Alex Gibney Quotes

Steve Jobs knows how to hold his hand out, to build beautiful products and make people pay for them.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

The iPod is a perfect example of Steve's [Jobs] methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system.

You know, Steve Jobs came to the music industry and pitched them the idea and they kept shootin' him down and shootin' him down, and now he makes money off the whole music industry regardless. Which is a minor part of his empire, 'cause obviously it's gadgets that make him all of his money. But regardless, he has basically monopolized the music game.

Having made up my mind, I went to see Steve [Jobs]. I brought a hand-drawn sketch with me, and I said, "Please make something like this." He said, "Don't show me such an ugly design sketch." But he also said, "You've got the right idea. I totally agree that the time has come when we can make the ultimate mobile machine."

I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for the computer, telling everyone here it is. It's small, it's simple, it's inexpensive: Build your own. No idea to start a company. Steve Jobs came by later and say, you know, people are interested. Why don't we start a company?

I think what people love about the Steve Jobs story is not just the track record at Apple, but that comeback story, that he was thrown out of Apple, came back and built the company even greater. And that perseverance is so important in terms of entrepreneurship. And nobody is a better role model for that, for all entrepreneurs all over the world than Steve Jobs.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

I have a cell phone that doesn't behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don't start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

One thing most people don't know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer.

Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

I'm a brand type guy and we want to make sure that 'Gas Monkey' is out there in every arena that we can be. I'm also never short on ideas and I usually try to get them out there at all times.

When I did inventions, I always thought only of the invention itself, but the kids would ask for marketing materials.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

He [Steve Jobs] had more of the future vision: We can bring this to everyone; we can start a company; we can sell it.

We Experiment Endlessly, With New Products, New Methods, New Companies And New Marketing. A Successful Business The Emphasis Is On Experiment And Development, Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business.

Jobs would have ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. He was dismissive of Gates' foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better.

I try to get people to see what I have. . . . When you run a computer company, you have to get people to buy into your dreams.

We truly could have used the later Jobs in earlier years at Apple, is what I feel.

Steve [Jobs] and I spent months getting to know each other before I joined Apple. He had no exposure to marketing other than what he picked up on his own. This is sort of typical of Steve. When he knows something is going to be important, he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.

What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down.

So the fact that the first movie about Steve Jobs was made by a guy who was completely entrepreneurial and outside the film industry, I think is very appropriate.