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Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Telephone
Bell
Telephones
Bells
Invented
Market
Scoffing
Research
Graham
Alexander

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
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What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
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Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
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I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.
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Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.
Walter Isaacson
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The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
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I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
Walter Isaacson
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More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
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Innovation requires articulation.
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for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
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But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.
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...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.
Walter Isaacson
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When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.
Walter Isaacson
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One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
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When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.
Walter Isaacson
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One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
Walter Isaacson
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I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.
Walter Isaacson
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Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute
Walter Isaacson
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Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
Walter Isaacson
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I don't think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.
Walter Isaacson