• It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden.
• idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of
• with a sweet flower-child demeanor made even mellower by his interest in Buddhism. That spiritual quest
• ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He
• It would make his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost. Intel’s chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers were incompatible with it.
• NOTE: Short term savings might induce unforseen long terms costs
• “Even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company,” said Jobs as they were driving in his Volkswagen bus. “For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.” This was enticing to Wozniak, even more than any prospect of getting rich. He recalled, “I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?”
• “If you want me to finance you,” Valentine told him, “you need to have one person as a partner who understands marketing and distribution and can write a business plan.”
• for the top marketing job at Intel, which
• over for the top marketing job at Intel, which
• He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
• The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute.
• The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
• “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
• So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.
• There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
• It’s not as if Xerox executives ignored what their scientists had created at PARC. In fact they did try to capitalize on it, and in the process they showed why good execution is as important as good ideas.
• “Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at assessing people’s answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or unsure of themselves.”
• felt I wasn’t up to running the Lisa division. I brooded
• “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”