What Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' Biography Got Wrong

The book "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson is on display at a book shop in Menlo Park, Calif., Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

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Comments

[Swinglens]

06:09 PM on 02/18/2012

Is it possible that Gates was the hare and Jobs the tortoise? I think I'm gonna get a Corona from the fridge and watch a movie with Apple TV. Sure hope iTV happens! : )

[DougGrinbergs]

04:05 PM on 02/15/2012

As it happens, I happen to be reading the book right now and just last night read the pages with Gates' comments about NeXT; I totally agree with Gruber that "NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”", which Isaacson just let stand.

[emcin]

10:53 AM on 02/15/2012

I disagree with Gruber's perception of how Isaacson portrayed Jobs or Gates or anyone else he went to for information. Jobs penchent for realtity distortion is widely known and Isaacson doesn't ignore it. Nor does he ignore the other sources' self interest in the matter. A fired CEO . . . a fierce competitor . . . of course a reader knows they have their own, self centered perception of events. Isaacson puts it all on the table and then gives the reader Jobs' version of events laid across other versions from people who were there. I certainly didn't come away from the book believing everything he attributed to Gates as true. Isaacson gave the readers different perceptions/memories of the same event and let the reader make their own decision about where the truth lies.

I also didn't come away from the book thinking Jobs' idea of design was only about how the item felt. The book is full of Jobs' closed system philosphy. The book does emphasize how Jobs paid obsessive attention to how a product felt, in a way no other manufacturer did. But isn't that also a widely accepted truth?. To say that the chapter on design overshadows multiple chapters that repeatedly emphasized Jobs equally obsessive commitment to hardware/software integration is misguided.

It sounds to me like Gruber is disappointed that Isaacson didn't definitively portray the "truth" according to Gruber's perception of it.

[Aardvaark]

12:20 PM on 02/15/2012

Agreed. Fanned & marked as Favorite. The book is a warts-and-all portrait, and fascinating because of it.

[theveggiedude]

05:06 PM on 02/15/2012

You should watch this hour long video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnO7D5UaDig

because Steve Jobs explains exactly how he feels about his closed system philosophy.

[bizzaro birdman]

10:53 AM on 02/15/2012

Who cares. I'm so sick of hearing about Steve Jobs.

[monoloco]

10:58 AM on 02/15/2012

Did someone hold a gun to your head and make you read this article?

[Orphie]

11:47 AM on 02/15/2012

But being inherently dismissive is just so damned cool.

[littlepuffycloud]

12:24 PM on 02/15/2012

And yet you took the time to click and comment..

[William1969]

10:32 AM on 02/15/2012

...life lesson.

[William1969]

10:32 AM on 02/15/2012

Lastly, for me and the Infamous Tech boss I worked with whom made a grown man cry, whom didnt see the issue of me wanting to go home after working 32 hous straight, no break, my biggest problems with these two figures Iraq these: Jobs, like my boss sought through " spiritual enlightenment" to, in my bosse's case improver his Karmic influence and affuence. He also spent lots of money calling in Feng Shui, disassembling our offices as to point and tune all our office for optimal spiritual resonance.( to calm, promote peace, serenity and most important of all.. FINANCIAL REWARD.
Only problem was, my boss wasn't
Willing to change, he thought that should be enough; it wasn't, and the company , as huge as it had become, did a tailspin.
That was a long if not parallel journey Jobs took
Spiritually speaking, how could one take such spiritual measures, to expect greatness whilst being the same shrew of a man amazes me, and has taught me an invaluable life lesss

[Aardvaark]

01:55 PM on 02/15/2012

I'm sorry for the way you were treated.

The way that a boss treats his employees often has nothing to do with their religion or spirituality. There are Christian bosses who are just as abusive or kind as atheist, or Buddhist or whatever. Some will make a claim of spirituality, and others will deny it.

Everyone's different.

[Anthony Liversidge]

03:39 PM on 02/29/2012

Actually it may well be that psychopathic tendencies or at least sociopathic lack of regard for other people's feelings is a qualification for leadership success. Trying to cater to everybody is not.

[miamorphos]

09:25 AM on 02/15/2012

Apple is a hardware company whose schtick is to do software in-house. It brands the corporation uniquely, and it enables a culture of people to buy in to the corporate image. And it promotes strong, strong customer loyalty. They're not buying a device, they're buying membership in a club. But at base it's a hardware company that controls its software. I've always thought Apple has an important place in the corporate landscape, even if most consumers pass it by. We don't all have to be open-source or global in our thinking, after all.

[Samuel Bun]

09:43 AM on 02/15/2012

They began as hardware but then they started using 3rd party video pci slots, ide over scsi, firewire died and then the use of Intel chips. Nothing in a mac including the cases are mac, it is all farmed out and Cook is the guy who did it. I don't think there is a hardware company in the world that hangs an apple sign out front.

[miamorphos]

10:44 AM on 02/15/2012

Ah, strictly defining it in this way, as "makers of chips," you're right. They're a software marchandizing pyramid, then, by that schema.

[adrianrf]

11:20 AM on 02/15/2012

you might try reading TFA, which is extremely well-argued - and completely correct.

Apple is a software company that makes its own hardware.
that truth is blindingly obvious.

describing a company's core differentiation strategy -- manifestly founded upon four generations of independent software architecture [Apple DOS; Lisa OS; classic Mac OS; OS X/iOS] -- as a "schtick" simply betrays a shallow understanding.

Apple is now the world's most valuable company because increasingly large numbers of consumers recognize the consistent experiential advantage of Apple products comes from Apple's expensive, unfashionable strategic decision to remain vertically integrated - whether or not they articulate that any more insightfully than you did - whereas all other PC manufacturers have one-and-a-half hands tied behind their backs in terms of innovation, because they are limited to being Microsoft's arms-length hardware-fulfillment layer; Microsoft is in turn severely constrained from substantive innovation in user experience and design, because it is handcuffed by a backwards-compatibility imperative driven by dependency on a motley crowd of outsourced hardware implementation partners.

the Microsoft model of disaggregated structure offers one benefit to end-customers, only: cheaper product up-front acquisition price.

the Apple model offers superior product experience.

and with one point of contact/responsibility for resolving any problems with the ownership experience, the long-term cost of ownership is usually lower.

more importantly for consumers, satisfaction levels are clearly [as measured by independent surveys and valuation alike] far higher.

[miamorphos]

01:09 PM on 02/15/2012

Thank you for your concise and yet sparsely punctuated data dump. I will send it out for processing and get back to you.

[miamorphos]

01:14 PM on 02/15/2012

Processing complete. Conclusion: you like Apple products.

Note that I said the corporation had a place and a strong base in people who wanted to purchase membership in the corporate worldview.

[Sundialsvc4]

09:16 AM on 02/15/2012

I detect here a very clever attempt to change a dead man's words to say, "let's open up Apple again to the clone-makers. We can make stuff so much cheaper, you know, and when you take the skin off the thing it's all the same, you know ..."

A biography is a place to say, at times, what a person did say ... not to take a dead man's words out of his mouth and to shape it into what you want, then drape his own mantle and "glow" back on top of them.

It's also highly inappropriate to aver that the biographer "distrusted Jobs."

But the bottom line is that this is a reasonably well-writ book that was timed to be introduced to the market at an opportune time, and that, I presume, sold reasonably well. I think that it is generally a mistake to venerate any company's CEO (or to denigrate any other one's, e.g. Bill Gates). All such people are reasonable for use as symbols, and important for use as symbols, but only symbols.

Apple is in fact a group of several thousand talented people whose history has been extremely up and down and which probably is headed for "extremely down" for a while. That's just the way this business goes. I don't think that there's too much place in all of it for "WWJD (What Would Jobs Do?) thinking," even by biographers or their reviewers.

[NHBill]

04:06 PM on 02/15/2012

Unlike say Walt Disney Jobs did not just drop dead.
There were years of planning and foresight to deal with his loss.
Also Jobs was clearly a very ill man for many, many years and yet Apple thrived under his reduced capacity.
Apple created and defined the "Post-PC Era" and will continue to dominate it until the next great Tech Era comes along.

[John Crane]

08:17 AM on 02/15/2012

No, I'd rather have a Samsung anything running Android anything, or a Windows phone running Windows 8.

Yes, I believe Steve Jobs would have slammed it against the wall, which is the same thing that I wanted to do with my tablet after reading this article. But, I realized that I was more emotionally mature and mentally stable than Steve Jobs. so instead, I wrote this comment.

[topkatnc]

09:23 AM on 02/15/2012

Good choice .

[Rich914]

08:08 AM on 02/15/2012

They completely left out mention of his brothers Blow and Hans.

[William1969]

09:57 AM on 02/15/2012

Now. That's funny!

[Pectin]

10:51 AM on 02/15/2012

If you're 12.

[HellBank]

08:01 AM on 02/15/2012

2000 years from now people will be waiting for Steve to return and establish his kingdom on earth.

[Samuel Bun]

09:51 AM on 02/15/2012

You're confusing him with Groucho Marx.

[Aardvaark]

11:40 AM on 02/15/2012

Or L. Ron Hubbard.

[LightShadow62]

07:44 AM on 02/15/2012

Jobs was a raging egotist and a great marketer. That pretty much says it all. His success comes from living in a society where style often trumps substance. Where the cheerleader is more revered that the book worm.
At the end of the day, I personally would much rather have one Wozniak than a room full of Steve Jobs.

[gx5000]

08:48 AM on 02/15/2012

Thanks for the Post, those of us that were in IT at the very beginning remember him as a con man, nothing he did has changed my opinion. Imagine a world where Wozniak could have brought the Revolution in open source form...sigh.

[William1969]

09:40 AM on 02/15/2012

Very good

[theveggiedude]

05:16 PM on 02/15/2012

I can appreciate open source, but I do see its limitations.

For instance, where are the open source gaming consoles? After all these years, you'd think there would have been one by now...

[topkatnc]

09:34 AM on 02/15/2012

I've been passing by a book in the library about him .. from your post and others , he wasn't the wizard after all .. I think I'll check that book out .

[William1969]

09:55 AM on 02/15/2012

The " infamous" tech boss's best only talent as he mastered was that he could convince an Eskimo he needed snow, more expeNsive,fancier looking snow.. Oh how I rue those days

[William1969]

07:23 AM on 02/15/2012

Just can't admire a guy that was a renowned, almost self proclaimed a hole. I worked for a relatively famous/ infamous man in the tech world who was very similar to Jobs, was even physically abusive. If its not possible to produce greatness without trampling on those who work for you, than I don't think it's worth pursuing.

[Pectin]

10:53 AM on 02/15/2012

Not to worry, it won't happen in your case whether you pursue it or not.

[Aardvaark]

02:06 PM on 02/15/2012

On this I disagree. While I haven't worked in the electronic tech world, I have seen leaders who treat their employees very well, and get things accomplished without the cruelty that Jobs was capable of.

His reality distortion field was capable of making people think that they could do things that they didn't think they could do, but I've also known bosses who could say, in essence, "I'm going to jump into hell next month to get some people out, and I need some help." The entire employee base would volunteer to follow.

Kelly Johnson, for example, seems to be a person who could bring about technological feats. Yes, he could be abrasive, but he didn't demean people to show how right he was.

[MisteRational]

07:16 AM on 02/15/2012

What was that? That he was an over rated egotist?

[thedogshouter]

06:46 AM on 02/15/2012

I'm so excited about this book!
I just can't wait not to buy it over and over again!

[Aardvaark]

12:12 PM on 02/15/2012

The reason the book is popular is that it presents him, warts and all, and pretty much lets you make up your own mind.

After the first several pages, I came to the conclusion that Jobs was a brilliant spoiled brat. He had the ability to see what would sell and developed products that were easy to use. He had vision, but he never learned that one can get as much out of people by means other than his reality distortion field.

Ultimately, his reality distortion field did him in, IMHO, because he couldn't believe the realities of cancer.