Steve Jobs, the biography written by Walter Isaacson, is as much about the history of technology and multi-media as it is about the founder of the Apple Corporation. Isaacson, who also penned biographies on Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, was approached by Jobs in 2010 to write his memoir. Isaacson had Jobs’ blessing to spare no details in telling the story of his business and personal life.
The Apple founder, who once referred to himself as “mercurial,” (others may have used a different descriptive!) was widely known for mood swings that could bring people to tears, but also help to push them to achieve feats of creativity and productivity they never thought possible
The biography begins appropriately enough with Job’s upbringing in Mountain View, California, a town that was near Palo Alto where Jobs would later live with his wife, Laurene and three children. Jobs was the son of two pretty ordinary people who adopted him at a young age. Before Jobs entered kindergarten he could read words and it wasn’t long before his parents and teachers realized the young Jobs was both gifted as well as rather demanding.
It was his father , a machinist who fixed up old cars, who taught his son to appreciate perfection in workmanship (that would later become an obsession), whether it be painting a stockade fence or refurbishing an automobile. His aptitude for technology became evident when he started tinkering around with the electronics of the cars his dad worked on. His business acumen, which he acquired without books or business workshops, would come a little later.
Jobs was introduced to his first computer at the age of 12. He quickly fell in love with the budding technology and joined the Hewlett-Packard Young Explorers Club. While with the club he approached then president, William Hewlett for parts for a computer he was working on. Hewlett was so impressed he offered Jobs an internship at his company that summer.
Jobs, a Zen Buddist, came of age during the 60’s and identified with the counter culture of that era. This association may have contributed to Jobs’ quest to veer from the corporate way of creating and marketing technology products.
His quick rise with Apple, spurred on after he and Steve Wozniak created the first Apple computer in Jobs’ garage made him a millionaire while still in his mid-20’s. However, his mercurial attitude and stubbornness also resulted in an unhappy parting in 1985 with the company he created.
His next venture was an attempt to build a computer mainframe geared towards education. The company he founded, NeXT, never quite became a household word. However, his venture into digital technology pointed him in another direction-film animation. He was able to form a marriage between art and digital technology to create computer animation for the mega-hit, Toy Story. The rest, as they say, is history, as the company he helped launch, Pixar, went on to make many more box office hits with Disney.
Along the way Jobs experienced ups and downs fit for a millionaire. He had relationships with the likes of Joan Baez, experienced difficulties as a new father, and fretted so much over the quality of the material things he bought that he only sparsely furnished his home, mostly because he couldn’t find the furniture that met his expectations for perfection.
A vegetarian throughout his life, he was persnickety about where he ate and often rudely dismissed restaurants (and the staff) that didn’t measure up to his expectations. He dealt with the people who intersected his business life in much the same way.
Jobs was also be a very generous man who bought houses for his parents and the mother of his first child, and compensated those who he called to duty with bonuses for creating the next innovation in quality, design, and usability.
Apple was built on providing quality products and an equally quality user experience. During Jobs’ absence it concentrated more on profits than quality. In 1997 Jobs returned to the helm of Apple and once again pursued his ideals. The result was the iPad, iPod, and iPhone.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, this college dropout was not only a creative genius but intuitively knew what people wanted before they did. To this end he drove headlong and fearlessly into his creative visions, caring more about the quality and uniqueness of his products than making money. Because of this drive for perfection, the money followed naturally.
I found this book by Isaacson to be not only a great read, but a way to fill in a few blanks on the evolution of technology, particularly as it pertains to the way we communicate and entertain ourselves. Isaacson’s account of Jobs will probably stand as the best account of this man who, as mentioned in the inside cover of the book, “revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. “
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 and died October 5, 2011.