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I’m a goddamn cynic and I’m impressed. Why haven’t we heard this before shouted from the rooftops?

Because it goes against a lot of what many companies do these days.

These in particular stand out:

22. “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”

11. “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”

10. “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”

5. “We’ve never worried about numbers. In the marketplace, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. ... You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.”

#22 is important, as a lot of companies are more than willing to shovel crap out the door if it makes a profit, or they get into a market or market segment that they really shouldn't be in or that they are not fully committed to, and it bites them in the butt.

I've also seen a lot of companies over the years, tech and otherwise, that get in a slump, and all they can think about is keeping the stockholders happy and so they do layoffs and scale back spending in areas - R&D, etc., and the stockholders buy into that as being effective, and ultimately it comes back to haunt them. Too many companies focus on the next quarter, or the following quarter, and watching the stock price, when they should be thinking about the future a lot more. The stockholders share some of the blame though, for accepting quick layoffs or cuts in spending in key areas as a solution rather than taking a long term look.

I think #5 is relevant as well, because a lot of companies do focus too much on market share when they should be worried about the products themselves.

How quaint, how old fashioned. It’s been said that the culprits of the money/costs focus have been elite business schools, and in particular Harvard and its graduate in the 40s Robert McNamara.

To focus on products and service these days is radical, and I’ve worked for companies, computer and otherwise, where CEOs who did just that were ousted and replaced by penny pinching doofi, who started out (and ended) with layoffs.

One such company, a software concern, was close to a $ billion in revenue, when it stumbled on a key product update, and the CEO co-founder who was promising to lead it to five billion in five years was ousted, replaced by one knocklehead then another, customers lost confidence in the company, it almost went broke, but the 2nd knocklehead finally reached a billion in a dozen years of penny pinching!