Steve Jobs, in his own words

Gizmodo

NEW YORK, Oct 6: Apple co-founder and innovator Steve Jobs died after a battle with cancer. Here are some of his most memorable quotes on work and life. On Apple: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." —PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996 "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." —BusinessWeek, 1998 "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago." —Fortune, 1996 "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!" —BusinessWeek, 1997 "Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste." —Shareholder meeting, 1998 "Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation." Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes? —Macworld, 2004 "And boy, have we patented it!" —Macworld, 2007 (iPhone introduction) On Bill Gates: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." —The New York Times, 1997 On PCs: Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made PC don't have that kind of pride in the product? "If they did, they wouldn't have made the PC —Playboy, 1987 On Life: "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates." —Newsweek, 2001 "My sex life is pretty good these days, Walt. How's yours? -AllThingsD D8, 2010 "That's the kind of Porsche that dentists drive" —As said to Kati Hafner of BusinessWeek when they walked through the Next parking lot, 'The Second Coming of Steve Jobs' On design: "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." —PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996 "In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. —Playboy, 1987 Advice: "You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff." to Nike —As said to Mark Parker, 'The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs' "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" —As said to John Sculley, 'Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple' Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. —Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005 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. —The Wall Street Journal, 1993 "I want to put a ding in the universe."