Reading Challenge : Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Reading Challenge
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The book is in my book shelf from 2011.  Every time I read , I can see  Steve Jobs in a new light. It was Jobs, who brought aesthetics and consumer friendly aspect in computers as well as many other devices ranging from MacBook ,iPod, iPad, PCs and finally to the phone.It is the  self-titled biography of Steve Jobs running in 600 plus pages, commissioned by Steve himself  to Walter Isaacson. Walter is CEO of Aspen Institute, and has been the Chairman of CNN and and managing editor at TIME. He also wrote best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Walter tried to do justice with biography.
Perhaps the funniest passage in Walter Isaacson's monumental book about Steve Jobs comes three quarters of the way through. It is 2009 and Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. At one point the pulmonologist tries to put a mask over his face when he is deeply sedated. Jobs rips it off and mumbles that he hates the design and refuses to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he orders them to bring five different options for the mask so that he can pick a design he likes. Even in the depths of his hallucinations, Jobs was a control-freak and a rude sod to boot. Imagine what he was like in the pink of health. As it happens, you don't need to: every discoverable fact about how Jobs, demanded excellence from his co-workers is here.
Isaacson reveals to my surprise that Jobs wasn't a visionary or even a particularly talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and – when he was getting it right, which wasn't always – 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 moolah will follow.
This book reveals moments that make you go "wow". There's the Apple flotation, which made the 25-year-old Jobs $256m in the days when that was really a big money. It is very rare that a company shows door to its creator, it is rarer that the same board call back the owner back to run it! This was precisely happened with Steve. There was a turnaround of the company after he returned back as CEO in 1997: in the previous fiscal year the company lost almost  $1 billion , but he returned it to profit in his first quarter. There's the launch of the iTunes store: expected to sell a million songs in six months, it sold a million songs in six days.
When Jobs died, iShrines popped up all over the place, personal tributes filled Facebook and his quotable wisdom – management-consultant banalities, for the most part – was passed from inbox to inbox. The beauty of this commissioned biography is honesty . Isaacson is all over Jobs's personal shortcomings and occasional business bungles, and Jobs sought no copy approval (though, typically, he got worked up over the cover design).
It’s  sheer bulk bespeaks a sort of reverence, and it's clear from the way it's put together that there's not much Jobs did that Isaacson doesn't regard as vital to the historical record. We get a whole chapter on one cheesy ad ("Think Different"). We get half a page on how Jobs went about choosing a washing machine – itself lifted from an interview Jobs, bizarrely, gave on the subject to Wired. Want to know the patent number for the box an iPod Nano comes in? It's right there on page 347. Similarly, the empty vocabulary of corporate PR sometimes seeps into Isaacson's prose, as exemplified by the recurrence of the word "passion". There's a lot of passion in this book. Steve's "passion for perfection", "passion for industrial design", "passion for awesome products" and so on. If I'd been reading this on an iPad, the temptation to search-and-replace "passion" to "turnip" or "erection" would have been overwhelming.
Guardian wrote that Isaacson writes dutiful, lumbering American news-mag journalese and suffers – as did Jobs himself – from a lack of sense of proportion. Chapter headings evoke Icarus and Prometheus. The one on the Apple II is subtitled "Dawn of a New Age", the one on Jobs's return to Apple is called "The Second Coming", and when writing about the origins of Apple's graphical user interface (Jobs pinched the idea from Xerox), Isaacson writes with splendid bathos: "There falls a [sic] shadow, as TS Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation."
But get past all that pomp and there's much to enjoy. Did you know that the Apple Macintosh was nearly called the Apple Bicycle? Or that so obsessed was Jobs with designing swanky-looking factories (white walls, brightly coloured machines) that he kept breaking the machines by painting them – for example bright blue?
As well as being a sort-of-genius, Jobs was a truly weird man. As a young man, he was once put on the night-shift so co-workers wouldn't have to endure his BO. Jobs was convinced his vegan diet meant he didn't need to wear deodorant or shower more than once a week! He was perpetually shedding his shoes, and sometimes, to relieve stress, soaked his feet in the toilet. His on-off veganism was allied to cranky theories about health. When he rebuked the chairman of Lotus Software for spreading butter on his toast "Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?", the man responded: "I'll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality."
That personality. An ex-girlfriend – and one, it should be said, who was very fond of him – told Isaacson that she thought Jobs suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. Jobs's personal life is sketchily covered, but what details there are don't charm. When he got an on/off girlfriend pregnant in his early 20s, he cut her off and aggressively denied paternity – though he later, uncharacteristically, admitted regretting his behaviour and sought to build a relationship with his daughter. It is interesting to note that Jobs himself was adopted, and seems to have had what Americans call "issues around abandonment".
You have hilarious instances in the book - Jobs cheated his friends out of money. He cut old colleagues out of stock options. He fired people with peremptoriness. He bullied waiters, insulted business contacts and humiliated interviewees for jobs. He lied his pants off whenever it suited him – "reality distortion field" is Isaacson's preferred phrase. Like many bullies, he was also a cry-baby. Whenever he was thwarted – not being made "Man of the Year" by Time magazine when he was 27, for instance – he burst into tears.
As for critiquing the work of others, Jobs's analytical style was forthright: "too gay" rabbit icon on desktop. “a shithead who sucks" (colleague Jef Raskin); "fucking dickless assholes" (his suppliers); "a dick" (the head of Sony music); "brain-dead" (mobile phones not made by Apple) !
Nowadays we are taught that being nice is the way to get on. Steve Jobs is a fine counter-example. In 2008, when Fortune magazine was on the point of running a damaging article about him, Jobs summoned their managing editor to Cupertino to demand he spike the piece: "He leaned into Serwer's face and asked, 'So, you've uncovered the fact that I'm an asshole. Why is that news?'"
It is also true that Jobs’  success did not occur in a linear trajectory. Rather, he struggled and succeeded only to struggle and succeed again.
As you read his story you will be motivated to think about your own journey. Job's biography will help you realize that you too can achieve your goals by overcoming your struggles even when they seem to repeat themselves.
Bit about Steve’s  personal life. He was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted at birth by a couple named Paul and Clara Jobs. When asked about his parents, Jobs has always enthusiastically responded that Paul and Clara were his real parents.
Luckily, both of Steve's adopted parents were focused on the role of education and the difference it can make in their young son's life. Steve's mother Clara was an accountant and she taught Steve how to read before he even started Kindergarten. Paul Jobs, a machinist for a company that made lasers, taught his son electronics and how to work with his hands. He did little things that encouraged his son to be inquisitive and to always embrace learning. For instance, one day, Paul Jobs cleared off a section of his workbench and gave it to the young Steve. At that workbench, Steve was encouraged to take apart and reassemble devices to learn how they work.
Jobs frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in California. Later, along with Steve Wozniak (Apple's co-founder), Jobs was hired there as a Summer intern. Following high school graduation, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and dropped out after only one semester. Steve continued attending classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor at friends' apartments and houses, returning Coke bottles for food money, getting weekly free meals at the local ISCON temple, and getting into drugs (Steve called his LCD drug experience one of the most enlightening experiences of his life).
Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in 1971, when a mutual friend introduced 21 year-old Wozniak to 16 year-old Jobs. In 1976, when Jobs was only twenty-one, they invented the first Apple computer and founded Apple computer in garage of Job's parents .
While Jobs was a persuasive and charismatic director for Apple, he was getting into power struggles frequently. In 1985, he was fired from his role as head of the Macintosh division by Apple's board of directors, and five months later, Jobs left the company.
Steve never gone to study at a top university but Stanford called him to deliver a lecture , there he said being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life".
After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT Computer, which produced sophisticated workstations. Jobs tried to market NeXT products to the financial and academic community, highlighting its innovative new technologies. After a few years, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development. In 1996, NeXT, the company that Jobs had started with 7 million dollar was sold to Apple for 429 million in order to integrate its technologies into Apple's operating system.
A year after leaving Apple, in 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group which was later renamed Pixar for the price of 10 million dollar. After years of unprofitability it contracted with Disney to produce a number of computer-animated films that Disney would co-finance and distribute. Their first movie was Toy Story, which became an instant summer blockbuster, followed by ten more pitch-perfect gems such as Finding Nemo and A Bug's Life. In 2006, Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth 7.4 billion dollars. Jobs became The Walt Disney Company's largest single shareholder owning seven percent of the company's stock.
In 1997, a year after Apple's merger with NeXT, Jobs was hired back as an interim CEO and the company started to branch out, introducing the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, the iTunes Store, the Iphone mobile device and the IPAD tablet.
India is always fascinated with Apple products , Steve Jobs and his company, But initially Apple treated its India customers with disdain, launching products here months after the international release. The truth is that Steve Jobs had a short lived fling with India in the '70s, before he founded Apple, and like many flings it was a bitter experience. He was then an employee of video game company Atari, the young Jobs came to India with his friend Dan Kottke. Jobs and Kottke were here between 1974 and 1976, traveling around including  places Haridwar, Rishikesh and Nainital. He was mystified by eastern philosophies, wanted to meet Neem Karoli Baba , he was on a quest for higher learning, to solve the unanswered questions of science. He could not meet Neem Karoli Baba as he left for heavenly abode by the time Steve reached Kainchi near Nainital.
I liked the Codo of the book. During the last days of his life, one sunny afternoon, sitting in his garden, he reflected on death. He talked about his days in India, Buddhism, reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. He said, ‘I am about to believe in God fifty fifty. For most of my life, I felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eyes.’ He further said, ‘ I like to think that something survive after you die. It is strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and may be  a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survive, that maybe your consciousness endures.’ Thereafter he felt silent for a very long time. ‘But perhaps on the other hand, it is like an on off switch’ he said. ‘Click!And you are gone.’ Then he paused again and smiled slightly. ‘May be that is why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.’