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.

before jil & donna, there was zoran

The French idea that you have to "suffer to be beautiful" is anathema to Zoran - a throwback to the era of corsets, before women exercised to maintain the body and knew what to eat.

''We don't operate on the cocktail circuit. We don't need that constant schmooze factor.''

-Zoran, designer for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (who bought his entire first collection), Queen Noor,

Candice Bergen, Lauren Bacall, Isabella Rossellini, Lauren Hutton

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/20/style/reviews-fashion-zoran-the-master-of-deluxe-minimalism-still-provokes.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

what Zoran's anonymous-looking, logo-free clothes do: they silence the discussion about fashion.

installing a shower in his loft to remind private customers he didn't approve of makeup with his clothes.

''I never feel I look as good in other designers' clothes as I do his."

Gloria Vanderbilt says: ''I was wearing, unfaithfully, an Armani suit, and Zoran had with him this beautiful chiffon stole, amber colored. He took it and draped it all over me so that the other outfit was completely covered.''

Zoran refuses to allow his clothes to be marked down, stores have an incentive to sell them at full price.

Zoran's supremely simple concept for his office, which was to allow the space to remain undefined -- "like Home Depot for girls" -- not unlike his clothes, which present hundreds of combinations.

Zoran does not have franchises; he doesn't do sunglasses or scent. He doesn't much like makeup or jewelry.

"You don't have his private phone number, do you? I'm desperate for more pieces. There is never enough."

Zoran makes clothing for women—there are plenty of them—who are discreet and utterly confident and who do not need to wear their money on their sleeves. If you have to ask why a simple quilted silk jacket, no lining, no fastening, costs two grand, you're probably not a Zoranista.

He insists that modern clothes must be wearable throughout the business day, travel well and work for a woman who "can wear anything she wants. She is intelligent and she is deciding."

The gender disparities in the United States’ STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce are disturbing. According to a report released last month by the Department of Commerce, although females fill almost half of the jobs in the American economy, less than 25% of jobs in STEM fields are held by women. Even worse, female representation in computer science and math — the largest of the 4 STEM components — has declinedover the years, from 30% in 2000 to 27% in 2009. These disparities are not only stifling America’s technological creativity — numerous studies have shown that diversity in the workplace promotes innovation — they’re a menace to the very future of the country.

“This is a national crisis,” Nancy Ramsey, a futurist and co-author of The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century, tells me. She sounds appalled. She has every right to be. In 2005, Ramsey, along with a fellow researcher, released a report for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology that looked into gender imbalances in information technology. Six years later, she says, not much has changed, and the lack of women in computer science is not only limiting the country’s creative and entrepreneurial output, it’s undermining the strength of our economy, and, by extension, our national security.

“The country is not responding,” says Ramsey, who wishes the situation was taken as seriously as the space race of the 1950s and 60s. (Her husband is Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.) “Tom Friedman jumps up and down daily about the state of the economy; Fareed Zakaria had a special on jobs on CNN but I don’t think either one of them have talked about the need for more people to be in technology, especially women and girls.” (According to the U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of computer scientists is expected to grow a whopping 24% between 2008-2018, which the Bureau says is “much faster” than average for most occupations. Rebecca Blank, Acting Secretary at the Commerce Department, tells me that because of this increased need, the participation of more women will keep the industry – and, by extension, the country – globally competitive in the long run.) Says Ramsey’s co-author, Pamela McCorduck, “What has really changed is competition from abroad. You care about your country, you do everything you can.”

These realities have significant implications for the economy on a more micro-level: Women in traditionally well-paying STEM jobs, particularly computer science, enjoy more wage parity with men than in other occupations. The disparities also have long-reaching cultural and social ramifications. Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher for the American Academy of University Women (AAUW) and co-author of the 2010 report Why So Few?, is blunt: “The growth of technology is driven by the people who are designing it. Without women at the design table, the interests of half the population will be basically be ignored.” Adds Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the University of Colorado’s National Center for Women & Information Technology: “We don’t know what women would invent because by and large right now, they are not.”

“Coming from a feminist viewpoint, the people who are developing technology are the ones with the power,” says Jennifer Skaggs, a University of Kentucky education researcher and author of the June 2011 paper Making the Blind to See: Balancing STEM Identity With Gender Identity.

“She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security,” the book says. “That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.”

- roger ebert

if I designed clothes that I would wanna wear every day, I would be very bored as a designer.

we’re not limited by the things that we personally want.”

- rodarte

she also appears to have come from a bygone age when getting dressed was considered a demanding form of self-expression, rather than an opportunity to wallow in spandex-enabled comfort.

Her appearance is so interesting it suggests that her appearance is the least interesting thing about her.

Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the F.I.T. museum, puts Guinness in the lineage of Grace Kelly, Tina Chow, and Nan Kempner—women whose wearing of clothes amounts to a form of creativity in itself.

she is bored by money—a great luxury. In her, as in few others, wealth has been transmogrified into a flowing, wild, slightly absurd freedom. “Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking Chinese when I go out to dinner, and everyone’s from hedge funds, and I want to talk about a certain color,” says Guinness

I think life is about having the mixture of the curiosity of an older person and the imagination of a child.

“I think the world’s just gone completely mad, with everyone wearing the same things, even celebrities,”

she’s given herself over to the world of imagination

“When there were little gangs at school around the head of the lacrosse team or whatever, wanting to be cool, I found that really depressing,” she says. “I’m most comfortable being by myself.”

she’s one of the only women of that sort who manage to combine cartoonish attire with sex appeal.

“I had gone to a couple dinner parties and realized, This is not the way that I build a new life,” she says. “I wanted to be around a different kind of person. I wanted to be around artists.”

Guinness is also making her own clothes, though she doesn’t know “if I want to get on that treadmill,” she says. “I’ve got such a backlog of projects I want to do, and it is an undertaking.”

- new yorker & nymag articles about daphne