I encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. It articulates why many Apple fans are not happy with it.
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
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Apple Praises 'Becoming Steve Jobs' as 'Better Than Anything Else We've Seen'
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I encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. It articulates why many Apple fans are not happy with it.
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42
You asked my "why not be skeptical of the other stories." I gave you a basis of why I'm less skeptical of those books. I never suggested you were arging against the negative info, I'm just compiling all the items that various books INCLUDING the Jobs sanctioned Isaacson bio. Jobs is portrayed in those books as Jobs. None of it takes away the genius and society changer he was.
So, yes, with all the previous books and Jobs own admission he could have been a better human being, father, husband, boss, son, I think a healthy dose of skepticism is invited by this book that seems to contradict Jobs himself.
Isaaccson book didn't protray Steve to be a god, in fact showed how terrible of a person he was to so many for many years
Steve jobs himself gave the thumbs up to the book, why the hell would I care about what Apple execs think is a god book because something comes out that kisses his ass and makes them look good?
This news makes this book an easy pass for me, or maybe I'll buy it to keep the fireplace going
Steve jobs himself gave the thumbs up to the book, why the hell would I care about what Apple execs think is a god book because something comes out that kisses his ass and makes them look good?
This news makes this book an easy pass for me, or maybe I'll buy it to keep the fireplace going
Where did you find the sample? I pre-ordered a while ago, but no sample has shown up in my library so far. Or am I looking in the wrong place?
Why would anyone need to defend Jobs? Who could? He was clear one of the most influential important people of the 20th century. His place among Edison, Ford, Einstein, etc. is sealed. I've been enamored with Apple since the Apple II and really the Mac and was elated when he returned to save the company.
Honestly, I didn't see the Isaacson book as a hit piece or love letter. It was about as honest a book as one should expect, and from an author who has made a career of writing balanced novels of historically great people.
MY original point is that he was still a person with flaws just like any of us; like any other person of great societal accomplishments. I accept that and don't really care for a revisionist history coming around to sanitize his wrong doings.
Spot. On. I knew somebody would say this on the first page. I couldn't help but think something similar when I was reading this article. Did Cue and Cook not like Steve Jobs because it painted the more grotesque and accurate portrait of him? Or because it "got some things wrong"...
Steve was like a second father to many of his like-aged colleagues, or may have even been a first father to some. Imagine if a book came out about your mom or dad that essentially said, "This person was a complete ass hole to everyone around them," and then imagine one that says, "Oh look at this angel!" Gee, I wonder which one you would praise more?
I think it's impossible to sum up everything a person is in one book; everyone, and i really do mean everyone in your life will have a different view of you, all are partly right and all are wholly wrong because you ARE a different person to everyone you speak to i think. You reveal different things to different people, and different people bring out different aspects of you, sometimes that surprise even you. I think to get even close to a glimpse of what really drove a person and get a sense of the different aspects of their personality you have to read a lot more than one book about them. For that reason, i'm looking forward to reading this one
This kind of happened to me with my Grandmother. She passed away when I was 8 or 9. I had nothing but these vivid, glowing amazing memories of this fantastic woman that despite ailing health and a severely crippling cancer, she still did everything and anything to please us (her grandkids).
only 30 someodd years later, through various retellings, stories and accounts from her life (chronicled in some writing by interviews with others around her) did I learn that she really wasn't all that pleasant a woman. She was career driven. intense, bossy, pushy and made a lot of peoples lives miserable. She despised my father for marrying her daughter, and generally was not all around this pleasant woman that I remember.
do I hate that I have learned this? not at all. I'm finally happy to know the real her. To see that despite these faults, the love and care she gave us meant that much more in spite of everything.
Nobody does themselves justice by pretending something that isn't true, just for rosy happy funsies.
Audio Book Version?
Does anybody know if there will be an audio version of this new Steve Jobs book? I love to use those while traveling to work. Thanks
Does anybody know if there will be an audio version of this new Steve Jobs book? I love to use those while traveling to work. Thanks
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Tim Cook, Eddie Cue, and Jony Ive have no incentive whatsoever to be completely frank and objective in their assessments of Jobs. Their number one priority is to protect the Apple company and brand, and they know "our revered founder could be kind of an asswipe" doesn't mesh with their agenda.
Oddly I don't think Steve Jobs would have approved of a book that only spoke of him in the most glowing terms. I have a feeling he was one of those people that wore his ******* badge proudly and wasn't embarrassed or ashamed to say "Yeah, I walked into the boardroom and fired everyone in the meeting on the spot."
Oddly I don't think Steve Jobs would have approved of a book that only spoke of him in the most glowing terms. I have a feeling he was one of those people that wore his ******* badge proudly and wasn't embarrassed or ashamed to say "Yeah, I walked into the boardroom and fired everyone in the meeting on the spot."
Steven Levy wrote an interesting article titled "The War Over Who
Steve Jobs Was" that talks about the new book vs. Isaacsons.
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-war-over-who-steve-jobs-was-92bda2cd1e1e
Steve Jobs Was" that talks about the new book vs. Isaacsons.
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-war-over-who-steve-jobs-was-92bda2cd1e1e
Or maybe they did not see this major asswipe Jobs regularly (or at all) in his latter years. Saying Jobs approved the Isaacson book doesn't mean his view of himself was more accurate, or less negative, than the view of his closest latter day collaborators; their view counts too. I think he was pretty hard on himself, and maybe introspective at the end.
The Jobs of his previous run at the top of Apples, at Next and Pixar is somewhat different than the latter one at Apple. In many ways, is is like he was a different person. This would of course color the view of his closest collaborators.
My copy just got dropped off at my doorstep about half an hour ago. (Yes, a day before official release... gotta love Amazon Prime!)
Looking forward to getting started on reading it, but I probably won't get too far in before the weekend.
Looking forward to getting started on reading it, but I probably won't get too far in before the weekend.
I think one thing this book and the promotion for it shows is just how much those closest to Steve miss him to this day.
And Jony said this in the New Yorker profile:
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Um, maybe he wasn't an "asswipe" to them or around them? Perhaps they know a side of Steve that the general public doesn't know and they want that to come out?
And Jony said this in the New Yorker profile:
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Um, maybe he wasn't an "asswipe" to them or around them? Perhaps they know a side of Steve that the general public doesn't know and they want that to come out?
It was poorly written, repetitive, and left out huge chunks of Job's life and progress. It seems like it was rushed by Isaacson and/or the publisher in order to get out in time for Jobs death and the hype that followed. I came away feeling that Isaacson was unfamiliar with Jobs and Apple's history and the overall personal computers development other than what he gathered through his research for the book.
Thanks-- this is a much less cynical, and probably more accurate view than I was starting to formulate on my own.
I think this puts things in the right perspective. Enough time has passed that everyone forgives the flaws and cherishes the positives. Combine that with the fact that everyone prefers to hear their own view recited back, rather than a composite view and it would explain why his inner circle is happiest reading a book based on interviews with the inner circle.
This is probably more about confirmation bias than rewriting history.
I think they're willing to accept them because they were well known from so many sources-- including interviews with Jobs himself.
It's my understanding that Job's never read Isaacson's book. He authorized it, but I believe he promised Isaacson that he wouldn't read it for years after it was published. I don't know if that changed as his health failed.
I'm waiting to start it tomorrow
I did like the Isaacson book, though at times, because of the nature of it, appearing weeks after Jobs's death, it seemed a little rushed and repetitive. I thought the early life and so on, which Jobs gave him complete access to, was revelatory. The original Mac, the loss of Apple, to his return, was fine. No doubt he was the enfant terrible as a young man, gifted but just a little crazy, self-obsessed and arrogant.
But after Jobs came back, I think he changed and continued changing. The harsh dogmatism started getting more nuanced. He took the Mac to Intel! The young Steve would have screamed at the old Steve! He thanked a big head of Bill Gates on the stage! He dropped the old connections and adopted USB! When the iPod hit, he resisted and then gave in to iTunes for Windows. Yes, he resisted flash on the iPhone, but wasn't he right? Adobe wrote it and rewrote it, but it's a dog on mobile.
The payoff is, Apple's veeps and others who worked with him thought the portrait of him was not the man they knew in his last years. Since they didn't talk to him, but only Steve and the people he dug up outside the company talked to him. I think what we get is probably a better, truer picture of the man, and the executive, he became in the last 13 years of his life. It's important to understand this, because after all, it's the greatest comeback story in American business, and he did it by being a wiser Steve Jobs than he had been in 1986. That's the part I don't think Isaacson could comment on so well, because he didn't have the time and the cooperation from the Apple inner circle, and he really didn't understand what happened. For Isaacson, you can tell at the end, he thought a lot about Apple was overblown, and the real, reliable business perspective was Bill Gates, whose perspective the closing chapters of his book are full of. And that's no way to understand Apple 1997-2011.
I did like the Isaacson book, though at times, because of the nature of it, appearing weeks after Jobs's death, it seemed a little rushed and repetitive. I thought the early life and so on, which Jobs gave him complete access to, was revelatory. The original Mac, the loss of Apple, to his return, was fine. No doubt he was the enfant terrible as a young man, gifted but just a little crazy, self-obsessed and arrogant.
But after Jobs came back, I think he changed and continued changing. The harsh dogmatism started getting more nuanced. He took the Mac to Intel! The young Steve would have screamed at the old Steve! He thanked a big head of Bill Gates on the stage! He dropped the old connections and adopted USB! When the iPod hit, he resisted and then gave in to iTunes for Windows. Yes, he resisted flash on the iPhone, but wasn't he right? Adobe wrote it and rewrote it, but it's a dog on mobile.
The payoff is, Apple's veeps and others who worked with him thought the portrait of him was not the man they knew in his last years. Since they didn't talk to him, but only Steve and the people he dug up outside the company talked to him. I think what we get is probably a better, truer picture of the man, and the executive, he became in the last 13 years of his life. It's important to understand this, because after all, it's the greatest comeback story in American business, and he did it by being a wiser Steve Jobs than he had been in 1986. That's the part I don't think Isaacson could comment on so well, because he didn't have the time and the cooperation from the Apple inner circle, and he really didn't understand what happened. For Isaacson, you can tell at the end, he thought a lot about Apple was overblown, and the real, reliable business perspective was Bill Gates, whose perspective the closing chapters of his book are full of. And that's no way to understand Apple 1997-2011.
now i'm glad i will never become a "public figure" ...... u have no privacy.. The former Walter Isaacson was ok.
even after your dead.... you can't make the media shut it...
Of course any book that devolves the entrails of someones history more is going to be "better" than any other right ?
it can't be worse.....
However, i doubt this will be over.... We will now see another one next year, now "even more a better" than the previous one.
This time, we go inside Steve's Job's house
"Steve wakes up at 6:00am" at "6:05 he pours his cornflakes." Dear god..
even after your dead.... you can't make the media shut it...
Of course any book that devolves the entrails of someones history more is going to be "better" than any other right ?
it can't be worse.....
However, i doubt this will be over.... We will now see another one next year, now "even more a better" than the previous one.
This time, we go inside Steve's Job's house
"Steve wakes up at 6:00am" at "6:05 he pours his cornflakes." Dear god..
Holy crap...ANOTHER biography?? Wasn't one just released last week? Man. A whole cottage industry around writing Steve Jobs books...
This is already available on iBooks—at least in Australia anyway. I just finished the Prologue, which is wonderfully written. It's framed by the author's first meeting with Jobs way back in 1986, but touches briefly on stories from his whole life. Brent Schlender explains his motivation for writing the book, which so far comes across as sincere, and not at all like 'propaganda' as some have assumed, based only on the positive feedback from Apple executives.
Okay, on to Chapter 1…!
Okay, on to Chapter 1…!