The North Star has always been the same, which for us, is about making insanely great products that really change the world in some way - enrich people's lives.
Tim CookRead
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
Interpretation
Success is often recognized in hindsight, despite initial skepticism.
Tim Cook's quote highlights how products that initially faced doubt and criticism can later be celebrated as successes. The iPod and iPhone both exemplified this phenomenon, where early misgivings about their design and functionality transformed into accolades over time, illustrating that innovation often meets resistance before gaining acceptance.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation about product development to emphasize the importance of perseverance.
The North Star has always been the same, which for us, is about making insanely great products that really change the world in some way - enrich people's lives.
There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is if you put a back door in, that back door's for everybody - for good guys and bad guys.
I don't subscribe to the view some people have in the industry that you should purposefully design products that do not last that long. I don't think it is good for anyone.
When technological advancement can go up so exponentially, I do think there's a risk of losing sight of the fact that tech should serve humanity, not the other way around.
Work takes on new meaning when you feel you are pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it's just a job, and life is too short for that.
That has always been the objective of Apple: to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, 'How did I live without this?'
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.
The greatest single programming language ever designed
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