IT related quotes

IT- Information technology related quotes.

Steve Jobs's Quotes On Design, Technology and Quality.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
[Steve Jobs]

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
[Steve Jobs]

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.
[On Mac OS X's Aqua user interface, as quoted in Fortune magazine (2000-01-04)]

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.
[As quoted in Newsweek (29 October 2001)]

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
[Stanford University commencement address (2005-06-12) ]

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me."
[The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]

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, Feb. 1, 1985]

"Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that."

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."

"Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. "
[Wired, February 1996]

"For something this complicated, 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."

"That's been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
[BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998,

"Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through."
[MSNBC and Newsweek interview, Oct. 14, 2006]

"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
[On Mac OS X, Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000]

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."
[Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998]

"The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient."

"But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea."

"And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important."
[BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2004]
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[Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 - 20026)] - legendary computer scientist

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Source: Notes On Structured Programming, 1972, corollary at the end of section 3, On The Reliability of Mechanisms.

Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.
1972 Turing Award Lecture[1], Communications of the ACM 15 (10), October 1972: pp. 859-866

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