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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like some people were looking for a hagiography. I for one very much liked the biography - the fact that Isaacson made efforts to present all sides of the story is greatly valuable even though it makes the book a bit depressing to read.

I think the other issue is that the book being a bit too factual and multifaceted doesn't go well with the opinionated audience.

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This is not at all what the criticism Gruber linked to is about. At all. Not even a tiny bit.

To be fair, this discussion isn't about that link. It's about Gruber's post, which is almost content-free. When you start a discussion with a link to a blog linking to a blog, you need to be prepared for things to get a little far afield.

And I'll admit: I'm detecting (both in Gruber's post and in the discussion here) an awful lot of simple anger at Isaacson coming out as needless nitpicking (c.f "He mispelled OS X!" above. Seriously?).

I don't think anybody was expecting a hagiography; Jobs has too many failures and flaws for any biographer to write that book. But just because Isaacson captured how Steve Jobs could be both terrible and compelling doesn't mean Isaacson succeeded. He didn't. He missed the point entirely about why people want to read about Jobs. We didn't buy the book to learn about Jobs' strained relations with his children or what he remembers about ex-girlfriends from 30 years ago. We bought it to find out how he managed to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, time and time again, realigning entire industries to his interests.

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.

So you come in with a preconceived notion of what the book should be about, and then complain that it isn't that. Don't judge a book by it's cover! Most people do buy a biography to learn "about [their] strained relations with their children" etc. The business side of his life has already been covered endlessly by so many people- a book about that would uncover nothing new.

It is a biography. Not a special book dedicated to helping create Steve Jobs clones. Biography by definition is an account of someone's life written by someone else. So that means it has to include Jobs' relationships along side other things.

And you are asking for too much in the rest of your comment - give me a break. Has anyone ever succeeded in duplicating someone great by copying what the person originally did? Isn't it all about originality, opportunity, luck and other intangible stuff? If I were to ask why did Einstein "get" theory of relativity and not someone else - what would be the answer to that kind of question? How would you even begin to answer it? It's ridiculous - no offense though.

And I guess you forgot that Jobs emphasized "intuition" over rationalism several times in the book. Are you now going to ask Isaacson missed asking him "how to have intuition" or "how to be at the right place at the right time"?

You aren't going to get those sort of answers - if you did, and if that sort of thing was actually useful, everyone would be Steve Jobs and everyone could be Einstein. Life and achievements are not imitable as much as you would like to think so.

For a biography the book does a decent job - if you are asking for something entirely different from a biography it's hardly the author's fault.

Your strawman argument here against everyone in the world besides you is almost adorable.

False Dichotomy. Isaacson didn't present "all sides", he only presented one side, which was his uninformed and ignorant opinion. Often he would quote Steve saying something and then say "but that's a lie" or "that's the reality distortion field talking", or "even Steve seems to believe the reality distortion field", as if he (Isaacson's) opinion of the truth was sacrosanct and what Steve (The guy who was present for the events) was saying was obviously false because Steve is "well known" to have a "reality distortion field". At best, Isaacson quotes people who are uninformed or being dishonest in "proving" that Jobs is wrong-- most hilarious example was quoting Bill Gates claiming that none of NeXTSTEP made it into OS X. Apparently Isaacson wasn't aware enough hot the issues to realize how absurd that claim is.

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"!

Do we really need to bring up "Apple stole from Xerox" and "Google vs. Apple"? It isn't like we are in need of hearing more about either issue. I like your points about that book, but it get derailed by weird asides that don't really add much.

Edit: And if you really need proof of a single lie, here is a fairly baldfaced one: http://imgur.com/DsBxN

Apple stole from PARC the same way MS stole MS-DOS: even though it was above board, they got such a good deal that it might as well have been theft.

Like cooldeal, I really can't tell if this is a troll or not, so I'm not going to even bother picking apart the dozens of inaccuracies.

FWIW, I too refrained from replying because of the same reason - felt too much like trolling to fall for the trap.

Not sure if I am replying to a troll(plus much of the above is copy/paste or very similar to an earlier comment from you).

>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)

The Apple haters also seem to uploading fake videos of a old Xerox GUI on Youtube! /sarcasm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q&feature=relat...

> 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

Sorry, Google Apps is not an application layer, however you wish it would be.

They had no real GUI in the 70ies, it was a terminal with mouse control. The GUI comes at the end of the 70ies, beginning 80ies and the guys from Apple came over, at that time, to see the concepts and prototyps.

From there, they started their own GUI metaphor.

I like the part in the video, when the guy inserts this big magnetic storage :D

As for Apple, the kernel is open source, but the whole Cocoa layer is closed. As for Android everything must be open, apart from the Google applications. Or not?

>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)

I have always thought Xerox had a GUI at the time and didn't know I was being misled.

Someone help with more info or references on this?

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