Quotes About Business

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.4

It would be pretty easy to write a better word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did. The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you'll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.

And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight. You'd be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular army forces.

A company big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in charge of acquisitions will be among the more conservative, because they are likely to be business school types who joined the company late. They would rather overpay for a safe choice.

Steve Jobs saved a company that was in a terminal decline. And not merely in the way a turnaround specialist does, by cutting costs; he had to decide what Apple's next products should be. Few others could have done it.

Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

Businesspeople are not used to thinking about closed systems;economists are.

A decir verdad, la misión empresarial de Apple, en esencia, es impedir que la música sea un bien abundante.

another indicator of how well the company is doing is to see whether management is buying stock in the company as well.

market capitalization (or market cap).

To stay in business, companies had to do the logical thing — cut expenses. What's usually the biggest expense for companies? People! Many companies started laying off employees. As a result, consumer spending dropped further because more people were either laid off or had second thoughts about their own job security.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

The stated object of the policy is to increase the cash reserves of the banks and financial institutions, so that they can increase their loans to business and individuals, thus stimulating the economy and providing new jobs for the unemployed. That is the theory, but it works only if you have both willing lenders and borrowers. In the absence of either one or both the medicine creates more questionable side effects than the intended recovery.

So Walmart bribed Mexican officials to redraw the map in its favor, the map was published, and the big-box horror store was built, its obscene size swelling over the pyramids. But this was not the end.

This corruption has become systemic, a way of doing business. Cops make money by shaking down anyone they can.

Business is bad, but at least it's quiet here," Ignacio, a shoeshine man, said to me in the plaza at Reynosa, brushing goop on my shoes.

tremendous profits

French is the most beautiful," he said, "and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.

This country of his was not like some others he had heard of, where only in war was there work enough to be done. He had often sat listening in the tea shop to those who talked of things they had seen in foreign countries, and this he held was a main difference, that in foreign countries war was a business, but here it had never been.

Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.

And it's possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business!