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Steve Jobs Quotes: As the sad news of the death of Apple Inc. /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -0.23% co-founder struck Silicon Valley and the global business world like a lightning bolt, many were remembering encounters with the man who has been described variously as the Thomas Edison of his generation, suffering no fools as he revolutionized three industries. See news of the death of Steve Jobs here.
Jobs was famous for his ability to convey enthusiasm for Apple products, both on stage and in interviews with the press, in an easy-to-understand manner, with simple terms and catch phrases like “awesome,” “insanely great” and “magical.” One sometimes emerged from his keynotes at Macworld still under the influence of his so-called reality-distortion field. I remember buying the original iPod nano after its launch, likely in that state.
Two events that I covered come to mind when thinking about the legacy of Jobs.
One was in New York, when I was a reporter for Reuters. It was in the early 1990s. Jobs had been ousted in 1985 in a coup d’etat led by then-CEO John Sculley. Jobs went on to found his next venture, aptly named Next Computer. He had gone to Wall Street to tout his company, possibly looking for bankers, funding and customers.
The Next computers were famously sleek, expensive black boxes, and were popular with the math geeks on Wall Street, with their starting price of around $7,000. Indeed, the core of the Next operating system, based on UNIX, is now part of the Macintosh operating system.
I don’t remember too many reporters at the event, but I remember talking to him briefly after he spoke at a trade show. This was long before the era in which he would be quickly ushered off stage by handlers. Back then, reporters could get near him after a speech and ask him questions. He was optimistic about Next and told the few of us who came to hear him that Next would go public in the next 18 months.
Even though the press at the time had been hard on Next and had started to question its viability amid tough competition, he stopped to briefly to talk to us and share his enthusiasm about his then-3-year-old company. He was polite and happy that we had shown up, taking the time to explain the positive trends he was seeing at Next.
We all gladly appreciated his sudden willingness to chat and dutifully ran off to call in our stories — this was the early 1990s — on his IPO plans.
The second notable event was when he came back to Apple, through the company’s acquisition of Next, and made his first appearance at Macworld in Boston in 1997. The crowd was overjoyed to see him in person, but the euphoria was somewhat tempered by the news that he had done a deal with the devil, in the view of the Apple faithful, signing a pact with Microsoft Corp. /quotes/zigman/20493/quotes/nls/msft MSFT -0.34% . Jobs also announced a shakeup of Apple’s board, and the addition of some key members, including Larry Ellison, Jerry York and himself.
Boos resounded in the audience as Bill Gates appeared via satellite, after he had agreed to invest $150 million in Apple and to develop applications for the Mac. The crowd also booed the addition of Oracle Corp. /quotes/zigman/76584/quotes/nls/orcl ORCL -0.23% CEO Ellison to the board.
Jobs chided the audience. Like a parent addressing children, he told them to be respectful. “If we screw up and don’t do a good job, it’s not someone else’s fault, it’s our fault,” he said, in a real tough-love speech. “If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.”
Sometimes taciturn, charming when he wanted to be, and always the company’s best evangelist in control of the message, Jobs was unique in his ability to make you want what he was selling. He made computers seem fun, easy to use, and showed us how they change lives. He then did the same thing with digital music, mobile phones and tablets.
He wanted to lead a revolution, and he did, in more industries than one. It was an insanely great career.
Jobs was famous for his ability to convey enthusiasm for Apple products, both on stage and in interviews with the press, in an easy-to-understand manner, with simple terms and catch phrases like “awesome,” “insanely great” and “magical.” One sometimes emerged from his keynotes at Macworld still under the influence of his so-called reality-distortion field. I remember buying the original iPod nano after its launch, likely in that state.
Two events that I covered come to mind when thinking about the legacy of Jobs.
One was in New York, when I was a reporter for Reuters. It was in the early 1990s. Jobs had been ousted in 1985 in a coup d’etat led by then-CEO John Sculley. Jobs went on to found his next venture, aptly named Next Computer. He had gone to Wall Street to tout his company, possibly looking for bankers, funding and customers.
The Next computers were famously sleek, expensive black boxes, and were popular with the math geeks on Wall Street, with their starting price of around $7,000. Indeed, the core of the Next operating system, based on UNIX, is now part of the Macintosh operating system.
I don’t remember too many reporters at the event, but I remember talking to him briefly after he spoke at a trade show. This was long before the era in which he would be quickly ushered off stage by handlers. Back then, reporters could get near him after a speech and ask him questions. He was optimistic about Next and told the few of us who came to hear him that Next would go public in the next 18 months.
Even though the press at the time had been hard on Next and had started to question its viability amid tough competition, he stopped to briefly to talk to us and share his enthusiasm about his then-3-year-old company. He was polite and happy that we had shown up, taking the time to explain the positive trends he was seeing at Next.
We all gladly appreciated his sudden willingness to chat and dutifully ran off to call in our stories — this was the early 1990s — on his IPO plans.
The second notable event was when he came back to Apple, through the company’s acquisition of Next, and made his first appearance at Macworld in Boston in 1997. The crowd was overjoyed to see him in person, but the euphoria was somewhat tempered by the news that he had done a deal with the devil, in the view of the Apple faithful, signing a pact with Microsoft Corp. /quotes/zigman/20493/quotes/nls/msft MSFT -0.34% . Jobs also announced a shakeup of Apple’s board, and the addition of some key members, including Larry Ellison, Jerry York and himself.
Boos resounded in the audience as Bill Gates appeared via satellite, after he had agreed to invest $150 million in Apple and to develop applications for the Mac. The crowd also booed the addition of Oracle Corp. /quotes/zigman/76584/quotes/nls/orcl ORCL -0.23% CEO Ellison to the board.
Jobs chided the audience. Like a parent addressing children, he told them to be respectful. “If we screw up and don’t do a good job, it’s not someone else’s fault, it’s our fault,” he said, in a real tough-love speech. “If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude.”
Sometimes taciturn, charming when he wanted to be, and always the company’s best evangelist in control of the message, Jobs was unique in his ability to make you want what he was selling. He made computers seem fun, easy to use, and showed us how they change lives. He then did the same thing with digital music, mobile phones and tablets.
He wanted to lead a revolution, and he did, in more industries than one. It was an insanely great career.
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