I'll start off by saying that this is a book club selection. Although I enjoy biographies, Steve Jobs is not someone that interests me, and I'm not a computer person. (That's my husband in the background saying, "Nope, she's not. Not at all!") I was a little intimidated by the length of the book. I was afraid it would be dry and much too technical. Plus, I'm not a fan of Apple as a company. All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this. As someone said to me recently, a good biographer can make all the difference. Isaacson's style is very readable, and I never felt like I was over my head in any aspect of Jobs' life. It was hard to put down even knowing the basics of the story.
Sometimes I read biographies because I want to know if my low opinion of the subject is undeserved and should be altered or at least updated. Sometimes what I discover is the person is worse than I thought! (Pete Rose comes to mind.) Steve Jobs falls into this category as well. Although he is hailed as a genius, it seems that his true "superpower" was being able to bully people into doing what he wanted. He was called a visionary and maybe that's his legacy. It seems that we as a society excuse bad behavior by saying someone is a genius or an artist or a visionary as if that's a necessary trade-off to being civil. I'm in the process of picking out my first smartphone. My first instinct was to go with an android because, as I mentioned before, I'm not an Apple fan. That's because they don't play well with others. I thought after reading this I might be a convert to the iPhone. Nope.
So which is worse: Being a Bully or someone who Steals someone else's idea and work (a la Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg)?
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorites parts of the book talks about Jobs being furious at Bill Gates because he has decided to build his company on graphical interfaces like Apple was. He accused Gates of "ripping us off. I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us." Gates very coolly replies, "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you already stolen it."
ReplyDeleteJobs stole many of his ideas from other companies and from colleagues. He would hate an idea and by the next day or even that afternoon was presenting the idea as his own. Everyone talked about the "reality distortion field" that existed around Jobs. It was a nice way of saying he lied.
At least Gates has some skill set. He apparently was/is a more than competent programmer. Jobs was very good at putting his name on patents along with the people who really created the product. Mark Z.? Yeah, he's thief. But I enjoy Facebook. :)