“Creativity is just connecting things,” Jobs told Wired magazine. “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.”
Interview at the All Things Digital D5 Conference, Steve and Bill Gates spoke with journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg onstage in May 2007.
Kara Swisher: The first question I was interested in asking is what you think each has contributed to the computer and technology industry— starting with you, Steve, for Bill, and vice versa. Steve Jobs: Well, Bill built the first software company in the industry. And I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well for the industry. I think the biggest thing was, Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software that— KS: Was important? SJ: That’s what I see. I mean, a lot of other things you could say, but that’s the high-order bit. And I think building a company’s really hard, and it requires your greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best ...