Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Finished reading the Steve Jobs biography, as this week we had the usual hype attached to the launch of a new Apple product.

This biography isn't a hack job, but was authorized by Jobs himself and is the result of many interviews with the author, Walter Isaacson, who also interviewed just about everyone that came into contact with Jobs over the years.

He was certainly a complex individual, and absolutely a genius. It's a fascinating book to read and very fast-paced. One theme throughout the book is just how much of a paradox he was. He could treat employees very badly and saw no middle ground. He either said of one's ideas that they were (crap) or he liked it, but virtually never heaped praise on anyone. He was a bad husband, a bad father, and didn't take responsibility for his first child from a previous relationship until many years later. Many people in the book express their frustration as to why Jobs could be so mean-spirited.

Lots of employees left Apple in frustration . . . but many stayed, and while they say he was difficult to work for, they also admit he pushed them to do things they never thought possible. When Jobs didn't like something, even if engineers spent months on it, they had no choice but to go back and redesign it, but Jobs was always right and the finished product was much better. He was a micromanager of the highest degree. Every inch of every Apple product he fussed and fussed over. He was even meticulous about what the INSIDE of the Mac computer should look like. Who cares what the inside looked like? Hmm, but then along came the later computers with transparent covers where you could see inside. He got that from his father, a carpenter who always made sure the back of a cabinet, that no one ever saw, looked as good as the front.

Apple didn't realy invent anything, but they took what was already out there and made it much better. MP3 players were around, but the iPod, coupled with iTunes, made them very easy to use. One tidbit I liked was from Bill Gates. He was totally dumbfounded over how in the world Jobs got the music companies to go along with him on the iTunes Store. This was during the days of illegal file sharing and it was assumed it was just herding cats to get music companies to agree to something like this.

What many forget is that Jobs' tenure at Apple was disrupted in the late 80's. He was kicked out of the company and left to start another computer company, which was unsuccessful. But then he began dabbling in other things, such as, what's that animation studio called? Oh yeah, Pixar! When he came back to Apple in the late 90's, he was only there about 15 years before passing away last year. But wow, the things he accomplished while he was there (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad).

Fascinating reading, and I highly recommend it. But you don't get any warm and fuzzy feelings from Jobs and I would never want to be the kind of person he was. But I sure do like my iPod and my recently purchased iPad.