Quotes About Innovation

Isaacson is to be commended for explaining the genius of Jobs in fascinating fashion, launching a discussion that could reach infinity and beyond." —The Christian Science Monitor "Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs comes as a breath of fresh air . . . a reliable and captivating guide to a man who reshaped the computing industry

He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and

The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn't invented the network yet.)

I'll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he's fallen in love with." But he was also willing to fight with its management if need be. "When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond." Apple's

inevitable call from him saying, "This hotel sucks, let's go." But Ive also captured the scattershot brilliance at the core of Jobs's genius when he described his boss tossing out ideas at a meeting. "Sometimes they were dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But

I came to work with Steve for a week," Lin recalled.

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect.

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, "Turn on, boot up, jack in.

veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field." Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory

There was no CD tray, just a subtle slot. And as with the original Macintosh, there was no

Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs's approach to business and design. He appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari's insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. "That simplicity rubbed off on him

desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point

Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.

love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much," he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. "It was the original vision for Apple.

Every time I'd design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us," said Wozniak.

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something," said Steve Bristow, an engineer. "At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.

Intel's chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers were incompatible with it.

something that could be mass-marketed to consumers. The Cube ended up not serving

The open sniping between Jobs and Eisner began in the summer of 2002

He was still Leonardo, always pursuing a curiosity, less passionate about tying up loose ends.

the Mac is dead, what's going to replace it?" Amelio asked. Jobs's reply didn't impress him. "Steve didn't seem to have a clear answer," Amelio later said. "He seemed to have a set of one-liners.

Both assessments contain a lot of truth, but there is more to it than that. 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 a mark of our political discourse that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never quite said—that he "invented" the Internet.