Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is simply out too soon. The man died less than a month before the book hit the shelves, and the book has the feel of being rushed, with too much recitation and no enough reflection. But for all its failings, it’s worth reading.
Before we begin, let me caveat that I’m not going to talk much about the events of Steve’s life; the blogs are alight with people talking about all the juicy bits, and you can find that elsewhere. I am, instead, going to talk about the book qua book– how the book does its job as a biography and as a reading experience– and about the larger themes Steve’s life can tell us.
As a Biography
Let us begin with the parts it gets right. Isaacson had amazing access and Jobs’ blessing to talk to whomever he needed to, and he managed to do incredibly good interviews with a huge array of people. He compiled a ridiculous amount of information about Jobs’ life, and presents it clearly. He is brutally honest about how brutally unkind Jobs could be. It is a tribute to him that he manages to keep that objectivity even after he had become as close to Jobs as the end of the book would imply, and a tribute to Jobs that he wanted no part in whitewashing what would obviously be a somewhat unflattering biography. The prose is smart and clear and clean, with a few slips into being too-clever-by-half.
But the book falls far too often into chasing the end of the chapter. The story of Steve’s life is told as it was experienced, demo after demo, launch after launch, leave after leave. The chronology is important, but it is the first and simplest step in a biography, and for large tracts toward the end of the book we get nothing more than the chronology. Whereas Steve’s early life is told with a pop-psychologist’s eye toward motivations and internal conflicts, the last decade of Steve’s life runs by with nary a thought about it. You repeatedly get the feeling that Steve’s death came earlier than the publisher expected, and the last few drafted chapters had a quick copy-edit before being sent off to the printer’s.
The book also has some bizarre blind spots. Pixar is a perpetual second fiddle to Apple, which seems to have genuinely been the case but is never addressed directly. NeXT exists as a vaguely-defined wilderness that Steve wanders through during his exile, but its products are barely mentioned and what made them interesting, failures, and ultimately a successful foundation for Apple’s rebirth is never touched on. This contrasts especially oddly with the lovingly detailed story of the Mac team, which is taken nearly wholesale from Revolution in the Valley (Odder still: Andy Hertzfeld’s book is basically a love story to the rest of the team, but in Isaacson’s book every Mac-team story is told from Andy’s eyes, and so it seems Steve and he made the entire computer themselves). There are also huge industry movements that get nary a mention: the Internet isn’t ever important except to give an i to the iMac, and Job’s embrace of and slow distancing from DRM is never mentioned at all. Those two in particular are important for Jobs’ story: they tell of a platform nobody owns as a contrast to the many Apple created and curated, and the tools used for that curation and why they were abandoned.
Both the Internet and DRM share one thing in common with lots of other things given short shrift in the book: software is only ever important because it talks to hardware. This fits the “integrated system” that Jobs embraced and a theme that Isaacson emphasizes, but Steve being painfully obsessive over hardware was no different than his being painfully obsessive about the design of software, and there were a lot more software releases over the years than hardware ones.
The rushing and the blind spots combine to make it harder for Isaacson to present us with big-picture thinking about why Steve’s particular obsessions worked well for him. We hear a lot about painting the back sides of fences and owning the whole widget, which are important lessons, but they’re just supporting points of the real lesson. Let me build up to what that lesson is.
Lessons
The book does a very good job of painting how hard it must have been to be around Steve: he could be mean, he was driven, he often seemed arbitrary, and he didn’t care if you liked him. But between that you can see a deeper truth: it seems like it must have been incredibly hard to be Steve. Everything around him sucked all the time. No one around him cared as much as they should. No one “got it”, even when it was obvious, and even when Steve told them. The world was full of bozos who made crappy products, and Steve had to deal with both all the time. He was literally being annoyed by this stuff on his deathbed.
And that’s because being in tune with the design of everything around him was who he was, and he couldn’t turn that off. A continuing theme was mentors of Steve approaching him and telling him he was being a jerk, and Steve admitting it, promising to be better, failing to do so, and then saying that it was just “who he was”. He couldn’t turn off his design sense, and he couldn’t turn off his reaction when that sense was offended.
So as a defense mechanism he took Alan Kay’s words to heart, and invented the future. But Steve wasn’t the one to do the inventing, so we see a continuing string of people executing on his ideas. The interplay between ideas and execution is an important part of Steve’s life, but Isaacson doesn’t seem to notice the succession of pairings through the years:
- Jobs and Woz create the Apple I; Woz executes on Jobs’ sales idea.
- Jobs and Markkula create Apple Computer: Markkula executes on Jobs’ business idea.
- Jobs and the Mac Team create the Macintosh: The Pirates execute on Jobs’ vision of the future of computing.
- Jobs and NeXT create NeXTSTEP: the company lays the foundation for OS X by burning through mountains of Jobs’ cash.
- Jobs and Cook create an Apple that can compete: Cook makes the company competitive.
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- Compare with Eisner and Wells creating a decade of Disney animation: when Wells dies Eisner flails.
- Jobs and Ive create a succession of products: Ive executes on Jobs’ vision, even keeping new technology from Steve until it’s ready to be useful.
In each case Jobs provides the impetus but someone else provides the technical expertise to make it happen. Jobs, though, was not just an “ideas man” who threw things over the fence: he was deeply involved in every aspect of the creation until the consumer swiped a credit card and took the thing home. His gift was knowing what would make the thing better, and his curse was an absolute inability to be shy about letting you know. So he found people who could take his criticism and use it as it was meant to be: as a tool to refine their craft.
Adding this all together, we see what made Steve great: he knew that every part of execution matters. This goes beyond the back side of the fence; it encompases his aversion to letting “B players” onto the team, and it fits with many people describing his ability to hone in on the weakest part of a design. It shows why he switched sides on DRM (avoid extra steps), and why he thought that integrated systems were superior (the seams always show). He knew and saw that letting a small fissure stay in a design could split the entire thing apart: Woody accidentally became a jerk, the bezel of the iPhone overshadowed the screen, the stores needed to focus on tasks not products. Products are holistic creations and must be thought of that way, or the stray threads are the first things that users will pull at.
Conclusion: Art and Technology
The basic pairing Steve came back to was art and technology. He told Isaacson this again and again, yet it falls behind the Reality Distortion Field in the book’s hierarchy of themes. But this was Jobs at his most self-aware: he saw that where he had done the best work of his life was when he found art and technology that matched, and where he could fuse them together. But a lot of times he missed the intersection: NeXT had art but the technology hadn’t caught up, yet. When the technology finally did catch up, the same art made Apple huge. In the same way, the technology of photorealistic 3D might some day make the Pixar Imaging Computer’s artistic dreams a consumer reality.
Spending so long searching for and living at that intersection meant that when everything starting to become a computer, balancing art and technology became an incredibly valuable skill. Apple suddenly had a head start on industries that they hadn’t even been in competition with a few years before, and that head start grew because most of their competitors weren’t even trying to find the balance.
Many are saying that Apple is Jobs’ greatest creation. I agree, but the measure of their greatness will be in how well they maintain the balance he created, and how successfully they continue to make technology that can truly be called art.
Tagged Apple, Review, steve jobs
