Truthfully, I thought everyone knew about the ‘Lucky 7 Lounge’. It’s a secret room at Pixar that’s really not so secret now. But I took a quick poll of some friends and coworkers and drew a blank, so here goes.

It was a nook, really, created by the shape of the building around it and the needs of the air conditioning system when the company’s new headquarters were built. Animator Andrew Gordon discovered it while investigating a human-sized hatch in the back wall of his new office. After finding that the tunnel ended in a ‘lost space’, he decided to start decorating.

Steve Jobs worked very hard to create great drama and excitement in his product launch keynote presentations.  From the classic “…and one more thing” to the great use of the Keynote software to maximum effect, Steve commanded the stage and his audience.  There simply is no executive in technology or just about any business category that has come close to his use of excitement, humor, and drama.  None of what Steve did on stage was unplanned, in fact everything was planned to just about the minute.

On January 9, 2007 at 9:00 a.m. Steve Jobs took the stage at the 2007 Macworld Conference & Expo and just about 35 minutes into his presentation he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years…” And at just about 9:42 a.m. Steve announced the iPhone.  Thus frozen in time is the near exact time the iPhone was officially announced. 

Mona Simpson is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She delivered this eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs, on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.

Some outlets have suggested that he doesn't care and will happily pay a fine if ever confronted by police; others, quoting Steve Wozniak, suggest that he had some kind of permit to do so.

Neither is true.  In fact the truth is far simpler.

Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws.  Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.

So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one.  At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.

One might also assume that the leasing company was happy - they had an endless supply of luxury cars to on-sell with the previous driver being none-other that Steve Jobs.

That would be a win-win-win situation for Steve, the leasing company and for the subsequent buyer.

It's impossible to separate Steve's rejection of cancer treatment from his brilliance as an innovator and CEO.

A more risk averse guy, with less of a sense of drive and infallibility would have got the operation sooner. But a more risk averse guy wouldn't have taken on the job of Apple CEO for a second time and rebuilt the company.

If a parallel universe was inhabited by 'sensible Steve' who got the cancer op immediately, I'm pretty sure that none of us would have heard of him. What sort of sensible person would continue to work long hours, if they had a great family sitting at home and a billion already in the bank? I wouldn't!

So this 'stupidity' is just the flip side of the coin of Steve's brilliant personality. Yes, he died sooner than he should have - but he also accomplished more during that time than most of us ever will.

Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. His legacy will last for many years, through people he’s trained and people he’s influenced. But what death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.

Onion News Network: Apple Announces Plans To Release Steve Jobs 2
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that in 2012 the company will release the Steve Jobs 2, an updated version of the revolutionary Apple founder featuring a richer, deeper voice and a sleek new white turtleneck.

You don’t have to work very hard to find things about Steve Jobs to dislike. You aren’t obligated to give the company he co-founded any money. You can even root against it, and take pleasure in its failures. But all Jobs ever did was make products that people were free to choose or ignore. Stallman and Raymond, however, seem to be confident that they understand what’s good for Apple customers better than Apple customers do. They’d be happier if the choices offered by Apple didn’t exist: Both say they hope that Jobs’ passing might hasten the end of the Apple we currently know.
Freedom, apparently, is just another word for agreeing with Richard M. Stallman and Eric S. Raymond.
Explain to me again what’s so damn liberating about that?

IN the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

His argument of why the departure of Steve Jobs would cause an increase in the stock price was based on the fact that the market would have discounted it and the only question would be when it would happen. Since that uncertainty of when was unresolved, it would weigh on the shares until the uncertainty would be lifted and the price would resume its value based on other factors.

I’ve appreciated receiving a number of emails from readers who agreed with my post yesterday rebutting Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “post” on Steve Jobs’ supposed lack of giving.

One reader pointed out that Jobs had really directly responded to these points in a 1985 Playboy Interview:

I have come to the conclusion that what has made Apple so different is that instead of having a profit motive at its core, it has something else entirely. Many big companies like to pretend this is the case — “we put our customers first” — but very few truly live by that mantra. When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers.

Apple never has.

As paradoxical as it is that the pursuit of profit is what causes the long-term failure of companies, I believe that Apple’s lack of focus on profitability has actually made it one of the most successful companies in the history of capitalism.

On May 19, 2001 Steve Jobs took a cherry-picked entourage of journalists on a tour of the company’s first brick-and-mortar retail outlet located in the second level of Tysons Corner Center in Virginia. “Literally half the store is devoted to solutions. Because people don’t just want to buy personal computers any more. They want to know what they can do with them,” he later explained in the above promotional video shown to the gathering of devotees at the Macworld Expo 2001 conference.

As with all things Apple, however, pundits were quick to predict a huge fail. The store couldn’t possibly earn enough to cover the cost of overhead, let alone keep itself running, they argued. Naysayers came out of the woodwork all guns blazing, warning Apple would pay dearly for experimenting with such an expensive and unproven concept. Some critics even called Apple crazy to gamble away its fortunes. It wasn’t just the pundits and haters.

Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their game, only better

The better part of a month has gone by, and most pundits have already weighed in on this year's CES -- the global gadget extravaganza that makes Las Vegas the gravitational center of the geek universe every January. The consensus? Meh.

That's because the cacophony and crowds and celebrity sightings -- is there a rapper who doesn't have an audio accessory line at this point? -- couldn't disguise the fact that Apple, the new king of the tech hill, had once again refused to participate in a gathering dominated by old-guard standouts like Sony, whose gargantuan 25,000 square foot pavilion is always the show's largest, and which traditionally pulls out the razzle-dazzle stops in its presser (last year: country pixie Taylor Swift; this year, the stars of "The Green Hornet" -- and their car).

Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest turning point that independent music has ever had. Until that point, almost no big business would sell independent music. (That's why I had to start CD Baby, because nobody would sell my music.)

By iTunes saying they wanted everything, then their competitors needing to keep up, we were in! Since the summer of 2003, every musician everywhere can sell all their music in almost every outlet online. Do you realize how amazing that is?

But there was one problem.

iTunes wasn't getting back to us.

Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and the rest were all up and running. But iTunes wasn't returning our signed contract.