Personal Information
Organization / Workplace
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Occupation
Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, CEO 2005-2010
About
My Hero Steve Jobs:
It wasn't that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it's that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That's Apple's problem: Their differentiation evaporated.
When I got back here, Apple had forgotten who we were. Remember that "Think Different" ad campaign we ran [featuring great innovators from Einstein to Muhammad Ali to Gandhi]. It was certainly for customers to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself.
You can tell a lot about a person by who his or her heroes are. That ad was to remind us of who our heroes are and who we are. We forgot that for a while. Companies sometimes forget who they are. Sometimes they remember again,