I just finished the Walter Isaacson biography that I started 10 years ago, and it is fascinating to reflect on some of Steve Jobs’ pronouncements in his final year, 2011.
“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was my son’s age.” (539) [I would agree]
To Rupert Murdoch: “You’re blowing it with Fox News. The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you are not careful.” (508) [ouch!]
“For a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software has to be tightly linked.” (137)
Walter: “I asked him to name another company that made great products by insisting on end-to-end integration. He thought for a while, trying to come up with an example. “The car companies,” he finally said, but then he added, “Or at least they used to.” (556)
[This was the year before the Tesla Model S first shipped, reviving that model]
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD reinforced my sense of what was important — creating things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and human consciousness as I could.” (41)
[Jobs was an OG evangelist, before psychedelic medicine mainstreams it. Side note: the book index and a search for LSD in Google Books produces four results. He actually mentions it no less than 12 times in the book]
“We tried to help Intel, but they don’t listen much. We’ve been telling them for years that their graphics suck.” (493) [For the past 10 years, NVIDIA has owned the vanguard of Moore’s Law, supplanting Intel. 125-year graph here]
Advice to Larry Page when he took over as CEO of Google: “We talked a lot about focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest because they are dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft.” (552) [the winnowing began soon afterward]
“Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they left it in good hands. But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic.” (559) [I worked there too. Sad to watch]
“I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.” (569) [Nailed it. When promoted from sales to CEO, Ballmer quadrupled revenue but drove >30% decline in market value while Apple grew 2000% in the same period. Then Satya took over in 2014 and Microsoft’s market value went up 6x]
“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.” (78) [total agreement]
“Great art stretches the taste; it doesn’t follow tastes.” (128)
iPhone: “Think of all the innovations we’d be able to adapt if we did the keyboard on screen with software. Let’s bet on it , and then we’ll find a way to make it work… By having software replace hardware, the interface became fluid and flexible.” (469) [value migrated to the SW stack]
“IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.” (136) [ouch!]
“Until the teachers’ unions are broken, there is almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they are.” (545)
“I know what I am talking about, and I usually turn out to be right.” (569)
“A lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So, I really want to believe that something survives” (571) [I believe we all seek symbolic immortality]
I’ll add some comments below from my experiences at Apple, NeXT and Pixar as well as the eulogy I wrote for BusinessWeek.
Walter’s book came out 19 days later, with the exact same photo of Jobs.
I found this photo on my drive with no idea where it came from, but it prompted me to look up the IPO prospectus for Apple, and I noticed the executives on p.21:
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