Steve Jobs

I was somewhat intimidated by the thickness of the book and spooked by Jobs' infamous death stare and enigmatic Mona Lisa-like smile.  The cover portrait, by Albert Watson who is kind of blind and bears an uncanny resemblance to his subject, was taken using an analog large format camera of which Jobs was duly impressed.  I took the dust cover off before started reading.

The authorized biography by the renowned Walter Isaacson clocks in more than 600 pages with never seen before obligatory pictures of Jobs and families in the middle and notes in the end.  I thought it would take me some time to finish it but no, it only took me more than a week even though I had been extremely busy between eating my meals and using the bathrooms.

The book chronicles Jobs' personal and professional life, warts and all, through and through with vivid recollections from Jobs himself as well as from others and often time interspersed with Isaacson's own take on the events.  The Book of Jobs certainly confirms Jobs as an enigmatic dichotomy.  He couldn't code like Gates, not a brilliant engineer like Wozniak, but what he lacked he more than made up for with his intuition, his belief in himself being special and his relentless drive demanded from himself and others for perfection.  And of course being exceptionally intelligent helped too.  Isaacson is even handed and sometimes even goes overboard to expose Jobs' dark side or quirks.  He insinuates that Jobs was too busy to flush toilets in addition to his more well-known infractions: Job soaked his feet in the toilet bowl to unwind, cheated Wozniak, abandoned his own child, had no qualms took others' ideas as his and totally lacked social grace.  Despite or perhaps even because of all his faults, it makes Jobs even more fascinating or human--apparently Jobs reality distortion field is at work here, death or alive.  In the end, Isaacson sheds his biographer role and let Jobs have the last words, which are intelligent and thoughtful as always but also uncharacteristically graceful: summing up who he is, what he wants to do and what drives him, all directly from the horse's mouth.   The book is compelling and easy to read, because number one Jobs was a compelling person on so many levels, with spectacular successes and failures, and you will have to make an effort if you were to try to make him less compelling and number two Isaacson's chronological recounting of events is easy to follow and not get in the way of the flow of the story.  It's not easy to sum up anybody's life in a book especially one as fascinating as Jobs' but I believe Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" has done it.

Albert Watson

Any work of art is a reflection of the artist himself.  I feel this is as much a portrait of Mr. Jobs as it is of Mr. Watson himself.  The analog picture was taken with a 4x5 view camera in 2006.

Picture taken from Apple's web site for illustration purpose.  Copyrights belong to its rightful owner(s).

Jobs: "I wanted my kids to know me."

via 9to5mac
From Isaacson’s upcoming Essay in Time Magazine:

A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. We talked about his childhood, and he gave me some pictures of his father and family to use in my biography. As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Jobs Is Too Sick To Be CEO

If you have been drinking Apple's Kool-Aid for too long, it's time for a dose of reality. Steve Jobs by his own admission is indeed too sick to carry on his CEO duty at Apple. This is something I or most people hate to be right. I hope he gets well soon. Without health, there isn't much else to get excited anymore. Hopefully, six months from now, we will see a stouter Steve energizing Apple and giving the world "one more thing ..." many more years to come.

Random Thoughts

It's an unalterable fact of life that everybody who is ever born is going to die one day. The question is when and how and in some cases, does it move the stock price? Being the CEO of Apple, a publicly traded company, I would like to see Jobs more forthcoming in terms of his health not reporting after the fact that he had pancreatic cancer or spinned his dramatic weight loss as the result of a "common bug." Journalists (or bloggers) should have the displeasure and courage to ask heartless impolite questions not just drinking up Kool-aid fed by Apple's flacks.

Jobs Spawned In Meat Packing District

Today is the grand opening of the 3rd Apple Store in New York City. Free gifts and all. When you are on the vertigo inducing 3-story spiral glass staircase, get ready to loosen your wallet to pay over priced mp3 players and all.... I may even go there. I want to look cool and hip too.

Ubernerds

More nerd news ...

Gates and Jobs share the stage to scratch each other's back. Oh, yes, two guys who never bother to finish college have been shaping personal computing since the 1970s.

Apple got the name from Apple Records

What Steve wants, Steve gets. Once again, Steve Jobs got the job done.

Apple is getting all the rights to the the name Apple. Apple Corps, the Beatles' company now needs to license to continue to use the name Apple.

It won't be long before iTunes is going to sell Beatles.

Trouble in Paradise

New Yorkers lead the way to sue Apple.

New York City Employees' Retirement System, holder of 1 million Apple stock, is the lead plaintiff in the shareholder lawsuit against Apple's option backdating. According to Bloomberg.com, Jobs was questioned by both the SEC and the Justice Department.

Jobs once said he is only indispensable to his family when asked if Apple can go on without him. Perhaps Apple can bring Steve Wozniak back to the helm, well, he never actually left to begin with, and bring back his Apple II. I am waiting for some solid hardware from Apple and OS X 10.5. The dropping of Computer from its name may not be such a good thing after all.

Apple Store Offline

A cell phone sans buttons introduced by Apple's Steve Jobs. JPGs from macRumors.com

When other ecommerce stores go offline, it means offline or some screwed up. But when Apple goes offline, it means only one thing - new products.

Apple store is taken offline so be prepared for some new updates there. Jobs is now doing his presentation. If he's not going to demo a "podPhone," the stock is going to nose dive I think. Entering the cell market is perhaps the next right thing for Apple to do but they are going to uncharted territory. There are talks that Apple may even operate the phone network so as to have end to end control of everything. Or it's going to be exclusively on Cingular for its debut.

OKAY, according to MacRumors.com, Wifi n is officially supported for its streaming video device. Speed if not love is definitely in the air now....

3 revolutionary products:
Widescreen iPod. Good I didn't buy any old iPod. this is the one...
Mobile Phone. So the rumors are just valid.
Internet Communicator. What the hell that is. I guess it's like a Tablet or such.
I take it back, it's actually one device doing the above three things. So this is drastically different from iPod's philosophy: do one thing and do one thing really well.

Apple's shares shot up minutes after Jobs introduced the "phone."...

Guys, get ready for a lot of touching and fingering ... that is if you can afford to spend $499 or $599 for a 4GB or 8GB model with a 2-year contract with Cingular.

iWoz: Book Report Part II

Let me see where I left off first. I didn't write much at all.

iWoz is Steve Woziniak's autobiography to set the record straight, or essentially telling people what an asshole Steve Jobs was . There were several events as mentioned in the book that leads me to conclude that Jobs could be an asshole.

On p.109

"In the meantime, trembling with fear, Steve passed the Blue Box to me. He didn't have a jacket on, but I did. I slid it into my pocket."

The Blue Box was one of Woz's brilliant hacks to make free (read illegal) phone calls. Jobs passed the Blue Box to Woz thinking that the police approaching them knew they were making illegal phone calls. So Jobs shit his pants and just wanted Woz to have the Blue Box when the police came.

On p. 147-148

"... Steve paid me half the seven hundred bucks he said they paid him for it.... Later I found out he got paid a bit more for it - like a few thousand dollars - than he said at the time."

So Jobs was a greedy liar, even to his friend and partner. Woz on the book says "I was hurt. But I didn't make a big deal about it or anything." Yeah, right. Many years later, like now, he still remembers and writes about it so the whole world knows Jobs was a liar and cheated him more than a thousand dollars. This was about the video game Breakout the two Steve's did for Atari, then Jobs employer. They did it in four days and ended up with mononucleosis.

On p. 195

"Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement. He said, 'You might just want to buy this product for a few hundred thousand dollars. I was almost embarrassed....Steve added, 'A few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working on this project."

Woz was talking a meeting they had with Commodore's bigwigs when they tried to raise money for their Apple II personal computer. So Jobs was not only greedy but ridiculously so.

It just gets better, on p. 269

"From what I heard, he threw it against a wall and put in a box and said, "Send it to him." As if Apple owned it. The Frog guy told me that Steve told him they couldn't do any work for us because Apple 'owned' Frog."

Woz quit his work at Apple (but still an employee and draws a salary up to this day) and started his own company CL 9, to make, gasp, universal remote. He was trying to get Apple's design firm, Frog Design, to do the prototype but Jobs wouldn't have any of it. So Jobs was a greedy asshole. (As an aside, Woz emphasizes more than once that the Wall Street Journal reportage was wrong on saying that he wasn't happy at Apple and was disgruntled. Woz says his reason to leave Apple was to start his company making universal remote. I wouldn't believe it let alone The Wall Street Journal.)

So you see it's not too farfetched that Apple has this option backdating scandal, because like Woz mentioned Jobs could be very not honest and greedy. Jobs name was cleared of any wrong doing by some internal committee, though the whole thing is still under SEC investigation as far as I know.

Also, Woz likes to point out that it was he and only he who single handedly designed Apple II, not he and Jobs. They didn't found Apple in Jobs garage as the legend would have it. It was HP, Woz beloved company that was started in the garage. Woz worked in his room in his apartment while Jobs worked in his room in his parents' house. Apple II, the one designed by him rocks while Apple III really sucks ass. Woz blames the constant crashing of Apple's OS 7 on Internet Explorer, at the same time without citing any evidence, at least in my mind.

In conclusion, Woz gives some words of wisdom to todays engineers, screw the committee and team work. Work alone. He promises it is worth it.

The book is easy to read, even I can finish it in a few days. I think any parent, engineer, entrepreneur can benefit from reading it.

iWoz: Book Report Part I

I was no good at writing book report. Actually that should come across as pretty obvious.

I checked out iWoz a few days ago. The book isn't like Shakespeare or something and perhaps just because of that it's very readable to me. iWoz is an autobiography of Steve Wozniak, the other Steve that founded Apple.

... to be contined.