When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
The World Is Cold. You Must Light The World On Fire.
We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.
Nice to see government taking notice of the power of social media. All these world leaders come here seeking to emulate the curiosity that is Silicon Valley. Yet, maybe it is a unique combination of being in the right place, at the right time with the right people that has engendered its meteoric rise. Maybe these attempts at imitation are doomed to fail.
“В офисе Apple.” This happened today. How’d I learn about it? Why, from the Kremlin’s new official Twitter account. Medvedev also visited Twitter, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley companies. Medvedev works on a MacBook, and recently began using an iPad.
If you’re still not convinced Jobs is open, consider this: The CEO has been held up as a more accessible tech leader than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. And Zuckerberg runs a social network, ostensibly all about sharing! Writing about the controversy over Zuckerberg rolling back user privacy protections, VentureBeat’s Kim-Mai Cutler suggested Zuck think more like Jobs:
Facebook’s moves can appear disingenuous, even if they’re not… So the company should just be frank and that message should come from the top.
Going more open is out of character for Jobs, a notoriously secretive boss, by all account obsessed with every detail of controlling his company, especially the flow of information.
But consider that Jobs, as he is no doubt acutely aware these days, won’t be CEO of Apple forever. He has a legacy to consider. And it’s become increasingly clear that a policy of total info-control is untenable as more and more people publish to the Web, whether through Twitter, personal websites or simply comments in online forums.
I love this. Even someone as powerful and industrious as Jobs finds it prudent to take the time to respond to individual emails from everyday people. This logic can be applied to any private or public organization that has previously benefited from opaqueness and obfuscation. An overabundance of information now exists, and everyone, from the top down, has access to it. Time to adapt or die.
Here’s to the crazy one. The mercurial. The rebel. The market maker. The lucky guy with the new liver. The one who sees things differently. He’s not fond of rules and bad typography. And he has no respect for mediocrity.
At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.
“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley.
That restraint is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look. In his Palo Alto home years ago, he said that he preferred uncluttered, spare interiors and then explained the elegant craftsmanship of the simple wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, the 20th-century furniture designer and father of the American craft movement.
Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”
“Real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had and then delivering capabilities that redefine product categories,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s what Steve Jobs has done.”
Source YouTube, Feld Thoughts
