A complete picture of Jobs

This is the definitive book to read on Steve Jobs, the IT czar who did the most to change the way we use technology in our lives. This is no adulatory biography or egotistical autobiography. The book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, brings out the whole picture of Jobs, his contradictions, his failures and his successes in his journey through life as he transforms from an upstart ideas man to the technocrat who rebuilt Apple into the world’s most valuable company.

“How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash and wrongheaded businessman that he was exiled from the company he founded become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products that transformed the company into the most valuable and admired enterprise on earth and that changed the everyday lives of billions of people from all different socioeconomic strata and cultures?”

It is in trying to answer that complex rhetorical question that the book succeeds, in weaving a fascinating tale. It is the story of one man who did the most to change the Universe in the 21st century, which Bill Gates — who did so much to deliver tech to millions of users as personal computers began to obey Moore’s Law in the old millennium — himself acknowledges. Jobs, who wanted the computer to be “a bicycle for the mind”, put in our hands at least three great devices of modern living — the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

The pricing of all three is such it makes us wonder whether these are lifestyle products or are their utility values so superior that we must pay a hefty premium for them. The answers lie in the aesthetics and in the personalities behind the design. If the iPod changed the way the world listens to its music, the iPhone added dimensions to the cellular phone, making it a wholesome microcomputer in billions of hands; and the iPad became the most loved notebook / tablet, opening up millions of possibilities in putting computers to use.

Quite early in the book, the theory that Jobs had a Freudian excuse for his sometimes irascible behaviour because his ‘birth parents’ abandoned him is shot down.

He is just a spoilt brat, plain and simple, the authors say and go on to prove their point, mainly through Schendler, the highly regarded chronicler of the tech revolution, who interacted the most with Jobs over the years right down to the countdown to Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer.

Jobs’ controversial exit from Apple, his egregious business blunders at NeXT, his buying Pixar on a whim and his acumen that led to a return to Apple are all splendidly captured in anecdotal fashion, bringing out the many facets of Jobs’ character along the way. As an aside, Jobs’ hilarious car journey to deliver the keynote speech on Stanford graduation day is an enjoyable aspect. His speech is an absolute classic that every student must read if s/he wants to make something of her/his life.

The fascinating friendships among the czars are splendidly brought out in Jobs’ life story. The men who sowed the wind to reap the whirlwind in the tech revolution had so much respect for each other and constantly interacted on industry issues. Even more than the turnaround that Jobs did of his life, career and company, his personal life in which he fathered a girl outside marriage and then wedded Laurene Powell, bringing to him long years of compassion as he grew older, make a fine story too.

And then, of course, there was a kind of starting point into his spiritual life in India, and his connections with the Garden of Buddha lays bare the story of a complex man whose positively changing personality helped him conquer the tech world before the inevitability of cancer took him away from our midst. It is an inspirational tale everyone should read if only to disabuse themselves of the notion that it is impossible to cope with failures in life.