STEVE  JOBS

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson ; Published by Little Brown; Pages 630 ; Price Rs.799/-

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Walter Isaacson is the President of the Aspen Institute and past Editor of Time. He is biographer extraordinaire and famous for his biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin. The book under review is the biography of Steve Jobs.

It is based on over forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues. It is the compelling story of an extraordinary life and the absolutely intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionised six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Jobs is the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to marry creativity with technology. His company exemplified leaps of imagination combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Jobs cooperated with the writing of this book and put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unalloyed view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that was the result.

One quality of Jobs is very evident. He was a control-freak. On one occasion he was recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. The pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask so that he could pick a design he liked.

The saga of Steve Jobs is the Silicon Valley creation myth writ large: launching a startup in his parents’ garage and building it into the world’s most valuable company. According to Isaacson Jobs wasn't a visionary or even a very talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.

We have the portrait of an exceedingly complex and amazing man who created Apple and some of the most important technology products of this century. In many ways, the Jobs of the early ’80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of his life.

Jobs drove those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. The book is replete with lessons on innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Jobs declared proudly that he didn’t "have any skeletons" in his "closet that can’t be allowed out". One example which was well-documented in the media at the time and which gets several pages of attention in the book is the issue of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems. The story is significant . The band of steel around the edge of the phone was never a big hit with Apple’s engineers, who warned that it could cause reception problems. But Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, insisted that the engineers could figure out how to make it work, to the point that they resisted putting a clear coating of varnish on the band to make problems less likely. When problems arose Jobs took the entire situation, going so far as to adamantly suggest that Apple simply ignore the issue, because in his mind, there was no problem. Only when Tim Cook implored him to face facts did Jobs decide to hold a press conference and offer solutions.

It is sad to read of Jobs’s depression and anger on the evening following the debut of the iPad. Isaacson writes "as we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone." In this and every launch, Jobs took the products, and their reception, very personally. In every phase of development, from inception to advertisements, he was a dictator, and people who reacted badly or were underwhelmed simply didn’t get it. The book is full of such personal perspectives in the timeline of Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’s many achievements are tallied in detail — the Macintosh, Pixar, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad . Jobs was totally involved from beginning to end in the creation of these products and companies — even during the years in which he was gravely ill — This is a testament to his work ethic, his creativity, and his genius. Jobs’s fantastic career was born out of his harsh, demanding attitude, rather than in spite of it.

The book also emphasises Jobs’s belief, that everything should be in his control from the word Go. The stubborn surety was that he knew what was right for himself and everyone else.

One of the true revelations of the book is that Steve Jobs cried — a lot, and in the presence of his co-workers. From the earliest days of his career when he cried to Steve Wozniak’s father Jerry about getting Woz to come work at Apple full time, he was in tears regularly when frustrated, when cornered, when happy or touched, and when angry. Though his return to Apple did seem to bring some temperance and evenness to his management efforts, Jobs never stopped openly crying when emotion overwhelmed him.

The sections where Bill Gates appear are the most touching and underlines the great difference between the two giants. On the success of the iPad, Gates tells Isaacson, "Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," adding, "Maybe I should have stayed in that game" .

Throughout the book, Jobs is incredibly cutting about various friends, former colleagues, business associates, and even celebrities.

Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all.

Isaacson glues together hundreds of snippets, anecdotes, quotes and short stories from Jobs’ life to form a mesmerising tale .

There are many chapters and passages which explore his personal life. Undoubtedly this book is an utterly charming collection of fascinating stories of Jobs eccentricities.

Jobs was a visionary as ruthless and driven as any of the great first-generation American capitalists and his story is one of the foremost tales from America .

P.P.Ramachandran.

03/05/2020

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Imp P. S.

Jobs travelled to India  in the summer of 1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram, in search of spiritual enlightenment. However, when he got to the Neem Karoli ashram it was basically deserted after Neem Karoli had died earlier in the year. Then he made a long trek up a huge dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba .Jobs left India after staying for seven months and returning to the US  with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life".