Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Melissa gave me this biography for Christmas. It's a treat because it's new, it's hardbound (and heavy!) and has some fascinating photos. It was a good read, despite Isaacson's occasionally confusing syntax. He did a masterful job of getting into Jobs's professional life and associations. There is less about his personal life, but we do get glimpses of Jobs's wife and children. It's often a story of our time and the development of iconic technology tools. It was fascinating to read about how these tools and ideas developed under Jobs's passionate attention. The book also reveals quite a bit about Bill Gates and other key players of this era.

Points to remember...

• Steve Jobs was passionate about DESIGN. This includes how products look, feel, and function. He lived at the intersection of the humanities and technology.
• He designed the new Apple campus building in a way to encourage people in different departments to intersect.
• He was diametrically opposed to Gates's open archetecture and instead controlled the user's experience from end to end.
• He launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries: (pp. 565-566)
• Apple II - took Wozniak's first circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists.
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution and popularized graphical user interfaces.
• Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, which opened up the miracle of digital imagination.
• The iPod, which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices.
• The App Store, which spawned a new content-creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books, and videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its central role in managing our content and let all of our devices sync seamlessly.
• And Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth.
• He was very difficult to work with...and the author traces Jobs's personality development over time. It's an interesting story which Isaacson offers with compassion.

My favorite part of the book is the final word which Isaacson gives to Jobs. It's what he hoped his legacy would be, and revealed what he cared about. Page 567 onwards...worth reading again...