Steve Jobs

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Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

He was instrumental in convincing Burrell to switch from the 6809 to the 68000 microprocessor, which turned Jef’s research project into the future of Apple. A year and a half later, in December 1981, he had to leave the project to return to finish his M.D./Ph.D. degree, but he eventually returned to Apple in the summer of 1984. He left Apple to co-found NeXT with Steve Jobs in September 1985, and after a seven-year stint at Sun and year and a half at Eazel, he returned to Apple as a vice president of software technology in January 2002. Steve Wozniak Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976. His brilliant design for the hardware and software of the Apple II created the foundation for Apple’s initial success.

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He’s worked at Apple continuously since 1978, co-designing many of the best Macintoshes over the years, such as the Macintosh IIci. Steve Jobs Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976, when he was twenty-one years old. After being rebuffed by the Lisa team in the fall of 1980, he took over the Mac project from Jef Raskin in January 1981, and led the Macintosh team until John Sculley ousted him in May 1985. He left Apple in September 1985 to co-found NeXT, Inc, and returned to Apple in 1997 after Apple bought NeXT in December 1996. He is currently the CEO of Apple, as well as Pixar, a leading computer animation studio.

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Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 54: Bill Gates. © Doug Wilson/CORBIS 60: Apple Lisa Computer. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 68–69: Design team signatures. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 72: Members of the Lisa team. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 79: Andy Hertzfeld sitting on his car. © D.W. Mellor 83: Crowd at US Festival. © Bettmann/CORBIS 85: Steve Wozniak playing air computer. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 99: Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson. © Norman Seeff 104, 107: Alice packaging. Photos courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 128: Mike Moritz. © Matthew Naythons 150: Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak. © Bettmann/CORBIS 169: Defender® screenshot.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

The Prototype: Interviews with Art Levinson, Ed Woolard, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, Larry Ellison, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson. Cliff Edwards, “Sorry, Steve . . . ,” Business Week, May 21, 2001. Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass: Interviews with Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs. U.S. Patent Office, D478999, Aug. 26, 2003, US2004/0006939, Jan. 15, 2004; Gary Allen, “About Me,” ifoapplestore.com. CHAPTER 30: THE DIGITAL HUB Connecting the Dots: Interviews with Lee Clow, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs. Sheff; Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001. FireWire: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein. Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001; Joshua Quittner, “Apple’s New Core,” Time, Jan. 14, 2002; Mike Evangelist, “Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article,” Writer’s Block Live, Oct. 7, 2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil Schiller.

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Lev Grossman, “Apple’s New Calling,” Time, Jan. 22, 2007; Steve Jobs, speech, Macworld, Jan. 9, 2007; John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 2007; John Heilemann, “Steve Jobs in a Box,” New York, June 17, 2007; Janko Roettgers, “Alan Kay: With the Tablet, Apple Will Rule the World,” GigaOM, Jan. 26, 2010. CHAPTER 37: ROUND TWO The Battles of 2008: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Bill Campbell, Art Levinson, Al Gore, John Huey, Andy Serwer, Laurene Powell, Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine. Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008; Joe Nocera, “Apple’s Culture of Secrecy,” New York Times, July 26, 2008; Steve Jobs, letter to the Apple community, Jan. 5 and Jan. 14, 2009; Doron Levin, “Steve Jobs Went to Switzerland in Search of Cancer Treatment,” Fortune.com, Jan. 18, 2011; Yukari Kanea and Joann Lublin, “On Apple’s Board, Fewer Independent Voices,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 24, 2010; Micki Maynard (Micheline Maynard), Twitter post, 2:45 p.m., Jan. 18, 2011; Ryan Chittum, “The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 18, 2011.

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John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010. Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?” Wired, July 2010; Jean-Louis Gassée, “The Adobe-Apple Flame War,” Monday Note, Apr. 11, 2010; Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Flash,” Apple.com, Apr. 29, 2010; Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs interview, All Things Digital conference, June 1, 2010; Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), “Steve Jobs: Savior or Tyrant?” InfoWorld, Apr. 21, 2010; Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Valleywag, May 15, 2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Apr. 28, 2010.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Rachel Metz, “Behind Apple’s Products is Longtime Designer Ive,” Associated Press, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-08-26/Behind-Apples-products-is-longtime-designer-Ive/50150410/1, updated 8/26/2011. 39. Isaacon, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 40. Interview with Jon Rubinstein, October 2012. CHAPTER 5 Jobs Returns to Apple 1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), Kindle edition. 2. Steve Jobs at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 1998, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGcJgpOU9w. 3. Apple 10K Annual Report 1998: http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?

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Interview with Paul Dunn, July 2013. 29. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 30. Dike Blair, “Bondi Blue,” Interview with Jonathan Ive for Purple #2, Winter 98/99, 268–75. 31. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 32. Benj Edwards, “The Forgotten eMate 300—15 Years Later,” originally in Macweek, December 21, 2012. 33. Interview with Doug Satzger, January 2013. 34. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 35. Apple brochure from 1977, noted in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. 36. David Kirkpatrick, reporter associate Tyler Maroney, “The Second Coming of Apple Through a Magical Fusion of Man—Steve Jobs—and Company, Apple Is Becoming Itself Again: The Little Anticompany That Could,” Fortune, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250834/, November 9, 1988. 37.

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Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster) Kindle Edition. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. John Paczkowski, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs Live at D8,” http://allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/, June 1, 2010. 5. Scott Forstall, Apple v. Samsung trial testimony. 6. Ibid. 7. Kevin Rose, “Matt Rogers: Founder of Nest Labs interview,” Foundation 21, 2012, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HegU77X6I2A 8. “On the verge,” The Verge, April 29, 2012, video http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2987892/on-the-verge-episode-005-tony-fadell-and-chris-grant. 9. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle Edition. 10.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

But Steve Jobs had an idea for something even more special-Lisa, a computer that would leapfrog Apple's technology, surpassing not only the Apple II, but Apple III as well. This jump would also vault Apple a generation or so past anything that its competitors were preparing. Begun when Steve Wozniak, at Steve Jobs's request, sketched its architecture on a napkin, Lisa had, in less than a year, evolved to a computer based on the powerful Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip, and was engineered to handle more complicated applications, even running several at the same time, a trick called "multitasking." Named after an Apple engineer's daughter (and allegedly an additional tribute to Jobs's own daughter), Lisa was also the first Apple computer specifically directed at office professionals-from white-collar workers to captains of industry.

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The most startling of these was an agreement forged in 1991 to join with another large company to produce the next generation of computers. Apple's new partner was its former blood nemesis-IBM. IBM! To those of us who recalled the rhetoric surrounding Macintosh's introduction-Steve Jobs claiming outright that "IBM is out to crush Apple" -this shift was straight out of Orwell's 1984, when the three global superpowers would shift alliances on a dime. Apple joining with IBM was like Luke Skywalker strolling off into the sunset with Darth Vader. When Apple's profits dipped in 1993, Sculley wound up leaving his post as Apple's leader. The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s.

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The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s. Sculley was permitted to retain the title of chairman, but no longer had a direct role in the company's operations-exactly the fate of Steve Jobs in 1985. The irony was inescapable: originally hired to anchor Jobs's dreamy fantasies, John Sculley apparently departed because his technological seduction had become too complete-he was running Apple too much like Steve Jobs had and, like Jobs, he was gone within months-still attempting to make a dent in the universe but no longer at Apple. (In Sculley's case this new launching pad was a relatively obscute company involved in wireless communications.)

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1988. ———. “How Steve Jobs Linked Up with IBM.” Fortune, October 9, 1989. ———. “The Future of the PC: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Talk About Tomorrow.” Fortune, August 26, 1991. ———. “What Bill Gates Really Wants.” Fortune, January 16, 1995. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Amazing Movie Adventure.” Fortune, September 18, 1995. ———. “Something’s Rotten in Cupertino.” Fortune, March 3, 1997. ———. “The Three Faces of Steve.” Fortune, November 9, 1998. ———. “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Apple Gets Way Cooler.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs: Graying Prince of a Shrinking Kingdom.”

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Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013. Wozniak, Stephen, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Young, Jeffrey S. Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward. New York: Scott Foresman Trade, 1987. Articles by the Author Schlender, Brenton R. “Jobs, Perot Become Unlikely Partners in Apple Founder’s New Concern.” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1987. ———. “Next Project: Apple Era Behind Him, Steve Jobs Tries Again, Using a New System.”

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The success of Toy Story had given the myth of Steve Jobs a rather nice touch-up. The question now was whether Steve’s Pixar triumph was a one-shot anomaly. For a man whose name eventually would become synonymous with great American second acts, the Steve Jobs of 1996 had had remarkably little success with his own sequels. The Apple II had been followed by the Apple III and the Lisa, both of which had been failures. The Mac became a success only in the more robust versions introduced by John Sculley. His most grandiose sequel of all, NeXT, the company he’d created to be an idealized version of Apple, had proved utterly anticlimactic.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

v=_p8AsQhaVKI. A decade earlier: “Steve Jobs to Kick Off Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2003,” Apple, May 8, 2003, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/05/08Steve-Jobs-to-Kick-Off-Apples-Worldwide-Developers-Conference-2003/; “Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store,” Apple, April 28, 2003, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/04/28Apple-Launches-the-iTunes-Music-Store/; Apple Novinky, “Steve Jobs Introduces iTunes Music Store—Apple Special Event 2003,” YouTube, April 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9o46zK5Jo. The pop star Taylor Swift: Duboff, “Taylor Swift: Apple Crusader, #GirlSquad Captain, and the Most Influential 25-Year-Old in America”; interview with Scott Borchetta.

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New York: Random House, 2019. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Ive, Jony, Andrew Zuckerman, and Apple Inc. Designed by Apple in California. Cupertino, CA: Apple, 2016. Kahney, Leander. Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013. ———. Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019. Kane, Yukari Iwatani. Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs. New York: Harper Business, 2014. Kocienda, Ken. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

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The company had sold: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s Watch Outpaced the iPhone in First Year,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-cant-shake-its-critics-1461524901; Apple Press Release, “Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results,” Apple (with consolidated financial statements), October 25, 2016, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/. The second camera: Apple Press Release, “Portrait Mode Now Available on iPhone 7 Plus with iOS 10.1,” Apple, October 24, 2016, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/10/portrait-mode-now-available-on-iphone-7-plus-with-ios-101/. A year before his death: “Steve Jobs in 2010, at D8,” Apple Podcasts, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-in-2010-at-d8/id529997900?i=1000116189688. The comedy site CollegeHumor: CollegeHumor, “The New iPhone Is Just Worse,” YouTube, September 8, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The crucial thing about Facebook is that it’s not a service or an app—it’s a fundamental platform, on the same scale as the internet itself. Steve Jobs: I admire Mark Zuckerberg. I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out—for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot. Purple People Eater Apple, the company that cannibalizes itself Only three years after reviving Apple on the back of the iPod, Steve Jobs decides to make it obsolete. As an Atari alumnus, Jobs knows firsthand the danger of trying to milk a hot product for all it is worth. He knows that somebody at some point will unseat Apple’s iPod monopoly with an MP3 player that can also place a phone call. Thus, Jobs concludes, Apple has to act first.

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He was the principal programmer behind Smalltalk, Kay’s pioneering object-oriented computer language, which ran on the Alto computer. When Steve Jobs visited PARC to see the Alto, Ingalls famously gave the demonstration. Later, Ingalls worked for Jobs at Apple. Steve Jarrett was a project manager for General Magic, the smartphone company that spun out of Apple in the midnineties. Later he joined Apple to help launch the original iPod. Today he’s an executive at Facebook, living in London. Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple, the company most responsible for bringing the personal computer to the masses. Jobs didn’t manage to gain full control of his company until twenty years later, but after he did Apple released a string of hit products—the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad—and it became the most valuable company in the world.

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Dan Kottke: The IPO was November of ’80, and Steve is raring to go. Because he had money to spend, right? The Apple III was launching, but Steve Jobs had already moved on. The Apple III didn’t interest him, because there were too many other people involved and he wanted to be in charge. John Couch: Steve says, “I want to run Lisa,” because it was the newest, newest product. Randy Wigginton: But they weren’t listening to him. Steve Jobs: I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction. David Kelley: Lisa—the Apple IV—was really mixed up. Dan Kottke: Steve was trying to bully the Lisa group.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

This situation was particularly complicated, since the Beatles' record company has the same name as Steve Jobs's computer company. Years ago, when Apple Computer created software to let its users play CDs, the Beatles sued, claiming that the Cupertino company had violated an earlier agreement not to venture into the music business. Apple paid $26 Download million to settle the case in 1991. But the appearance of an Apple iTunes store led the Beatles to claim that Jobs was going beyond the terms of the settlement, which didn't specify that Apple could start its own music store. "It'll get resolved, it's not a big deal," Jobs told me after the other Apple filed suit in London.

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It would take Phil Schiller five days to get back to California. Other people at Apple were stuck in Europe. But with the exception of some managers checking out suppliers in Asia, almost all the people working on the iPod were at home in the Bay Area. At Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Steve Jobs was sending an e-mail to Apple employees: I'm sure you've heard about today's extraordinary and tragic events. If you want to stay home with your families today, please do so. For those of you who want to come to work, we will be open. Steve By the time of Apple's iPod press conference in October, the plane crashes had been followed by a wave of anthrax attacks.

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I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. In no case, my PR contact said, would Apple send us one to arrive until after the Tuesday launch. They weren't even about to put one into a Federal Express box on Monday, afraid that some-Perfect 13 one might rip open the box and discover Steve Jobs's big secret. Instead, Apple would dispatch a pair of couriers from Cupertino to hand-deliver the new product to a few select tech writers. Apples spokesperson made it clear that they would deliver to no designee, only me. Maybe, I thought, I should have flown out to see this.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

i–iV The first two Apple sections, i and ii, are based primarily on interviews with the team responsible for carving out the interaction paradigms that formed the foundation of the iPhone—the user interface, the multitouch software, the early hardware. I conducted interviews with Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Greg Christie, in addition to other members of the original iPhone team on background. Further details and quotes from Jony Ive were taken from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive, and Brett Schlender’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs “misremembered” the iPhone’s touchscreen genesis in a Q-and-A hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their annual D: All Things Digital conference.

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i: Exploring New Rich Interactions iPhone in embryo Apple’s user-testing lab at 2 Infinite Loop had been abandoned for years. Down the hall from the famed Industrial Design studio, the space was divided by a one-way mirror so hidden observers could see how ordinary people navigate new technologies. But Apple didn’t do user testing, not since Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. Under Jobs, Apple would show consumers what they wanted, not solicit their feedback. But that deserted lab would make an ideal hideaway for a small group of Apple’s more restless minds, who had quietly embarked on an experimental new project.

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Passionate users felt that FingerWorks’ pads were the only serious ergonomic alternative to keyboards, and now that they’d been taken away, more than a few Finger Fans blamed Apple. “People with chronic RSI injuries were suddenly left out in the cold, in 2005, by an uncaring Steve Jobs,” Dstamatis wrote. “Apple took an important medical product off the market.” No major product has emerged to serve RSI-plagued computer users, and the iPhone and iPad offer only a fraction of the novel interactivity of the original pads. Apple took FingerWorks’ gesture library and simplified it into a language that a child could understand—recall that Apple’s Brian Huppi had called FingerWorks’ gesture database an “exotic language”—which made it immensely popular.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Alan Maltun, “Students Beg to Stay After School to Use Computers”; David Einstein, “Bellflower Paces Area Schools in Computer Field”; Bob Williams, “Computer Parade Uneven,” The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1983, SB1. 30. Andrew Emil Gansky, “Myths and Legends of the Anti-Corporation: A History of Apple, Inc., 1976–1997,” PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2017; Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom”; Harry McCracken, “The Apple Story is an Education Story: A Steve Jobs Triumph Missing from the Movie,” The 74, October 15, 2015, https://www.the74million.org/article/the-apple-story-is-an-education-story-a-steve-jobs-triumph-missing-from-the-movie/, archived at https://perma.cc/EZV6-UGLT. 31. Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” The New York Times, May 14, 2017, 1. 32. “’82 House Freshmen Eschew Partisanship and Posturing,” The Washington Post, December 26, 1982, A1; Zschau, “Tax Policy Initiatives to Promote High Technology,” May 13, 1983, Box 51, FF Capital Gains 1, Ed Zschau Papers, HH. 33.

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Horace Dediu, “The iOS Economy, Updated,” Asymco blog, January 8, 2018, http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/08/the-ios-economy-updated/, archived at https://perma.cc/W2Z5-MT6G. 11. Bruce Newman, “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder,” San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2011. 12. “Remembering Steve,” Apple.com, https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/, archived at https://perma.cc/7SES-3F5F; Maria L. LaGanga, “Steve Jobs’ death saddens Apple workers and fans,” The Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011. 13. “Steve Jobs’ Memorial Service: 6 Highlights,” The Week, October 25, 2011. 14. “What Happened to the Future?” Founders Fund, http://foundersfund.com/the-future/, archived at https://perma.cc/82XW-VA2A. 15.

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House Democratic Caucus, Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: Turning Point for America’s Economy (Washington: USGPO, 1982). 23. “Steve Jobs and David Burnham,” Nightline, ABC News, April 10, 1981, archived at https://perma.cc/4UER-Y3YV. 24. David Morrow, oral History interview with Steve Jobs, Palo Alto, Calif., April 20, 1995, Smithsonian Institution. 25. Quoted in Audrey Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom,” Hack Education.com, February 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple, archived at https://perma.cc/3K62-ACW5. 26. Milton B. Stewart, “Polishing the Apple,” Inc., Feb. 1, 1983, https://www.inc.com/magazine/19830201/6207.html, archived at https://perma.cc/K7UQ-4ACC. 27.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

In addition to unveiling its new computer, Apple announced the new software it intended to have ready by the time the machine shipped a few months later—a word processor, a spreadsheet program, an enhanced BASIC, and a sophisticated operating system. The marketing plan called for the Apple III to be portrayed as a serious computer that could be used in professional offices. The machine seemed likely to succeed. A few months later, continuing to ride the tide of acclaim, Apple announced its first public stock offering. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Not since Eve has an apple posed such temptation.” * * * Figure 69. Apple goes public Mike Markkula presents Steve Jobs with a check for $92 million from his stock offering in Apple. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) When Apple was first formed, Mike Markkula dreamed of building the largest privately held company in the nation, a company fully owned by its employees.

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The number of Apple dealers had risen to 3,000. Mike Markkula took over for Scotty as president of Apple, a position he believed to be a temporary one, and at age 26 Steve Jobs became chairman of the board. Apple was now investing millions of dollars in research and development to create a product that would stun the world. It wanted to prove that it had learned the lessons of the Apple III, that Apple could indeed introduce a new product successfully. By the fall of 1981, rumors abounded in the trade journals about new products Apple was developing. The rumors were wrong, though not even Apple realized it at the time.

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Some questioned his choice of processor, but no one argued with the processor’s $20 price tag. He called his machine an Apple. * * * Figure 57. The Apple I Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I was a circuit board. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) The Apple I had only the bare essentials. It lacked a case, a keyboard, and a power supply. The hobbyist owner had to connect a transformer to it in order to get it to work. The Apple I also required laborious assembly by hand. Woz spent a lot of time helping friends implement his design. Steve Jobs saw a great financial opportunity in this skeletal machine, and urged Woz to start a company with him.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Because of the iPod: Apple press release, 4/9/2007. Jobs said he never saw: Kara Swisher, “Full D8 Interview Video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/full-d8-video-apple-ceo-steve-jobs. Apple’s three-year head start: “Apple Says App Store Has Made Developers over $1 Billion,” AppleInsider.com, 6/10/2010. 7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again Starting in 2010 Jobs had: “Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone,” iFixIt.com, 1/20/2011. “It turns out”: Beth Callaghan, “Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions,” AllThingsD.com, 10/5/2011.

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Jobs was personally offended: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past Video: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D1 in 2003,” AllThingsD.com, 5/3/2010. It’s hard to imagine: “iPhone,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements. Publicly, Jobs continued his: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D2 in 2004,” AllThingsD.com, 5/10/2010. The tension between the partners: Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, 11/2005. Jobs successfully pinned the Rokr screwup: “iPod Sales per Quarter,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements; Peter Burrows, “Working with Steve Jobs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 10/12/2011.

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But perhaps the most notable example: Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012; Liz Gannes, “Google Maps for iPhone Had 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours,” AllThingsD.com, 12/17/2012. Apple’s Tim Cook knows all the challenges: Ina Fried, “Apple’s Tim Cook: The Full D11 Interview,” Tim Cook interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 5/29/2013, available at www.allthingsd.com/20130529/apples-tim-cook-the-full-d11-interview-video. Jobs was a master: Peter Kafka, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs at D8: The Full, Uncut Interview,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/steve-jobs-at-d8-the-full-uncut-interview. Acknowledgments Writing is usually a solitary act.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

johnaugust.com. https://johnaugust.com/2009/what-does-execution-dependent-mean. Accessed November 16, 2017. 10. At This Point 1. Apple Newsroom, “Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Steve-Jobs-Resigns-as-CEO-of-Apple/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Letter from Steve Jobs,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Letter-from-Steve-Jobs/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Apple Media Advisory,” October 5, 2011. Accessed November 16, 2017. Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book.

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Patent 7,469,381, filed December 14, 2007, and issued December 23, 2008. This is the patent describing inertial scrolling. http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7469381; Matt Brian, “The Apple Patent Steve Jobs Fought Hard to Protect, and His Connection to Its Inventor,” The Next Web, August 7, 2012. Accessed November 19, 2017. https://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/07/the-apple-patent-steve-jobs-fought-hard-to-protect-and-his-connection-with-its-inventor/ 3. “Crackberry,” Urban Dictionary. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crackberry 4.

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While other companies design beautiful hardware, excel at marketing, hire good lawyers, and manufacture gadgets at scale, no other company makes software as intuitive, carefully crafted, or just plain fun. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important software in the company’s history. When I joined Apple in 2001, desktop and laptop computers were still the company’s main products, and while the colorful iMac had been a notable success in reestablishing Apple as a design leader in high technology—Steve Jobs had been back for four years following his eleven-year exile—the company still sat below 5 percent share in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows. Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Notes Chapter One 1998 1 Ken Auletta (2009) Googled: The end of the world as we know it, Virgin Books, London. 2 http://gladwell.com/outliers 3 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 4 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 5 Alan Deutschman (2000) The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Broadway Books, New York. 6 http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/58082/16-Brilliant-Insights-From-Steve-Jobs-Keynote-Circa-1997.aspx 7 http://www.zdnet.com/news/jobs-apple-still-on-right-track/99946 8 http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html 9 http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortune/index.htm 10 http://www.industryweek.com/articles/whats_really_driving_apples_recovery_325.aspx 11 http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament 12 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 13 http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/att_lessons_fro.html 14 http://frozennorth.org/C509291565/E668712860/index.html 15 http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ Chapter Two Microsoft antitrust 1 Private e-mail. 2 Private e-mail.

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In 1998 Microsoft was crushing yet another upstart – Netscape, which had had the temerity to suggest that the browser could become the basis for doing work anywhere, so that Windows itself would become irrelevant; all you’d need would be a computer that could run a browser, and you’d be able to do everything for which you presently needed a PC. Steve Jobs and Apple Microsoft had reached the pinnacle by besting Apple – the company co-founded by Steve Jobs, a charming, brilliant, tempestuous, iconoclastic, unique businessman who had been thrown out of it in 1985 but returned, triumphantly, at the end of 1996 when another company he had set up, NeXT Computer, was bought by the then ailing Apple, which was bleeding cash. He forced out the incumbent chief executive in July 1997 and became ‘interim’ chief executive that September – at which point the company had made a loss of a billion dollars for the financial year.

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Among those also targeted for Microsoft’s arm-twisting via Windows to try to crush other products in different fields, the trial heard, were Intel, Sun Microsystems, Real Networks, IBM – which was denied an OEM licence for Windows 95 until a quarter of an hour before its official launch, and so missed out on huge swathes of PC sales – and Apple. In particular, Apple was offered a deal: stop developing its own systems for playing music and films on Windows, and let Microsoft handle them using its DirectX system. If it did, Microsoft would stop putting obstacles in the way of Apple’s QuickTime on Windows. Steve Jobs, who was at the meeting in June 1998, rejected the idea because it would limit the ability for third parties to develop content that would run on Windows PCs and Apple machines. (In retrospect, that decision may be one of the most significant to Apple’s later success that Jobs ever made, since it meant that Microsoft could not control how Apple-encoded music was played on Windows.)

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Tesler could not help but contrast the situation at PARC with what he had seen of Apple. By 1980, he had an inside view. His first extended encounter with Apple came in December 1979, when he, along with Adele Goldberg (also from Alan Kay’s group in PARC’s systems science lab), gave two demonstrations of the Alto to a group from Apple that included Steve Jobs.9 Six months before the demos, in June 1979, Xerox had purchased 100,000 shares of Apple for $1.05 million in Apple’s second round of private investment.IV An investment in Apple made sense for Xerox because if the smaller company did well, Xerox could make a good deal of money, and if Apple failed, Xerox would be well positioned to acquire it.III Apple, by this time, was seen as such a potentially lucrative investment that Markkula could hand-select investors.

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Comment from stevewoz at http://www.cultofmac.com/96939/apples-first-ceo-says-young-steve-jobs-could-be-trusted-with-detail-but-not-with-a-staff/. 34. Ann Bowers, interview by author, Nov. 7, 2015. 35. “The overriding consideration was pride—Mike just wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of making Apple a huge success and fulfilling the implied commitment to the Apple employees.” Introductory remarks given by Arthur Rock at the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Award Dinner Honoring Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula, San Francisco Olympic Club, Feb. 3, 1983, AR. 36. Mike Markkula, interview by author, Feb. 24, 2016. 37. Steve Jobs, quoted in “Apple Shuffling Reflects Growth,” Computer Systems News, April 13, 1981. 38.

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He calls the ethics center “the most bang for my philanthropic buck that I’ve ever gotten.”9 Markkula remained on Apple’s board until 1997, when Steve Jobs, who had left the company a dozen years earlier to launch NeXT, returned and asked him, along with every other Apple director save two, to resign. Markkula and Jobs had been somewhat estranged for years. Jobs felt betrayed by Markkula’s backing John Sculley over him in the power struggle that had pushed him out of Apple in 1985. Markkula thought that Jobs had left Apple in a way that was “unethical,” recruiting employees for NeXT while still chairing the Apple board.10 But the conversation upon Jobs’s return after Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million was long and cordial.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

The following afternoon he had lunch with a colleague who worked at Apple. They mentioned they were kicking off a new project. Did he happen to know anyone with experience building handheld devices? I got a call from Apple the next day. Because you’ve picked up this book, the rest of the story is probably pretty familiar. I took a consulting gig with Apple at first, just hoping to make enough money to pay my employees or maybe leverage my job into a buyout for Fuse. Putting my hopes on Apple was a serious long shot. Steve Jobs was back at the helm then, but during the previous decade Apple had been in a death spiral, launching a slew of mediocre products that edged the company close to collapse.

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But that’s not to say that sticking to your vision will always lead to success. Not even for Steve Jobs. Most people don’t realize what the iPod was originally built for. Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers. That’s what was in Steve Jobs’s head: We’re going to make something amazing that will only work with our Macs. People will love it so much that they’ll start buying Macs again. At the time Apple was near death. It had almost no market share—even in the United States. But the iPod would solve that problem. It would save the company. So as far as Steve Jobs was concerned, the iPod would never work with a PC.

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I should have remembered what it was like at Apple during the very first months when we started building the iPod. It just didn’t occur to me—Nest was so much bigger and more established than my tiny iPod team, I thought this was a completely different situation. But it was exactly the same. Back then Apple’s executive antibodies saw us coming to take their time and draw away their resources, so they tried to block our way and ignore our requests. That’s when Steve Jobs gave us air cover, dropped bombs on the teams who were slowing us down, forced the issue, yelled sometimes to make sure we got what we needed. Steve Jobs fighting for us was ultimately what allowed us to succeed.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

I believe the world would be a better place had LS&Co. registered Apple-like success, as the Haas family (who own LS&Co.) is what you hope all business owners would be: modest, committed to the community, and generous. Steve Jobs brought Drexler onto Apple’s board of directors in 1999, soon after his return to Apple—and two years later Apple launched its first brick-and-mortar store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.30 Apple’s stores were glitzier than Gap stores. Most experts yawned. Brick and mortar, they said, was the past. The internet was the future. As if Steve Jobs, of all people, didn’t understand that. It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance; and that by opening fancy stores it was positioning itself for luxury with the equivalent of a walker.

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They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young people do, and have a facility with technology that makes them influential and important to business.4 They sided with Apple, as the firm embodies their own maverick, antiestablishment, progressive ideals—and conveniently ignored the fact that Steve Jobs gave nothing to charity, almost exclusively hired middle-aged white guys, and was an awful person. It didn’t matter, because Apple is cool. Even more, Apple is an innovator. And so, when the federal government decides to force Apple to change its behavior, the Apple Macolytes leap to its defense. I’m not one of them. Double Standard I’ve always tried to give the impression that I just don’t care what others think.

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That set the stage for the masterpiece—the iPhone—that had Apple fanatics all over the world camping out in front of electronics stores. And finally, the sublime iPad. The unsung hero of Apple’s success is Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms of Apple, and who set about partnering with them similar to the way a vampire partners with a blood bag. Could Apple have maintained this pace into the current decade had Steve Jobs survived his illness? Probably. Because for all of his less than savory traits, he accomplished one important thing: he turned Apple, after the risk-averse years under John Sculley, into a company—arguably the biggest company ever—that made taking risks its first option.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Samsung, however, won legal victories: Charles Arthur, “Samsung Galaxy Tab ‘Does Not Copy Apple’s Designs,’ ” The Guardian, October 18, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/​technology/​2012/​oct/​18/​samsung-galaxy-tab-apple-ipad; Associated Press, “Samsung Wins Korean Battle in Apple Patent War,” August 24, 2012, https://www.cbc.ca/​news/​business/​samsung-wins-korean-battle-in-apple-patent-war-1.1153862; Mari Saito and Maki Shiraki, “Samsung Triumphs Over Apple in Japan Patent Case,” Reuters, August 31, 2012, https://in.reuters.com/​article/​us-apple-samsung-japan/​samsung-wins-over-apple-in-japan-patent-case-idINBRE87U05R20120831. Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/​63316/​steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/.

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Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/​63316/​steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/. Apple designers borrowed: Christina Bonnington, “Apple v. Samsung: 5 Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents,” Wired, July 27, 2012, https://www.wired.com/​2012/​07/​apple-reveals-for-monday-trial/. “We are going to patent it all”: Fred Vogelstein, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013), p. 172. calling their larger phones “Hummers”: Chris Ziegler, “Apple’s Steve Jobs: ‘No One’s Going to Buy’ a Big Phone,” Engadget, July 16, 2010, https://www.engadget.com/​2010/​07/​16/​jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy-a-big-phone/.

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But that didn’t deter Jobs: Alan Kay, “American Computer Pioneer Alan Kay’s Concept, the Dynabook, Was Published in 1972. How Come Steve Jobs and Apple iPad Get the Credit for Tablet Invention?” Quora, April 21, 2019, https://www.quora.com/​American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/​answer/​Alan-Kay-11. would need to be portable: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Jobs disembarked at the grimy: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Samsung began supplying Apple: Frank Rose, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (New York: Stuyvesant Street Press, 1989), p. 163.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/ imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Next the team traveled: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?”; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012; Janet Abrams, “Radical Craft/The Second Art Center Design Conference,” http://www.core77.com/reactor/ 04.06_artcenter.asp, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Ive then spent yet more: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?” 188 They also designed a beautiful: Neil Hughes, “Book Details Apple’s ‘Packaging Room,’ Steve Jobs’ Interest in Advanced Cameras,” Apple Insider, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.appleinsider.com/ articles/12/01/24/book_details_apples_packaging_ room_interests_in_advanced_cameras_.html; Yonu Heisler, “Inside Apple’s Secret Packaging Room,” Network World, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.networkworld.com/community/ blog/inside-apples-secret-packaging-room. 188 The iMac’s launch in 1998: http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Instead of being a technological marvel, the Sony VCR would be a great consumer experience. It’s no accident that when he launched his company, Steve Jobs followed the Sony model of a consumer-friendly technology company. He knew that it was always tempting for technology companies to frame themselves from the engineer’s point of view, not the consumer’s. Over time, Jobs would fight his engineers constantly to keep Apple products easy to use. No one has reframed the story of personal technology quite like Steve Jobs. With every new product, he further moved the focus away from engineered functionality and toward user experience.

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Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 16. 186 Walter Benjamin argued: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1968). 187 When Steve Jobs returned: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 348–57. 187 Designers Jonathan Ive and Danny Coster: Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive? The Man Behind Apple’s Design Magic,” IN: Inside Innovation, September 2006. The “jelly bean story” was told to Peter Burrows at the Radical Craft Conference at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 2006, and reported on in IN magazine, a quarterly magazine inside BusinessWeek, which I founded that year and edited.

To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy

Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

The last thing I expected was to speak to a celebrity. “Hi, is this Lawrence?” “Yes, it’s me.” “This is Steve Jobs,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I saw your picture in a magazine a few years ago and thought we’d work together someday.” Even in those days, when the downfall of Steve Jobs was a favorite topic around Silicon Valley eateries, a call from him was enough to stop me in my tracks. Maybe he wasn’t as hot as he had been before his unceremonious departure from Apple ten years earlier, but our industry had never had a more charismatic figure. I couldn’t help but feel a spurt of excitement at realizing not only that he knew who I was, but that he had actually called me.

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Classification: LCC PN1998.3.L4673 A32016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.L4673 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020541 COVER DESIGN BY BRIAN MOORE eISBN 978-0-544-73419-7 v1.1016 For Hillary, Jason, Sarah, and Jenna Prologue “Hey, Steve, you up for a walk?” I asked over the phone. It was the fall of 2005. Steve Jobs and I had asked each other that question countless times over the past ten years. But this time was different. Steve had turned fifty earlier that year and the burden of cancer and surgery was taking its toll. For a while now we had kept our talks and walks light. Steve had enough on his hands at Apple. In the past year he had introduced a new line of iPods, including the brand-new iPod shuffle and iPod nano that continued to usher in a new era of music listening.

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His last two products before being stripped of all responsibilities at Apple in 1985—the Lisa and the original Macintosh computers—had both been commercial disasters, and the NeXT Computer was regarded by many observers as the triumph of hubris over practicality. It had been heralded as a technological marvel, but it had been unable to compete with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics that sold less expensive, more compatible machines. More and more, Jobs was looking like yesterday’s news. When I told friends and colleagues that I was meeting Steve Jobs about Pixar, the most common response was “Why would you want to do that?”

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

Pixar was a computer hardware company when Steve Jobs bought it in 1986. Before purchasing Pixar, Jobs had been forced out of Apple in 1985 by his hand-picked CEO successor, John Scully, following frequent clashes. Scully wanted Jobs to focus exclusively on products, while Jobs wanted to take Apple back over from Scully. After Scully caught wind of an attempted coup by Jobs when Scully was on a trip to Asia, he stripped Jobs of his responsibilities. Jobs then left Apple, bought Pixar, and started another computer company, called Next Computer. Both Pixar and Next struggled, and the open question was whether Steve Jobs was just another one-hit wonder.

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by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review blog, September 28, 2009, which can be found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2009/09/how_do_innovators_think.html. Jeff Bezos quote from: “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos,” by Julia Kirby and Thomas Stewart, Harvard Business Review, October 2007. Apple and Steve Jobs: Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio (2008), 190–197. “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” by Gary Wolf, Wired, March 2002. Steve Jobs calligraphy example taken from his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. James Chanos reference: Interview with Chanos. Jerry Seinfeld: Drawn from The Comedian (DVD), Directed by Christian Charles, with Jerry Seinfeld (2002).

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CHAPTER 3 Failing Quickly to Learn Fast Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. After all, Chris Rock, the Pixar filmmakers, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs, and Colonel Casey Haskins are all perfectionists and yet they accept, even welcome, failure as they develop new ideas and strategies. Rock won’t appear on national television without perfecting his act, while Gehry was for years frustrated by the imperfections he noticed while watching performances at Disney Hall (he’s past that now). Steve Jobs will famously refuse to release a new Apple product, or product enclosure even, until it’s as close to perfect as possible. Yet none of them allow perfectionism to paralyze their creative processes, at least not for long.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

Going out to the wild, woolly west, where it was more a meritocracy, I would have a chance to move quickly and sit on the management team.”8 Move quickly, indeed. Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of sales and marketing and given the task of overseeing the launch of the highly anticipated Macintosh, Apple’s new computer that would replace the Apple II as the company’s flagship product. To kick off the launch, the company made a big move: it bought a slot to run a commercial during the Super Bowl, which would be played in Tampa, Florida, on January 22, 1984. Once the ad was produced, Bill and the team showed it to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An allusion to George Orwell’s novel 1984, it showed a young woman running through a dark hallway, fleeing guards, and emerging into a chamber where hundreds of gray-clad, head-shaven men are listening, zombie-like, to a droning “big brother” figure on a large screen before them.

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.* Although he did not know it at the time, he was about to enter the third chapter of his career, a return to coaching full-time, but not on a football field. When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, Bill Campbell was one of the few leaders at the company who fought against the move. Dave Kinser, an Apple colleague of Bill’s at the time, recalls Bill saying that “we’ve got to keep Steve in the company. He’s way too talented to just let him leave!” Steve remembered that loyalty. When he returned to Apple and became its CEO in 1997, and most of the board members stepped down, Steve named Bill as one of the new directors.* (Bill served on the Apple board until 2014.) Steve and Bill became close friends, speaking frequently and spending many Sunday afternoons walking around their Palo Alto neighborhood discussing all sorts of topics.

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He was a football coach turned sales guy. Yet somehow, Bill had become so influential that he went on a weekly Sunday walk with Steve Jobs, and the Google founders said they wouldn’t have made it without him. Bill’s name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Eventually it hit me: I recognized him from a case I had taught a few times on a management dilemma at Apple in the mid-1980s, when a brave, bright young manager named Donna Dubinsky challenged a distribution plan from Steve Jobs himself. Bill Campbell was Donna’s boss’s boss, and he dished out exactly the kind of tough love you’d expect from a football coach: he tore her proposal apart, pushed her to come up with something stronger, and then stood up for her.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

Aside from the usual tricks of a good PowerPoint presentation—simple slides, well organized argument, speaker involvement, moments of feeling, and so on—he points to some unusual innovations that make Steve Jobs a great stage director: constant invention of an enemy against which Apple must always fight,24 an extraordinary feeling for slogans, the ability to make sense out of numbers by magnifying them, and a constant search for analogies or comparisons to make them as eloquent as possible. And finally, Steve Jobs has the ability to create memorable moments, discreetly accentuated by technological wizardry, that the audience will long remember. With Steve Jobs, we touch on the quintessence of oral presentation. The performance becomes its own subject, the medium mediates itself and is no longer there simply to communicate messages and persuade an audience.

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The “Mac family” waits like impatient fans for Steve Notes, the boss’s presentation.16 Over the years, these annual meetings have become highly codified ceremonies, the staging of which Steve Jobs has brought to a high polish. Helped by increasingly inventive technology, the entertainer of the early days turned into a guru able to convert millions of the faithful into purchasers of his latest technological gadgets. Boston, January 1997, Macworld Conference Expo: it is a historic moment. As the mythical brand is running out of steam—not only are the numbers down, but the notoriety and the originality of Apple are under severe strain—Steve Jobs, then president of Pixar,17 returns after ten years away. He is greeted like a messiah by the Apple community, which sees his return as a sign of renewal.

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The presentation follows a well-tried plan: brief slide on earnings—better to be quick; they’re bad—then Steve Jobs, armed with his remote, the essential tool of Steve Notes, briefly recounts his time at Pixar, then follows with three quotations that appear on the screen. “Apple has become irrelevant.” “Apple can’t execute anything.”18 “Apple’s culture is anarchy; you can’t manage it.” Jobs’s entire presentation is based on these three negative judgments. The procedure is clever; it enables him to build, practically in real time, Apple’s new strategy on the basis of criticisms made of it and to bring out the value of the innovative products and services intended to contradict these received ideas.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Hardware hackers such as Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards. The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.

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But growth began to taper off, largely because Commodore’s computer sales were slumping in the face of new competition from Apple and others. “We have to take control of our destiny,” Kimsey told Case.29 It was clear that for Quantum to succeed, it had to create its Link online services for other computer makers, most notably Apple. With the tenacity that came with his patient personality, Case targeted the executives at Apple. Even after its brilliantly controlling cofounder Steve Jobs had been forced out of the company, at least for the time being, Apple was difficult to partner with. So Case moved across the country to Cupertino and took an apartment near Apple’s headquarters. From there he waged his siege.

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Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 135. 108. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 94. 109. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 110. Steve Jobs presentation, Jan. 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY. 111. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 173. 112. Author’s interview with Andy Hertzfeld. 113. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 114. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly Media, 2005), 191. See also Andy Hertzfeld, http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt. 115. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 116. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 117.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

Snapchat investors and advisors, afraid of irritating Evan, have often been unwilling to speak publicly about even basic things like how the company differentiates itself and what its mission is. Evan is hardly the first tech founder to be secretive. Some of the industry’s most revered leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are known for their intense corporate secrecy. As much as Evan has had a rivalry with Mark Zuckerberg, he has also been empowered by Zuckerberg, who blazed the trail for him. Steve Jobs was not the CEO of Apple until his second stint with the company; Google’s investors demanded they bring in Eric Schmidt as a more professional CEO than cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But Zuckerberg’s overwhelming success and maturation from immature genius into visionary CEO caused a shift in Silicon Valley to strongly favor founders as CEOs.

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Michael. Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. New York: Overlook Press, 2009. Reis, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011. Roose, Kevin. Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014. Rose, Todd. The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. New York: HarperOne, 2016. Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs. New York: Crown Business, 2015. Sorkin, Andrew Ross.

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By the time Reggie had his epiphany, the tech world was embracing front-facing cameras. On October 14, 2011, Apple released the iPhone 4S, its second phone with a front-facing camera (making the iPhone 4, also with a front-facing camera, more affordable). Apple’s front-facing cameras were mostly for its video chat feature, FaceTime, but were starting to be used for photographs as well. Technology and art were converging as the iPhone created amateur photographers of everyone. Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company, modeled after two of his heroes, Edwin Land and Steve Jobs. Jobs had also considered Land a personal hero and someone he modeled his career after.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Only about a decade ago Apple was best known for its innovative personal computer design and production. Established on 1 April 1976 in Cupertino, California by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Apple was incorporated in 1977 by Jobs and Wozniak to sell the Apple I personal computer.1 The company was originally named Apple Computer, Inc. and for 30 years focused on the production of personal computers. On 9 January 2007, the company announced it was removing the ‘Computer’ from its name, reflecting its shift in focus from personal computers to consumer electronics. This same year, Apple launched the iPhone and iPod Touch featuring its new mobile operating system, iOS, which is now used in other Apple products such as the iPad and Apple TV.

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From capacitive sensing to click-wheels As the pioneer of personal computers, Steve Jobs was on his second mission for re-revolutionizing them. His vision for Apple was to prepare the company for the post-computer era, in what he envisioned and often acknowledged in his interviews and media appearances as the new era of the consumer–computer relationship. During an interview at the 2010 D8 conference, Steve Jobs explained his vision of the future for computing by using the analogy of rapid urbanization and its effects on changing consumer views and the need for transportation (Jobs 2010). During his talk, Jobs redefined Apple’s overall strategy as building a family of products around the concept of fragmented computing needs by different uses.

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Besides the communication technologies (discussed in Chapter 4), the iPhone is smart because of features such as the Internet, GPS, a touch-screen display, and the latest new voice activated personal assistant (SIRI). While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has failed to make this fact more broadly known. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the epitome of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on (Mazzucato 2013b).

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The computer was almost surely an Alto and the principal demonstrators were Goldberg, Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and Diana Merry. Steve Jobs was initially skeptical of what PARC might have to offer but allowed his engineers to convince him otherwise. As for Jobs’s acuity, he later admitted that he was shown three mind-bending innovations at PARC, but the first one was so dazzling it blinded him to the significance of the second and third. Perhaps most important, the Steve Jobs demo was not a random event or a stroke of luck for Apple, as it has sometimes been portrayed. Apple’s engineers knew what they were after. They had taken great pains to plan for the moment, and they arrived at PARC fully prepared to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

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That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC’s front door. CHAPTER 23 Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell Thus we come to Steven P. Jobs. The Apple Computer cofounder’s visit to PARC, from which he reputedly spirited off the ideas that later made the Apple Macintosh famous, is one of the foundation legends of personal computing, as replete with drama and consequence as the story of David and Goliath or the fable of the mouse and the lion with an injured paw. It holds enough material to serve the mythmaking of not one corporation but two, Xerox and Apple. If one seeks proof of its importance, one need look no further than the fact that to this date no two people involved in the episode recollect it quite the same way.

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Because I was the only one there all the time!” Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple’s mythmaking rather than PARC’s. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs’s peerless perspicacity as Xerox’s obtuseness. The author who wrote, “You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery…the slickest trick of all was Apple’s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened. Yet it is possible to resolve all these accounts and reconstruct a story that has never before been told in its entirety.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

He has since founded Vatera Healthcare Partners, a health venture capital firm, and Arisaph Pharmaceuticals, a biotech discovery firm. Steve Jobs 1955–2011, United States Apple Computer, Pixar Jobs was a game designer at Atari when he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne launched Apple Computer in 1976 to market a personal computer Wozniak had invented. The first Apple PCs proved a huge success, but later products floundered. Infighting led to Jobs’s 1985 ouster. He founded NeXT Computer and bought the Pixar animation studio from George Lucas. Pixar’s 1995 IPO made Jobs a billionaire. Two years later, Apple bought NeXT and reinstated Jobs as CEO, ushering in an era of tremendous innovation and growth driven by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

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Compare Boone Pickens’s resiliency to the hesitancy that affected Ron Wayne, an original partner in Apple Computer. Wayne had started a slot machine business that failed, swallowing $50,000 of savings. After that failure he went to work at Atari, where he met Steve Jobs. When Jobs later asked Wayne to join Apple Computer as a third partner to balance and adjudicate between Jobs and the engineering wunderkind Steve Wozniak, Wayne was initially enthusiastic. But then it became clear that they were going to structure the nascent Apple Computer as a partnership. Wayne, who was significantly older than his partners, was worried about the personal liability he would incur if all the borrowing and spending Jobs was doing to manufacture the Apple I at volume did not pan out.

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Such acumen explains how Dietrich Mateschitz was able, as an unknown businessman, to persuade the young Formula 1 driver Gerhard Berger to walk around with a bottle of Red Bull in his hand without having an official endorsement contract. It explains how Steve Jobs—the same man who had been ousted ten years earlier—was able to persuade the leaders of Apple not only to buy NeXT, a company with little in the way of unique technology, but also to reinstate him as Apple’s CEO. And it offers some insight into the history of the Time Warner Center, the jewel in the crown of Stephen Ross’s Related Companies portfolio.14 Redevelopment projects require a strong, name-brand tenant to anchor the deal.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.” The hostility he created between the two groups, by lionizing the artists and belittling the soldiers, was so great that the street between their two buildings was known as the DMZ—the demilitarized zone. The hostility undermined both products. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability).

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A Forbes article stated, “There are very few miracle workers in the business world, and it is now clear that Steve Jobs is not one of them.” WHEN MOSES DOUBLES DOWN The facts of Jobs’s forced exit from Apple in 1985, and his path to the mess at NeXT, have been well laid out. In 1975, Steve Wozniak combined a microprocessor, keyboard, and screen into one of the earliest personal computers. Jobs convinced Wozniak to quit his job and start a company. After some initial success with their Apple I and II, however, competitors quickly passed Apple by. In 1980, Atari and Radio Shack (TRS-80) sold roughly seven times as many computers as Apple. By 1983, Commodore dominated the market, with the IBM PC, launched only two years earlier, a close second.

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The company translated that scientific and manufacturing expertise into products generating over $10 billion in annual sales. It did so, in large part, by balancing loonshots and franchises extraordinarily well. In April 2000, three years after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he invited Art Levinson to join his new board of directors. After Jobs passed away in 2011, Levinson replaced him as chairman of Apple. RESCUE OPERATIONS The well-told story of Jobs’s return to Apple and its subsequent rise to the most valuable company in the world is a remarkable example of nurturing loonshots, in a race against time, to rescue a franchise in crisis. But it should be, by now, a familiar example.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

We’d known from the outset that entering into a relationship with GM and Philips would likely put an end to our dream of making the first animated feature film, but that was a risk no matter who we joined up with: Each investor was going to have its own agenda, and that was the price of our survival. To this day, I am thankful that the deal went south. Because it paved the way for Steve Jobs. I first met Steve in February of 1985, when he was the director of Apple Computer, Inc. Our meeting had been arranged by Apple’s chief scientist, Alan Kay, who knew that Alvy and I were looking for investors to take our graphics division off George’s hands. Alan had been at the U of U with me and at Xerox PARC with Alvy, and he told Steve that he should visit us if he wanted to see the cutting edge in computer graphics.

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A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled—initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment—I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments. In the late 1980s, while we were building Pixar, Steve Jobs was spending most of his time trying to establish NeXT, the personal computer company he’d started after being forced out at Apple. He came to the Pixar offices only once a year—so rarely, in fact, that we had to give him directions each time so that he wouldn’t get lost. But I was a regular visitor to NeXT. Every few weeks, I’d head down to Steve’s office in Redwood City to brief him on our progress.

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Perhaps they thought that if they asked that question they would come up with something original, that they would remain true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. In fact, this kind of thinking only accomplished the opposite. Because it looked backward, not forward, it tethered the place to the status quo. A pervasive fear of change took root. Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?” No one—not Walt, not Steve, not the people of Pixar—ever achieved creative success by simply clinging to what used to work. When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

“I want to put a ding in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it. And that’s exactly what Apple does in the industries in which it competes. Apple is born out of its founders’ WHY. There is no difference between one or the other. Apple is just one of the WHATs to Jobs’s and Woz’s WHY. The personalities of Jobs and Apple are exactly the same. In fact, the personalities of all those who are viscerally drawn to Apple are similar. There is no difference between an Apple customer and an Apple employee. One believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to work for the company, and the other believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to buy its products.

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In 2003 and 2004, Apple ran a promotion for iTunes with Pepsi—the cola branded as “the choice of the next generation.” It made sense that Apple would do a deal with Pepsi, the primary challenger to Coca-Cola, the status quo. Everything Apple does, everything they say and do, serves as tangible proof of what they believe. The reason I use Apple so extensively throughout this book is that Apple is so disciplined in HOW they do things and so consistent in WHAT they do that, love them or hate them, we all have a sense of their WHY. We know what they believe. Most of us didn’t read books about them. We don’t personally know Steve Jobs. We haven’t spent time roaming the halls of Apple’s headquarters to get to know their culture.

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This is an issue that will have an exponential impact as time passes. Such a departure as Gates’s is not without precedent among companies with equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound. Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The top manager—the CEO—takes the widest perspective and the most long-range time frame. In Apple’s case, Steve Jobs would eventually come to play this role as well. Jobs had been forced to resign from the company he helped to create in 1985, but after a string of bad managers put Apple on the brink of bankruptcy, he returned to the company in 1997 and assumed the position, first, of interim CEO, and then of CEO. Many people at the time thought Apple was done for, its market share torn to shreds by Microsoft. Jobs disagreed. In Jobs’s view, Apple had been destroyed by its previous leaders’ “bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values” and abandoning its commitment to “making great products.”12 To save Apple, Jobs would enact vast changes on both fronts.

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Quoted in Sean Rossman, “Apple’s ‘The Woz’ Talks Jobs, Entrepreneurship,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 6, 2014, http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2014/11/05/apples-woz-talks-jobs-entrepreneurship/18561425/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 11. Quoted in Alec Hogg, “Apple’s ‘Other’ Steve—Wozniak on Jobs, Starting a Business, Changing the World, and Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish,” BizNews.com, February 17, 2014, http://www.biznews.com/video/2014/02/17/apples-other-steve-wozniak-on-jobs-starting-a-business-changing-the-world/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 12. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 295. 13.

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See Don Watkins, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2014), and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1992). Chapter 6 1. Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova, “CHART OF THE DAY: Apple’s Incredible Run under Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, August 25, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-market-cap-during-steve-jobs-tenure-2011-8 (accessed May 28, 2015). 2. JPL, “A Look at Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Market Returns from 1968–2007,” AllFinancialMatters.com, April 2, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080412003318/http://allfinancialmatters.com/2008/04/02/a-look-at-berkshire-hathaways-annual-market-returns-from-1968-2007/ (accessed May 28, 2015); “Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

He next became CEO of Intuit when Doerr suggested to founder Scott Cook that Campbell would be a great partner. Four years later, he moved up to chairman of the board. On the eve of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, he asked Campbell to join his board. Today Campbell serves as a mentor to some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Marc Andreessen to Steve Jobs, whom he walks and talks with most weekends in Palo Alto, where they are neighbors. He estimates that he spends about 10 percent of his time on Apple business, about 35 percent on Intuit business, an equal amount at Google, about 10 percent as chairman of the board of Columbia University, and the remainder on assorted activities.

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Campbell’s boldness appealed to the ever-rebellious Steve Jobs. The two men bonded. By 1984, said Campbell, “Sculley and Jobs were going at each other already.” Although Jobs had recruited Sculley to bring professional management to Apple, he came to think he was more interested in marketing, including marketing himself, than in Apple products; Sculley believed Jobs wanted an acolyte, not a CEO. Nevertheless, Campbell earned the rare distinction of being able to both befriend Jobs and command Sculley’s respect. Before Sculley succeeded in pushing Jobs out of Apple in 1985, Campbell warned him it would be a huge mistake.

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Neither Seidenberg nor representatives from AT&T or Nokia joined in Google’s November announcement of the first truly open mobile operating system. A traditional Google corporate ally, Steve Jobs, also did not join because Apple’s iPhone provides a mobile operating system, one less open than Google’s. This was a little clumsy, because half of Apple’s eight directors serve as Google directors or advisers, among them Eric Schmidt, Bill Campbell, and Al Gore. At Apple board meetings, Schmidt told me he now recused himself from mobile phone discussions. In the auction, that commenced in January, all bidders were instructed not to reveal their bids.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

By that day, it had already inspired more than 11,000 print articles and generated 69 million Google hits.7 No one understood consumers’ digital desires better than Steve Jobs. A generation earlier Apple’s elegant Macintosh took desktop computers mainstream. Six years before the iPhone launch, Apple reinvented the music business in the face of industry skepticism by making portable music easy and fun with the iPod digital music player and its iTunes online music service. Computer and music industry executives dismissed iTunes as a pipe dream. Record labels would not initially yield to Apple the right to control the online distribution of music purchases, but eventually relented.8 They were wrong. Apple offered a lifeline to a drowning business, and Jobs appealed personally to artists hurt by Internet music pirates, including Bob Dylan, who agreed to let iTunes prerelease his new album Modern Times.9 For the first time in thirty years, a Dylan album ranked number one on the Billboard chart.

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Rubin’s Dream touch-screen phone was moved into the fast lane.5 Fred Vogelstein summed up iPhone’s impact that day in his book Dogfight with a quote by Google engineer Chris DeSalvo: “We’re going to have to start over.” 6 Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw a TV report about Apple’s news. He soon forgot about exercise. There was Steve Jobs waving a small glass object, downloading music, videos, and maps from the Internet onto a phone. “How did they do that?” Lazaridis wondered. His curiosity turned to disbelief when Sigman took the stage to announce Cingular’s deal to sell Apple’s phone. What was its parent, AT&T, thinking? “It’s going to collapse the network,” he thought. The next day Lazaridis grabbed Balsillie at the office and pulled him in front of a computer.

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By early 2010, RIM had a plan to produce a tablet with a seven-inch-long screen—small enough to fit in a coat pocket or purse—with a high-quality, high-definition screen, a fast browser, a sharp camera, and great sound. The device would be called PlayBook. But Apple once again set the agenda when Steve Jobs unveiled its tablet in late January 2010. With its ten-inch multitouch screen, familiar features including iTunes, a full browser, and lots of apps, plus an electronic reader, all wrapped in an elegant and accessible design, the Apple iPad would become one of the fastest-selling electronic devices ever when it hit the market that April. One of the iPad’s strengths was that it looked like a larger iPod or iPhone, complete with the all-glass screen and a single home button, but it was better suited to applications that called for a larger screen, including games, watching movies, and reading.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37, no. 7 (1996). doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1996.tb01475.x. Lehman, C. “Interview with a Software Engineer.” Quillette.com. January 5, 2018. Leibowitz, G. “Steve Jobs Might Have Never Started Apple If He Didn’t Do This 1 Thing.” Inc., 2018. https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/in-a-rare-23-year-old-interview-steve-jobs-said-this-1-pivotal-experience-inspired-him-to-start-apple-computer.html/. Lesinski, J. M. Bill Gates: Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. Springfield, MO: Twenty-First Century Books, 2009. Lienhard, D. A. “Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments (1959–1968).”

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Cognition and Instruction 20, no. 1 (2002): 47–77. Kozhevnikov, M., et al. “Spatial versus Object Visualizers: A New Characterization of Visual Cognitive Style.” Memory and Cognition 33, no. 4 (2005): 710–26. Premier Composite Technologies, Dubai, Arab Emirates. Steve Jobs Theater Pavilion. http://www.pct.ae/steve-jobs-theater (accessed August 7, 2021). Sedak, Gersthofen, Germany. Apple Park, Cupertino, California, 2,500 glass units in facade. https://www.sedak.com/en/references/facades/ (accessed August 7, 2021). 1. WHAT IS VISUAL THINKING? Adolphs, R. The Neuroscience of Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

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“Academic Acceleration in Gifted Youth and Fruitless Concerns Regarding Psychological Well-Being: A 35-Year Longitudinal Study.” Journal of Educational Psychology (2020). https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Article-JEP-Bernstein-2020-F.pdf. Bianchini, R. “Apple iPhone Design—from the 1st Generation to the iPhone 12.” January 18, 2021. https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/apple-iphone-history-of-a-design-revolution/. Blume, H. “Neurodiversity: On the Neurobiological Underpinning of Geekdom.” Atlantic, September 1998. Blumenthal, K. Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2012. Bouchard, T. J., Jr., et al. “Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart.”

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

The Road Not Taken Donna Dubinsky was just shy of thirty, and it was the most hectic time of her life. As Apple’s distribution and sales manager in 1985, she was working virtually nonstop from morning until bedtime, maniacally focused on shipping computers to keep up with explosive demand. Suddenly, Steve Jobs proposed eliminating all six U.S. warehouses, dropping their inventory, and moving to a just-in-time production system in which computers would be assembled upon order and overnighted by FedEx. Dubinsky thought this was a colossal mistake, one that could put the company’s entire future in jeopardy. “In my mind, Apple being successful depended on distribution being successful,” she says.

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Washington, “Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 354–58. “Apple being successful depended on”: Personal interview with Donna Dubinsky, June 20, 2014; Todd D. Jick and Mary Gentile, “Donna Dubinsky and Apple Computer, Inc. (A),” Harvard Business School, Case 9-486-083, December 11, 1995. Jobs promoted every one of them: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). “Voice feeds” : Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it. Even then, Copernicus stalled for four more years. His magnum opus only saw the light of day after a young mathematics professor took matters into his own hands and submitted it for publication. Almost half a millennium later, when an angel investor offered $250,000 to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to bankroll Apple in 1977, it came with an ultimatum: Wozniak would have to leave Hewlett-Packard. He refused. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects. “My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company. Because I was just afraid,” he admits. Wozniak changed his mind only after being encouraged by Jobs, multiple friends, and his own parents.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

When originally completed, it served as a research and development center, but as Apple scaled down after Sculley left in 1993, it became a fortress for an increasingly besieged company. When Steve Jobs returned, first as “iCEO” in 1997, there were many noticeable changes including a dramatic improvement in the cafeteria food. The fine silver that had marked the executive suite during the brief era when semiconductor chief Gilbert Amelio ran the company also disappeared. As his health declined during a battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011, Steve Jobs came back for one last chapter at Apple. He had taken his third medical leave, but he was still the guiding force at the company.

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Instead, the Knowledge Navigator envisioned a natural conversation with an intelligent machine that both recognized and synthesized human speech. Brought to Apple as chief executive during the personal computing boom, Sculley started his tenure in 1983 with a well-chronicled romance with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs. Later, when the company’s growth stalled in the face of competition from IBM and others, Sculley fought Jobs for control of the company, and won. However, in 1986, Jobs launched a new computer company, NeXT. Jobs wanted to make beautiful workstations for college students and faculty researchers. That placed pressure on Sculley to demonstrate that Apple could still innovate without its original visionary.

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When word circulated that the firm had been acquired, possibly for more than $200 million, it sent shock waves up and down Sand Hill Road and within the burgeoning “app economy” that the iPhone had spawned. After Apple acquired Siri, the program was immediately pulled from the App Store, the iPhone service through which programs were screened and sold, and the small team of programmers who had designed Siri vanished back into “stealth mode” inside the Cupertino campus. The larger implications of the acquisition weren’t immediately obvious to many in the Valley, but as one of his last acts as the leader of Apple, Steve Jobs had paved the way for yet another dramatic shift in the way humans would interact with computers.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

We’ll examine both of these key moves in greater detail later in the book, with Facebook’s shift to mobile featured in our analysis of Facebook’s business model, and Facebook’s hiring of Sheryl Sandberg in the section on the key transition from contributors to managers to executives. Apple illustrates how this overlap looks over multiple decades. In its storied history, Apple went through complete scaling cycles for the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iMac, and the iPod (with the cycle for the iPhone still under way). It’s worth noting that Apple failed to launch any blitzscalable products after the Apple II and the Mac until Steve Jobs returned and launched the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. It was part of Steve’s rare genius that time and time again he was able to pick the right product for Apple to blitzscale, even without slowing down for a period of classic start-up growth to gather feedback from the market.

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If the company doesn’t realize the root cause, the most common (and unhelpful) response is to call for changing the CEO or the executive team—the VP of sales is particularly vulnerable because he or she often takes the blame for the slowdown—or both. How many times does replacing the CEO actually reignite massive growth? The only good example we can think of is what Steve Jobs did at Apple. So if you have a Steve Jobs waiting in the wings, go ahead and switch CEOs. Otherwise, it probably won’t help. Consider what happened to two blitzscalers who ran out of headroom—Groupon and Twitter. Groupon was one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, thanks to its leadership position in the rapidly-emerging daily deals market.

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Many of Google’s services are strong enough to succeed on their own, but this means that they are succeeding in spite of, rather than because of, multithreading. In contrast, Apple’s highly centralized approach allows it to produce highly integrated and polished products, but, as a result, it restricts itself to a much smaller product line. Of course, this is intentional; Steve Jobs always wanted to run as close to single-threaded as possible to maintain Apple’s unity of purpose. One of the first things Steve did when he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997 was to reduce the company’s product line from dozens to a simple two-by-two matrix: consumer desktop, pro desktop, consumer laptop, and pro laptop.

The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

For Jobs, any son of a bitch who charged him too much for a part or didn’t like him personally or who competed with Apple—that is, with Steve Jobs—deserved whatever evil befell him. This was a dumb strategy when Apple was small, and even dumber when it grew large. Luckily, Jobs’s subordinates knew better, and it became standard operating procedure to simply sneak in the back door contracts with his latest set of enemies in order to keep the assembly lines running. Meanwhile, as Jobs was undergoing the transition to adulthood, Apple continued to grow at a frantic pace. The finished Apple II was a magnificent machine. Inside was Wozniak’s masterful design, which required only 62 chips (compared with hundreds in other personal computers).

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Late one evening, after 20 hours of work, one executive turned to a poster on the wall showing a still from the now-famous Macintosh 1984 commercial and punched it down, yelling, “You want to know where Big Brother really is? It’s not at IBM. It’s right here.” Meanwhile, Steve Jobs smirked and relaxed by sticking his bare feet in a flushing company toilet. Yet Apple had become too big even for Steve Jobs to ruin. With Markkula, then Sculley, at the controls, presiding over a growing professional middle management, Apple grew up. Jobs aside, it became a good, solid place to work, with extended career paths and professionalism that instilled employee loyalty. There were no more Nights of the Long Knives and fewer mercurial, unpredictable bosses—except Jobs. Much of the funkiness and flash were gone, but so was the amateurishness and the risky company swings.

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At meetings they would begin talking to one another, ignoring everyone else, riffing off each other’s thoughts, anticipating the other’s ideas before they were said, speaking almost in a private language. Yet there were those Apple managers who looked in Sculley’s eyes and saw the shrewdest of businessmen, a chameleon with a color so pure that even Steve Jobs couldn’t see past it to the real John Sculley inside. Apple had at last become a serious company. But it was almost too late. 1983 was a watershed year in the personal computer market. Most of the computer companies on the market recognized the inevitable and offered IBM software-compatible equipment—except Apple. IBM further consolidated its control of the market with the PC and a more powerful version called the PCxt, which as good as obliterated the poor Apple III and stole the lower end of Lisa’s market.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

According to Wozniak, “We went to Commodore and talked primarily with Andre Sousan. Steve Jobs was trying to talk Commodore into buying the Apple II for a large amount, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. … Steve Jobs also wanted Commodore to hire us along with the proposed deal. The deal was never on paper and never concrete, as to how much.” “The discussions never got beyond a meeting with Jack and Steve,” says Peddle. “Jack’s view was that Steve wanted much too much for the company and in the fall of 1976 he was right. I remember him laughing about Steve Jobs and his view of his company’s position.” Tramiel was willing to purchase Apple, but he wanted the lowest price possible.

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Wozniak also created six expansion slots for his improved Apple. This brought it up to date with the functionality available to other computers, including the Altair and the KIM-4 expansion module. In October, Peddle approached Apple in the hopes of acquiring Wozniak’s technology. “We tried to get them to sell us the Apple … as the basis for our PET,” says Peddle. The person negotiating on behalf of Apple was Steve Jobs. The two partners came to Commodore headquarters with the intention of selling their fledgling company. “Andre sets up a meeting with Apple to have a discussion about how we could get to the CES show together,” recalls Peddle.

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In August 1978, Apple came to Peddle in search of a head engineer. “Jack * me up and Steve [Jobs] came to me with a great offer,” recalls Peddle. And what was the job offer? “To replace Woz and be the technical guru for the company.” Apple used everything in their power to lure Peddle. “I met with [Mike] Scott and Steve [Jobs],” says Peddle. “Basically the guys at Apple offered me a deal that would have made me one of the top five stockholders at Apple.” The offer was too attractive to decline. “I guess he’d just had it,” says Seiler. “He was always fighting with Jack Tramiel. There were always differences about how the business should be run. Jack was cheap.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

It did stick with me, however, that to take their show on the road, even a megabrand like McDonald’s can, on occasion, be forced to ‘think outside the bun’. APPLE SEEDS SALES Another brand that is anything but typical in its approach to every element of doing business is Apple. Steve Jobs’ fanaticism for product design and detail was (and still is) seamlessly visible all the way from technical form and function to packaging to the Apple Stores. And boy, has it ever paid off – there is nothing remotely ‘average’ about an Apple Store. I find the shopping experience there to be a disarming cross between visiting an art gallery and some form of an electronics exhibition that has been stripped of everything but the coolest and best the business has to offer.

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This means as few walls as possible – real and imaginary. It also calls for leaders that are out there getting their hands dirty every day. Steve Jobs put it perfectly when he said to his biographer Walter Isaacson, ‘Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’ MEET ME IN THE PIAZZA Collaboration should have been Steve Jobs’ middle name as he was forever going to amazing ends to foster it – and not just at Apple. When he created Pixar, home to Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and many other animated classics, he went to great lengths to make unplanned collaboration part of the company’s foundations – literally!

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A counterpoint to my friend Antonio’s story is that of Ronald Wayne. Wayne had worked alongside Steve Jobs at Atari and became one of the co-founders of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak. At forty years of age, Wayne was almost twice as old as his young co-founders and so he agreed to essentially act as the venture’s ‘adult supervisor’ in return for which he was given a ten per cent stake in the nascent company. Among other things Wayne drew up the partnership agreement between the three, drafted the first company logo and wrote the Apple 1 manual. For a variety of reasons, however, Wayne just didn’t feel comfortable that things were going to work out – he also didn’t particularly enjoy working with Jobs – and so after only a couple of months Wayne called it quits and relinquished his stock in the company for a one-time pay-out of $800.

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, death from overwork, fixed-gear, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, Skype, Steve Jobs

Minimalism imported back to Japan The American company Apple has an intriguing connection to the minimalist culture of Japan. Many minimalists are fond of Apple products and of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. The products that Jobs created always avoided excess. The iPhone only has one button, and you don’t have to worry about being stuck with a lot of extra wires and ports when you buy a Mac. Apple products generally don’t include operating manuals. I think this is all due to the fact that Jobs had been a minimalist, and he was known to be a believer in Japanese Zen, which teaches minimalism. It’s quite well-known that Steve Jobs considered Master Kobun Otogawa of the Soto school his master and had at one point seriously considered studying Zen at the temple Eiheiji, located deep in the mountains on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

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To him, scoring is his top priority. He’s reduced everything else to save his energy and focus on what’s truly important: those crucial opportunities to score. Steve Jobs, the perfect minimalist Steve Jobs was not a minimalist simply because he always wore the same thing and removed excess from his products. Minimalism really did guide almost everything he did. The first thing that Jobs is said to have done after making his comeback to Apple was to donate old documents and machines that were almost covered by cobwebs to a museum. He started out by parting with material objects. He wanted to focus on producing products that would change the world, so he got rid of everything else that wasn’t important.

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Those at Toppan Printing who printed this book, everyone at National Bookbinding who put this work together, those of you at ALEX Corporation who handled the desktop publishing, the people at Tokyo Shuppan Service Center who were responsible for the proofreading, and the people at Taiyo Shoji for always transporting our heavy loads of books—thank you all very much. And last but not least, many thanks to the people who serve as our agents and those of you at the wonderful bookstores. I hope you’ll continue to offer this book to our readers. I’d also like to thank Steve Jobs and Apple. It’s because of the iPhone and MacBook Air, two truly minimalist products that Mr. Jobs introduced to the world, that I’ve been able to say goodbye to so many of my material possessions, while also being able to write at any location. It’s thanks to Microsoft Word that I was able to write this.

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Here are five businesses that, in at least one area, understood the importance of developers and engaged appropriately. Apple In August 2011, a month after reporting record earnings, Apple surpassed Exxon as the world’s biggest company by market capitalization. This benchmark was reached in part because of fluctuations in oil price that affected Exxon’s valuation, but there’s little debate that Apple is ascendant. By virtually any metric, Steve Jobs’s second tenure at Apple has turned into one of the most successful in history, in any industry. Seamlessly moving from hit product to hit product, the Apple of 2012 looks nothing like the Apple of the late nineties, when Dell CEO Michael Dell famously suggested that Apple should be shut down, to “give the money back to the shareholders.”

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Even its forgotten desktop business is showing steady if unspectacular growth. There are many factors contributing to Apple’s remarkable success, from the brilliance of the late Steve Jobs to the supply chain sophistication of current CEO Tim Cook. And of course, Apple’s success is itself fueling more success. In the tablet market, for example, would-be competitors face not only the daunting task of countering Apple’s unparalleled hardware and software design abilities, but the economies of scale that allow Apple to buy components more cheaply than anyone else. The perfect storm of Apple’s success is such that some analysts are forecasting that it could become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

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What led 42Floors to this decision? In their own words, “The very best can’t be hired. They must be courted.” For perhaps the first time in the history of the industry, people are worth more than the code they produce, a valuation supported by logic. Steve Jobs believed that an elite talent was 25 times more valuable to Apple than an average alternative. For Jobs, this was critical to Apple’s resurgence: That’s probably…certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, saying in a 2010 interview: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

He sagely recommended to the board members that they stick with their founder. Galli says that the final decision to leave Amazon was his own. Before he joined the company, he had read the book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley, who had joined Apple as CEO in the mid-1980s and then ousted Steve Jobs in a boardroom coup. “Before I went out there, I promised myself and my family that I would never do to Jeff what Sculley did to Steve Jobs,” Galli says. “I just felt like Jeff was falling in love more and more with his vision and what the company could be. I could anticipate it was not going to work. He wanted to have a more hands-on role.

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Over his years at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs usually reviled those former colleagues who had defected from his company and abandoned its righteous mission. Though Diego Piacentini left Apple for a startup that Jobs had incredulously dismissed as just a retailer, the two remained unusually cordial, perhaps because Piacentini had given Apple six months to find his replacement as head of European operations. Jobs would occasionally contact Piacentini when he needed something from Amazon, and in early 2003, Piacentini e-mailed his former boss with a request of his own. Amazon wanted to make Apple a proposal. Piacentini brought Neil Roseman and H.

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I had to roll up my sleeves and start all over again.” He’s now a life coach living in Barcelona, Spain. Diego Piacentini, a new executive from Apple, was thrust directly into the mess. Bezos hired the suave, Italian-born Piacentini in early 2000 to take the top spot running Amazon’s international operations. Piacentini’s old boss Steve Jobs had expressed incredulity at the move in his typically strident way. Over lunch in the Apple cafeteria in Cupertino, Jobs asked Piacentini why he would possibly want to go to a boring retailer when Apple was in the process of reinventing computing. Then in the same breath, Jobs suggested that maybe the career move revealed that Piacentini was so dumb that it was a good thing he was leaving Apple.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The fertility of the network was illustrated by the story of Apple, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. On the face of it, Apple was an obvious candidate for venture investment, because scores of insiders already understood that the personal computer would be the next big thing in technology. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, had recognized the PC as “an idea whose time has arrived” and had produced a prototype complete with mouse and graphical interface. Intel and National Semiconductor had considered making a PC, and Steve Wozniak had twice offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard.[1] But all four companies had decided not to build a PC, inhibited by what the business thinker Clayton Christensen termed the “innovator’s dilemma.”

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All four companies had too much of a stake in the status quo to risk disrupting it. A startup that filled the resulting vacuum looked like an obvious bet for venture capitalists. And yet when Apple set out to raise money, the stars in the venture-capital firmament failed to recognize the opportunity, proving that even the most brilliant VCs are capable of costly errors. Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner refused even to meet with Steve Jobs. Bill Draper of Sutter Hill sent an associate to visit Apple, and when the associate reported that Jobs and Wozniak had kept him waiting, Draper wrote them off as arrogant.[2] Meanwhile, Draper’s old SBIC partner, Pitch Johnson, wondered, “How can you use a computer at home?

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At a telling point in their courtship, Yang asked Moritz if the company should change its name, maybe to something more serious. Moritz retorted that if Yang did that, Sequoia would not back him.[10] Moreover, Moritz had a rationale for his retort—one that Yang himself had never thought of. In his years as a journalist, Moritz had written a perceptive book about Steve Jobs. Now he insisted that Yahoo was that precious thing, an inspired and memorable company name. Like Apple.[11] Whether by instinct or cunning, Moritz had given the perfect clincher of an answer. Because he understood Jobs as well as anybody in the Valley, he had the credibility to imply a connection between two unknown grad students and a storied Silicon Valley legend.

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy

Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator

There is no better example of a company that enjoys a heavier advantage thanks to its design than Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs – upon returning to the company after a 12-year absence – discovered the under-appreciated design laboratory of Jonathan Ives. Since then, Apple has released innovative products with great design time and time again, enjoying tremendous success. It’s grown to be the largest tech company in the world, at as much as 100 times its own size in 1997. Apple has accomplished this success by releasing one great product after another, but it owes its growth to one product above all others: the iPod. Before the iPod, contact with the elegance of Apple’s design was reserved for its relatively small group of extremely dedicated followers.

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Since Microsoft Office was such a dominant software program, so important to doing business, getting people to switch to a Mac was nearly impossible. So, Apple went for a more emotional point by attacking music. “Music is a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music has been around forever. It will always be around,” Steve Jobs said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. People had been listening to music on their computers for a few years at that time, but the portable digital player market was just emerging. Many of the players that were on the market at the time of the iPod’s introduction were bulky, difficult to transfer music to, and had interfaces that were “unbelievably awful,” as Steve Jobs put it. Apple had an opportunity to get one of its products into the hands of consumers more easily than it could a personal computer, and it seized that opportunity with the iPod.

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Gastev (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/) The height of Roman typography The influence of the brush even found its way into lettering carved in marble, such as in the base of Trajan’s Column, which is considered the height of Roman typography. Though there is subtlety in the lettering that, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said of calligraphy, is “beautiful in a way that science can’t capture,” the general “skeleton” of the letters is based upon the square, the triangle, and the circle (see Figure 3-14). Figure 3-14 The theoretical underpinnings of Roman capitals: the square, the circle, and the triangle.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

The tech blogs, now believing that Jack had founded and built Twitter on his own, that he had come up with the idea when he was just a child—which Jack insinuated to dozens of media outlets—and that he possessed the same principles as Jobs in both design and management, started asking: “Is Jack Dorsey the next Steve Jobs?” (They inevitably answered: “Yes.”) It wasn’t a grand master plan by Jack to copy Jobs. Rather it was dozens of little plans that added up to a re-creation. In many respects it was Steve Jobs who helped create Jack Dorsey. Jobs was notorious for denying access to reporters. He had trained the media to behave exactly how he wanted them to—when he spoke, they listened, which was his best magic trick of all. So when he took a leave from Apple after falling ill in 2009, the media went in search of the next Steve Jobs. Jack walked like that duck, used the same quotes as that duck, wore the same glasses, had the same principles, and the same astounding theories on design as that duck.

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Everyone else, now seated, started giggling at them. But worse than the anarchy inside was the fact that Apple Computer had recently torn a hole in the hull of the company. On a Tuesday morning several months earlier, Odeo employees had gathered around their computers to watch Steve Jobs, the venerable CEO of Apple, announce the latest iPod. But stunned silence had enveloped them when Jobs declared that Apple was adding podcasts to iTunes. At the end of the announcements, the tech giant sent a brief press release across the news wires with the ominous headline, APPLE TAKES PODCASTING MAINSTREAM. In that brief moment podcasting, which had been the entire company thesis for Odeo, had become a simple add-on for Apple.

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He referred to “rounding the edges” in design meetings, a term Jobs began using in 1981 when he designed the Macintosh operation system. He set up the same weekly schedule for product meetings at Square that Jobs had commanded at Apple. And he started using Jobs quotes in his own speeches. Then Jack started hiring former Apple employees at Square. But their interviews were different from those of other candidates. “Did you have the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs?” Jack would ask. “Can you tell me a little about his management style?” During discussions with former Apple employees who had been hired at Square, Jack heard that Jobs didn’t consider himself a CEO but rather an “editor.” At some point Jack started referring to himself as “the editor, not just the CEO” of Square.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Campbell, “Rainbow Makers,” Chemistry World, June 1, 2003. 3. APPLE ENVY In January of that year: John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, January 9, 2007. One of them was Ana Arriola: Ana used to be a man named George. She transitioned from male to female after she worked at Theranos. “We have lost sight of our business objective”: Email with the subject line “IT” sent by Justin Maxwell to Ana Arriola in the early morning hours of September 20, 2007. Avie was one of Steve Jobs’s oldest: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 259, 300, 308.

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Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it.

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The lawyers weren’t of much help when he asked them, so he looked up Food and Drug Administration regulations on his own and decided that a “for research use only” sticker was probably the most appropriate. This was not a finished product and no one should be under the impression that it was, Tony thought. | THREE | Apple Envy For a young entrepreneur building a business in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was hard to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs. By 2007, Apple’s founder had cemented his legend in the technology world and in American society at large by bringing the computer maker back from the ashes with the iMac, the iPod, and the iTunes music store. In January of that year, he unveiled his latest and biggest stroke of genius, the iPhone, before a rapturous audience at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

CNET.com, July 12, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-943519.xhtml. 210 iPod, boasting 100 million customers: Steven Levy, “Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone,” Newsweek, July 16, 2007. 210 Apple’s stock shot up 44 percent: Matt Krantz, “iPhone Powers up Apple’s Shares,” USA Today, June 28, 2007. 211 “four times the number of PCs that ship every year”: Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out.” 211 Ericsson released the R380: Dave Conabree, “Ericsson Introduces the New R380e,” Mobile Magazine, September 25, 2001. 211 Palm followed up with its version: Sascha Segan, “Kyocera Launches First Smartphone in Years,” PC Magazine, March 23, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361664,00.asp#fbid=C81SVwKJIvh. 211 “one more entrant into an already very busy space”: “RIM Co-CEO Doesn’t See Threat from Apple’s iPhone,” InformationWeek, February 12, 2007. 212 the phone was exclusively available from only one carrier: In a handful of markets regulators ruled the exclusivity arrangement illegal. 212 “The bigger problem is the AT&T network”: David Pogue, “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 212 priced at a mere $99 in 2007: Kim Hart, “Rivals Ready for iPhone’s Entrance; Pricey Gadget May Alter Wireless Field,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007. 212 “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software”: Apple, press release, September 24, 2007. 213 “I say I like our strategy”: Steve Ballmer interviewed on CNBC, January 17, 2007. 213 They ran out of the older model six weeks before the July 2008 launch: Tom Krazit, “The iPhone, One Year Later,” CNET.com, June 26, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9977572-37.xhtml. 213 60 percent went to buyers who already owned at least one iPod: Apple COO Tim Cook’s comments at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, cited in JPMorgan analyst report, “Strolling Through the Apple Orchard: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Scenarios,” March 4, 2008. 215 the average iPhone user paid AT&T $2,000: Jenna Wortham, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” New York Times, September 2, 2009. 215 as high as $18 per user per month: Tom Krazit, “Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 per iPhone, Per Month,” CNET.com, October 24, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.xhtml. 216 Apple announced its 10 billionth app download: Apple.com, “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” February 25, 2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.xhtml. Accessed October 20, 2011. 219 financial analysts, technology blogs, and the mainstream media were already obsessed: James Quinn, “Apple’s ‘Tablet’ to rival Amazon’s Kindle,” Daily Telegraph (London), May 22, 2009. 219 “Apple’s latest billion-dollar jackpot”: David Smith, “Steve Jobs’ New Trick: The Apple Tablet,” Observer, August 23, 2009. 219 “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet”: Nick Bilton, “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet,” New York Times, December 28, 2009. 219 “already 75 million people who know how to use this”: Joshua Topolosky, “Live from the Apple ‘Latest Creation’ Event,” Engadget.com, January 27, 2010. 219 all committed to providing books for the device: Ibid. 219 daily version of the paper specially tailored for iPad users: Andy Brett, “The New York Times Introduces an iPad App,” TechCrunch, April 1, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/new-york-times-ipad/.

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The iPod Wins, Three Years Late The MP3 player market did eventually consolidate around a dominant product, Apple’s iPod. But the iPod, launched in late 2001—three years after the MPMan—was anything but a first mover. How can we understand the iPod’s success despite its delayed entry? In 1997, the late Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company he had co-founded as a college dropout, as interim CEO. As the Internet bubble grew, Apple was hungry for growth. Only a sliver of computer users had embraced its Mac offering. In 2001, Jobs noted: “Apple has about 5 percent market share today. Most of the other 95 percent of computer buyers don’t even consider us.”

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But its approach is timeless. iPod: Staged Expansion While the 1990s were rocky for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in the new century it seemed he could do no wrong. In chapter 6 we saw how Jobs constructed the iPod ecosystem. For his minimum viable ecosystem he carried over two elements from the Macintosh world—the Apple Store and the iTunes music management software—and waited for the other key elements—broadband and content—to arrive before he introduced his MP3 player into the marketplace. In 2001, the iPod player was rolled out. The MVE was in place. Apple’s first expansion of the iPod ecosystem came with the rollout of the iTunes music store in 2003, which offered consumers an easy way to purchase legal digital music.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

It had been eight years since Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs had tantalizingly hinted that Apple would do for television what it had done for computers, music players, and phones—make them simple and elegant. Jobs said his television would render complex remote controls obsolete. The yearned-for Apple TV set never materialized, although a prototype existed in Apple’s labs. The ailing Jobs would meet with executives in his Palo Alto home and discuss his vision for a television that could be controlled through voice and touch, said one former Apple executive. Internal design teams worked through various prototypes that would deliver on Jobs’s ambition to create a simplified TV interface.

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Building the audience into a state of frenzied anticipation, the Apple cofounder would culminate with the day’s big product news, casually underselling it as just “one more thing.” The days of Steve Jobs’s euphoric introductions of Apple’s “insanely great” creations were gone. Instead of chasing “the new hotness,” Cook favored iterating on the Apple TV set-top box the company had unveiled in 2006, betting that the comparatively inexpensive product could find its way into consumers’ living rooms. Launching a physical product is one thing. Bringing to life a rumored subscription video streaming service is another matter. It would fit neatly with Apple’s burgeoning, multibillion-dollar services business, which by March 2019 had brought in more revenue than sales of Mac computers and iPads combined.

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Chapter 15: “If You Want to Grab People’s Attention, You Have to Tease” Chapter 16: The IQ Test Part IV: The Incumbent Responds Chapter 17: Netflix Bets on Itself Part V: Meeting the Public Chapter 18: Liftoff Chapter 19: In Space, No One Can Hear You Stream Part VI: Navigating the Recovery Chapter 20: To Everything (Churn, Churn, Churn) Chapter 21: Amazon on the March Chapter 22: Paciencia y Fe Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Streamatis Personae Amazon Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman, former CEO Andy Jassy, CEO Mike Hopkins, senior vice president, Prime Video and Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios Albert Cheng, chief operating officer, co-head of television Roy Price, former head of global video content and Amazon Studios Bob Berney, former head of marketing and distribution, Amazon Studios Apple Steve Jobs, late cofounder and CEO Tim Cook, CEO Zack Van Amburg, co-head of Apple TV+ Jamie Erlicht, co-head of Apple TV+ Eddy Cue, senior vice president, internet software and services AT&T/WarnerMedia Randall Stephenson, former CEO, AT&T John Stankey, CEO, AT&T; former CEO, WarnerMedia Jason Kilar, CEO, WarnerMedia Andy Forssell, executive vice president and general manager, WarnerMedia direct-to-consumer Bob Greenblatt, former chairman, WarnerMedia Kevin Reilly, former chief content officer, HBO Max Jeremy Legg, former chief technology officer, WarnerMedia Richard Plepler, former chairman and CEO, HBO Comcast/NBCUniversal Brian Roberts, CEO, Comcast Steve Burke, former CEO, NBCUniversal Bonnie Hammer, vice chairman, NBCUniversal Matt Strauss, chairman, direct-to-consumer and international Jeff Shell, CEO, NBCUniversal Netflix Reed Hastings, cofounder, co-CEO Marc Randolph, cofounder, former CEO Ted Sarandos, co-CEO Cindy Holland, former vice president, content acquisition and original series Bela Bajaria, vice president, content Scott Stuber, vice president, original films Neil Hunt, former chief product officer Patty McCord, former head of HR Quibi Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder Meg Whitman, CEO Roku Anthony Wood, founder, CEO Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president, platform business The Walt Disney Co.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers

business process, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect. Then out came Steve Jobs. Whoa! Wow. He was in full persuasive presentation mode—trying to convince all of us to give Apple our entire catalog of music, talking about iTunes’ success so far, and all the reasons we should work with Apple. He made a point of saying, “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.” This was huge to me, because until 2003, independent musicians were always denied access to the big outlets. For Apple to sell all music, not just music from artists who had signed their rights away to a corporation—this was amazing!

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But there was one problem. iTunes wasn’t getting back to us. Yahoo!, Rhapsody, Napster, and the rest were all up and running. But iTunes wasn’t returning our signed contract. Was it because I had posted my meeting notes? Had I pissed off Steve Jobs? Nobody at Apple would say anything. It had been months. My musicians were getting impatient and angry. I gave optimistic apologies, but I was starting to get worried, too. A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs, while Rhapsody and Napster had more than 2 million songs.

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When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line. The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby’s catalog into the iTunes Music Store. iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the major labels. Many of us in the music biz—especially those who had seen companies like eMusic use this exact same model for years without much success—were not sure this idea was going to work. I flew to Cupertino, California, thinking I’d be meeting with one of Apple’s marketing or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people from small record labels and distributors had also been invited.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

See Jay Yarow, “Google Is Reportedly Trying to Get a Bigger Slice of Android App Revenue,” Business Insider, June 28, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/google-play-store-revenue-2013-6; Vogelstein, Dogfight, 121. 42. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 500–502. 43. Arnold Kim, “Steve Jobs Announces Third Party SDK for iPhone for February 2008,” MacRumors, October 17, 2007, http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/17/steve-jobs-announces-3rd-party-sdk-for-iphone-for-february-2008/; Apple Hot News (archived October 18, 2007), “Third Party Applications on the iPhone,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071018221832/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/. 44. Nielsen Informate, “International Smartphone Mobility Report,” March 2015, http://informatemi.com/final_download_report.php?

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He couldn’t get the company to approve a mobile phone app because it would cannibalize its thirty-year-old legacy technology.25 The Symbian experience showed Apple and Google that just starting a two-sided platform and securing customers on both sides wouldn’t be enough. The platform would also have to nurture a healthy ecosystem around it. Symbian couldn’t do that. If anything, Symbian contributed to making its ecosystem more dysfunctional. In 2005, when Apple and Google started looking into how to reduce the frictions in the mobile phone business, it wasn’t obvious what sort of platform they should build or how they should go about nurturing a healthy ecosystem around it. Maybe One Side Is Enough Steve Jobs, having created a highly successful music business around the iPod, was worried: “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.”26 People wouldn’t need iPods if handset makers built music players into them.

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Since AT&T’s share of US mobile connections in the second quarter of 2007 was only 26.2 percent, the iPhone wasn’t available to 73.8 percent of subscribers unless they switched carriers.32 The iPhone was thus a single-sided business when Apple made the first iPhone available on June 29, 2007. Apple made the handset, the operating system, and most of the apps. It just needed to get the subscribers of the mobile carriers, the ones it did exclusive deals with, to buy its new phone. Herding Cats Larry Page was as worried about the mobile phone as Steve Jobs, but for a different reason.33 Google made its money serving ads on the web that people accessed from desktop computers. With the explosion in mobile devices, Page thought it was clear that most people were eventually going to move from fixed to mobile devices.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Even in open environments, remember that headphones are the new DO NOT DISTURB sign. Lesson #3—Create more collisions. Apple’s new campus (which is due to be completed in 2016) will cover close to three million square feet and hold up to thirteen thousand Apple employees. The headquarters (based in Cupertino, California) will also house its own power plant and over six thousand trees. The design has been called a “spaceship,” and reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson tells us there’s a powerful reason for its circular shape: Steve Jobs loved moments of collision. The biography tells the tale of Pixar’s headquarters where the bathrooms were something of a hike for the majority of employees.

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And what this data indicates is that the one-screen world is not a possible trend but an inevitability that has already taken place, and that the growth continues at an exponential pace. When Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 7, 2012, many people were waiting to see both how Cook would handle the first major release from Apple in a post–Steve Jobs world and what the rumored iPad would be capable of, as the iPad 2 was still selling well. Beyond a smooth performance and a new iPad that featured Retina Display with a faster computer processor (dual-core A5X processor with quad-core graphics, thank you very much), few picked up on the staggering data point that Cook enlightened us all with. Apple sold over fifteen million iPads in the first quarter of 2012.

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In it, author Henry Bloget reported that two-thirds of Apple’s revenue came from products that were invented from 2007 onward. One of the most memorable lines out of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was this quote: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” The question becomes this: Is there a critical path or road map for the rest of us? Is it really possible for the rest of us to be as innovative and risk-taking as Apple? If it were possible, then Apple would not seem to be so different, brave, and bold. That being said, there are some common threads that weave through the most entrepreneurial individuals and organizations. For some this involves their ability to embrace new business models; for others it’s the ability to respect the business owners that they have become, while still embracing their internal entrepreneurs (and letting that mindset roam free).

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Branding A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly. Today’s strongest tech brand is Apple: the attractive looks and carefully chosen materials of products like the iPhone and MacBook, the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own. Many have tried to learn from Apple’s success: paid advertising, branded stores, luxurious materials, playful keynote speeches, high prices, and even minimalist design are all susceptible to imitation.

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But by then Gates’s enemies had already deprived his company of the full engagement of its founder, and Microsoft entered an era of relative stagnation. Today Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist. THE RETURN OF THE KING Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates’s dominance, Steve Jobs’s return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company’s founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

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Grossman and David Gahr/Getty Images 14.5: Jim Morrison, Elektra Records and CBS via Getty Images 14.5: Kurt Cobain, Frank Micelotta/Stringer/Getty Images 14.5: Amy Winehouse, flickr user teakwood, used under CC BY-SA 14.6: Howard Hughes, Bettmann/CORBIS 14.6: magazine cover, TIME, a division of Time Inc. 14.7: Bill Gates, Doug Wilson/CORBIS 14.7: magazine cover, Newsweek 14.8: Steve Jobs, 1984, Norman Seeff 14.8: Steve Jobs, 2004, Contour by Getty Images Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abound Solar Accenture advertising, 3.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 Afghanistan Airbnb airline industry Allen, Paul Amazon, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 12.1 Amundsen, Roald Andreessen, Horowitz Andreessen, Marc Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) antitrust Apollo Program Apple, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 14.1 branding of monopoly profits of Aristotle Army Corps of Engineers AT&T Aztecs Baby Boomers Bacon, Francis Bangladesh Barnes & Noble Beijing Bell Labs Berlin Wall Better Place Bezos, Jeff, 5.1, 6.1 big data Bill of Rights, U.S.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

Rule #1 is dedicated to laying out my argument against passion, as this insight—that “follow your passion” is bad advice—provides the foundation for everything that follows. Perhaps the best place to start is where we began, with the real story of Steve Jobs and the founding of Apple Computer. Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said If you had met a young Steve Jobs in the years leading up to his founding of Apple Computer, you wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who was passionate about starting a technology company. Jobs had attended Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts enclave in Oregon, where he grew his hair long and took to walking barefoot.

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Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, “Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.” The Messy Lessons of Jobs I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break—a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.

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In Rule #1, I provided several examples of people who had great jobs and love (or loved) what they do—so we can draw from there. Among others, I introduced Apple founder Steve Jobs, radio host Ira Glass, and master surfboard shaper Al Merrick. Using this trio as our running example, I can now ask what it is specifically about these three careers that makes them so compelling? Here are the answers that I came up with: TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

And to have strategic insights. Steve Jobs was famous for not worrying much about Apple’s stock price. How did Steve Jobs manage Apple? He was not an engineer himself, yet he guided Apple into being one of the great engineering companies, in the true sense of what it means to “engineer.” Competitors raced to be first to market or to include the most features in their products, but they tended to create products that were clunky and awkward in comparison to Apple’s. Many people and companies want to emulate Apple and study what the company has done. In trying to learn from Steve Jobs’s Apple, it is useful to pay attention to what he did not do.

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Luckily, I was able to watch and learn something from leaders who were skilled strategists: • like Pierre Wack, the legendary head of strategy at Shell, who taught me to see the correlations among the elements of a situation and to be alert for whipsaws as trends overshoot and rebound • like Steve Jobs of Apple, whose brutal honesty let him cut through layers of baloney and grab the crux of a situation (and annoy many people around him) • like Andy Marshall (Office of Net Assessment/Department of Defense) who had a fine instinct for defining the competition at just the right level to change the conversation for the better (his paper on redefining the Cold War situation as a long-term competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was pivotal in moving US policy makers away from an armaments view to one that encompassed economic and social dimensions) • like Andy Bryant, the board chair of Intel who understood how size and complexity can compete with having the technological edge • like Simon Galbraith of Redgate Software, whose natural talent for diagnosis led him to a canvas larger than a single business These general managers, and others, did things differently, and, over time, I began to get a feel for the broad outlines of that difference.

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Amazon began to greatly improve its logistics system and offered the Marketplace sellers use of its warehouse and shipping services. It was an offer of marriage most could not refuse. And its continued expansion into more and more products countered threats from almost all suppliers. Another case of seeing the crux was Apple management realizing that Steve Jobs’s devotion to doing everything in-house was in stark conflict with the concept of an app store. They began to realize that opening up the iPhone’s app store to outside programmers would produce enormous competition among app makers, driving down their prices, increasing their quality through comparison, and thereby increasing the value of each iPhone.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

No to P2P; yes to i. Along with John Ashcroft, Steve Jobs helped lead America’s B2K transition, and the internet has not changed back. The connection between Steve Jobs and Apple’s customer base is intense and bizarre, but it’s at most half the story: DESIGNED BY APPLE IN CALIFORNIA reads the most common label on the company’s products, followed by ASSEMBLED IN CHINA. Behind Apple’s success was another world-historical phenomenon: the rise of Chinese high-tech manufacturing. In 1998, Jobs hired a VP from leading compatibles producer Compaq named Tim Cook to build Apple’s offshore manufacturing relationships.

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Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 90. 47. Walter Frick and Scott Berinato, “Apple: Luxury Brand or Mass Marketer?” Harvard Business Review, October 2, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/10/apple-luxury-brand-or-mass-marketer. 48. Dawn Kawamoto, “Apple Acquires Next, Jobs,” CNET, December 20, 1996, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-acquires-next-jobs. 49. Alvy Ray Smith, A Biography of the Pixel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 429. PARC star and Pixar leader Smith left a few years before the IPO. As to why, he recalls, “I had to get Steve Jobs out of my life.”

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This was the context for the 1979 show-and-tell between PARC and Apple that led to the Mac. The meetings were a condition Steve Jobs placed on a million-dollar investment from Xerox. A chance to buy 100,000 big shares of Apple at $10.50 was, in retrospect, quite the opportunity, but that wasn’t what the copier company was really after.10 The investment was a way for the bigger firm to secure a stake in what it hoped would be a contract manufacturer for the retail Alto. It wasn’t a crazy idea; Warner-owned Atari was making an unsuccessful pitch to IBM for the privilege of building a Blue microcomputer at the same time. Apple, however, had other plans, and Jobs was up front (if bratty), telling the PARC team that he had no intention of building the Xerox machine.

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds

death from overwork, deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, mirror neurons, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

Conversations, after all, are not one way. Admitting that it is a bit of a generalization, Sierra says, “If you’re using formal language in a lecture, learning book (or marketing message, for that Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 147 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Presentation Tips from a Steve Jobs Keynote Apple’s Steve Jobs is a good example of someone who presents with the help of multimedia in an engaging style. It’s true that he has great products to talk about, but he is also incredibly skilled at presenting those products. Great content is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. Jobs has both solid content and excellent delivery skills.

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If we are not vehemently devoted to avoiding cognitive overload, we may end up preventing learning. Chapter 2 First Things First: Preparation 37 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Know your audience When I was working at Apple in Cupertino, California, I received an email forwarded from Steve Jobs’s office. The email was from the leader of a user group whose organization had received a presentation from one of Apple’s field engineers the day before. The user group leader was not happy with the presentation and decided to let the CEO of the firm know of his displeasure. My job was to investigate the problem and smooth things over with the user group.

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Nonetheless, I set up the equipment as planned. I mingled around and talked to many members before the presentation. They were gracious hosts, a common characteristic of Apple user groups. During this time I realized that my prepared talk—as good as I thought it was—was not going to be a good fit for this particular group. I was disappointed, but was determined to push ahead with my presentation. After all, I was from Apple and people expect a kind of “mini-me” version of a Steve Jobs presentation, don’t they? Still, somehow the projector-and-computer accompaniment did not feel right for the context. Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 141 Wow!

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

It’s still a data problem, just an inverse one. What makes someone creative is the ability to recognise that they are on the right lines with a certain idea. Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs described innovation as the ability to say no to 1,000 possible ideas. ‘You have to pick carefully,’ he said. ‘I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.’ Steve Jobs eventually led Apple to create iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, but before he did this he said no to dozens of other products the company had been working on in his absence. Fortunately, machines are getting better at this task, too.

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It could, for instance, pull concert data from StubHub, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp, and order taxis through TaxiMagic. In April 2010, Apple acquired the company for an amount reported to be around $200 million. Under the guidance of Steve Jobs (one of the last projects he was heavily involved with before stepping down as Apple’s CEO as his health worsened), several modifications were made to Siri. Much as Apple had done thirty years earlier with its graphical user interface, Jobs played up the friendliness and accessibility of the AI assistant. He insisted on giving it spoken responses – which the original Siri app had not had – and got rid of the ability to type requests as well as just ask them, so as not to complicate the experience of using it.

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In all their ‘bigger, taller, heavier’ grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer-driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that. As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.” Apple visit “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter,” Musk tweeted at the end of November. “Do they hate free speech in America?” That evening, Musk had one of his regular long phone conversations with his mentor and investor Larry Ellison, who was then living mainly on Lanai, the island he owned in Hawaii. Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available in the iPhone’s App Store.

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“He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.” * * * When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?

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“The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says. This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.” Friendly design There was another principle that came out of Apple’s design studio. When Jony Ive conceived the candy-colored, friendly iMac in 1998, he included a recessed handle.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

The interface, which depicted green leaves sprouting when drivers went easy on the gas and brakes, provided positive, emotional reinforcement of environmentally friendly driving practices—an early attempt to fuse user-friendly design and sustainability. 2007: IPHONE MULTI-TOUCH SCREEN, Apple Before the iPhone was announced, Apple was worth $74 billion; by 2018, it was worth over $1 trillion. Steve Jobs had always dreamed of increasingly natural ways of interfacing with computers. In the iPhone, which served the functions of at least half a dozen different devices, his company finally hit on one that made computers not only personal but ever present. But in doing so, Apple brought forth a world of constant access and distraction whose consequences are still unfolding. 2008: APP STORE, Apple The iPhone may have been the first, most important step, but it was the App Store that unleashed the mobile revolution.

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It’s what transformed the minicomputer into the personal computer: from command lines glowing coldly on black screens to operating systems that sit on almost every office desk in the world. It’s what made computing the glue of the modern knowledge economy. The story goes that Steve Jobs went for a demo at Xerox PARC, saw the future there, and more or less stole it. But it’s a story riddled with holes, starting with the obvious: How would Steve Jobs have even thought there was anything to steal in the first place? Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his Ph.D. program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become known for designing computer programs that made 3-D maps of mouse brains.

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In the middle lies a grove meant to recall the time, just fifty years ago, when Silicon Valley wasn’t Silicon Valley, but rather the Valley of Heart’s Delight, covered in 10 million fruit trees—apricot, cherry, peach, pear, and apple. It took Apple, the computing giant, years to buy up all that land in secret, assembling some sixteen different plots across fifty acres in a $5 billion jigsaw. If the building looks like a spaceship, then it’s one that lifted off directly from Steve Jobs’s imagination to land in the heart of an otherwise sleepy suburb. It was one of the last undertakings that the great man signed off on before he died. Every morning during the construction of Jobs’s last dream, Harlan Crowder woke up to the dull roar of heavy trucks on their way to the site, their alarms bleating as they nudged their loads into place.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

But when its CEO, Ken Olson, was asked about the personal desktop computer that rival IBM was readying for the market, he responded that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”40 At the time, Harvard dropout Bill Gates’s obscure startup, Microsoft, had thirty-eight employees.41 Gates plainly didn’t agree with Olson about the future of the personal computer, and neither did his eventual rival Steve Jobs, the Reed College dropout who founded Apple Computer in 1977.42 Four years later, Apple went public in the most oversubscribed initial public offering since 1956,43 turning three hundred Apple employees into millionaires. Not long after Apple went public, a pre-med student at the University of Texas named Michael Dell started PCs Limited out of his dorm room. Lacking funds to take on a lot of inventory, Dell hit on the idea of selling computers over the phone so he wouldn’t have to commit capital to equipment until he had actual orders.44 It’s a safe bet that most of those new Apple millionaires, like the tycoons at Apple’s competitors, had gone to college.

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Chapter Nine: Why We Need People with Money to Burn 1.Warren Brookes, The Economy in Mind (New York: Universe Books, 1982), p. 77. 2.Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 407. 3.Ibid., 157. 4.David McCullough, The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 34. 5.Ibid., 108. 6.Konstantin Kakaes, “New Directions,” Wall Street Journal, June 25–26, 2016. 7.Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 339. 8.Dawn Kawamoto, Ben Heskett, and Mike Ricciuti, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple,” CNET, August 6, 1997. 9.Alexis Tsotsis, “Uber Gets $32 Million From Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs,” Tech Crunch, December 7, 2011. 10.Source: Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/. 11.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 12.Noam Cohen, “Technology’s Trumpian Visions,” New York Times, July 27, 2016. 13.Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 37. 14.Ibid., 13. 15.Ibid., 168. 16.Ibid., 52. 17.Ibid., 60. 18.Ibid., 62. 19.Michael Freeman, ESPN: The Uncensored History (Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000), 58. 20.Ibid., 59. 21.Ibid. 22.Ibid., 7. 23.Ibid., 77. 24.Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind Its Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 25.T.

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The Washington Post once confidently asserted, “It is a fact that man can’t fly.”4 Thank goodness the Wright Brothers not only ignored the naysayers but also had enough revenue from their bicycle shop to invest the considerable sum of one thousand dollars in their seemingly impossible aviation project.5 When the venture capitalist Ed Tuck set his mind to making GPS technology available to the general public, his search for investors led to eighty-six rejections before he found someone to help him bring Magellan GPS systems to market.6 But consider the unseen. How many advances have never seen the light of day because the wealth to back them wasn’t available? It’s hard to believe, now that Apple is the most valuable company on Earth, but when Steve Jobs returned from exile in 1997 to run the company he had co-founded, it was “less than ninety days from being insolvent.”7 Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, invested $150 million in Jobs’s return to Apple.8 How many more investments might Gates have made, how many more world-changing companies might he have saved, how many more global problems might his foundation have solved with the billions that he and Microsoft have handed over in taxes over the years?

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

., 1989. Apple founding: Mike Markkula, interview by author; Steve Jobs, interview by author; Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984). Nothing else was in Intel’s interest: Mike Markkula, interview by author. Even a supplier-customer relationship between Intel and Apple failed to materialize. Wozniak had originally chosen a Motorola processor for Apple machines, and even though Markkula says he and Grove met several times to discuss whether a switch to an Intel chip was warranted, “the timing was never right,” and so Apple stayed with Motorola.

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Jobs at McKenna dinner: Ann Bowers, interview by author. Not very appealing: Arthur Rock quoted in “HBS [Harvard Business School] Working Knowledge,” http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=1821&t= special_reports_donedeals Noyce and Jobs Seabee accident: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Remember personal things: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Apple Computer IPO: Apple Computer prospectus, 12 Dec. 1980. On Tandem: Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit”; “The fall of an American Icon,” Business Week, 5 Feb. 1996. Compaq acquisition of Tandem: David Lazarus, “Compaq Boosts High End with Tandem Deal,” Inc., 23 June 1997.

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But he was equally 252 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP convinced that Jobs and Wozniak were not the men to lead that market. This was especially true after Bowers brought home her first Apple in 1978, and she and Noyce spent much of the weekend on the phone to Mike Markkula trying to set it up properly. The Apple machine did not strike Noyce as the groundbreaking technical breakthrough necessary to bring computing power to the common man. But over time, Noyce’s feelings about Apple began to change. This was due, in no small measure, to Steve Jobs, who deliberately sought out Noyce as a mentor. ( Jobs also asked Jerry Sanders and Andy Grove if he could take them to lunch every quarter and “pick your brain.”)

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

So, in what many analysts at the time thought was an act of desperation, Apple’s board made a decision to buy NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs had set up after he was ousted from Apple back in 1985. Acquiring NeXT gave Apple a much-needed new operating system to work with – and a really good one at that. But far more crucially…it also gave it Steve Jobs. While Apple’s engineers were tasked with the job of modifying NeXT’s OS to work with its drab grey boxes, Jobs was given the job of turning the company around. And this is when he did something that would set Apple on course to become the most innovative, influential, and valuable company of the 21st century – and in so doing, pave the way for a generation of new companies that would soon start to transform the way the world worked.

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Bright, savvy customers like Jay know how to get a good deal. If she were thinking and acting like a normal customer, Apple would be toast. But she isn’t. Jay’s behaviour mirrors that of the Manchester United supporters on the terraces at Old Trafford. Jay isn’t an Apple customer, she is an Apple fan – which means she has a totally different relationship with the brand. This is what Apple – and particularly Steve Jobs, when he was at the helm – has known for years, and what Nokia totally missed when they opened their concept store. Apple doesn’t have customers, it has fans. And you don’t get fans simply by opening a flashy store.

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It also has the same root as the word “spiritual”. Steve Jobs engaged at a very deep and personal level. He called Apple “the largest start-up in the world” for a good reason. Under his leadership, its primary purpose was the fulfilment of its social mission. It was all about the why, not the what. In 1997, Apple was a failing computer company with a rapidly diminishing value of $3 billion. Nokia dominated the high-end mobile phone market. Kodak dominated the photography market. Palm and Handspring vied with each other in the hand-held market. Twenty years later, Apple’s iPhone dominated all three categories.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Be Willing to Wave Good-Bye to the Past We haven’t spent much time in this book detailing perhaps the most iconic transformations of the 1990s (IBM) and early 2000s (Apple). Both examples are well documented and indeed are powerful examples of dual transformation. And in both cases transformation A involved jettisoning key parts of the historic core business. In IBM’s case, over the past two decades, beyond substantial investments to create a services arm, the company exited the hard disk drive, printer, and personal computer markets. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was known as a creation maestro, but his first set of actions when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s wasn’t to create; it was to destroy. He consolidated Apple’s complicated product portfolio to four products.

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Commercials, hilarious in retrospect, touted the fact that Rokr was the first handset that integrated Apple’s iTunes music software. Popular artists like Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers poured into a phone booth and the voice-over intoned, “One hundred tunes in your pocket, baby.” One hundred tunes. Wow. It was clear from the beginning that then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ambivalent about the partnership. Just two weeks after the commercial launch, Jobs noted publicly, “We see it as something we can learn from. It was a way to put our toe in the water.” Apple had also filed a number of patents that would enable it to create a simple, elegant phone, such as its 2004 filing (granted in 2010) for a “capacitive touchscreen.”

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The great fun is doing what you do every day. I’m sort of a poster child for not sort of doing anything but what we do every day . . . We’re a very poorly diversified portfolio. It either goes to the moon or crashes to the Earth.” And crash both Nokia and RIM did. In January 2007 Steve Jobs announced, and in June Apple launched, the iPhone. Dubbed the “Jesus phone” by worshippers, the phone created a media firestorm and immediately started showing up in the hands of celebrities. In November, Google, along with a range of handset manufacturers, formed the Open Handset Alliance, powered by Google’s Android operating system.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Fred Vogelstein, “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone,’ ” New York Times, October 6, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?pagewanted=all; Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs: Complete Transcript of Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo, January 9, 2007,” Genius, January 9, 2007, http://genius.com/Steve-jobs-complete-transcript-of-steve-jobs-macworld-conference-and-expo-january-9-2007-annotated/. 4. Helen Walters, “A Sputnik Moment for STEM Education: Ainissa Ramirez at TED2012,” TED Blog, March 2, 2012, accessed November 2, 2014, http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/02/a-sputnik-moment-for-stem-education-ainissa-ramirez-at-ted2012/. 5.

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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” Ballmer prophesied during a CEO Forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007. But, by the end of the first week of sales, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones. The company was fast on its way to taking more than 20 percent of the smartphone market within just a few months.1 To those who waited in line outside Apple stores for a day or two to snap up the first phones—or paid others hundreds of dollars to wait for them—the iPhone was a revolution, the stuff of dreams.

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Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2012–5215” (Reston, VA, 2012), available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5215/. 10. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 11. C. Hagelüken, R. Drielsmann, and K. Ven den Broeck, “Availability of Metals and Materials,” in Precious Materials Handbook, Ulla Sehrt and Matthias Grehl, 10–35 (Hanau-Wolfgang, Germany: Umicore AG, 2012). 12. Michael Wolff, “Michael Wolff: Uber Invades the World,” USA-Today, June 14, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/14/the-rise-of-uber/10417655/; Brian Lam, “The Life of Steve Jobs,” Gizmodo, August 24, 2011, http://gizmodo.com/5301470/the-life-of-steve-jobs---so-far. 13. Michael Feroli, “Economics Web Note,” Morgan Markets, J.P.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Frox was developing “revolutionary” home entertainment systems, including the much-publicized Frox wand, a one-button universal remote. Frox had attracted engineers from Lucasfilm, Droidworks, Xerox PARC, Sun Microsystems, and Apple Computer. But Frox didn’t have the design flair of Steve Jobs. Kaphan lasted about three years, the company lasted twenty. In 1992 Kaphan joined Kaleida Labs, a joint venture between Apple and IBM, which created a digital multimedia player for computers, and wanted to create a similar program for television set-top boxes. Founded in 1991, it was folded into Apple in 1995. In the spring of 1994, just about the time Bezos was looking for an idea that he could turn into a good Web-based business, Herb and Shel were doing the same thing.

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Except for Web services, Bezos sold only physical goods in Amazon’s first decade. Then, on March 4, 2003, Apple’s Steve Jobs demonstrated that some physical products were unnecessary. The music CD was simply a way of delivering the real product, the music itself. But music can be digitized and shipped over the Internet without the cost of the physical CD or the expense of mailing. The iTunes music store was born. Sometime in 2004 Bezos had an Amazon executive approach Gregg Zehr, a hardware developer who had worked at Apple and at palmOne, which created the Palm personal digital assistant. The executive asked Zehr to start a new company in order to create a new electronic book reader for Amazon.

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This was, no doubt, due partly to the fact that Steve Jobs had already agreed to the agency model, which could have given Apple better access to e-books from placated publishers. On the other hand, in October 2010 Amazon offered to pay royalties of 70 percent to authors who self-publish through the Kindle store, compared to 25 percent from most publishers. For now, the Kindle still leads the market for e-book readers at its current price. Research company ChangeWave estimated that the Kindle had the largest share of the market in early 2011, at 47 percent. Apple’s iPad (which does much more than just read books and is more expensive) had a 32 percent share.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

MECC ­people reflected on their “awareness and appreciation” of computing, just as they praised the social aspects of their network, the rich “people-­ to-­ people contact.”34 Networked computing via time-­sharing thrived in Minnesota, having been motivated by a desire to equally serve citizens across the state, to provide the “same opportunities in computing . . . ​to a rural resident as to anyone in the suburbs or Twin Cities.”35 Just as DEC had spurred sales of its time-­sharing minicomputer systems by making them attractive to students and educators, Apple also targeted schools in the late 1970s. Steve Jobs ­later explained that “schools buying Apple IIs” was “one of the t­ hings that built Apple IIs.”36 Indeed, a MECC staff member who had attended a conference in California reported to his colleagues in Minnesota about the amazing Apple II computer he had seen, and MECC soon arranged to buy over five hundred of them from Jobs and Wozniak.37 MECC led the nation in placing microcomputers in its classrooms, and Apple gained an early and large share of the educational computing market; moreover, the long-­ ago decision to implement Dartmouth Time-­Sharing with BASIC at UHigh in Minneapolis had impor­tant ramifications all ­these years l­ater.38 MECC and its constituent members (such as TIES and MERITSS [Minnesota Educational 240 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States Regional Interactive Time-­Sharing System]) had been building a library of applications and games—­w ritten in BASIC —­since the 1960s.

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Increasingly, ­people would have to purchase computers and software (now, devices and apps) for their personal and social computing. BASIC also figures prominently in the history of Apple. Steve Wozniak produced his own “Integer BASIC” for his homemade computer, built around MOS Technology’s 6502 micropro­cessor chip; he shared Integer BASIC , and he even published programs in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.29 When Wozniak’s high school chum Steve Jobs saw the computer, he proposed they team up to assem­ble and sell them. They named the computer Apple, and soon began working on a new version, the Apple II. Although Apple declared its philosophy 238 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States was “to provide software for our machines ­f ree or at minimal cost,” Apple sought (aggressively) to sell its hardware.30 ­W hether they w ­ ere called home computers, hobby computers, microcomputers, or personal computers, they ­were consumer products, purveyed by Steve Jobs.

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Gates first learned to program in BASIC , the language on which he built his Microsoft empire. Wozniak adapted Tiny BASIC into Integer BASIC to program his homemade computer, the computer that attracted the partnership of Steve Jobs and launched Apple. And the Minnesota software library, mostly BASIC programs including The Oregon Trail, proved to be the ideal complement for the hardware of Apple Computers. During the 1980s, the combination of Apple hardware and MECC software 10 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States cemented the transformation from computing citizens to computing consumers. The title of this work nods to Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking A ­People’s History of the United States.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Gates would soon enter the software applications business himself to grow the IBM-compatible PC market and take more of the profit, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. He did this first for Apple’s Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, and then for DOS and Windows PCs, bundled in the Office suite from 1990. To encourage other companies to help expand demand for PCs, Gates also decided to give away for free the software development kit (SDK) needed to build applications for DOS and then Windows. By contrast, Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs did not give away software development kits for free or try to build a broad applications market. Instead, he hired Microsoft in 1982 and paid Gates a $50,000 advance to write applications for the Macintosh personal computer, which was incompatible with DOS.5 Jobs also charged hundreds of dollars to developers who wanted to build Macintosh applications on their own.

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Selby, Microsoft Secrets (New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1995), 137, 158–59. 3.This information comes from a 1994 magazine interview with Bill Gates cited in Cusumano and Selby, Microsoft Secrets, 159. 4.David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (New York: HarperBusiness, 2015), 98–100. 5.Manes and Andrews, Gates, 245–46. 6.For details, see “Did Apple not originally allow anyone to develop software for the Macintosh?” Stack Exchange Retrocomputing, https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2513/did-apple-not-originally-allow-anyone-to-develop-software-for-the-macintosh/2520?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa (accessed May 21, 2018). 7.Yoffie and Cusumano, Strategy Rules, 114. 8.Mathew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents,” New York Times, March 18, 2018; and Katrin Benhold, “Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate,” New York Times, May 19, 2018. 9.Politico Staff, “Full Text: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday Testimony to Congress on Cambridge Analytica,” Politico, April 11, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978 (accessed May 15, 2018). 10.See “List of Unicorn Start-Up Companies,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_start-up_companies (accessed May 21, 2018). 11.Brian X.

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We also wrote up our initial thoughts on market dynamics and how business models and strategy differed for innovation platforms as compared to transaction platforms. David Yoffie joined the project after the publication of Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (Yoffie and Cusumano, 2015), which included a detailed analysis of how platform thinking evolved at Microsoft, Intel, and Apple.4 We then expanded the scope of this new book to examine common mistakes among platform companies, challenges for conventional firms trying to compete with digital platforms, platform governance and antitrust issues, and some emerging platform technologies that could greatly impact the future.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

That’s why so many busy and powerful people practice mind-clearing meditation and stick to rigid daily routines: to minimize distractions and maximize good decision making. Simplification is why Steve Jobs’s Magic Mouse doubled Apple’s mouse market share overnight. With zero buttons (the whole thing is a button, actually) and a touchscreen glass top, the mouse is both pretty and intuitive—a huge departure from the conventional “innovative” mouse arms race, which amounted to adding more bulk and more buttons. Similarly, Apple’s iPod won the MP3 player war with breakthrough simplicity, both in physical design and how the company explained it. While other companies touted “4 Gigabytes and a 0.5 Gigahertz processor!” Apple simply said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

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Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us.

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He got to be the best by focusing on what he needed to know, knowing how to figure out what he didn’t know, and forgetting about everything else. Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives. They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs. This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices. US presidents do the same thing. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

You could open up the Apple II, and there were slots and so on, and anyone could write for it. The Mac was way more closed. What happened?” “Oh,” said Wozniak. “That was Steve. He wanted it that way. The Apple II was my machine, and the Mac was his.” Apple’s origins were pure Steve Wozniak, but as everyone knows, it was the other founder, Steve Jobs, whose ideas made Apple what it is today. Jobs maintained the early image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the age of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, he led Apple computers on a fundamentally different track.

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The spirit of Theodore Vail was alive and well in the resurrected dominion of the firm with which Apple was now allied. Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. In 2009 hearings before the FCC, they now sat on opposite sides. Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.… I hate it.”3 As this makes clear, where once there had been only subtle differences there now lay a chasm. Apple, while it had always wavered on “openness,” had committed to a program that fairly suited not just the AT&T mind-set, but also the ideals of Hollywood and the entertainment conglomerates as well.

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Even if Windows was never as advanced or well designed as Apple’s operating system, it enjoyed one insuperable advantage: it worked on any computer, supported just about every type of software, and could interface with any printer, modem, or whatever other hardware one could design. After it was launched in the late eighties, early-nineties Windows ran off with the market Apple had pioneered, based mostly on ideas that had been Apple’s to begin with. The victory of PCs and Windows over Apple was viewed by many as the defining parable of the decade; its moral was “open beats closed.” It suggested that Wozniak had been right from the beginning. But by then Steve Jobs had been gone for years, having been forced out of Apple in 1985 in a boardroom coup. Yet even in his absence Jobs would never agree about the superiority of openness, maintaining all the while that closed had simply not yet been perfected.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Brown explains: “Xerox built big complicated stuff that sold for $250,000 a unit and came with three-year guarantees. What was the chance that any of the PARC stuff could ever be sold through the Xerox channels? Zero.” So the decision was made to try to partner with Apple. Almost every version of the story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC for a demonstration in December of 1979 is wrong. It is usually said to epitomize the complete failure on Xerox’s part to understand what they had invented. A bit of background: Apple had successfully launched the Apple II computer in April of 1977. It was an instant hit, and between September of 1977 and September of 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533 percent.

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The tragedy for Xerox was that two years later, the Xerox CFO sold all its Apple stock. Imagine what it would have meant to the company if it had held on to 5 percent of Apple, which would now be worth about $32 billion. In 1985, after the debut of the Macintosh, Microsoft quickly introduced Windows, an operating system that totally mimicked the Macintosh. Whatever advantage Apple had was quickly extinguished, and Steve Jobs was forced out of the company. Jobs immediately set out for revenge on his old company by building a new computer called NeXT. Not long after that, a twenty-nine-year-old English engineer, Tim Berners-Lee, took up a position at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).

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The earliest networks—like the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), organized by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog—grew directly out of 1960s counterculture. Brand had helped novelist Ken Kesey organize the Acid Tests—epic be-ins where thousands of hippies ingested LSD and danced to the music of a new band, the Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc., dropped acid as well. “Jobs explained,” wrote John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said, “that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew well had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.”

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.

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He swiped at the little slider on the screen to answer the call, but for some reason it took seven tries before it worked. This little fail was ironic given who was phoning. “Hi,” the caller said. “Is this Dag?” “Yeah,” Kittlaus replied. “This is Steve Jobs.” “Really?” said Kittlaus, who had received no forewarning that the Apple CEO was going to call. He turned toward a colleague standing nearby and mouthed, It’s Steve Jobs! No way! his colleague mouthed back. Jobs came straight to the point, according to Kittlaus’s account. “We love what you are doing,” Jobs said. “Can you come over to my house tomorrow?” Kittlaus got directions and asked if he could bring along his cofounders.

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Game Changers 4 To be sure, they have an unsurpassed ability: “The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet),” accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/ihb0. 5 “The next big step”: Sundar Pichai, “This year’s Founders’ Letter,” Google blog, April 28, 2016, https://goo.gl/hMKbBS. 5 On computers, we squeeze our fingers: “Typewriter History,” Mytypewriter.com, https://goo.gl/cNSxXM. 7 There are around 2 billion: “Number of mobile phone users worldwide from 2015 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/tv793j. 7 The number of deployed smart speakers: Bret Kinsella, “Smart Speakers to Reach 100 Million Installed Base Worldwide in 2018, Google to Catch Amazon by 2022,” Voicebot.ai, July 10, 2018, https://goo.gl/VKLB3F. 11 “When you hear a voice”: Ryan Germick, interview with author, April 26, 2018. 12 “Conversation is probably the hardest AI problem”: Ashwin Ram, interview with author, May 26, 2017. 14 “speech is so essential to our concept of intelligence”: Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), accessed July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/VUpsxh. 2. Assistants 17 This slice of campus life: Knowledge Navigator (1987) Apple Computer, Apple concept video posted to YouTube on December 16, 2009, https://goo.gl/MyHN8l. 17 “mini-Steve Jobs”: Jay Yarow, “Why Apple’s Mobile Leader Scott Forstall Is Out,” Business Insider, October 29, 2012, https://goo.gl/p8rCss. 17 “I am really excited to show you Siri”: Let’s Talk iPhone—iPhone 4S Keynote 2011, posted to YouTube on October 5, 2011, https://goo.gl/32qJ5o. 18 “Telling me I can’t do something really sets me up”: this and subsequent quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise noted, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 19 Cheyer had started a school club: Jon C.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

HOW TECHNOLOGY COULD TURN THE PAGE ON PUBLISHING On January 28, 2010, John Sargent Jr. and Brian Napack, the chief executive and the president of Macmillan Publishers, flew to Seattle to give Amazon.com some news they knew the online retailer wouldn’t like. A couple of days before, Macmillan had made a deal to sell its titles in Apple’s iBookstore, just as Steve Jobs was set to introduce the company’s new iPad. Rather than sell titles to Apple on a wholesale basis and let the company set a retail price, as it did with Amazon and other bookstores, Macmillan would set the price for its digital books itself and give Apple a 30 percent commission for selling them to consumers. Apple had also made similar deals with four of the other five major U.S. publishers. But Amazon wanted to set book prices as well.

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In the grand narrative of the music business collapse, the labels were rescued from their own incompetence by Steve Jobs’s iTunes music store, which made piracy a marginal problem. Apple certainly pushed the labels into doing something they were unable to do themselves, and its iTunes Store has become the biggest music retailer in the United States. But legitimate online music stores like Apple’s have hardly stopped piracy: more music is downloaded illegally than legally, according to the NPD Group.82 (Not all of those songs represent lost sales, of course, but surely some must.) And, like the industry’s attempts to turn file sharing into a legitimate business, the real story of Apple’s effect on the music business is more complicated than most people realize.

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To understand how technology executives see issues involving open platforms, remember that their perspective is informed by Apple’s 1980s struggle with Microsoft for the personal computer business. Then, as now, Steve Jobs wanted to control his products, so he declined to license the Macintosh operating system software to other computer makers. Since Microsoft didn’t make machines, it made deals to supply its operating system software to every PC clone company it could. As more companies began making computers that used Intel chips and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, competition drove down prices, “Wintel” machines dominated the industry, and Apple became an also-ran in the business it invented.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

People don’t say, “Hotmail me” or “Bing it,” but they could have if the marketing departments at those companies had done some thinking about making their companies’ services into a verb. As you go through your daily routine, try to think about all the companies that touch you and whether they are verbs. Marketing is 20% hard facts and 80% human brain. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, there were 40 other music storage devices on the market and some with four times as much memory. But Apple dominated the market. Why? Because Steve Jobs understood the human side of commerce. He understood that by creating a story behind the product, by making it “cool” or “hip” to have an iPod and making it fun and easy to use, it didn’t matter if the product was not quite as powerful or as fast or as cheap as the competition, because he knew that he could capture the customer’s emotion, mind, spirit and ego.

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Don't do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it. Gary Vaynerchuk A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. Jeff Bezos My Brand Logo. Your logo should mean something. The initial logo for Draper Associates, designed by my cousin, Phyllis Merikallio, was a blue globe in front of a black triangle. I liked this for a lot of reasons. The triangle represented “change” and the globe represented “the world,” so together these images said, “Change the world.” Apple’s logo was a rainbow-colored apple, which was both eye catching and meant that the products were for everyone.

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His employees started chanting the same mantras and they even took on his fashion sense, wearing the same t-shirts and jeans that he did. He encouraged a very casual tone among his employees so that they knew that he just wanted them to get the job done (not to wait on protocol) and they responded accordingly. Steve Jobs created the meme of calling his employees “evangelists” so Apple employees would take on his religious fervor for the company. Many even wore jeans and black turtlenecks to emulate the great man. Bill Gates prided himself on his high IQ, so everyone at Microsoft was focused on being smart. Some employees even wore glasses that looked like the ones Bill wore whether they had a vision problem or not.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

On September 23, 1997, Steve Jobs walked onstage to applause at a meeting of Apple executives and managers. He had returned to the company two months earlier as interim CEO and was determined to make changes. Dressed in sandals, shorts, and a black mock turtleneck with which the world would later become familiar, he looked relaxed, even though he had been up until 3:00 A.M. working on an ad campaign that he hoped would revive Apple’s brand. The brand had suffered from neglect since he left the company in 1985. Jobs didn’t mention it in the meeting, but the brand wasn’t all that was suffering at Apple. By 1997, the company had just 4 percent of the personal computer market and that year stood to lose more than a billion dollars.

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We’d already carved up mountains, paved over swamplands, and invented garages to cater to our four-wheeled wonder wagons, so giving up on them now hardly seemed realistic. After a multitude of commenters disabused me of my car-free fantasy, I breathed a sigh of concession and moved on. It was about then that I discovered Tesla. I had joined Pando in April 2012, a few months after Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, died, and I found a tech world still grieving the loss of its superstar. The industry was bereft of a figure who could command the world’s attention with the twitch of a stage-managed eyebrow, a man who could send the media into conniptions with an addendum to a slide show. Silicon Valley was frantically searching for one more thing, but results had been mixed.

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That was a huge bet he made, and it worked,” Musk said in 2013. Management books tend to be written by management consultants who study companies during their times of peace, Horowitz cautioned. Other than Grove’s writing, he didn’t know of any books that taught people how to manage in wartime like Steve Jobs. When Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO in 1997, the company was months away from bankruptcy. Four years later, it released the iPod. On May 8, 2013, Tesla reported its first quarterly profit. There had been many start-ups over the decades, but, at last, an electric car company was selling enough cars to stay in business.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995. 13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html 14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php 15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html 16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html 17. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 1996). 18. http://pdgmag.com/2012/02/02/steve-jobs-lee-clow-and-ridley-scott-the-three-geniuses-who-made-1984-less-like-1984/ 19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 20. Adelia Cellini, “The Story Behind Apple’s ‘1984’ TV Commercial: Big Brother at 20.”

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We’ve simply subjected the world to our designs, leaving everyone else to live with the consequences, whether or not we like them. Technology seems value-neutral, yet it isn’t. It has its own worldview, one the rest of us adopt without consideration because of the convenience and fun of our communications devices. People worship Steve Jobs and his legendary leadership of Apple, and they consume Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad with delight and intensity—yet these products and indeed the vision of Jobs are reorganizing our world from top to bottom. The nerds who brought you today’s three most dominant communications technologies—the personal computer, the Internet, and mobile phones—were in different ways self-consciously hostile to established authority and self-consciously alert to the vast promise and potential of individual human beings.

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Years later, after the PC was an established reality, Ken Olson, the founder of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation, still … publicly asserted that there was no need for a home computer.”17 On the other hand, antiestablishment ideology became entrenched in manifold specifics of the PC’s design; Markoff relates, for instance, that the visualization that comes with iTunes—the pretty colors that move and change in sequence with the music—was inspired in part by Jobs’s use of LSD, which Jobs called “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” A liberationist ethic also became entrenched in the overt marketing of personal computing devices, most famously in a classic television commercial, Apple’s 1984 spot. Following the rousing success of Apple’s first two home computer models, Steve Jobs wanted to do something big to roll out its third model, the Macintosh personal computer. He hired Ridley Scott, who two years earlier had directed the sci-fi classic Bladerunner, to make the commercial.18 The result was a powerful and intense ad that referenced the dystopian future of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience. Apple machines were more fun. But you could access these capabilities only by buying Apple’s integrated software and hardware. Apple’s determination to maintain its proprietary system failed in the face of widespread adoption of the more open standard of the IBM PC: Windows, a combination of Apple’s graphical user interface with Microsoft’s ubiquitous MS-DOS, swept the world, and almost swept Apple from that world. By the mid-1990s, Apple was on the edge of bankruptcy, its market share falling, its innovations failing. But 1997 was the year of the Second Coming of Steve Jobs (he had been forced out of the company a decade earlier by the board).

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When IBM attempted to regain control with a new and more sophisticated operating system, OS/2, it was too late. MS-DOS (powering Windows 3.1) was everywhere. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began assembling Apple machines in 1976 in Jobs’s garage, now designated a historic site. 18 Although Gates and Microsoft had understood that ease of use was as important as technical sophistication to commercial success, Jobs extended this vision further and conceived a computer that you could use without understanding anything about computers. To achieve this goal, Jobs drew on another invention from Xerox Parc – the graphical user interface. Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience.

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But in the right circumstances – those of 1940 – Churchill’s optimism and confidence were vital. Steve Jobs similarly failed to conform to the conventional depiction of ‘rational’ behaviour under uncertainty. Just as Churchill became premier with no specific plan for how the war would develop, Jobs returned to Apple content to wait for ‘the next big thing’. Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes of his subject’s ‘reality distortion field’. The phrase was adopted from Star Trek by one of Apple’s first software designers, who identified his CEO’s approach as ‘a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’ – characteristics similar to those identified by Churchill’s biographers. 33 Strikingly, however, the first half of Isaacson’s book, which deals with the period prior to Jobs’s 1997 return to Apple, contains sixteen references to the ‘reality distortion field’, the remainder contains only three.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Like McNutt, his motto was: “The good God is in the detail.” Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple, took that creed to the level of obsessive compulsion. Towards the end of his life, as he lay dying in hospital, he burned through 67 nurses before settling on three that met his exacting standards. Even when heavily sedated, he tore an oxygen mask off his face to object to the way it looked. The pulmonologist was startled when Jobs demanded to see five other mask designs so he could pick the one he liked best. Yet what sounds like a rampant case of OCD helped turn Apple into one of the most successful companies in history.

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You have to find and marshal the right people, and then manage the creative collisions that ensue. But it works even in the fastest-moving sectors of the economy. Steve Jobs once observed that Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh computer “turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.” Nearly three decades later the company is still thrashing the competition with the same recipe. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” Jobs declared after the launch of the world-conquering iPad. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

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“He knows how to walk that tightrope of giving us the freedom to contribute our own ideas while also bringing us all along together down a single path.” Not all successful leaders have a mother’s heart. Steve Jobs is the classic counter-example. Apple insiders described him as a tyrannical control freak who could be obnoxiously rude to his staff, shouting them down, passing off their ideas as his own, displaying zero interest in their private lives. Would Apple have thrived even more had his EI matched his IQ? We will never know. But perhaps Jobs was that very rare thing: a genius you walked away from at your peril. To what extent lesser mortals can work the Mr Nasty leadership style is up for debate, but there is no doubt that fixing a complex problem often depends on a driving, central figure.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Never follow the masses, at least not until you had gone back to first principles and thought the thing through. Much later, when he was moving up the corporate ladder at Genentech, Levinson met Steve Jobs and eventually joined the Apple board. Then, in 2004, he was asked to join Google’s board, where he remained for five years until the corporate orbits of Apple and Google began to collide. Nevertheless, even after Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, when Apple’s board made Levinson chair, he remained on good terms with Page and Brin and Schmidt at Google. That was the way Levinson was: He seemed to get along with everyone. 6 | THE DINNER Just as Art Levinson wasn’t your average dyed-in-the-wool scientist, Bill Maris wasn’t your average number-crunching venture capitalist.

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—WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass 5 | CALICO The evening of October 18, 2012, was warm and cloudless the way Silicon Valley evenings often are. Art Levinson had just departed Laurene Jobs’s home and was motoring along in his aging Lexus to see Larry Page, and a few others, for dinner at his house in Palo Alto. Laurene was Steve Jobs’s widow, and as Apple’s chairman Levinson had driven down earlier from San Francisco to review a few matters with her. On and off, Levinson had been thinking about the get-together with Page. He was skeptical, but that wasn’t unusual for him. He was always skeptical. But this particular idea…well, it was intriguing.

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Before joining Calico, Koller knew she could write her own ticket at any of Silicon Valley’s great Cloud makers: Google, Facebook, Apple. But did she really want to create software that made better Twitter feeds, or cool faces on Snapchat, or yet another product that piled up more of the planet’s digital ad revenues? In the sprawling world of Google, she would be a blip: one more very smart human in a sea of geeks. But Calico was different. She had never forgotten Steve Jobs’s grand goal: “Make a dent in the universe.” At Calico, maybe she could make a dent—save lives, perhaps millions—even her own.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Maura O’Neill, “Disruptive Innovation Often Comes from Unexpected Places,” Huffington Post, January 25, 2013. 7 the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs . . . Jobs’s interest in shoshin and other Zen principles has been chronicled in a number of places, including Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); as well as Daniel Burke, “Steve Jobs’ Private Spirituality Now an Open Book,” USA Today, November 2, 2011; and my own article for Fast Company, “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs (and Silicon Valley) about Innovation,” April 9, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669387/what-zen-taught-silicon-valley-and-steve-jobs-about-innovation. 8 a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to . . .

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The company figured that the only way to pull off something as audacious as this was through a partnership with a tech company. Striking a collaborative deal with Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t easy. (According to a press report, Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive9 Mark Parker for trying to expand into digital; stick to the sneakers was Jobs’s message, with a profanity or two thrown in.) But eventually, Nike won over Jobs and produced a hybrid product, Nike+, which wirelessly connected a Nike running shoe to an Apple iPod device, which was in turn connected to a website. A classic “smart recombination,” it enabled the runner to program music, track running and health data, communicate with other runners, find running partners, share tips, and so forth.

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Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”2 and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything. Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Thanks to Charley and some software Draper had written, some of phone phreaking’s drudgery was eliminated; what Charlie Pyne and Jake Locke had to do with their index fingers at Harvard in the 1960s—dialing thousands of numbers and listening for dial tones—an Apple II could now do automatically. According to Wozniak, Draper cracked some twenty WATS extenders by Charley’s brute-force dialing of codes while Draper was working at Apple. All this did not sit well with Steve Jobs and the other managers at Apple, who thought the Charley Board product was a bit too risky and, besides, they disliked Draper to begin with. Charley was shelved. Draper left Apple and moved from California to rural Pennsylvania to work at a friend’s company designing a product for the emerging cable television industry.

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Riches, or promises of riches, or maybe just a fun job that might pay the bills beckoned. In 1976 former phone phreaks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were selling Apple I computers to their fellow hobbyists. “Jobs placed ads in hobbyist publications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66,” journalist Steven Levy wrote. “Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with the purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder.” The fully assembled and tested Apple II followed later that year. By 1977 microcomputers had begun to enter the mainstream.

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And it made me want to have more of those adventures by designing more things like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that people didn’t expect. For the rest of my life, that was the reason I kept doing project after project after project, usually with Steve Jobs. You could trace it right up to the Apple II computer. It was the start of wanting to constantly design things very, very well and get noticed for it. Steve and I were a team from that day on. He once said that Apple wouldn’t have existed without the blue box, and I agree. Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

See also “Average App Store Review Times,” http://appreviewtimes.com/. 25Laura McGann, “Mark Fiore Can Win a Pulitzer Prize, but He Can’t Get his iPhone Cartoon App Past Apple’s Satire Police,” Nieman Lab, April 15, 2010. http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/. 26Gabe Jacobs, “Bushisms iPhone App Rejected,” Gabe Jacobs Blog, September 13, 2008, http://www.gabejacobsblog.com/2008/09/13/bushisms-iphone-app-rejected/ (no longer available online); Alec, “Freedom Time Rejected by Apple for App Store,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 21, 2008, https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/freedomtime-rejected-by-apple-for-app-store/. 27Robin Wauters, “Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/apple-rejects-obama-trampoline-iphone-app-leaves-us-puzzled/; Don Bora, “Rejected App (Biden’s Teeth),” Eight Bit Blog, June 6, 2009, http://blog.eightbitstudios.com/rejected-app. 28“iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple,” Lambda Jive, September 26, 2009, http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/. 29Alec, “Steve Jobs Responds,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 23, 2008, http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/. 30Ryan Singel, “Jobs Rewrites History about Apple Ban on Satire,” Wired, June 3, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/jobs-apple-satire-ban/. 31Alexia Tsotsis, “WikiLeaks iPhone App Made $5,840 before Pulled by Apple, $1 From Each Sale Will Be Donated to WikiLeaks,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-2/. 32Rebecca Greenfield, “Apple Rejected the Drone Tracker App Because It Could,” Atlantic, August 30, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/apple-rejected-drone-tracker-app-because-it-could/324120/. 33Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Speech Policies Should Still Worry the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 20, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_speech_policies_should.php. 34Charles Christensen, “iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators,” Prism Comics, June 2010, http://prismcomics.org/display.php?

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So only certain providers have voluntarily taken on this burden. Among the largest social media platforms, Apple’s App Store is the only one that has instituted a review mechanism for user-provided content that precedes the content’s being made available. For Apple, this was extremely important. Ensuring the user “freedom from porn,” as Steve Jobs notoriously promised, was just part of the broader promise of the iPhone and iPad.14 Apple wanted the feel and experience of each device to seamlessly extend to the apps designed for it. Imposing a review process for third-party apps, to ensure that they meet Apple’s standards of technical quality and design but also of propriety, was a way to protect the Apple brand—by extending the boundaries of the commodity itself to include not just the iPhone or iPad but a carefully moderated set of apps for them.

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The Birth of the Bleep and Modern American Censorship,” Verge, August 27, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/27/4545388/curses-the-birth-of-the-bleep-and-modern-american-censorship. 13Horwitz, “The First Amendment Meets Some New Technologies”; Lane, The Decency Wars. 14Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Gawker, May 15, 2010, http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-from-porn. 15Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; Grimmelman and Ohm, “Dr. Generative”; Steven Johnson, “Everybody’s Business—How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web,” New York Times, April 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/technology/internet/11every.html. 16Hestres, “App Neutrality.” 17Weber, The Success of Open Source; Fred von Lohmann, “All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 9, 2010, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-program-license-agreement-all. 18Rogers, “Jailbroken.” 19Nick Statt, “US Government Says It’s Now Okay to Jailbreak Your Tablet and Smart TV,” Verge, October 27, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/27/9622066/jailbreak-unlocked-tablet-smart-tvs-dmca-exemption-library-of-congress. 20Boudreau and Hagiu, “Platform Rules.” 21Morris and Elkins, “There’s a History for That”; Nieborg, “Crushing Candy.” 22Elaluf-Calderwood et al., “Control as a Strategy”; Tiwana, Konsynski, and Bush, “Platform Evolution.” 23Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping.” 24Graham Spencer, “Developers: Apple’s App Review Needs Big Improvements,” MacStories, March 1, 2016, https://www.macstories.net/stories/developers-apples-app-review-needs-big-improvements/.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Whenever a new marker is discovered, a person’s DNA (or more precisely, the relevant part of it) has to be sequenced again. Working with a subset, rather than the whole, entails a tradeoff: the company can find what it is looking for faster and more cheaply, but it can’t answer questions that it didn’t consider in advance. Apple’s legendary chief executive Steve Jobs took a totally different approach in his fight against cancer. He became one of the first people in the world to have his entire DNA sequenced as well as that of his tumor. To do this, he paid a six-figure sum—many hundreds of times more than the price 23andMe charges. In return, he received not a sample, a mere set of markers, but a data file containing the entire genetic codes.

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Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. That data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company.” Brilliance doesn’t depend on data. Steve Jobs may have continually improved the Mac laptop over years on the basis of field reports, but he used his intuition, not data, to launch the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He relied on his sixth sense. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he famously said, when telling a reporter that Apple did no market research before releasing the iPad. In the book Seeing Like a State, the anthropologist James Scott of Yale University documents the ways in which governments, in their fetish for quantification and data, end up making people’s lives miserable rather than better.

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Ironically, Google’s co-founders wanted to hire Steve Jobs as CEO (despite his lack of a college degree); Levy, p. 80. Testing 41 gradations of blue—Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, March 1, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html). Google’s chief designer’s resignation—Quotation is excerpted (without ellipses for readability) from Doug Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” blog post, March 20, 2009 (http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html). [>] Jobs quotation—Steve Lohr, “Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?” New York Times, January 18, 2011, p.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

While personal computers tend to have an identifiable brand, different firms design and manufacture different parts of a finished computer. Even Apple’s devices, which are proudly designed in California, contain parts—such as their displays—that are designed and manufactured by others, including Apple’s nemesis, Samsung.8 In fact, soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple he begun to outsource the manufacturing of devices, relying heavily on technologies from other firms.9 The iPod was made possible by a small hard drive that was invented by Toshiba. The Gorilla Glass screen of the iPhone was the brainchild of Corning, a glass manufacturer in upstate New York. What is true for Apple products is also true for many other modern devices.

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Silicon Valley’s knowledge and knowhow are not contained in a collection of perennially unemployed experts but rather in the experts working in firms that participate in the design and development of software and hardware. In fact, the histories of most firms in Silicon Valley are highly interwoven. Steve Jobs worked at Atari and Steve Wozniak worked at HP before starting Apple. As mentioned previously, Steve Jobs is also famously known for “borrowing” the ideas of a graphical user interface and object-oriented programming from Xerox PARC. If HP, Atari, and Xerox PARC had not been located in the valley, it is likely that the knowledge and knowhow needed to get Apple started would not have been there, either. Hence, industries that require subsets of the knowledge and knowhow needed in other industries represent essential stepping-stones in the process of industrial diversification.

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So social institutions affect not only the size of the networks that people form but also their adaptability, and this helped Silicon Valley leave Route 128 in the dust.15 Silicon Valley’s porous boundaries and adaptability are exemplified in Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in late 1979. It was there that Jobs learned about graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and object-oriented programming. Ultimately Apple, not Xerox, was the company that succeeded in commercializing these technologies. Intellectual property purists might complain about Apple and not Xerox profiting from these ideas, but a more pragmatic view holds that it was better for the long-term sustainability of Silicon Valley to have Apple (or anyone, for that matter) develop and commercialize ideas that otherwise could have died in the inboxes of Xerox’s managers or, worse, might have been commercialized by a company in a competing cluster.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The cosmetic issues, though, were minor compared to a tumultuous set of internal circumstances, revealed in detail here for the first time, that threatened to bankrupt the company once again. Musk had hired George Blankenship, a former Apple executive, to run its stores and service-center operations. At Apple, Blankenship worked just a couple of doors down from Steve Jobs and received credit for building much of the Apple Store strategy. When Tesla first hired Blankenship, the press and public were atwitter, anticipating that’d he do something spectacular and at odds with the traditions of the automotive industry. Blankenship did some of that. He expanded Tesla’s number of stores throughout the world and imbued them with that Apple Store vibe. Along with showcasing the Model S, the Tesla stores sold hoodies and hats and had areas in the back where kids would find crayons and Tesla coloring books.

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*At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said. Steve Jobs caught wind of these meetings and turned on the charm to keep Fadell. “He was sure nice to me for a while,” Fadell said. A couple of years later, Fadell left Apple to found Nest, a maker of smart-home devices, which Google then acquired in 2014.

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SpaceX flew a supply capsule to the International Space Station and brought it safely back to Earth. Tesla Motors delivered the Model S, a beautiful, all-electric sedan that took the automotive industry’s breath away and slapped Detroit sober. These two feats elevated Musk to the rarest heights among business titans. Only Steve Jobs could claim similar achievements in two such different industries, sometimes putting out a new Apple product and a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year. And yet, Musk was not done. He was also the chairman and largest shareholder of SolarCity, a booming solar energy company poised to file for an initial public offering. Musk had somehow delivered the biggest advances the space, automotive, and energy industries had seen in decades in what felt like one fell swoop.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

C H A P T 3 E R Steve Wozniak Cofounder, Apple Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II. Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent.

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We wanted to be able to demonstrate that you could use the same technology on the screen that you used on the printed page. Apple had actually been working on that for a while. Their technology was called TrueType. We were trying to market our solution to Apple, not with a lot of success. By then Steve Jobs had left. He’d been the primary Adobe champion inside Apple. Now Jean-Louis Gassée had taken over the product side of the business, and for whatever reason, Jean-Louis and Adobe never got along. So we were beginning to really have a problem with Apple. They were getting tired of paying us royalties for the LaserWriter; they thought that they shouldn’t have to pay anymore.

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It was sad to see him go because he supported good people so well in the company. Steve Wozniak 47 Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn’t he one of the founders? Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I, and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer, Incorporated. Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super-conservative guy. I didn’t know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read all these right-wing books like None Dare Call it Treason, and he could rattle the stuff off.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game