calvin

If you don't see it through I think you will be unhappy all your life.

I always had this sense that I wouldn't be understood, and that I had to do it myself.

I just decided I could make samples at night and on weekends. And buyers agreed to buy them.
And I thought I'll just figure it out.

... American film and music have always been at the forefront of inspiration for people around the world. Fashion, too. Because so many of us are really Inspired by the way modern women live and work-- That's an American thing. And I think we have great influence.

I was sitting in my tiny little showroom
with 3 coats and 4 dresses
In walks the GMM of bonwit teller...
I didn't want the clothes to wrinkle so I wheeled a rack to bonwit teller.

more steve

''It was like the first adult love of your life,'' [Jobs] confesses, ''something that is always special to you, no matter how it turns out.'' ''It's very romantic going back to your first love,'' observes the industry analyst Esther Dyson, ''but it rarely works out.''

Jobs would be offered the chance to return to his first love. And he jumped, setting off a frenzy of late-night meetings, negotiations and soul-searching throughout Silicon Valley.

Apple would make a good living off the Macintosh technology for years, but as an innovator, the company all but stood still.

While the personal computer industry has become a global $150-billion-a-year business, it remains a remarkably tiny community in some respects, ruled by a few hundred people who came of age together.

a textbook study of Steve Jobs in action, part hustling opportunist and part technology visionary.

Jobs paced the room and scribbled with a black marker on a white board, tracing the evolution of computer operating systems and prescribing their future.

spellbinding salesman of technology

He sees business as a passion, the pursuit of something worthy; his friends talk of his ''need to do something big.''

Jobs, whose genius for infecting others with his enthusiasm is known, by critics and admirers alike, as the ''reality distortion field.''

Esthetically, Jobs is a modernist, a believer in simple elegance.

Jobs's return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce certain standards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown

'The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. 'I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success -- they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem

with the fact that they

just make really third-rate products.''

ugly.

Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Steven Levy remembers Jobs telling him once that he hoped to create "a $10 billion company that didn’t lose its soul."

He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world

Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.

I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.

In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000.

In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation.

Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control. 1,200 Apple employees were laid off.

he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

steve rememberances

I will miss the thespian who made inanimate objects like a computer become a thing to behold. A few years ago, I compared Steve to Howard Hughes using the line, “Some men dream the future. He built it.”

For many of us who live and die for technology and the change it represents, he was an example of what was possible, no matter how the chips were stacked against you. Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects. Everyone saw steel, silicon and software; he saw an opportunity to paint his Mona Lisa.

People saw a phone; Steve saw a transporter of love. People saw a tablet; he saw smiles and wide-eyed amazement. They made computers; he made time machines that brought us all together through a camera, screen and a connection.

To me Steve Jobs meant try harder, damn it, your customers expect better than that. Steve taught me to care about the little things, because in the end, little things matter.

Steve was my secret muse. Trust me –- he is a secret muse to many of us in the valley. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Dave Morin. Jack Dorsey. We are all part of the tribe called Jobs. There is a whole generation of entrepreneurs who ask themselves this one question –- what will Steve do. Natch. What would have Steve done!

- om

it's like an obi-wan thing. he'll become a legend. he already was.