digitally helped to transform the music industry.
His work at Apple and other projects made him a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 2011 at $8.3 billion. He was 110th on the Forbes list of billionaires worldwide and 34th on the United States list (according the their March 2011 estimates).
Steve Jobs was married to Laurene Powell Jobs. He had 4 children, 3 with Powell Jobs and a fourth child, Lisa. He named an early Apple computer, a predecessor to the Macintosh, after her.
What set Steve Jobs most apart from his peers was an exquisite sense of product design and the ability to intuit what people would want, and use. Combined with his leadership (and salesmanship) skills, he was the most formidable CEO of recent times.
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. In the early hours of this morning Apple published a statement on their official website:
“We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.”
I’ve never been a huge fan of Apple, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have respect for them. Steve Jobs definitely had an impact on the Technology / IT industry and he will be missed. R.I.P. Steve Jobs
Here’s a collection of Steve Jobs Quotes
1. “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. ”
2. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
3. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. ”
4. “I want to put a ding in the universe.”
5. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
6. “It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.”
7. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
8. “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
9. “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
10. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
11. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
12. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
13. “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
14. “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. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”
15. “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life.”
16. “Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
17. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”
18. “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
19. “Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
20. “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.”
21. “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
22. “It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.”
There you have it, hope these Steve Jobs quotes are responsible for your inspirational fix for the day. Feel free to share this post with your friends. Sharing is caring after all.
Watch this space for regular updates in the Quotes category on Running Wolf’s Rant.
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