Page 23 - The Apple Experience

a yacht. (In fact with the exception of a corporate jet, Jobs lived a humble
lifestyle. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates once visited Jobs at his home and

wondered how so many people could fit in such a modest dwelling.) Jobs’s

vision was to make tools that would help people unleash their personal

creativity. He wanted to build a company that would outlast him. He wanted

to build a legacy. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to

me,” Steve Jobs once said. “Going to bed at night saying, ‘We’ve done

something wonderful,’ that’s what matters to me.”
A vision helps you see things that others might have missed. For

example, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple on April 1,

1976, “Woz” shared Jobs’s vision to build “personal” computers that average

people could use and enjoy. The Apple II became the most popular personal

computer of its time, but it was still not ready to enter the homes of everyday

people. In 1979 Jobs was given a tour of the Xerox research facility in Palo

Alto, California. There, for the first time, he saw a crude “graphical user
interface” where a user would interact with a computer via colorful icons on

the screen and a gadget called a “mouse.” Jobs instantly saw the potential of

the technology for satisfying his vision of bringing a computer into the

homes of everyday people. Jobs once said Xerox could have dominated the

entire computer industry but did not because the Xerox vision was limited to

building another copy machine. In other words, two people can see the same

thing but interpret it differently based on their vision.

The Real Beginning of the Apple Store

Steve Jobs had a lot in common with country music superstar Garth Brooks.

Both artists were inspired by innovators who paved the road ahead of them. I

saw Brooks perform a one-man show at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas in