This quote from the Wall Street Journal jumped out at me this morning from their “Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes” article:
“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]
This drive to create products of the highest quality with a unique aesthetic is also something one found in the career of someone else who built a major corporation that has enhanced our lives: Walt Disney. This is a theme I’ve written on before and will hopefully develop and research more fully for future articles. Suggestions and recommended reading from PJM’s readers is always appreciated.
Jobs is done but left his mark on every corner of wireless technology. It only leaves us asking who won the war between the two titans of modern computer technology? Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates / Apple vs. Microsoft– check out my rendering of an epic match-up of their cyborg selves on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/08/end-of-era-steve-jobs.html
There is a fantastic book: http://www.amazon.com/Path-Between-Seas-Creation-1870-1914/dp/0671244094/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314301703&sr=8-1
In describing how the Panama Canal might be dressed up, or improved:
“The canal itself and all the structures connected with it impress one with a sense of their having been built with a view strictly to their utility. There is an entire absence of ornament and no evidence that the aesthetic has been considered except in a few instances…One feels that anything done merely for the purpose of beautifying it would not only fail to accomplish that purpose, but would be an impertinence.”
I started investing in 1980. Bought some AAPL and held it for a few years but sold when Jobs left. Should have bought and held when he came back.