Review:
Steve Jobs is a figure about which I
cannot avoid having mixed feelings. On one hand, he’s in charge of
creating incredible gadgets while on the other he’s in charge of
generally pricing them out of my reach and artificially limiting
their capabilities. Regardless, Jobs is one of those prophets under
whose shadow my life is being lived: as an IT professional, as a
child growing up in the PC era, as a gadget freak, wherever I go I am
affected by Jobs and his creations. When I heard generally favorable
feedback for this biography of his, I decided it was worth spending
my time on if only to expand my understandings of this Information
Age world we are living in.
You know what? Once I started reading
the book I couldn’t look back. For a few weeks, Steve Jobs became
an integral part of my life. Coincidently, I happened to buy my first
Mac during the reading of the book.
Steve Jobs (the book) offers a very
comprehensive look at the man’s life. Built as individual stories
covering different aspects of Jobs’ life and told in chronological order (although some overlap is unavoidable), we follow
Jobs from the time baby Steve was given away for adoption to the Jobs
family and up until his immanent [recent] death. There’s him
growing up, him building the first Apple computers with the other
Steve [Wozniak], him artistically borrowing the Xerox interface to
build the first Mac, him getting cast out of Apple, moving on to NeXT, Pixar, and
then his resurrection back at Apple to turn a dying company into the
world’s number one company, for better and worse. In effect, we
have the rise, the fall, and the resurrection of the Jobs Messiah.
By far the greatest achievement of
Steve Jobs, the book, is its careful depiction of a complicated
reality. More than any book of fiction can do, Steve Jobs’
biography manages to portray a reality so complicated and involving
so many characters that it feels real; it feels as if the book is
taking its reader right inside Jobs’ world as his character evolves. The
experience is simply fascinating: far from the normal portrayal of
characters as either the defenders of all that is good or as the
masters of all evil, this biography manages to portray Steve Jobs as
a person. A person with ups and downs; a person that can be good and
a person that can be bad. An utterly convincing person. A person just like the rest of us. I cannot recall a book that manages this feat as
convincingly as Walter Isaacson does it here, be it from the fiction
of non fiction department.
As comprehensive and thorough as the
biography is, I found myself thinking a lot about the bits that
weren’t there, the stories that were only half told, and the truths
that were misrepresented. There are plenty of those around! On the
omissions side, I found the book’s failure to mention the “I’m
a Mac [and I’m a PC]” ads quite puzzling, especially given the
ample room given to Apple’s advertising and marketing storydescribing. On the
half truths side we have Ridley Scott, the director of Apple’s
famous 1984 Big Brother TV ad, described as a director coming
straight off the success of Blade Runner; alas, at the time Blade
Runner was considered a major flop. It took years, decades, for the
film to be recognized as the Pièce de résistance we tend to regard
it as now. Another case of presenting the Apple version of the truth comes with the telling of the various shenanigans of the iPhone 4, such as Antennagate and the story where
a Gizmodo editor’s house was raided by police at Apple’s request
after Gizmodo managed to put its hand on an iPhone 4 prototype. The
book describes the incident as a normal police raid, and tells the
story in a non flattering way, portraying Apple as a company that
tries too hard to take control over the world. It glosses over
Apple describing the phone to the police as an item so valuable it
cannot be priced; as with the later search for the elusive iPhone 5,
Apple does not mind putting itself above the justice system.
All these deficiencies are worth
pointing out because Steve Jobs’ biography tries to create an image
of a person trying to create the best technological gadgets people couldn't even dream of through a vision of one company that controls everything from start
to finish in order to create simple products. That’s fine; that’s
what so great about Apple. But hey, what about all those third world
people that pay for Apple’s success in sweat and blood? What about
Apple’s abuse of its own customers, where the company happily killsits products once they reach their second anniversary? You won’t
find much mentioning of that in the book.
The Steve Jobs at the beginning of the
book was a pirate who built his success on the efforts of others. I
say that in the most flattering of ways: that is what human
civilization is all about. The Steve Jobs at the end of the book is
almost the exact opposite: a person wary of collaboration, a person
who – in many aspects – became an opponent of a sharing culture.
A person that could be said to have sold his soul on his way to the
throne.
So yeah, I think this biography missed
out on some key aspects of its subject matter. As an advocate of the
open source philosophy, I consider this disregard crucial if the
purpose of the book was to provide a conclusive review of the person
that was Steve Jobs. Indeed, it is clear to me that Steve Jobs and I
would have never got along well with one another: he would have
probably labeled me a B person, and I would have dismissed him as
an inconsiderate two faced person that spat into the well he used to
drink from. What this biography makes pretty clear to me is
that the person I take as the real hero from this book is the other
Steve: between his engineering smarts, easy character and willingness
to share, Steve Wozniak is clearly a person I would have loved a
chance to be friends with. Sure, Apple would not have become what it
ended up as without the Jobs' Steve; but then again, the whole of
human civilization is built on many bad things that took place in its
history, things that at the time we would have preferred to have gone
down better. In other words, I argue that the end results of
Steve Jobs’ ventures do not justify the means with which they were
achieved.
Overall:
Despite all my criticism, once I regard
Steve Jobs’ biography for what it is – a book, not the ultimate
word of god – I cannot avoid crediting it for what it is. It is a
complex portrayal of a complex person, and as such it is an
intriguing, and an often touching, read. Given that, and given the
amount of creative thinking the book had generated, I cannot avoid
crediting it with 4.5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended!
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