Quotes from Walter Isaacson

I'm not sure," Atkinson replied. "Maybe six months." It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one.

freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Most outside experts disagreed. "Maybe it's time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently," Business Week wrote in a story headlined "Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work.

For help with the speech, he called the brilliant scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing). Jobs sent him some thoughts. "That was in February, and I heard nothing, so I ping him again in April, and he says, 'Oh, yeah,' and I send him a few more thoughts," Jobs recounted. "I finally get him on the phone, and he keeps saying 'Yeah,' but finally it's the beginning of June, and he never sent me anything.

After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.

The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.

Its leading thinkers embraced a Renaissance humanism that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge.

People who were not crushed ended up being stronger.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.

Ever since Apple's first brochure proclaimed Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. It takes a lot of hard word, he said, to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.

had the rights to make all the sequels and exploit the characters. "I made a presentation that said, here's the 15% of Pixar that Disney does not already own.

Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were so alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became.

Sculley began to believe that Jobs's mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity.

What's the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

As a result, the process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing

Let's make it simple. Really simple

Although Jobs later said that he was not plotting to take over Apple at the time, Ellison thought it was inevitable. Anyone who spent more than a half hour with Amelio would realize that he couldn't do anything but self destruct, he later said

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

Avie Tevanian, a lanky and gregarious engineer at NeXT who had become Jobs's friend, remembers that every now and then, when they were going out to dinner, they would stop by Chrisann's house to pick up Lisa. "He was very sweet to her," Tevanian recalled. "He was a vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn't. He was fine with that. He suggested she order chicken, and she

One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to have skin in the game and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year." Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Jobs would take $120 million in cash and $37 million in stock, and he pledged to hold the stock for at least six months.

La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendrá de lo bien que se enseñe en sus escuelas la multiplicación y las tablas periódicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginación y la creatividad.

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn't able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.