Steve Jobs Biography Review

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man" George Bernard Shaw wrote in "Maxims for Revolutionaries", a part of the preface to his play Man and Superman. Person who has read about Steve Jobs, during the last 40 years is likely to need Walter Isaacson has over 600 pages to convince them that Steve Jobs was a very unreasonable. 

Parts of this folly are legendary. The insistence on the perfection of the design details inside the tiny boxes of Apple computer that no one would ever see. The staging that turned the launch of Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad cultural references. The intransigence that got him ousted from his own company and, a decade later, saw him return to make a success of it (and Pixar). The hippie phase in which he took a trip to India and experimented with LSD. The refusal to grant early supporter of Apple shares. Much of this material has already been documented, particularly in the books of Steven Levy.
Other parts are less well known. Jobs would have lived longer if he had not resisted the surgery for several months. Instead, he tried to beat his cancer with a range of non-medical treatments, including variations on fad diets he experimented for much of his life. It could, Isaacson writes, eat only salad of carrots, for example, for weeks at a time, or just fast. These eating disorders (Isaacson characterization) finally made it harder for him to ingest the protein he needs while he is sick. But being unreasonable helped, too: for the last years of his life he worked with the physical pain caused by her cancer recurring. 

This biography was the idea of ​​Jobs. He proposed, Isaacson discovered later, shortly before his first cancer surgery. Both jobs Isaacson and his wife promised a free hand - his wife Isaacson encouraged to report on the subject, warts and all. Jobs only intervention other than the provision of more than 40 interviews over two years has been to insist on replacing the first publisher to test a cover design. Isaacson has also interviewed dozens of employees jobs and industry figures, and cites the many books written about Apple over the years, and hundreds of articles and speeches.
It is difficult to know which parts of the job could have objected to the book: would he have found some tiny imperfection in the accounts of the battles conference room, creating the Mac, iPhone or iPad? Or would it have been chagrined to read, once again, on his thorny relationship with his eldest daughter Lisa, whose existence has been slow to accept? It would be fair to say that people grow and learn better - he was 23 when she was born. Yet in 2010, youngest daughter of Jobs, then barely 16 years old, tells Isaacson's OK that his father does not know (but not, as Isaacson's just an ordinary, his son): "Sometimes I wish I had more attention, but I know the work he does is very important and I think it's really cool, so I'm fine. I do not really need more attention. " 
Any journalist who has dealt with Apple over the years knows that it can be difficult to convince the company to part with information. Disease Jobs is a particularly relevant example in this regard: he resisted public disclosure of his health problems, despite his responsibilities as CEO of a public company. When, in March 2008, Fortune magazine under a piece entitled "The Trouble with Steve Jobs to discuss these issues, writes Isaacson," editor Jobs called Fortune, Andy Serwer, in Cupertino for him under pressure to spike. He leaned Serwer is face and asked, 'So you've discovered that I am an asshole. Why is that news? "
When someone dies, for the living, they can suddenly snap into focus as a full four-dimensional being. In the first application in 2004, Isaacson, refused to write the biography of employment until the end of his career, perhaps a couple of decades. As it happens, the book ends with the retirement of Jobs from Apple in August and some thoughts about the switch: it is four-dimensional complete.

Who Is Steve Jobs ?

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs was an American businessman and visionary widely recognized. Shortly after Steve Jobs, got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife in a nineteen thirty, Cotswolds style home in Old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to provide places where he lived. His previous home had only a mattress, table and chairs. Everything must be perfect, and it took time to understand what has been perfect. This time he had a wife and family in tow, but it makes little difference. "We talked about furniture, in theory, for eight years," his wife, Laurene Powell says Walter Isaacson, in "Steve Jobs", Isaacson biography of the founder of exciting new Apple. "We spent a lot of time to ask," What is the purpose of a couch? "

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved the most difficult. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a wash cycle. What should the family? As Jobs said: "We spent some time in our family talking about what the trade-off we want to do. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also on the values ​​of our family. Do we care most about getting our wash done in an hour against half past one? Or do we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasts longer? Do we care about the use of a quart of water? We spent about two weeks to talk about it every night at the dinner table. "

Steve Jobs, Isaacson biography makes clear, was a complex and exhausting. "There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and it is the truth," Powell said Isaacson. "You should not whitewash." Isaacson, to his credit, does not work. He talks to everyone in the career of Jobs, meticulously recording conversations and meetings dating back twenty to thirty years. Jobs we learn, was a tyrant. "He had the uncanny ability to know exactly what your weakness is, what will make you feel small, to make you cringe," a friend says Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant and then denies that the child is his. He parks in the handicapped spaces. He yells to his subordinates. He cries like a little child when he does not get his way. He gets arrested for driving a hundred miles an hour, honking angrily to the officer to take too long to write the ticket, then resumes its journey a hundred miles an hour. He is sitting in a restaurant and sends his food three times. 

He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, 22 hours, the piano needs to be repositioned, strawberries are insufficient, and the flowers are all bad: he wanted calla lilies. (When his tax assistant public relations, at midnight, with the flowers on the right, he said that his suit is "disgusting.") "Machines and robots have been painted and repainted as compulsively revised his color scheme , "writes Mr. Isaacson, the factory employment, after the founding of NeXT in the late eighties." The white walls of the museum, as they had been at the plant in Macintosh, and there was $ 20 000 black leather chairs and a custom staircase. . . . He insisted that the machine on the assembly line 165 feet be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they are constructed so that the process would be better for visitors who watched from the gallery 'observation. "

Isaacson began with humble origins of Silicon Valley Jobs, Apple earlier in the triumph, and the humiliating eviction of the firm he created. He then charts the triumphs even greater at Pixar and a resurgence of Apple, when Jobs returned in the late years, and our natural expectation is that jobs will emerge wiser and gentler his tumultuous journey . It never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he crossed 67 before he found three nurses he loves. "At one point, the lung has tried to put a mask on his face when he was deeply sedated," Isaacson writes:

Jobs is torn and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Although barely able to speak, he ordered them to wear five different options for the mask and he picked a design he liked. . . . He also hated the monitor they put oxygen on her finger. He said he was ugly and too complex.
One of the great puzzles is why the industrial revolution began in England. Why not in France or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had abundant reserves of coal, for example. He had a patent system in place good. He had relatively high labor costs, which has encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, economists and Joel Mokyr Ralf Meisenzahl focus on a different explanation: ". Hackers "the role of Britain's human capital advantage in particular, a group they call They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a much larger population of qualified engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial era and refined their refined and sophisticated, and makes them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retired engineering in Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton production. Yet England's real advantage was that he had Henry Stones, Horwich, adding rolls for metal mule, and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth acceleration and deceleration the spinning wheel, and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked on how to add the power of water to draw the race, and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn on securities purposes and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tools and the tweaker The tweaker. He created the "automatic" mule running: a demanding, high-speed, reliable rethink the original creation of Crompton. These men, economists argue, provided that the "micro inventions needed to make inventions macro highly productive and profitable."

Hope that all Answers your question regarding who Steve Jobs is ^_^