Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011. Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4516-4853-9)
I want to live alone in the desert
I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe
I want to live on the Upper East Side
And never go down in the street
Splendid Isolation
I don’t need no one
Splendid Isolation
Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don’t have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self
Splendid Isolation
I don’t need no one
Splendid Isolation
((C) 1998 Warren Zevon)
I’m listening to Warren’s song from his live album, Learning to Flinch as I type this review on my iMac wireless keyboard in my writing studio overlooking a river that, though he wasn’t an outdoorsman, Steve Jobs would appreciate. There’s a high gray and aqua sky above the stark, empty early winter landscape. The sun is hidden somewhere between twelve o’clock and nine: it’s completely concealed by clouds. Somehow, the austerity of the day, the melancholy of the “in betweeness” of this time of year is a suitable, nay perfect, backdrop to talk about the life and legend that was Steve Jobs.
Enigmatic. Irritable. Demanding. Narcissistic. Habitually deficient in honesty if deception served a “greater” purpose. Emotionally absent as a father and partner.
These are a few of the negative character traits that ring true from Isaacson’s multiple interviews with Jobs (over 100) and the men and women who knew him as boss, father, husband, lover, friend, and business competitor.
But, as with every great man (and make no mistake about it, in terms of late 20th century and early 21st century product design and intellectual capacity, Steve Jobs possessed the greatness of a Henry Ford or a Thomas Edison), there is also the positive. For if a man like Jobs did not have his positive side, well then, what the world would be left with is another sociopathic tyrant, another Hitler, another Stalin.
Loyal. Honest in most things (perhaps too brutally so). Generous. Self-reflective. As demanding of himself as he was of others. Spiritual. Artistic. Gifted. Genius. A leader.
Those are the positive aspects of Jobs’s complex personality that shine through in this impressive book.
I am new to the Apple fold. Since 1984, when Rene’ and I bought our first Tandy 8088 machine from a Radio Shack store in the Burnsville Mall, through a series of other DOS or Microsoft based machines ( a Sony, an HP, a Micron, a TI, a Gateway, and several others), I had adhered to the notion that Apples were for graphic designers, architects, and no one else. There was, as I considered each new computer purchase along the way (necessitated by the built-in obsolescence of the DOS-Windows machines or by their inability to last for more than a year or two without a major melt down) always the sense that those folks who owned a Mac were snooty: That because they bought an Apple they were condescending and chauvinistic about their choice in technology. But when my eldest son (and webmaster) Matt finally had enough of my phone calls, enough of my emails asking “How do you add this widget to Windows again?” and pushed hard last year for me to make the switch, I went with him to Best Buy to pick out a new iMac. Now I know what I’ve been missing for 27 years. Finally, as Steve Jobs intended, I have a machine that is built for humans to interact with and understand: I am no longer the pawn of a series of programmers and engineers. I am no longer the mere operator of a machine: I am its master.
The biography is, for someone like me (who didn’t really appreciate the Steve Jobs story as it was being played out in Silicon Valley) an eye opener. Walter Isaacson was tabbed personally by Jobs to write this book and, given that the story’s subject matter selected the author, this biography could have been a whitewash, a fluff piece extolling Jobs’s brilliance as an engineer. But Jobs wasn’t a genius in the sense of Bill Gates or Jobs’s own original partner, Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs’s genius is best described (according to Isaacson) as an affinity for standing at a particular intersection to direct traffic:
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics…Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and science, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was if he was suggesting themes for his biography…The creativity that can occur in one strong personality was the topic that interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.
There is no clearer example of Jobs standing at the above-stated intersection than his involvement with the iPod and his ability to convince recording studios and musical artists (including U2, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles) of the need to make their music available to the common man and woman through Apple’s iTunes Store at a time when Napster and other on-line sites were decimating the bottom line for artists and studios.
After a lot of negotiating with the record companies, he said, “they were willing to do something with us to change the world.” The iTunes Store would start with 200,000 tracks and would grow each day. By using the store, he said, you can own your own songs, burn them on CDs, be assured of the download quality, get a preview of a song before you download it, and use it with your iMovies and iDVD to “make the soundtrack of your life.” The price? Just 99 cents, he said, less than a third of what a Starbucks latte cost. Why was it worth it? Because to get the right song from Kazaa (an on-line service) took about fifteen minutes rather than a minute. By spending an hour of your time to save about four dollars, he calculated, “you’re working for under the minimum wage!” And one more thing: “With iTunes, it’s not stealing anymore. It’s good karma…” Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell six million songs in six months. Instead, the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six days…
Jobs’s insistence on the vertical integration of Apple products, from iMac, to iPod, to iPhone, to iPad has been challenged by tech savvy geeks as being overly paternalistic and limiting. But for the vast majority of computer and device users who have no interest in hacking or innovation on a household level, Jobs clearly got it right: Build beautiful, easy-to-use, durable machines that don’t witness their usefulness expire once they’re pulled from the box. Isaacson explains this philosophy, the history behind it and the man who preached it to his disciples in a concise and compelling fashion that anyone interested in computers, business organization, or creative genius will gobble up like free space on a hard drive.
5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended as a holiday gift!
