
From a 1997 interview:
Great products, according to Jobs, are a triumph of taste, of
''trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and
then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.'' The
Macintosh, he has said, turned out so well because the people working
on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.
And so Jobs's return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce
certain standards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown ugly. Jobs has never hidden his longstanding objection to Microsoft --
not, he says, because of its dominance, or even Bill Gates's billions.
''The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,'' he said
last year in ''Triumph of the Nerds,'' a television documentary about
the history of the computer industry. ''I don't mean that in a small
way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of
original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products.