Clint Graham's Reviews > Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was a colossal jerk. Even as the protagonist in the story of his own life, I had to root against him at some points. This book could have been a master class in manipulation, callousness, and arrogance.

It isn't always pretty to see how the sausage is made. Could the same amazing products have been forged with a leader who was less intense? No. The intensity was the driving force behind his passion for products. The floundering performance at Apple in Jobs' absence is a testament to how profoundly critical he was to the company's success.

Jobs had the rare quality of being completely authentic. As poorly as he handled his relationships with people, he was never a phony. This shined through all parts of his life. He rejected needless consumer crap because he needed to examine the reason and function for everything. Nonsense withered in his presence.

His views on creating products at the intersection of technology and creativity were eons ahead of his time. Walter Isaacson pits Jobs against Bill Gates frequently throughout the book, and rightly so. Jobs had a passion for his work above all else. But it seems like Isaacson was casting Gates as a caricature of sniveling corporate greed, completely ignoring the merits of building Microsoft into the behemoth that it was.

Even though Jobs never read his own biography, he would have liked it. It was real. His iThings were always perfectly polished masterpieces, but he was an unvarnished, emotional, passionate man who poured his soul into everything he did.

And what was with all the product placement in this book? Isaacson must have made bank off of Apple and Pixar. ;-)