Betabeat just received a marvelous little press release from Agate publishing on their new book, I, STEVE: STEVE JOBS IN HIS OWN WORDS, a 160 page collection of quotes from the most iconic product pitchman since P. T. Barnum.
The book, says Agate, is a natural companion to the long awaited biography of Mr. Jobs, coming soon from Walter Isaacson. Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky just announced a few weeks back that he’ll be releasing a book on Steve Jobs in January. The macabre scrabble to be a part of Steve Jobs final years is in full swing.
Betabeat hasn’t had time to read the entire book yet, but we picked out few of our favorite quotes for you to savor on the subway ride home. The full book comes out in late October.
After Apple management complained about the six Apple employees Mr. Jobs was taking with him to start NeXT: “I wasn’t aware that Apple owned me, you know. I don’t think they do. I think that I own me. And for me not to be able to practice my craft ever again in my life seems odd. We’re not going to take any technology, any proprietary ideas out of Apple. We’re willing to put that in writing. It’s the law, anyway. There is nothing, by the way, that says Apple can’t compete with us if they think what we’re doing is such a great idea. It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300+people couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.”—Newsweek, September 30, 1985
Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: “We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design;and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product. We’re the only people left in the computer industry that do that.”—Steve Jobs, interviewed by Jeff Goodell, “Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview,”Rolling Stone #684, June 16, 1994
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”—Wired, February 1996
“What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t get published next week. Some 70% of the newspapers in the U.S. wouldn’t publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth saving here. See?”—Time, August 18, 1997
“I’m always keeping my eyes open for the next big opportunity, but the way the world is now, it will take enormous resources, both in money and in engineering talent, to make it happen. I don’t know what that next big thing might be, but I have a few ideas.”—Steve Jobs on the “next big thing”, CNNMoney, January 24, 2000
“We don’t stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with RAMs and with charts and comparisons. The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.”—The Apple Way, 2006
“We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we’re living in, these tools surprise you.… That’s why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we’re constantly surprised with what people do with them.”—D5 Conference: All Things Digital, 2007
“One of the things I learned at Pixar is the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other. In Silicon Valley and at most technology companies, I swear that most people think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting on a couch, drinking beer and thinking of jokes. No, they really do.That’s how television is made, they think; that’s how movies are made. People in Hollywood and in the content industries, they think technology is something you just write a check for and buy.They don’t understand the creativity element of technology. These are like ships passing in the night.”—CNN Tech, June 10, 2011
