Steve Jobs Summary, Analysis and Criticism | Walter Isaacson
The Autobiography
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DISCLAIMER: This is an unofficial summary and analysis.
About Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane. He is also an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City. Walter is the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow. Finally, he has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine.
Isaacson is well-known for his biographical accounts of influential people’s lives. For example, he has written successful biographies on Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Kissinger, and DaVinci.
Introduction
Steve Jobs: The Biography is an unfiltered account of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ life. Isaacson was able to engage in more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs taking place over two years. He also interviewed more than a hundred people who knew Jobs well. For example, family members, friends, colleagues, and competitors. This biography invites readers into the life and personality of Steve Jobs. Steve was an intense man with a rollercoaster life, but he did not want any control over this biography. He put nothing off-limits and chose not to read the biography before it was published. So, this biography offers a uniquely genuine portrayal of who Steve Jobs was and what he achieved.
StoryShot #1: Childhood, Abandoned and Chosen
Steve Jobs was the biological son of John Jandali and Joanne Schieble. Schieble’s family disapproved of her relationship with Jandali as he was a Muslim. So, the two were forced to put Steve up for adoption. Subsequently, he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.
Paul was an engine technician who turned to car mechanics. He was the first person to introduce Steve to engineering and design. Steve was initially unsure of how he felt about having two sets of parents.
When Steve was young, his family moved to Palo Alto, California. This area included the famous “Silicon Valley.” He was brought up during the technological boom within the technological epicenter.
Steve was often bored in school and found himself in trouble for things like pranks. His parents realized that he was only playing up because he was bored. He was too intelligent for the work he was being given. The only time Paul was ever mad at Steve was when he found out he had experimented with LSD and Marijuana.
High school was also when Steve found his appreciation for things other than electronics, like music and arts.
StoryShot #2: Odd couple: The Two Steves
Steve Wozniak was five years older than Steve Jobs. That saidHowever, their minds were very alike. They first met in a mutual friend’s garage and worked together on technological projects. For example, their first project together was called “Blue Box.” This project used frequencies to allow people to make long-distance calls for free. When they began selling it, someone stole one right from them at gunpoint.
StoryShot #3: The Dropout
Jobs’ ‘different’ personality seemed to develop significantly during late high school. Jobs tried everything from strange diets to various drugs.
Jobs then attended Reed College. Here, despite the ‘Hippie’ reputation, he did not enjoy college. Jobs met Robert Friedland while at college. Jobs initially adopted Friedland’s quirks but . However, he eventually dismissed Robert as a gold-digger. Jobs dropped out of Reed after only a year but was allowed to take courses he enjoyed as he wished.
StoryShot #4: Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design
A year and a half after dropping out of Reed, Jobs returned to Silicon Valley. He promptly walked into Atari’s head office and said he would not leave until he had a job. Steve was offered a job. That said, most of his coworkers were quickly alienated by his personality.
Temporarily, Jobs left Atari to go to India. In India, he pursued his interest in eastern culture. Atari’s head challenged Jobs to create a one-player version of Pong when he returned and offered a bonus for using little computer chips. He enlisted Wozniak to help him, and they finished the game in four days.
StoryShot #5: The Apple I
While the computer revolution was being born in Silicon Valley, Wozniak saw a microprocessor for the first time. This gave him the idea for the modern computer: Keyboard, screen, and computer in one. Wozniak wanted to give the design away for free. However, Jobs found a way to make money off of it. Jobs had been walking back from an apple orchard on that day and decided the name “Apple” stuck. Thus, Apple Computers was founded.
Jobs and Wozniak labored hard to produce over a hundred computers in one month, which they sold to friends and a local computer dealer. Apple was profitable within just thirty days.
StoryShot #6: The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age
Jobs quickly realized the Apple computer lacked something other larger companies had: presentation and money. He used his Atari connections to find a retired 33-year old millionaire, Mike Markkula. Mike had the connections to get Apple running. Markkula even hired a publicist for Apple. When the Apple II was released, the success was astounding.
Eventually, Markkula hired Mike Scott as President of the company, mainly to manage Jobs. The two clashed on many points, but the Apple II sold over six million units.
StoryShot #7: Chrisann and Lisa
Jobs had been dating Chrisann Brennan on and off for five years, and they had their first child in 1978. The child was a girl and was named Lisa. Jobs dismissed that the child was his throughout the pregnancy. He later expressed regret over the way he handled the situation.
StoryShot #8: Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces
Jobs moved onto other projects after the Apple II but was unsatisfied with the Apple III and the Lisa computers.
Xerox was said to be the major technological innovator at the time. Jobs struck a deal with them that provided Apple with access to some of Xerox’s technologies, like the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI allowed users to view text and graphics simultaneously.
Jobs applied this new technology to the Lisa, as well as the modern computer mouse.
Despite this innovation, the management at Apple demoted Jobs by the summer of 1980. He was no longer in control of large projects due to his quirky behavior.
StoryShot #9: Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame
Apple went from being worth $5,309 in 1977 to $1.79 billion by the end of 1980. After Apple’s stock market launch, Jobs was worth $256 million at the age of twenty-five. Despite this wealth, Jobs didn’t show much interest in material things other than fine sports cars and German knives.
Jobs excluded even some of the earliest employees from the stock market launch to retain his stocks. Wozniak eventually gave away many of his stocks to these people.
StoryShot #10: The Mac is Born
Jeff Raskin originally headed the Macintosh project. However, Jobs eventually won a power struggle by assuming full control over the project. He strengthened his power at the Apple head office when Mike Scott was removed as president after a round of lay-offs.
StoryShot #11: The Reality Distortion Field
Jobs had a way of motivating people to do extraordinary things that his employees called the “reality distortion field.” Jobs could convince people anything was possible by willfully distorting reality.
Jobs also only saw the world in black in white. People were either “enlightened” or an “asshole.” Also, many employees complained of Jobs stealing their ideas. Later, Apple started giving out an award to the employee who most bravely stood up to Jobs each year. Jobs’ coworkers realized that at the heart of Jobs’ quirkiness was an absolute commitment to perfection.
StoryShot #12: The Design: Real Artists Simplify
Jobs’ perfectionism was exemplified by the Macintosh project. He wanted everything to be beautiful — packaging, interface, screens, and even the computer’s inside itself. This drove engineers crazy.
Jobs wanted artists and engineers to feel the same. He had the name of every engineer and artist that worked on the Macintosh engraved on the inside of the computer.
StoryShot #13: Building the Mac
Jobs competed everywhere, including within his own company. He competed against the product Lisa to ship the Mac first. Lisa eventually flopped, leaving only the Macintosh as the backbone of the company.
Later in the year, Jobs was led to believe that he was named the man of the year by Time Magazine. However, they instead named his Macintosh “Machine of the Year.”
StoryShot #14: Enter Sculley
Jobs believed that he was still too immature to run Apple himself, so he recruited John Sculley. Sculley was a former Pepsi marketing director who was responsible for the Pepsi Challenge campaign. Sculley was initially reluctant, but Jobs won him over.
The Macintosh was designed to cost $1,995. However, Sculley insisted on including the marketing costs for a big launch. This pushed the cost to $2,495. Jobs later blamed this decision as the primary reason Microsoft won control of the personal computer market.
StoryShot #15: The Launch
Even as Apple was growing, IBM was slowly starting to win the lion’s share of the PC market. Apple’s response was the launch of the Macintosh in 1984. The Macintosh launch would set the blueprint for Jobs’ future product launches.
First, Jobs hired Ridley Scott and spent $750,000 on the famous “1984” television commercial. This was the first broadcast at the Superbowl that year. He then began giving interviews with magazines. This publicity had a significant impact on the Macintosh’s success.
StoryShot #16: Gates and Jobs
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955. While Jobs grew up like a hippie in California, Gates was the son of a prominent Seattle attorney and attended a private school.
Gates was soft-spoken and almost shy. He had a sense of business and strategy that eluded the more artistic style of Jobs. They first started working together when Microsoft was writing some software for the Macintosh. Despite this, their relationship soon soured when Microsoft produced Windows, which mirrored the Mac operating system.
Gates argued that both the Macintosh and Windows systems were rip-offs of a Xerox technology. Jobs never forgave Gates for this perceived betrayal.
StoryShot #17: Icarus
While the Macintosh created a lot of buzz initially, sales eventually slowed as people realized some of the machine’s limitations. Also, Jobs’ personality began to clash even further within the company. He eventually decided to leave Apple after toying with the idea of running AppleLabs.
StoryShot #18: NeXT
Jobs started “NeXT” with his own money and hired some of his favorite engineers from Apple. This cooled relations with his first company.
NeXT was designed to respond to the needs of educational institutions for computing power. During his time with NeXT, Jobs made some of the biggest mistakes of his career. He learned from these mistakes.
StoryShot #19: Pixar
Jobs acquired a 70% stake in Lucasfilm’s animation division for $10 million and renamed it Pixar. This name was based on the division’s most important piece of hardware. Eventually, Jobs realized he should focus primarily on the animation of Pixar. The reason for this change in focus was that one of the shorts they produced was named the best of the year.
StoryShot #20: A Regular Guy
Jobs waited until after his adoptive mother died in 1986 to seek out his biological mother. He eventually reconnected with both Joanne Simpson and his sister Mona. In an ironic twist, Jobs had often dined at his father’s Mediterranean restaurant in San Jose, without even realizing it.
His daughter was very much like him in that she was temperamental. Subsequently, they sometimes did not speak for months.
StoryShot #21: Family Man
Jobs met his future wife, Laurene Powell when he was giving a talk at Stanford Business School. This is where Laurene was a student.
Laurene got pregnant during their first vacation together in Hawaii. They got married in a small ceremony in 1991 and moved into a modest house in Palo Alto.
Jobs’ daughter Lisa moved in with them when she was in eighth grade, and she lived there until she went to college at Harvard. Jobs also had three more children with Laurene.
StoryShot #22: Toy Story
Initially, Pixar lured animators away from Disney. When Disney could not lure them back, they instead partnered with Pixar to create Toy Story.
Of course, Jobs found a way to make more money off of Pixar. Jobs also struck a deal with Disney’s Michael Eisner to equally share all profits from future projects.
StoryShot #23: The Second Coming
NeXT never made a dent in the computing industry due to its high cost and small software library. Meanwhile, Sculley was running Apple into the ground as he presided over diminishing profits and market share.
By 1996, Apple’s stock price went down to around $14. They had also gone through a few CEOs before settling on Gil Amelio.
Amelio needed some fresh ideas for Apple and eventually chose to acquire NeXT. At first, it was unclear what role Jobs would have at Apple. Eventually, Amelio and Jobs settled on simply calling him an “advisor.”
StoryShot #24: The Restoration
Once back at Apple, Jobs quietly began consolidating his power base by installing his favorite people from NeXT into senior Apple positions.
Larry Ellison of Oracle (the creator of JAVA) was constantly in the press, claiming he was ready to finance a hostile takeover of Apple. Plus, he was ready to install Jobs as CEO whenever he wanted.
When it was clear Amelio was not working out, Apple offered Jobs the CEO position. However, Jobs refused. He insisted on remaining an advisor. Jobs started demanding the repricing of stock options for top employees. He also argued the entire board should resign. Finally, Jobs managed to strike a partnership with Microsoft. This partnership ended a decade of litigation and sent Apple’s stock price soaring.
StoryShot #25: Think Different
Jobs was also given the reigns of the company but remained as the “Interim” CEO. He canceled all licensing deals and decided to focus on making fewer but greater projects. However, working so hard meant he had less time for his family. Plus, when he did have time, he was too exhausted.
StoryShot #26: Design Principles
Steve Jobs had an eye for talent. When he realized how talented a designer Jony Ive was, he made him the second most powerful person at Apple. They both understood the importance of packaging. Subsequently, both of their names are listed on the patents for various innovative packages for Apple products.
StoryShot #27: The iMac
The first product that Jobs and Ive designed together was the iMac. The iMac was a desktop computer priced around $1,200 and designed for the everyday casual user. Jobs and Ive made bold changes to the idea of what a computer should look like. They chose a blue, translucent case that gave the computer its signature appearance. Jobs launched the iMac in May 1998, and critics raved about the computer’s novel look. The iMac sold 278,000 units in its first six weeks and 800,000 by the end of the year.
StoryShot #28: CEO
Jobs eventually accepted the title of full CEO, dropping the “interim” from his title. Jobs immediately began cutting inventory and striking favorable deals with suppliers. On top of this, he brought in Tim Cook to head operations.
By this time, Jobs had been running Apple for two years while only taking a dollar a year in compensation. This unsettled the board.
The board also offered him 14 million stock options. Instead of accepting, Jobs asked for 20 million options instead. The board reluctantly accepted.
StoryShot #29: Apple Stores
Jobs believed in his products but hated the idea of someone else selling them. He believed that the features that made Apple products unique could be lost in a big box retail store. So, Jobs began making plans for Apple retail stores. The board hated the idea of retail stores since Gateway had failed miserably by investing in stores. That said, Jobs still put a team together to get stores up and running.
Apple’s stores were averaging 5,400 visitors a week by 2004. Jobs added the Genius Bar to his stores and eventually opened the flagship Apple store in New York City. This store would eventually become the highest-grossing store of any store in New York.
StoryShot #30: The Digital Hub
Jobs wanted Adobe to write video editing software for the Mac, but Adobe refused. Jobs saw this as a betrayal. This experience further convinced him that he needed control of the entire user experience, from hardware to software to the retail store.
Jobs decided that portable music players would be the next great Apple product and acquired SoundJam to begin designing Apple’s music player.
Critics were skeptical that people would buy a $399 music player. Still, consumers soon made the iPod so successful it would change the entire music industry.
StoryShot #31: The iTunes Store
Around 2002, record companies were having major trouble with piracy. They came to Jobs for help. Jobs convinced the music companies they needed to compete directly with piracy by offering an affordable, seamlessly integrated way to purchase music. This process needed to be more convenient than stealing music. This was the start of iTunes.
iTunes was a huge success. Eventually, Apple’s top management even convinced Jobs to provide a Windows version of the iTunes store.
The iTunes store sold seventy million songs in its first year. By January 2007, iPods were half of Apple’s revenues.
StoryShot #32: Music Man
Jobs was such a fan of Bob Dylan that he eventually struck a marketing deal where Dylan would appear in an iPod commercial. Dylan experienced a large wave of success after this commercial. So, appearing in an iPod ad became something most artists would do for free.
StoryShot #33: Pixar’s Friends
Jobs’ main role at Pixar was to structure the company’s deals. The deal Pixar had with Disney was running out. Bob Iger had recently replaced Michael Eisner as the head of Disney. Bob and Jobs saw eye to eye. So, they were able to strike a deal where Disney acquired Pixar. A reasonable number of Pixar employees landed in high-level roles in the animation division at Disney.
StoryShot #34: Twenty-First-Century Macs
The Power Mac G4 Cube, designed for serious professionals, was so beautifully designed it won a place in the Museum of Modern Art. That said, it did not sell as well as Jobs thought it would.
Jobs was still learning from his mistakes and decided to focus on making the iPod better. He switched from a Motorola Chip to an Intel Chip, which made the iPod much faster. Bill Gates even commented that he was impressed with this move by Jobs.
StoryShot #35: Round One
Jobs first learned of his cancer during a routine urological exam in October 2003. He refused surgery for nine months. Instead, he tried to cure himself with vegan diets and acupuncture. Of course, his condition only got worse. This meant he had to get major invasive surgery to remove the tumor.
Removal of this tumor reminded Jobs of his mortality. Subsequently, he was willing to accept an invitation to give a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. This speech is said to be one of the greatest commencements ever given.
Jobs and Gates eventually found a grudging respect for each other. This culminated in a joint interview they gave to The Wall Street Journal in 2007.
StoryShot #36: The iPhone
Jobs realized how cellphones with cameras were killing the digital camera market. He anticipated that the same would happen once cellphone companies started adding music players to their phones. So, he decided to tackle this dilemma earlier rather than later. Jobs originally created a partnership with Motorola. He broke off and created a team specifically for this project.
The iPhone was made possible by multi-touch. Multi-touch allowed devices to sense more than one finger. Plus, gorilla glass was an incredibly strong glass introduced to protect the phones from scratches and damage.
Again, critics believed the price point was too high. Jobs and consumers proved them wrong yet again.
StoryShot #37: Round Two: The Cancer Returns
Jobs’ cancer returned in the spring of 2008. He eventually got a liver transplant in Memphis that year.
He also struggled with the fact that he may no longer be indispensable to Apple. The company’s stock price had risen from $80 to $140 by the time he announced his return.
StoryShot #38: The iPad
Jobs had wanted to make a tablet computer since the early 2000s. Once the iPhone was launched, Jobs moved onto the iPad and launched it in January 2010. Apple sold over a million iPads in the first month and fifteen million in the first nine months.
Jobs was unhappy with most of the ads developed for the iPad. He eventually settled on emphasizing all the different things people could do with an iPad. Jobs also opened up app-creating to third-party developers, which created its own industry overnight.
StoryShot #39: New Battles
Having successfully launched the iPad, Jobs now moved on to fighting Google. Google had recently launched its Android mobile operating system.
Jobs was not pleased and is even quoted as saying: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product.”
Jobs still maintained that a closed, tightly integrated system produced the best consumer experience. Comparatively, companies like Microsoft and Google believed that open systems and natural competition should determine the winner.
StoryShot #40: To Infinity
Many consumers complained that the iPad was simply a large music player. Jobs responded to this by adding major creative tools like GarageBand. He also began working on two long-term projects at Apple. The first was iCloud, a cloud storage system that would become the future of computing. The second was the redesign of the offices of Apple. Jobs hoped these would become the best office building in the world.
StoryShot #41: Round Three
One of Jobs’ most significant accomplishments was staying alive long enough to see his son, Reed, graduate from high school. Jobs continued to struggle with his cancer and his eating disorders, much to his family’s dismay. He would be one of the first twenty people in the world to have their DNA sequenced. Despite this, it was an effort to save his life that fell short.
Jobs met with Barack Obama in 2010 to discuss schooling in the US. Specifically, they spoke about how there were not enough engineering schools. He later made a special dinner for large technology-company CEOs to meet with Obama to offer insight.
In the final year of Jobs’ life, he had expressed an interest in mentoring some new-age CEOs. This included Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google.
Jobs resigned from the CEO position at Apple in August 2011. He appointed Tim Cook as the new CEO.
StoryShot #42: Legacy
At Steve Jobs’ core was his incredible intensity. Apple surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in the world shortly before Jobs’ death. The book ends with Jobs’ own words on what drove him:
“I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how — because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.”
– Steve Jobs
Final Summary, Review and Criticism
This book is a well-written portrait of one of the most influential people of the late 20th century. It is not, however, without its critics.
The biography starts with Jobs’s birth in 1955 and follows him until his death in 2011. It explores both the public and personal life that are intertwined to create a well-rounded picture of Jobs’ life that shows both his successes and failures. As the author, Walter Isaacson delves into Jobs’s childhood to illustrate his motivations as an adult. He also works to explore Jobs’s “intense perfectionism, fierce competitiveness, and bold vision for changing computer technology and society”. The book has received criticism for its glorification of Jobs’ accomplishments at the expense of his shortcomings.
Criticism
Some readers may find that the author has glorified Jobs’ accomplishments at the expense of his shortcomings.
Rating
We rate Steve Jobs 4.5/5. How would you rate Walter Isaacsson’s book?
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