Tim Cook's Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial

• By Chloe Albanesius
• October 23, 2011 11:16pm EST
• 5 Comments

Apple on Wednesday held a memorial for Steve Jobs at its Cupertino headquarters and the 90-minute tribute opened with a heartfelt speech from Tim Cook, who took over as CEO in August after Jobs retired. Apple on Sunday released video footage of the event, but for those without access, here a transcript of Cook's tribute to Jobs.

Good morning. It's so great to see so many of you here today and to have even more joining us remotely around the world. We've closed all of the retail stores in the world right now, and they are all with us as well.

Before I get started, I'd like to recognize a very special guest. Steve's wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, has joined us today. Laurene not only brought Steve great strength, but all of us as well, especially over the last couple of weeks. As I have, and I know many of you have, we've been spending a lot of time mourning Steve's passing. The last two weeks for me have been the saddest of my life by far. But I know Steve, and Steve would have wanted this cloud to lift for Apple, and our focus to return to the work that he loved so much. So it's with that spirit that we wanted to get the entire company together today to celebrate Steve's extraordinary life and the many accomplishments he had across his life.

People all over the world have been deeply moved by his passing and many have spoke about what he meant to them. You've probably seen characterizations; he's been called a visionary, a creative genius, a rebel, a non-conformist, an original, the greatest CEO ever, the best innovator of all time. Steve's legacy is to think about the way he lived and what he left for us. He leaves with what he did, what he said, and what he stood for.

He did some amazing things and he himself once said, "to get to work on one revolutionary product in a career is extraordinary." By my count, he worked on six. The introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 revolutionized personal computing and desktop publishing. And the ad that ran during the Super Bowl, to launch the product, set a benchmark for advertising that is still widely held today as the best ad of all time.

With iPod and iTunes, Steve reminded all of us of our love for music, changed the way the world listen to music, and along the way, changed the entire music industry.

The iPhone revolutionized the mobile phone industry and redefined what a smartphone should be. The iPhone would be come the best-selling smartphone in the world and many people around the world today can't imagine their lives without it.

And just last year, with the introduction of the iPad, Apple jumpstarted an entirely new product category that no one thought they needed and now no one can live without.

And along the way, he created the best animation studio called Pixar and taught us that cartoons weren't just for kids. And if that wasn't enough, he initiated a retail strategy for Apple that would set a benchmark for all retailers around the world to strive for.

Throughout his life, he said truly profound things that have provided me and so many others a guiding light. He said, "simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, but it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." He said, "Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing." He said, "If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long, just figure out what's next." And finally, he said, "My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each others' kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."

I personally admire Steve not most for what he did, or what he said, but for what he stood for. The largest lesson I learned from Steve was that the joy in life is in the journey, and I saw him live this every day. Steve never followed the herd. He thought deeply about almost everything and was the most unconventional thinker I have ever known. He always did what he thought was right, not what was easy. He never accepted the merely good. He would only accept great—insanely great.

He valued beauty in everything, and insisted that everything that Apple do be beautiful. He believed the future does not belong to those who are content with today, and pushed himself incredibly hard and those around him to achieve more. This is the way he lived, and these are the things he leaves us. What he did, what he said, and what he stood for.

But there is one more thing he leave us. He leaves us with each other because without him, Apple would have died in the late 90s and the vast majority of us would have never met. Other than his family, Apple would be his finest creation. He thought about Apple until his last day, and among his last advice he had for me and for all of you was to never ask what he would do. "Just do what's right," he said.

He said he saw Disney paralyzed after Walt Disney's passing as everyone spent all of their time thinking and talking about what Walt would want, and he did not want this to occur at Apple.

When Steve came back to Apple, he wanted to create an ad that would re-establish and remind us of our core values and beliefs and it was meant more for the employees of the company than for the customers of the company. We didn't have any great new products to talk about yet; those would come a year later with the iMac. So we worked with our ad agency to create a campaign that featured some of his greatest heroes. Steve was involved in carefully crafting every word of this ad and these words touched the bottom of his soul.

The version that we all saw on TV was read by Richard Dreyfus, but what you may not know is that Steve also read a version but chose not to run that version because he did not want it to be about him. He wanted it to be about Apple. I personally heard this version for the first time after he passed away and was very deeply moved by it, and I would like to play the audio of The Crazy Ones, as read by Steve, so you can hear the words he wrote and in his voice.

Jobs Voiceover: Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things, they push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Let's join together for a moment of silence and reflect on what Steve meant to each of us and to the world.

Thank you. You know, looking out at everyone, Steve would've loved this, I can tell you that.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.