Bicicleta Apple, Steve Jobs, nu mai e!

Steve Jobs a murit! Ca orice mare om al istoriei, fostul conducător al companiei Apple, s-a remarcat printr-o o serie de expresii, unele pline de bun simț, iar altele pline de un fin sarcasm.
Iată câteva citate celebre ale creatorului Macintosh, iPod, iPad, iPhone...

"... the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

• Moartea este probabil cea mai tare invenție a vieții
• Nu contează să fiu cel mai bogat din cimitir.
• Vreau să plec spunându-mi că am facut ceva minunat. Asta contează pentru mine.
• Am fost lipsiți de rușine atunci când a venit vorba de furat idei geniale.
• Nu avem șansa să facem multe lucruri, dar fiecare trebuie făcut excelent. Pentru că asta este viața noastră.
• Aș da la schimb toată tehnologia mea pentru o întâlnire cu Socrate.
• În mintea începătorului sunt întotdeauna multe posibilități, dar în mintea expertului sunt puține.
• Valoram 1.000.000 de dolari la 23 de ani, peste 10.000.000 de dolari la 24 de ani și peste 100.000.000 de dolari la 25 de ani, dar nu e deloc important, pentru că niciodată nu am facut-o pentru bani.
• Munca mea nu este să le fie mai ușor oamenilor. Treaba mea este să le fie mai bine.
• Designul nu înseamnă doar cum arată sau cum se simte un produs, înseamnă cum funcționează.
• Inovația face diferența între un lider și un discipol.
• Noi știm ce vrem: să facem produse foarte bune.
• Când îmi vine o idee bună, treaba mea este sa o răspândesc pentru a vedea cum gândesc oamenii, să îi fac să discute despre ea, să se contrazică, să răspândească ideea mai departe, la 100 de persoane, să aduc oameni diferiți la un loc pentru a explora... pur și simplu să explorez lucruri.
• De cele mai multe ori, oamenii nu știu ce vor până nu le arăți.
• Singura problemă a Microsoft este ca angajații nu au gust. Nu au gust deloc. Ma refer la faptul că nu se gândesc la idei originale și că nu pun cultura deloc în produsele lor.
• (Despre Bill Gates) Îi doresc tot binele din lume. Cred că el și Microsoft sunt închiși la minte. Ar fi fost un om mai deschis daca ar fi încercat să se drogheze când era mai tânăr.

Cuvintele sale

• Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [...] The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." Wired, Feb. 1996
• When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through." MSNBC and Newsweek, Oct. 2006
• "[Y]ou 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." Stanford Commencement Address, June 2005
• "I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. Interview for the documentary "Memory and Imagination," 1990
• "My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people." Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003
• "We try to pick things that are in their spring. So we have a history of doing that, we went from the 5-inch floppy disk to the 3.5 inch with the Mac and sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac, people call us crazy. But sometimes you have to pick the things that look like the right horses to ride going forward." D8 Conference, June 2010

Cuvintele altora

• Josh Bernoff, AdAge Digital "By my count, Steve Jobs changed the world five times. Five. [...] Nobody else comes close."
• Andrew McAfee, AndrewMcAfee.org: "Jobs and Apple have done the best job of answering with their products the question posed by wiki inventory Ward Cunningham What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work? As I’ve stressed before, most technologists / nerds / geeks don’t think this way - they think that success comes from cramming in features and functions, bells and whistles."
• Umair Haque, HBR Blogs: "Steve's goal in paying obsessive attention to all things Apple wasn't merely to "listen" but to discern people's wildest expectations, and then firmly take a quantum leap past them, instead of merely discovering the lowest-common-denominator of what people wanted most today, and then pandering to it. Leapfrogging your customers means creating new markets, not just new products. And Apple's created (or rejuvenated) market after market by applying the logic above"
• OmMalik, GigaOm: "While I wish for him to have more time with his family, I am also being very selfish. I will miss the thespian who made inanimate objects like a computer become a thing to behold. A few years ago, I compared Steve to Howard Hughes using the line, “Some men dream the future. He built it.”
• John Gapper, Financial Times: "Mr Jobs, at the age of only 56, stands as one of the great business leaders – arguably the greatest – of the postwar era. For the past 30 years, he has not only led the wave of technological change emanating from Silicon Valley – the personal computer, the internet, the tablet – but stamped his aesthetic on the world. He has combined the iconoclasm and creativity of the rebel entrepreneur with the ability to assemble a world-beating manufacturing, design and marketing team around him. In the past few years, Apple has been not only unbeatable but hardly even matchable. Its competitors have fallen by the wayside in frustration."
• John Biggs, TechCrunch: "I wasn’t always a Mac lover. I thought they were over-priced and pretty. [...] But over the past decade I learned the satisfaction of a machine that just works. It’s a machine that [Jobs] put most of his life into, a machine that has the heart of a much older thing, a thing that lay blinking and frantic in a Stanford computer lab somewhere and then, over time, shrank down to something you and I can fit into our pockets. Many complained that the ecosystem that he created was a walled garden, but I’d equate it to a pasture. “The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance” wrote Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “But its background is always in perfect harmony” In the front, anything can happen. In the back, perfect calm and order."

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