Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson, “Steve Jobs”, Simon & Schuster, 2011, 569 pps  

This book gets my “Must Read” rating.  Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a story capturing a personality whose passion for perfection revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.  Some have added a seventh: retail stores. 

Jobs’ knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.  I was personally always somewhat peeved at Apple’s position denying an open source architecture in their products and not even allowing access to the battery.  Of course, additionally, the price of the product always seemed too high to me.  In any event, this book convinced me that Jobs had very good reasons for maintaining this closed architecture.  I still have a PC and a Kindle, which are not Apple products, but I also have two Ipods and an Ipad and of course Itunes on my PC. When I need another laptop it may well be an Apple product.  Yet, Gates always provided a much more affordable product and that fact made it as useful as anything Apple did.  Besides, Gates could just utilize the magnificent ideas Apple came up—just a little later.

A brief look at some of the eccentric behavior of Jobs:   

He saw the world as black and white.  All people were either shitheads or geniuses; you could be in each group on the same day.  

· Jobs was given up at birth by his college educated parents.  Because of this he refused to ever meet his biological father.  He did meet his Mother and sister, Mona Simpson (the author).

Jobs’ adoption parents had pledged to the biological Mother to send their son to college.  Steve insisted on the most expensive private college, Reed, he could or he wouldn’t go at all.  At graduation he would not let them attend.

·        He would not put a license plate on his car & continually parked in handicap spots.  

     

      

      He could be classified as a person with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Pg. 266   He had a Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn’t apply to him; he credits LSD for many of his early and long lasting insights.

·        He fathered a daughter, Lisa Brennan,  in 1978 but originally denied paternity.  A year later he agreed to a paternity test (Apple would soon be going public and he decided it was best to get the issue resolved .) Pg. 90

·        Jobs did not believe in market research.  He stated that customers don’t know what they want until shown.  “Had Henry Ford done market research he would have discovered that people wanted a faster horse.”

My Notes:

Pg. 40: In Reed College, Jobs refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls.  He began to feel guilty spending his parent’s money on an education that did not seem worthwhile.  So he decided to drop out and continue audit classes and stay with friends after he stopped paying tuition.  For whatever reason, Reed College allowed this.  Among the classes he took was calligraphy.  It was another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology.  In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, and human touches.

Pg. 59:  In 1975 Popular Mechanics described the first personal computer kit, the Altair.  It wasn’t much—just a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new era.  Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and started working on a version of BASIC.  It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak.

Pg. 64:  Wozniak felt after they designed the first Apple Computer that he had to offer it first to HP since he was working there and “it was my duty to tell HP about what I had designed while working for them.”  So he demonstrated it to his managers in the spring of 1976.  The senior executive at the meeting was impressed, and seemed torn, but he finally said it was not something that HP could develop. It was a hobbyist product, at least for now, and didn’t fit into the company’s high-quality market segments.  So, on January 3, 1977, the new corporation, the Apple Computer Co., was officially created and it bought out the old partnership that had been formed by Jobs and Wozniak nine months earlier. 

Pg. 84:  In 1977 the Apple II came out and would be marketed in various models for the next sixteen years, with close to six million sold.  More than any other machine, it launched the personal computer industry. Wozniak deserves the historic credit for the design but Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek case.  He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines. 

Pg. 91:  Jobs bought a house but became so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches.  His bedroom had a mattress in the center on the floor, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls and an Apple II on the floor—nothing else.

Pg. 95: Xerox had a visionary scientist, Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” 

Pg. 104:  Apple went public on December 12, 1980.  At age twenty-five, Jobs was now worth $256 million. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business.  And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.  (By 1985 his worth would be down to $100 million when he resigned from Apple and sold all his Apple shares, except one so he could attend shareholder meetings if he wanted.)

Pg. 230:  Jobs and Gates had a personal rivalry—occasional grudging respect—and basic philosophical differences.  Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware and software, which led him to build a machine that was not compatible with others.  Gates believed in, and profited from, a world in which different companies made machines that were compatible with one another; their hardware ran a standard operating system (Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the same software apps such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel).

Pg. 291:  In 1995 Jobs had an IPO for Pixar just one week after Toy Story’s very successful opening.  By the end of the day, the shares Jobs retained—80% of the company—were worth an astonishing $1.2 billion.  The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies.

Pg. 296:  It had taken Microsoft a few years to replicate Macintosh’s graphical user interface, but by 1990 it had come out with Windows 3.0, which began the company’s march to dominance in the desktop market.  Windows 95, which was released in 1995, became the most successful operating system ever, and Macintosh sales began to collapse.  By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. 

Pg. 319:  When Jobs was brought back to Apple, one of his first actions was to ask for the resignation of all the board members except one, Wollard.  The board asked that he allow an additional member to stay as it “would help the optics.”  He agreed.

Pg.380:  Jobs’ vision that your computer could become your digital hub went back to a technology called FireWire, which Apple developed in the early 1990s.  It was a high-speed serial port that moved digital files such as video from one device to another.  Jobs decided to include it on the updated versions of the iMac that came out in October 1999.  He began to see that FireWire could be part of a system that moved video from cameras onto a computer, where it could be edited and distributed.  Jobs asked Adobe to make a new Mac version of Adobe Premiere, which was popular on Windows computers.  Adobe’s executives turned Jobs down because they said Macintosh had too few users to make it worthwhile.  Jobs never forgave Adobe and a decade later got into a pubic war with the company by not permitting Adobe Flash to run on the iPad.  He took away a valuable lesson that reinforced his desire for end-to-end control of all key elements of a system.  So; starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac.  These included Final Cut Pro, for editing digital video; iMovie; iDVD, for burning video or music onto a disc; iPhoto, to compete with Adobe Photoshop; GarageBand for creating and mixing music; iTunes, for managing your songs; and the iTunes Store, for buying songs.

Pg. 381:  Jobs had another insight.  If the computer served as the hub, it would allow the portable devices to become simpler.   A lot of the functions that the devices tried to do, such as editing the video or pictures, they did poorly because they had small screens and cold not easily accommodate menus filled with lots of functions.  Computers could handle that more easily.

Pg. 383:  Jobs unveiled iTunes in January 2001 as part of the digital hub strategy.  The next step for the digital hub strategy was to make a portable music player.  Jobs realized that Apple had the opportunity to design such a device in tandem with the iTunes software.  Complex tasks could be handled on the computer, easy ones on the device.  Thus was born the iPod, the device that would begin the transformation of Apple from being a computer maker into being the world’s most valuable company.

Pg. 389:  The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’ decree that the iPod would not have an on-off switch.  It became true of most Apple devices. There was no need for one.  Apple’s devices would go dormant if they were not being used, and they would wake up when you touched any key. 

Pg. 407:  Why did Sony, the producer of the Walkman, fail in producing a device like the iPod?  Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into divisions, each with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.  Apple, on the other hand, was organized in teams, each under Jobs’ control and pushed to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. 

In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization.  If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division.  Jobs’ position on this: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”  So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

Pg. 465:  By 2005 iPod sales were skyrocketing.  An astonishing twenty million were sold that year, quadruple the number of the year before.  The product was becoming more important to the company’s bottom line, accounting for 45% of the revenue that year.  That is why Jobs was worried.  “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone” he claimed. As he explained, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras.  The same could happen to the iPod, fi phone manufacturers started to build music players into them.  He first partnered with Motorola but the resulting clumsy ROKR convinced him to go it alone.  In January 2007 he introduced the iPhone.

Pg. 501:  Jobs finally allowed outsiders to write apps for Apple equipment.  But they would have to meet strict standards, be tested and approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes Store.  He felt this gave Apple the benefits of openness while retaining end-to-end control. The App Store for the iPhone opened on iTunes in 2008; the billionth download came nine months later.  With the iPod, Jobs transformed the music business.  With the iPad and its App Store, he began to transform all media, from publishing to journalism to television and movies.

Pg. 531:  By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era.  In the future your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for your content.  Instead the hub would move to “the cloud.”  Your content would be stored on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and it would be available for you to use on any device, anywhere.  (I have a problem going all the way with this—I will still maintain my own backup, somewhere).