Steve Jobs: The genius, the ogre

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster. 630 pp. $35

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Reviewed by Michael D. Schaffer

Steve Jobs was all about things: elegantly designed things, wondrously innovative things, meticulously made things.

Heck, let's steal his own quote: Steve Jobs was all about "insanely great" things.

And about people?

Not so much. Yelling and humiliation were mainstays of his management style; kindness was rare, meanness was not. Yet, along with the rage went a charisma that mesmerized those who worked with him and for him, drawing them into his dreams, with amazing results.

Both sides of Jobs - the digital wizard and the temperamental tyrant - are on full and detailed display in Walter Isaacson's splendid biography, written at Jobs' invitation and with his full cooperation, but, uncharacteristically, without his control.

Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, is an accomplished biographer who has written the life stories of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger. And in 2007, after the Einstein biography appeared, Jobs sought him out, and suggested that Isaacson write about him.

What hooked Isaacson was the realization that Jobs' stunning innovations brought art and technology together, something that Isaacson believes "will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

In his introduction, Isaacson writes that Jobs declared nothing off-limits and interfered only once, asking that he be allowed to have some say in the design of the book jacket - not a frivolous request, given Jobs' obsession with the power of design. In black and white, Jobs stares out from the cover, his eyes boring into the reader, giving a hint of what it must have felt like to be an Apple engineer facing the great man's famous and feared unblinking gaze.

Isaacson, who had more than 40 interviews with Jobs over about two years, does not minimize or apologize for Jobs' faults. "He was not a model boss or human being," Isaacson writes. "Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair." Isaacson underscores that with one example after another of Jobs' callous disregard for others, and his conviction that rules were for other people.

While kindness or even mere civility may often have eluded him, Jobs brought to market innovative devices that changed the daily life of millions, from Apple II to Macintosh to iPod to iPhone to iPad, the products of a restless, perfectionist creativity that his death on Oct. 5 brought to an end.

Isaacson writes that Jobs' "passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine."

In a way, Jobs was as tyrannical with consumers as with Apple employees. He scorned marketing research in the belief that people wouldn't know what they wanted until he gave it to them. The customer was not always right.

So intent was Jobs on control that he insisted the innards of the Macintosh not be accessible to the consumer. "You wouldn't even be able to open the case and get to the motherboard," Isaacson writes. "For a hobbyist or hacker, that was uncool. But for Jobs, the Macintosh was for the masses. He wanted to give them a controlled experience."

There's a lot of ground to cover in recounting Jobs' record of innovation, and Isaacson moves through it at just the right pace and with just the right level of detail as he lets us in on why rounded corners are important and how the iPod got its wheel. The story could very easily have bogged down, but Isaacson is too much a master of his craft to let that happen.

While Isaacson's thoroughness is admirable, it's impossible when recounting a life as busy as Jobs' to hit everything. Some things inevitably get short shrift, including what role Jobs may have played in Apple's decision to manufacture its products in China.

Isaacson notes that when Jobs was told anodized aluminum would not be available in sufficient quantities for production of the PowerBook G4, "he had a factory built in China to handle it." Toward the end of the book, in recounting a dinner meeting that Jobs and other business executives had with President Obama, Isaacson casually drops the information that "Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China." The reason, Jobs told the president, was that he couldn't find the 30,000 engineers in the United States that he needed to support them. "If you could educate these engineers, we could move more manufacturing plants here," he told Obama.

While Jobs, with all his colorful flaws, is an arresting protagonist, other compelling characters move through the pages of the book.

Especially engaging is Isaacson's treatment of Jobs' Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, whose seemingly constant affability was 180 degrees from Jobs' "nasty edge." Wozniak's design of the Apple II circuit board and operating software, a piece of brilliant engineering, "was one of the era's great feats of solo invention," Isaacson writes. Left on his own, Wozniak would happily have given the Apple II away, but Jobs wasn't about to let that happen.

Also interesting is Isaacson's account of Jobs' wary relationship with the other master of the digital universe, Bill Gates. Where Jobs was intuitive, Gates was analytical. Jobs thought Gates had no style; Gates thought Jobs didn't know much about technology. And each thought he was smarter than the other.

In the end, though, it's Jobs' brilliant but flawed personality that fascinates as much as all the iThis and iThat: his "binary view" of the world that saw everything as the best ever or the worst ever, the determination to bend reality to his will that led him to spurn convention - like initially ignoring conventional medical treatment after his cancer diagnosis. "You almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him," one executive recalled.

Even filtered through the printed page, the charisma exercises its seductive tug.

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