Steve Jobs speaks out

As the founder and saviour of Apple, Steve Jobs is seen as a messiah in the technology industry. So his interview with Fortune 500 comes as a fascinating insight into how he has masterminded one of the world's most innovative companies. Here are some snippets.

Steve on consensus:

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what's the next big thing. There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, "If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse.'""

Steve on trends:

"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do."

Steve on consultants:

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

Steve on integration:

"There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook."

Steve on decisions:

"I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done."

Further reading on CNN.com.