Futune Magazine recently interviewed Steve Jobs, and while there have been many such interviews in the past, this one is filled with great advice.
Here are some of them:
We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say, 'We're going to do it. Let's try.' The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let's give them a shot. And they did.- On making the iPhone
So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse".- On asking people what they want
We do no market research. We don't hire consultants- On choosing a strategy
And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is- On what drives Apple employees
My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects.- On Steve's managing style
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.- On Apple's focus
In the end, it's ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: 'Why are you here?' The answers themselves are not what you're looking for. It's the meta-data."- On finding talent
At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar.- On dealing with crisis
Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you're going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.- On Caching the next tech wave
We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place - the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time.- On handling economic downturn
These days, everyone talks about HTML5. All the big guys like Apple, Google, and Microsoft put a lot of effort into making it happen. Google is especially focused on bringing HTML5 and web apps into the world.
Want to try out the new Digg 4 - go here http://new.digg.com (limited access - be quick)
Earlier today On2, the company behind the video codec used in the FLV video format (used by Flash), told us that they will discontinue their Flix video product line.
There is one story that keeps popping up about Wired Magazine reporting that 26% of their traffic is now coming from the iPad. A truly amazing number. But there something odd about it. I'm not seeing that anywhere else. So I did a little digging.
My use of the stream have now reached a point where I am no longer looking for news. Instead, my world is pretty much divided into two types of information. Updates that are followable, and updates that isn’t. I am now spending 99% of my time on the first group.
Foursquare Grader has compiled a list of the percentage of people who have been rewarded a badge on Foursquare. This tells us a lot about how it is being used. Most social networks have a relatively low activity rate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
A few days ago I wrote, “Facebook is Dying, Social is Not,” and it appears that I hit a nerve. The article has so far been read by more than 25,000+ readers, in less than 3 days. It is safe to say that the complexity and privacy issues are something people really cares about.
Every now and then a short video is released that show just how much the world has changed. One of the best ones are “The Social Media Revolution” from Socialnomics. Yesterday they released an updated version, with all the latest stats.
You might have heard it already, but Google have released a new beta version of Chrome, which breaks new records in speed. And to show off how fast it really is they have made a little video.
RescueTime, a company the provides time management software, recently did a survey on what men and women spend their time one. Interesting study, but I don’t think they made the right conclusions.
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