Steve Jobs on managing through the Economic Downturn.

I found this quote on Fortune’s Magazine’s website through a mention on this blog.

“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

What’s interesting is that this may actually be what put Apple so far ahead of there competition after the .com bomb. Obviously not all companies have the huge cash reserves Apple does, but it does show that they’re looking towards the future and have a plan, a rather good plan. It means that as the economy picks up, we’ll probably see plenty of new exciting products from Apple.

Although of course the big question on all the Apple rumour sites is, will Steve still be with us? I really do hope so.