Quotes About Innovation

When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being "worth thousands and thousands of dollars," and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: "We're going to be charging higher education a single price of $6,500.

When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker's code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate.

Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy.

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone. 

Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them, he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was now about to get out of his groove.

It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy.

innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead

Never do something that a thousand other people are doing.

authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

We kind of missed the boat on that, he recalled. So we needed to catch up real fast. 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 find itself behind.

There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least

Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes society to a new level.

Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the future. If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example