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.

Wozniak Can Dance

Steve Wozniak is going to be on Dancing With The Stars. Woo hoo.

via Macrumors.

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.

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.