Guy kawasaki on Steve Jobs

I don't know if everybody has heard, but about ten minutes ago, Apple announced that Steve Jobs died today. And so, I have to tell you, I don't think it's appropriate nor probably the best thing to do for any of us to necessarily be focusing on Facebook marketing right now.

And so, I am going to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple, and what Steve has meant to me, what Steve has meant to the industry, and personal computing, and just Internet and everything, if you don't mind, rather than talking about Facebook marketing. I hope that is okay with all of you.

This announcement literally happened as we were prepping and getting all our things together for the conference that we are now attending. It could not have happened with less notice to us. So, I hope it's okay with you that I'm going to switch topics completely.

And my phone, my cell phone and my other phone, is just ringing off the hook with people trying to get quotes from me. But I'm going to do this webinar instead.

Here's the story. I joined Apple in 1983. My past at Apple was that I interviewed for a job with Apple the first time in order to work in what was called the Apple University Consortium. And the Apple University Consortium was Steve Jobs' vision that the place to seed Macintoshes would be universities.

At the time, K-12 was pretty much dominated by the Apple II, so he saw that the next level of computing would be, of course, colleges. So he created a program, it was headed by a guy named Dan'l Lewin, whose charter was to convince universities to use Macintoshes. And it started with places like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford.

The first job I interviewed was to work in that group. I don't know, it just wasn't a good fit for me. So about six months went by and then the second job I interviewed for at Apple was to be software evangelist. And a software evangelist job was to meet with soft and hard companies and convince them to do Macintosh products.

That's the job that I took. The second job that I tried for at Apple. And if you really want to know the inside story, the reason why I got that job is because my college classmate Mike Boich was working in the Mac division. And so he hired me because we knew each other, we were friends. So one could say it was purely nepotism.

Let's talk about the Macintosh division. The Macintosh division, I think, was probably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California, and that is saying a lot, believe me. So the closest thing I can say to describing what it was like to work there…

You know how after the Superbowl, there's a TV camera on the winning quarterback and the TV camera says, "Where are you going to go now?" to the quarterback, and the quarterback says, "I'm going to Disneyland." Well, working in the Macintosh division in the mid 80s was like working at Disneyland, or more accurately, being paid to go to Disneyland.

Basically, the division was on a mission, a mission from Steve, as opposed to God. And this mission from Steve was that we wanted to prevent worldwide domination of information and freedom from IBM. So we looked at IBM as the enemy.

This was the whole point of the 1984 commercial. That if IBM ruled the world, it would be boring, totalitarian, George Orwellian--just an ugly society of mediocrity and conformity and thought control. And Apple was going to send the proverbial act into the image of big brother. It was religious fervor in the sense that we were fighting a mighty opposite. Which was IBM, the totalitarian mainframe company.

And so we were I'd say about fifty people. We had a building on Mariani Drive. There's a story about how someone put a pirate flag above the building, that's true. Steve Capps, the person who wrote the Finder, got a pirate flag and put it up there because we were going to be pirates. Knock the establishment. This was Steve's division.

What we did is we worked very, very hard because we truly thought we were on a mission to improve people's creativity and productivity and prevent totalitarianism, primarily of IBM. The group was a very interesting collection of people. There were people like me who had MBAs, and I was hired despite having an MBA.

There were people like Burrell Smith, who Steve found working in an Apple II repair department. Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote much of the Macintosh ROMs and was an old -- or, not old, no one was old at the time -- but an experienced Apple II programmer. It was a collection of just great software and hardware engineers.

There were artists like Susan Kerr, who created much of the early graphics and icons of Macintosh. Joanna Hoffmann was the first person who did the marketing function for the division. Mike Boich, as I said who I worked for, he and I went to Stanford together. He went to HP, the calculator division of HP in Corvalis. He was recruited out of there.

The person who recruited him was a guy named Mike Murray. Mike Murray was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. Subsequently, he went to work for Microsoft and he became Microsoft's VP of HR. So, it was a merry band of pirates. Steve himself had only attended one semester of Reed, a college in Oregon, so here we were, on paper not so qualified.

We had a few PhDs. One person was Bruce Horn, he was a PhD student from I believe Carnegie Mellon. He was the coauthor of the Finder with Steve Capps. And so, it was a great place to work because, man, we were going to change frickin' history. And I can't tell you how euphoric it was to work there. Because it was such bright people and we had such a mission to change the world. So that was the Macintosh division. I guess one of the high points of that division… [interrupted by vibrating phone]

Anyway this was the division. Some aspects of the division that you might interesting. Steve bought the division a Bösendorfer Grand Piano. And some of the people played Bösendorfer Grand Piano. There was a BMW motorcycle for the division. We also had a travel policy that any flight over two hours qualified for first class. I tended to interpret that rule as the two hours begins at the moment you leave your apartment. So I lived in Los Altos. Los Altos to SFO can be 45 minutes or so, so I basically flew first class everywhere. It was a great time.

Across the street was the Lisa division. The Lisa division was creating basically a very large Macintosh. But it was $7,000. Big footprint. Arguably, the Lisa taught us many lessons that we applied to the Macintosh and made Macintosh successful. A social media analogy would be that Google Buzz is to Google Plus was Lisa is to Macintosh. So that was the Macintosh division. Macintosh was announced on January 24, 1984, in De Anza College where Steve unveiled it. At the time, he was not wearing a black mock turtleneck. His thing was a double-breasted suit with a bowtie. So he introduced it, and that was one of the most enchanting moments of my life: to watch Macintosh be introduced by Steve Jobs.

The first time I saw a Macintosh was in the back of that building, the Macintosh division building. At the time, I was in the jewelry business and my friend Mike Boich showed me a Macintosh, and I was an Apple II user and that was a religious experience also because back then with an Apple II you were fortunate if you had a 24x80 terminal screen, you moved the cursor around with cursor keys. Graphics was using Xs and Os to draw things. The first time you saw a Mac, right, was multiple fonts, and multiple sizes, and multiple styles—integration of text and graphics. And the first time you saw Mac Paint with graphics, paint cans, brushes—it was a magical experience.

Now, what happened after that was that we had a very successful launch. The goal was to sell a quarter million Macintoshes in the first hundred days and we achieved that goal. Back then, the whole thing with Macintoshes and developers were we told them three stories: it was a very rich technical environment, this great programming environment, very rich ROM set; we told them that it was a good financial bet because we were going to bring people to personal computing who had never used a personal computer before; and finally, it was a good hedge because at the time the IBM personal computer division was starting to publish software, so we were explaining to people that if IBM started publishing software in your segment under their own label, you would be dead. So that was our evangelism pitch.

And I think mostly what appealed to developers was the richness of the Macintosh programming environment. Back then, the decision was being made by engineers and nerds, not MBAs and marketing people. So that's what really sucked people in. It was very, very interesting albeit challenging programming environment.

SNow we're in mid-1984, things are going pretty good. We're selling a lot of Macs, had that post-launch glow. Sort of hit the wall because businesses were not embracing Macintoshes. It didn't have some crucial pieces of software thanks to me. It was slow in a lot of operations. It took us a good two years to significantly revise that product. I think mostly because we were still tired from shipping it at all.

And after that, there was what I called the Wonder Years. I wonder when there will be software, I wonder when we'll turn the corner. As businesses were rejecting it, we went through this period of euphoria, then we went through this period of down in the dumps. This is one of those major times when according to all the experts Apple was supposed to die. We brought in some adult supervision, i.e., John Sculley. A lot of interesting things happened. It culminated with some layoffs, culminated with a board decision picking between John Sculley and Steve Jobs.

So Steve Jobs was out. He went out and started NeXT: the big black cube computer built on UNIX. And things did not exactly pick up. A few years went by, they made Mike Spindler CEO, and then they made Gil Amelio CEO. Gil Amelio decided to buy NeXT, I think, for $400 million dollars. Steve came back to Apple first as an advisor, temporary, to help Gil and stuff. And then, eventually, Gil started imploding and Steve came back, introduced the iMac.

And from there, the rest is kind of history, right? So, the iMac, if you remember, it was that teardrop shape-looking computer that came in colors like blueberry and cherry and, I don't know, tangerine and stuff. That sort of, the industrial design of that computer, I think, was really sort of what rekindled people's enthusiasm for Macintosh. And fast forward a few years and we have things like the iPod and iPhone and iPad. Macintosh flipped to less than 5% market share; it subsequently has returned. I don't ever know if it will be more than 10%, but it's definitely on the upswing.

I can tell you with total certainty that Steve Jobs was a great, if not the greatest, influence in my life. From him I learned, one is an appreciation of design, an appreciation of elegance and simplicity. I learned how far you can push people, that you can get the best work out of people by pushing them with great challenges. Steve wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy guy, but he got the best results out of people. He could drive you crazy because the trash can icon didn't look right or a certain shade of black wasn't black enough. He was heavily influenced by Paul Rand, the logo designer.

I consider it an honor to have worked for him in the Macintosh division. And only 100 or so people can say that, so what a time! What a time! And if you look back, no matter how you feel about Apple, you have to say it was among the starters of the personal computer industry. It definitely made the graphical user interface go mainstream. If you look at it, Steve Jobs created the, in a sense, the Apple I standard, the Apple II standard, the Macintosh standard, then he created his smartphone standard iPhone, iPod standard, iPad standard. Lots of companies and people are fortunate to create one revolution, but Steve Jobs arguably created four or five.

I truly do believe that if you look at all the CEOs over the history of business, I don't think there's a CEO who has done more for his employees, his shareholders, and his customers. The world is a lot worse off without Steve Jobs. May he rest in peace. But wow what a job he did for everybody, personally for me, and many, many people who worked for the Macintosh division. And I think in many ways, for many of the people who use Apple products that these Apple products made them more creative, more productive and brought joy and enchantment to their lives.

OBITUARY - Steve Jobs "may never be equalled"

Passionate, prickly, and deemed irreplaceable by many Apple fans and investors, Steve Jobs made a life defying conventions and expectations.

And despite years of poor health, his death on Wednesday at the age of 56 prompted a global gasp as many people remembered how much he had done to transform the worlds of computing, music and mobile phones, changing the way people communicate and access information and entertainment.

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come," said Microsoft co-founder and long-time rival Bill Gates.

"For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor."

The founder of Apple Inc died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, surrounded by his family. The circumstances of his passing were unclear, but Jobs has had a long battle with cancer and other health issues.

Jobs' family thanked many for their prayers during the last year of Steve's illness.

A college dropout, Jobs floated through India in search of spiritual guidance prior to founding Apple - a name he suggested to his friend and co-founder Steve Wozniak after a visit to a commune in Oregon he referred to as an "apple orchard."

With his passion for minimalist design and marketing genius, Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and then brought a revolution to the mobile market.

The iconic iPod, the iPhone - dubbed the "Jesus phone" for its quasi-religious following - and the iPad are the creation of a man who was known for his near-obsessive control of the product development process.

"Most mere mortals cannot understand a person like Steve Jobs," said bestselling author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee, in a recent interview. He considers Jobs "the greatest CEO in the history of man", adding that he just had "a different operating system."

Charismatic, visionary, ruthless, perfectionist, dictator - these are some of the words that people have used to describe Jobs, who may have been the biggest dreamer the technology world has ever known, but also was a hard-edged businessman and negotiator through and through.

"Steve was the best of the best. Like Mozart and Picasso, he may never be equalled," said Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape Communications.

Microsoft's Gates had called Jobs the most inspiring person in the tech industry and President Barack Obama held him up as the embodiment of the American Dream.

It's hard to imagine a bigger success story than Steve Jobs, but rejection, failure and bad fate were part and parcel of who he was. Jobs was given away at birth, driven out of Apple in the mid-80s and struck with cancer when he finally had regained the top of the mountain.

He resigned as CEO of Apple Inc on August 24 - saying he could no longer fulfill the duties - and briefly served as chairman before his death.

Jobs grew up with an adopted family in Silicon Valley, which was turning from orchards to homes for workers at Lockheed and other defense and technology companies.

Electronics friend Bill Fernandez introduced him to boy engineer Wozniak, and the two Steves began a friendship that eventually bred Apple Computer.

"Woz is a brilliant engineer, but he is not really an entrepreneur, and that's where Jobs came in," recently remembered Fernandez, who was the first employee at Apple.

Wozniak earlier this year said that his goal was only to design hardware and he had no interest in running Apple.

"Steve Jobs' role was defined -- you've got to learn to be an executive in every division of the company so you can be the world's most important person some day. That was his goal," joked Wozniak, who is still listed as an employee, even though he has not worked at Apple for years.

AWFUL-TASTING MEDICINE

Jobs created Apple twice - once when he founded it and the second time after a return credited with saving the company, which now vies with Exxon Mobil as the most valuable publicly traded corporation in the United States.

Every day to him was "a new adventure in the company," Jay Elliot, a former senior vice president at Apple who worked very closely with Jobs in the eighties, said earlier this year, adding that he was "almost like a child" when it came to his inquisitiveness.

He was highly intolerant of company politics and bureaucracy, Elliot noted.

But the inspiring Jobs came with a lot of hard edges, oftentimes alienating colleagues and early investors with his my-way-or-the-highway dictums and plans that were generally ahead of their time.

Elliot was a witness to the acrimony between Jobs and former Apple Chief Executive John Sculley who often clashed on ideas, products and the direction of the company.

The dispute came to a head at Apple's first major sales meeting in Hawaii in 1985 where the two "just blew up against each other," Elliot said.

Jobs left soon after, saying he was fired.

"It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith," Jobs told a Stanford graduating class in 2005.

He returned to Apple about a decade after he left, working as a consultant. Soon he was running it, in what has been called Jobs' second act.

Jobs reinvented the technology world four or five times, first with the Apple II, a beautiful personal computer in the 1970s; then in the 1980s with the Macintosh, driven by a mouse and presenting a clean screen that made computing inviting; the ubiquitous iPod debuted in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and in 2010 the iPad, which a year after it was introduced outsold the Mac.

Steve Jobs "may never be equalled"

src:~in.news.yahoo.com

APPLE, NEXT, IPHONE

A college dropout, Buddhist and son of adoptive parents, Jobs started Apple Computer with friend Steve Wozniak in 1976. The company soon introduced the Apple 1 computer.

But it was the Apple II that became a huge success and gave Apple its position as a critical player in the then-nascent PC industry, culminating in a 1980 initial public offering that made Jobs a multimillionaire.

Despite the subsequent success of the Macintosh computer, Jobs' relationship with top management and the board soured. The company removed most of his powers and then in 1985 he was fired.

Apple's fortunes waned after that. However, its purchase of NeXT -- the computer company Jobs founded after leaving Apple -- in 1997 brought him back into the fold. Later that year, he became interim CEO and in 2000, the company dropped "interim" from his title.

Along the way Jobs also had managed to revolutionize computer animation with his other company, Pixar, but it was the iPhone in 2007 that secured his legacy in the annals of modern technology history.

Forbes estimates Jobs' net worth at $6.1 billion in 2010, placing him in 42nd place on the list of America's richest. It was not immediately known how his estate would be handled.

Six years ago, Jobs had talked about how a sense of his mortality was a major driver behind that vision.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," Jobs said during a Stanford commencement ceremony in 2005.

"Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Quotes from late Apple founder Steve Jobs

Here are some key quotes from Steve Jobs, the legendary co-founder and former chief executive of Apple Inc, who died on Wednesday after a years-long battle with cancer.

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 2005

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"No one wants to Die.

Even People who want to go to Heaven dont wan't to die to get there.

And yet death is the destination we all share.

No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, beacause 

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."

"Almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

ALLTHINGSD CONFERENCE, 2010

"There's nothing that makes my day more than getting an e-mail from some random person in the universe who just bought an iPad over in the UK and tells me the story about how it's the coolest product they've ever brought home in their lives. That's what keeps me going. It's what kept me five years ago, it's what kept me going 10 years ago when the doors were almost closed. And it's what will keep me going five years from now whatever happens."

INTERVIEW WITH PLAYBOY MAGAZINE, 1985

"I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a 5-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying."

APPLE PRODUCT LAUNCH, JUNE 2011

"One more thing ..."

INTERVIEW WITH BUSINESS WEEK, 2004

"Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea."

"And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important."

INTERVIEW WITH FORTUNE MAGAZINE, 2000

"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, 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 of the product or service."

"My position coming back to Apple was that our industry was in a coma. It reminded me of Detroit in the '70s, when American cars were boats on wheels."

COMMENT TO NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER WHO ASKED ABOUT JOBS' HEALTH, 2008

"You think I'm an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong."

INTERVIEW WITH WIRED, 1996

"These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light -- that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important."

src:-in.news.yahoo.com