We all know you are an Applehead. So go ahead and gush about this one.
I won't pretend I don't like Apple products. That made the book more interesting to me, because I'm familiar with the products that Apple produced over the years. The first Apple computer I ever used was the Apple II in the early 1980s. After that, I went PC for a while, but returned to Apple computers when I got a job writing catalog copy for a electronics company in the 1990s. It was during that time that I was really struck by how much more elegant Apple products are than PCs.
There's nothing wrong with the PC. It's a very functional and capable machine. But the PC lacks the ease-of-use and elegance that Apple computers have always had. This was true in spades back around 1990. Today it is less so, but there is still a marked difference in feel between the two devices. Steve Jobs is the story of how came about, and that is why I found it so interesting.
It was the greatest book you've ever read, right?
No. But it was very entertaining. By far the most interesting parts of this book were the early chapters that described Steve Jobs's life from the time he met Steve Wozniak to the time Apple really got off the ground. That part of the story was a very careful and slow-paced description of the way the Apple II computer came about.
As the book progressed, the pace picked up -- towards the end, the narrative degenerated into a rush of product rollouts piled one on top of the other. It became a littlle less compelling then, but still interesting.
Apple had a rapid succession of huge successes starting right after the year 2000. There was the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, and I'm sure I'm missing a couple of important products in between. It was a lot of innovation in a very short period of time, and that made it a hard story to tell. Unfortunately Isaacson chose to tell every step of the story, instead of zooming in on crucial details and moments that might have made the tale easier to digest.
I wish Isaacson had threaded this series of products together in an interesting way instead of just saying Jobs did this, then he did this, then he did this, then he did this. It felt like a string of pearls, but without the string to holding things together. Perhaps it would have worked better if he had considered that dizzying chain of products as various incarnations of a single concept (the rise of graphical computing as opposed to text-based, for example) rather than as a series of discrete products.
Jobs was dying while Isaacson finished the book. Hard not to wonder if the last chapters were rushed because both Isaacson and the publishers knew the book would sell better if it came out around the time Jobs died.
What do you think Isaacson got right?
He did a good job of painting Steve Jobs character. He spent a lot of time discussing the peculiarities of Steve Jobs, such as his hard-core veganism, his tendency to walk the floors of Apple without shoes, his combative, sometimes intimidating personality, his complicated relationships with women and later, with his family.
Isaacson carefully described what people who knew him called Jobs's “reality distortion field,” and how that fit into his overall personality. The reality distortion field was a term Jobs's colleagues used to describe his ability to bend the will and perception of people around him to buy into his own vision. It explained a lot that went on inside Apple, both in the early days and when he took over again in 1998.
The book very rightly highlighted Jobs's talent for getting the best out of other people. Isaacson understood that this ability to extract perfection from other people is great gift, in fact, a form of genius, and that it was this ability, more than pure intelligence or technological skill, the made Jobs so remarkably successful. I don't think until recently biographers or business thinkers fully understood that the ability to manage people and get them to work together -- and especially the ability to intuitively understand both what your employees can and can't do and what customers want and think they want -- is a crucial part of successful leadership.
As Isaacson notes, it possible to be a genius in people management to the same degree someone can be a genius in physics, or literature. That genius can make the difference between an enterprise succeeding or failing. You can have Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams, but without Washington there is no America. You can have genius engineers like Steve Wozniak and brilliant artists like John Lasseter (the chief creative officer of Pixar Studios), but without Jobs to pull people together there is no Apple, or Pixar.
Where do you think Isaacson went wrong?
Isaacson didn't do as thorough job as I would've liked in describing the technical achievements involved in the production of Apple's products. For example, he mentioned something called object-oriented programming only in passing. This was actually a very important development in computer programming which enabled large-scale software development in the 80s and 90s.
He also glossed over the processor improvements at Intel and other chipmakers like Motorola, and the development of hard drive and video technologies that made all of Apple's best products possible. Without a flat screen display, an iPad or iPhone is unthinkable. But there was not a single word about the development of these amazing technologies. Screen technology was so taken for granted in this book that in 50 years a person reading this book would totally miss this point (we don't miss it because we remember the CRT monitors) and wonder what the hold up was, why it took us so long to develop the iPhone.
I understand that Isaacson was trying to write a book that wasn't overly long and technical, but Steve Jobs was first and foremost a technologist. I would have liked to have seen the author spend more time explaining how all the different technologies had to come about before an iPhone could come onto the scene. It would have made the book more compelling, and might have been the unifying concept that would have made the last few chapters more cohesive. It also would have served to show how people in other parts of the industry contributed to Apple products -- to read the book, one would think there were no innovatons outside of Apple that helped push Apple along. But I can think of a few: besides flat screens and touch screens, how about cell phone technology, laser and color printing, and oh yes, the internet. Apple as we know it wouldn't exist without the internet, but that story is also missing.
So what do you think of Steve jobs now?
I'm in awe of what he was able to push people to create. He wasn't a computer programmer or a trained engineer himself, but he had a keen ability to understand what technology was able to do and how to push it to its absolute limit.
I'm also impressed with his obsession with elegance and simplicity and better appreciate how important that was, not just to the development of Apple products but also to the progression of computer technology in general. Jobs didn't just make good products, he made elegant ones, products that had to survive the acid test of ease-of-use for the complete neophyte. They had to be easy to learn how to use, and attractive enough to make people want to use them. Jobs brought that to consumer electronics more than any other single person, and that is what he will be remembered for.
Finally, I agree with Isaacson's assessment that Jobs could be very insensitive, manipulative, and even cruel, and believe (as Isaacson seems to) that Jobs could have achieved everything that he did without being abusive to the people around him. Intellectual greatness does not justify cruelty.
Overall Catechism Grade: B for general audiences, for techies like me, B+.