Thoughts on Steve Jobs, The Book

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography on the flight back to SFO a few minutes ago, and wanted to jot down a few responses while they were fresh in my head.

The first is that we are very lucky that Jobs reached out to Isaacson (and that Isaacson agreed to do it.) I can't think of a better biographer for this project--so much so that one of the strange thoughts I had after Jobs died was, "At least we're going to have this book to read." It's a very subtle book, admirable in its restraint, I think. There is not a lot of editorializing or broader cultural analysis, just an incredibly careful and nuanced narrative of Jobs' life. Which, I think, is what most of us want to read right now.

The second thing that occurred to me is that, while Jobs historically had a reputation for being a nightmare to work with, in fact one of the defining patterns of his career was his capacity for deep and generative partnerships with one or two other (often very different) people. That, of course, is the story of Jobs and Woz in the early days of Apple, but it's also the story of his collaboration with Lasseter at Pixar, and Jony Ive at Apple in the second act. (One interesting tidbit from the book is that Jobs would have lunch with Ive almost every day he was on the Apple campus.) In my experience, egomaniacal people who are nonetheless genuinely talented have a hard time establishing those kinds of collaborations, in part because it involves acknowledging that someone else has skills that you don't possess. But for all his obnoxiousness with his colleagues (and the book has endless anecdotes documenting those traits), Jobs had a rich collaborative streak as well. He was enough of an egomaniac to think of himself as another John Lennon, but he was always looking for McCartneys to go along for the ride with him.

The most bizarre revelation for me in the book was how much the young Jobs apparently used to cry in meetings at Apple. I literally can't imagine what that would have looked like, from my admittedly very distant knowledge of Jobs. As my friend Tom Coates remarked on Twitter, there are so many different kinds of crying; it would have been interesting to have a bit more color on exactly what kind of tears were shed.

Also: the guy took a lot of walks. The whole idea of inviting someone to go for a walk with you is really lovely. (And for what it's worth, seems very Bay Area to me.) I intend to emulate Jobs in this respect and take more walks with my friends. Just not with Larry Ellison.

The final thought I had is a meta observation about the news environment that Jobs helped create. After devouring the first two-thirds of the book, I found myself skimming a bit more through the post-iPod years, largely because I knew so many of the stories. (Though Isaacson has extensive new material about the health issues, all of which is riveting and tragic.) At first, I thought that the more recent material was less compelling for just that reason: because it was recent, and thus more fresh in my memory. But it's not that I once knew all the details about the battle with Sculley or the founding of NeXT and forgot them; it's that those details were never really part of the public record, because there just weren't that many outlets covering the technology world then.

This reminded me of a speech I gave a few years ago at SXSW, that began with the somewhat embarrassing story of me waiting outside the College Hill bookstore in 1987, hoping to catch the monthly arrival of MacWorld Magazine, which was just about the only conduit for information about Apple back then. In that talk, I went on to say:

If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like John Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.

So in a funny way, the few moments at the end of Steve Jobs where my attention flagged turned out to be a reminder of one of the great gifts that the networked personal computer has bestowed upon us: not just more raw information, but more substantive commentary and analysis, in real-time. It's not just gadget blogs and rumor sites. Take an important issue like IOS vs Android (and the larger closed versus open debate): the amount of complex, thoughtful, provocative material that's been written about that -- from literally hundreds if not thousands of different authors -- over the past few years is just extraordinary, when you think about it. I remember the blank stares I got trying to convince The New Republic and The New Yorker to let me write about the cultural clash between Apple and Microsoft sometime around 1993. Nowadays, if anything we have too much of that mode of commentary. The Web made that depth and diversity possible, of course, but we wouldn't have had the Web without personal computers first. All of which may have made Walter Isaacson's job slightly harder as a biographer, but it has made the rest of our lives so much more interesting.

Comments

[Neopod]

Spot-on review, Jobs was passionate, heck I cry when projects go wrong. Walter Isaacson's version is just right. Pity Steve could not read it, but his family can.

[John]

8,000 words? Please… :)

[WichitaDan]

I'm sure Paul McCartney would appreciate the analogy...not.

[vas sudanagunta]

Walking with someone completely changes the psychological dynamic.

Facing a person across a table feels more adversarial. Both SIDES are fixed and facing in opposite directions, talking AT each other.

When you walk WITH someone, you are facing in the same direction, going the same speed.

If you are walking with someone, and you start into an argument, notice how you stop and face the other person?

[Iren]

I was not sure I want to read Jobs' biography. But now I'm sure: I do!
Thank you for the article. Such articles, as well as the book itself are the great memory of Steve.

[Dr.R.D.B.(Ben)Laime]

Trust you know that there's a one-man show on B'Way that lashes out at Jobs and Apple for the horrible place where the Apple products are made. Jobs was brilliant, yet he was a "bastard" to many(including employee). I saw Issacson on 60 Minutes and hope to get to his book. I'm just getting to know you by reading "Where Good Ideas Come From." Love it. At age 77, I still have so much to learn.

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While Jobs historically had a reputation for being a nightmare to work with, one of the defining patterns of his career was his capacity for deep and generative partnerships with other people.

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Isn't it part of the problem that people consider it important that their lives be 'interesting'? And, it seems important that Jobs, while garnering vast wealth for stockholders, oversaw the terrible abuse of thousands on the production side of his new and improved cool gadgets. Exploitation is hardly a feat worth celebrating.

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