Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

"At the January 2000 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX, which used some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT three years earlier. It was fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that he was willing to incorporate himself back at Apple at the same moment as the NeXT OS was incorporated into Apple’s. Avie Tevanian had taken the UNIX-related Mach kernel of the NeXT operating system and turned it into the Mac OS kernel, known as Darwin. It offered protected memory, advanced networking, and preemptive multitasking. It was precisely what the Macintosh needed, and it would be the foundation of the Mac OS henceforth. Some critics, including Bill Gates, noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system. There’s some truth to that, because Apple decided not to leap into a completely new system but instead to evolve the existing one. Application software written for the old Macintosh system was generally compatible with or easy to port to the new one, and a Mac user who upgraded would notice a lot of new features but not a whole new interface."

Reading that, it seems to me he got it right, except for misspelling "OS X".

The real value and insight that the book provides is the access to Jobs during the last years of his life, as well as the people who played important roles in Apple's resurgence during the last 10 years. To nitpick the minor technical details in the book is to completely miss the point.

The fact of the matter is, though, that the nitty-gritty technical details are just not part of the picture for Jobs. Jobs picked at tiny details only when designers and engineers did something wrong or did something didn't lend itself to Jobs' greater artistic vision. If you're interested in exceptional technical detail, Jobs just would not have been your man.

And let's face it, if you're interested in the technology. there will be dozens of engineers and a limitless number of other writers that can write about those matters later. Gross technical detail is just not seeing the forest for the trees; and if you don't realize that fact, then you are someone that would have probably have been met with Jobs' scorn.

I was much more interested in getting some perspective on Jobs the person, how he acted, how he thought, and why he behaved like he did, not some rehashing of resent technical history that is already well known.

Much like Apple's products, this book was created for the masses, not the engineers.

IF the book had presented all sides, say, quoted Steve, and then Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld on an issue and then gotten Woz's or Raskin's opinion of who was right, and Steve, Bill and Andy disagreed in what they said, and the reader was given the opportunity to decide for themselves what the truth was... then that would be "presenting all sides." However, I can not think of a single incident where Isaacson quoted more than one person, and in most cases he just asserts that Steve is lying.

The truth is, there is no "Reality Distortion Field". The term itself is a joke. The claim that Steve can get away with lying is a piece of propaganda that has ben perpetuated for decades by Apple haters. (and they have to, because the people who hate Apple are jealous because Apple produces better products, they can't really bash Apple for being better, so they have to resort to smears.)

I've paid close attention, and in every case of Steve Jobs saying something that people claimed was a lie, I've yet to find one where he publicly tells a flat out lie. He's been wrong in his opinions, but that's quite different than lying.

For instance, he was quoted as saying that "people don't read anymore"... haters claim this means that he claimed Apple would never make a kindle competitor, but that's not what he said. He identified a core problem that the kindle, and later Apple, were trying to solve. That's not a lie-- people don't read anymore, compared to how much they used to read in the past.

People lying about Steve Jobs-- as Isaacson does-- does not change the facts about what Steve Jobs said and did.

I know that's the strategy. For decades haters have been lying about the PARC visit, and claiming that Apple "Stole" from PARC. They simply ignore the fact that Apple got a license agreement from Xerox, paid Xerox in pre-IPO Apple shares, and that the whole thing was on the up and up. They feel that if they just repeat this lie, over and over, and in every context, even when places where it isn't relevant, they win every argument. In fact, it has gotten to the point where some apple haters really are completely ignorant-- they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact) enough time that they think they can repeat it and not be held accountable. Here on Hacker News, one actually said to me "Its widely accepted that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, why do you even bother disputing this fact?" .... when it is not a fact at all.

Now these same people are spreading the lie that Google is Open while Apple is closed. Truth: Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open source, and both Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer where their proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's the Google Apps. The Lie: Touch screens have existed for years before the iPhone: The truth: Multi-touch is a new, non-obvious, and very innovative invention.

You can't change reality be repeating a bunch of lies over and over and over and over and over.... but you can make a lot of uninformed people believe it. And that's the goal.

Unfortunately, Isaacson's book perpetrates many of these lies, despite having access to the sources of truth.

I don't think Isaacson is an Apple hater... I just think that he felt there was more profits for himself by feeding the myth of Steve Jobs, rather than biographying the real Steve Jobs.

Edit: Whoops. Bill Gates was "claiming", not "flaming"!

Isaacson had a chance to uncover what made Steve Jobs tick. To understand how Jobs made the company that made the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and put giant footprints on the PC, music, filmmaking, and telecom industries. Instead we got armchair psychology and a rehash of "he's demanding to the point of being unbearable but he usually makes good calls." Why could Steve Jobs create Apple and not anybody else? He's not the only visionary in Silicon Valley and certainly not the only asshole. So why, with unprecedented access to Jobs and everyone he's worked with, could Isaacson not tell us anything new?

Maybe if you think Jobs wasn't anything special, just a fortunate narcissist, you'd be satisfied with the book. Obviously he'd be nothing without people, like Woz, Hertzfield, Tribble, Tevanian, Ive, Catmull, Lasseter, and many others who did incredible work that he could never do himself. But even that perspective leaves the question of why so many geniuses did their best work when they worked with Jobs.

Isaacson doesn't even address how Jobs learned how to run companies. I'd argue that the pivotal moment for this occurs during the NeXT days, covered by Isaacson only superficially. But NeXT is clearly the turning point of Jobs' career. Everything he did up till and including NeXT ended in flames. But after, it's success after success. How then did he finally manage to not alienate everybody and go down in a blaze of glory? How did he hang onto his team from NeXT use them to remake Apple? Not to mention Isaacson failed to understand that how NeXT's system became the foundation of everything important Apple has done since (OS X and iOS are both direct descendants of NeXT's OS).

Nor do we learn about how he worked with any of his trusted lieutenants besides Ive, like Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Phil Schiller, or Scott Forstall. We don't even get a sense of why they stuck by him or bought into his vision. We get some insight into the Woz relationship, but still not why they succeeded when others failed.

Isaacson had the chance to tell the story of a remarkable life in business, but he demurred. Judged against the life it chronicles, Isaacson's book is a failure.

Maybe. I don't really know, I'm just hypothesizing.

Likewise, he barely touches on Jobs personal beliefs and his connection to Zen Buddhism. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask Jobs more about that? We only get a few quotes, the most substantial is lifted from his graduation speech.

I suspect the many typos and small errors were caused by the book being rushed, however.

In a nuthsell, Isaacson doesn't understand computing, or the computing industry, and so he let a lot of errors in (OS X contains no NEXT code) and spends a lot of time focussing on things that don't matter.

It's more important because he was the one and only guy that was given that much access and he blew it. He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

My main stylistic gripe, however (which Gruber mentioned on The Talk Show), was that you couldn't tell if Jobs' quotes from the interviews or from the time the events were taking place.

The book was originally scheduled to come out early next year, I believe, and was moved up to late October around the time Steve resigned. The publishers wanted the bio to coincide (read: cash-in on) with Steve's death and we got a rushed product.

Personally I was really looking forward to it, when I started reading the book I kept making allowances, thinking that maybe I was expecting too much. I don't read many biographies, so perhaps this is how it's done, after all, the Author wrote an apparently well regarded biography on Einstein.

But Siracusa nails it, when he says most people don't understand theoretical physics, so a biographer can get away with not understanding the stuff that Einstein is famous for (paraphrase). The same is not true for tech, it's forgivable to not know this stuff, but it is unforgivable that seemingly he didn't even try, as evidenced by his obvious lack of insight into the motivations of the man he was writing about.

I would love to see someone like Gruber or Siracusa write the definitive biography of Steve Jobs, because the Isaacson biography isn't that book.

The book also just not outstandingly written. The first half is also stuff that's pretty much known from other books or sources, so if you've read a lot about Apple or Steve Jobs, there's nothing really new.

Hypercritical 42 - http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 The Talk Show - http://5by5.tv/talkshow/66

Careful when you listen... the entire network of podcasts is highly addictive (if you're into podcasts).

It's slow moving, but once Siracusa gets rolling, you can taste his frustration with the crappy job that Isaacson did with it.

edit: typo.

  > TLDL; Jobs biography not fawning enough
  > for Apple fanboys.

Clear, penetrating, insightful criticism, indeed.

Perhaps it is not good form to comment on a podcast you didn't listen to...?

edit: As a response I take TLD[R|L] to mean "it was too long so I didn't bother", however I have also seen it (more recently) as a summary to one's own long text. I took the above comment to mean the former.

The main complaints were:

1) Isaacson doesn't know anything about the tech industry.

2) Despite knowing he doesn't know anything about the industry he's writing about, he didn't even try to learn anything about it, and it shows.

3) Because of 1) and 2), Isaacson solely focuses on everyday stuff that any lay-person can relate to; this is all fine and well and the anecdotes add color to any biography, but when it is the sole focus of the biography of a man who is interesting precisely because of what he did in and to the tech industry, it entirely misses much of the point of what people find interesting about his life.

4) As the only guy who ever had direct access to Jobs, he should have used that privilege to dig into more of the reasoning of why Jobs did many of the things he did in the industry, not to write some People-magazine style fluffy personal interest story.

5) On a nitpickier level, what little technical detail it contains is often flat-out wrong, like the claim that OS X didn't use or contain any of the software developed at NeXT.

A clear cut demonstration that it’s sufficient to write Gruber on anything and some people will completely irrationally hate it, hate it, hate it.