Steve Jobs shares his advice or "secret" to create successful companies
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A great excerpt from the D5 conference with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Steve Jobs shares his advice or "secret" to create successful companies
Steve Jobs shares his advice or "secret" to create successful companies
updated 13 years ago
Steve Jobs shares his advice or "secret" to create successful companies
Excerpt from the D8 - All Things Digital Conference from 2010.
Full video is available on Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-all-things-digital-conference-video/id529997900?i=1000116189688
Steve Jobs is talking about the courage it takes to remove certain pieces of technology from Apple products. This happened after the iPad was introduced without support for Flash, just as the iPhone, back in 2007.
This clip adds some perspective into the debate of Apple's new AirPod and the decision to remove the traditional analog audio connector from the iPhone 7. This kind of decision is not new to Apple.
The interview occurred 6 years ago, and Steve Jobs was already using the word "courage" to explain why the company does things the way it does.
STEVE JOBS: Um. You know. This is probably a bad example, but I'm going to use it. When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened. I got a lot of advice from people that said, you gotta just let it slide. You can't, uh, you shouldn't go after a journalist because they bought stolen property, and they tried to extort you. You should let it slide. Apple's a big company now, you don't want the PR. You should let it slide.
And I thought deeply about this, and I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big, and we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can't do that. I'd rather quit. You know, you go back five years ago, what would we have done if something like this happened. You go back ten years ago. Uh, what would you do if, uh, what would you do — no I won't go into that — we have the same values now as we had then. We're certainly a little more experienced, we're certainly more beat up, uh, but the core values are the same. And we come into work wanting to do the same thing today as we did five or ten years ago which is build the best products for people. You know there's nothing that makes my day more than getting an email 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. And it's what kept me going five years ago. It's what kept me going ten years ago when the doors were almost closed, and it's what'll keep me going five years from now, whatever happens.
What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up wtih a product and we tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves.
They go YES or NO, and if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow.
Thats how it works. Its really simple.
As for the enterprise market, its not so simple, the people that use the products don't decide for themselves. And the people that make those decisions are sometimes confused.
We love just trying to make the best product in the world for people, and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not.