Steve Jobs was so taken by a typography class in college that no detail was ever irrelevant (cf. below).
Apple ended up being one of those companies, like Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines and R.E.I., that keeps reminding customers that they are always right… a great business sense/strategy.

Using one of Jobs’ favorite expressions, “insanely great,” part of Bill Gates’ tribute:
For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.
Bill Gates

Some Steve Jobs quotes:
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”
—PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.“

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
—Playboy, 1987

“I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”
—Newsweek, 2001

Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made PC don’t have that kind of pride in the product?

“If they did, they wouldn’t have made the PC
—Playboy, 1987

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
—BusinessWeek, 1998

Again, in his own words/voice (but make sure you check out Rob Siltanen’s contribution in Forbes to… “Think Different about Think Different”).

From his Stanford Commencement address:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
More here:

Thoughts, memories, and condolences, are collected here: rememberingsteve@apple.com

MADE ON A MAC

Addendum: An excerpt from Isaacson’s book, “Steve Jobs” – his last visit:
As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.
The Financial Times, last summer, on polluting Chinese factories tied to Apple and other companies.
And in Le Monde (Paris):
“Capable d’humilier ses employés en public, de les renvoyer brutalement, il était aussi odieux que manichéen. Un produit était ou fantastique ou nul, ses salariés étaient ou des génies ou des clowns, indispensables ou à jeter. Vous passiez d’une catégorie à l’autre en une fraction de seconde, sans préavis. Fasciné par les célébrités hollywoodiennes, asocial, timide et complexé, il garait sa Mercedes sur les places de parking réservées aux handicapés, ne donnait pas aux oeuvres de charité, ni lui ni son entreprise – contrairement à Bill Gates qui y consacre sa vie et ses millions – et a laissé sa première fille, illégitime, et sa mère vivre dans la pauvreté pendant plusieurs années avant de reconnaître l’enfant.
Alors qu’il avait déjà fait fortune et pour ne pas avoir à verser de pension, il avait affirmé au tribunal qu’il était stérile et qu’il ne pouvait donc pas être le père (il aura trois autres enfants).”