Steve Jobs abrasive style drove people away, says biographer

Posted on 24 October 2011 - 11:12am

Last updated on 24 October 2011 - 06:45pm

A customers holds a copy of the book Steve Jobs – a biography about the late co-founder of Apple – at a book store in Taipei on Oct 24, 2011. AFP

APPLE Inc co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionised multiple industries with his cutting-edge products but he was not the world's best manager, biographer Walter Isaacson said.

Jobs changed the course of personal computing during two stints at Apple and then brought a revolution to the mobile market but the inspiring genius is known for his hard edges that have often times alienated colleagues and early investors with his my-way-or-the-highway dictums.

"He's not warm and fuzzy," Isaacson said in an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS on Sunday. "He was not the world's greatest manager. In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."

"He could be very, very mean to people at times," he added.

Jobs loved to argue but not everyone around him shared that passion, which drove some of his top people away. While his style had yielded breakthrough products, it didn't make for "great management style," Isaacson said.

In one of the more than 40 interviews that Jobs gave the biographer, the technology icon said he felt totally comfortable being brutally honest.

"That's the ante for being in the room. So we're brutally honest with each other and all of them can tell me they think I'm full of s**t, and I can tell anyone I think they're full of s**t," Jobs said. "And we've had some rip-roaring arguments where we're yelling at each other."

Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs, which hits bookstores on Monday, reveals that Jobs refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months, was bullied in school, tried various quirky diets as a teenager, and exhibited early strange behaviour such as staring at others without blinking.

The book is expected to paint an unprecedented, no-holds-barred portrait of a man who famously guarded his privacy fiercely but whose death ignited a global outpouring of grief and tribute.

Isaacson said in the interview that the reality distortion theory that had always been associated with Jobs stemmed from the Apple co-founder's belief that he was special and that the rules didn't apply to him.

'Magical thinking'

"He could drive himself by magical thinking," Isaacson said. "By believing something that the rest of us couldn't possibly believe, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't."

Jobs, who has revolutionized the world of personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet, digital publishing and retail stores, would have liked to conquer television as well, Isaacson said.

"He had a few other visions. He would love to make an easy-to-use television set," said Isaacson, speaking of Job's last two-and-a-half years of life. "But he started focusing on his family again as well. And it was a painful brutal struggle. And he would talk, often to me about the pain."

Jobs, in his final meeting with Isaacson in mid-August, still held out hope that there might be one new drug that could save him. He also wanted to believe in God and an afterlife.

"Ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about (God) more. And I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe it's because I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear," Isaacson quoted Jobs as saying.

"Then he paused for a second and he said 'yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone," Isaacson said of Jobs. "He paused again, and he said: And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices." – Reuters

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

On facing death and dying

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Why the iPad will take over the world

By Edmund Conway Retail and consumer Last updated: November 12th, 2010

92 Comments Comment on this article

The Apple iPad is the ultimate browsing machine (Photo: REUTERS)

Apple is on the verge of releasing the latest iteration in its operating system for the iPhone and iPad. Sometime in the coming months, it is also likely to bring out a newly beefed up version of the iPad. These may not seem like particularly momentous moments to anyone but the more die-hard Apple evangelists, but for me they have underlined the fact that this little tablet is heading for domination of the mobile computing industry.

Before you dismiss this as hype, I should emphasise that this conclusion has come only after some months of reflection, consideration and intense usage of an iPad, and comparison with its competitors. I was one of those fools who bought an iPad right at the beginning, when they were just out in the US and were yet to touch down in Britain. I picked it up in Washington, where I was attending the IMF's summit, more out of hope and curiosity than an expectation that it would change my life. And the truth is I was initially rather disappointed.

I bought it wondering whether it would be the tool that meant I could throw away my laptop. And so I tried, over the following days, to use it as a journalistic tool – I tried to write articles on it (using the bluetooth keyboard – typing on the screen isn't bad, but it isn't brilliant), take notes with it, use it to read the IMF reports and send emails back home. It was an unmitigated disaster. I lost some of my most important notes because one of the applications kept crashing (this is not good news when you're a journalist – and fellow hacks are, understandably, reluctant to share notes at the best of times); cutting and pasting text (quite important when you routinely have to edit and re-edit your articles) was fiddly; there wasn't a word count in Pages, the main word processing application; you couldn't switch between different applications (multi-tasking); you couldn't search with PDF files (disastrous if you are trying to navigate a 300 page report on banking regulation), etc etc.

I never wrote this at the time (far too much going on with elections, expenses and whatnot), but my abiding feeling was that I had bought the iPad hoping to dispel all those people who said they couldn't see the point of it – and I had come out agreeing with them. What was the point of this device? Not good enough to double as a laptop, not small enough to fit in your pocket, not easy-on-the-eye to read for long periods in the same way as a Kindle. Jack of all trades and master of none – or so I thought.

What I hadn't realised was that this is pretty much the point. The iPad is a disruptive innovation. Disruption, for those of you who, like me until recently, aren't familiar with business theory, is one of the ways companies upend their bigger and older competitors in business these days. The gist is as follows: when a business comes along with an innovative product that challenges an existing one, it is often cheaper, of lower quality and is often deemed "not good enough" by potential customers.

Think of mp3s – their sound quality is far inferior to CDs, but customers realised pretty soon that they were both cheaper, more convenient and of a just about satisfactory quality. When personal computers first arrived, those who built powerful mainframe room-sized computers dismissed them as incapable – and indeed they were often so slow that they couldn't keep up with the people typing into them. But the point behind disruption is that in due course the quality of the product gets to a standard that is acceptable to consumers (and if not better than the incumbent product, it is at least cheaper). Right now, flash memory is disrupting hard disks. And so on.

The graph below tells the story: sustaining technologies, such as hard disks, or dedicated digital cameras, improve over time, but eventually reach a standard beyond what most consumers, and perhaps even high end users are after. Into the market comes the disrupting technology, for instance flash memory or cameraphones, whose qualities (be they size or picture quality) are initially well below the standards of the sustaining technology but are compensated by their cheaper price or added convenience. Sometimes a whole new range of customers enters the market at this lower price/quality point. Eventually the quality of the disrupting product can surpass the old sustaining one.

The iPad is disruptive to notebook computers: in its first iterations it doesn't meet the exacting standards that many computer users have, so it is not an obvious replacement. It wasn't good enough for me as a journalist; or indeed for anyone who wants to use their laptop for photo manipulation, DJing, game playing and so on. But it is good enough for many others.

It is good enough for students, for instance. Since returning to college, I have found myself using the iPad more and more. It is smaller than the laptop, I can use it to read as well as take notes and write. It still isn't brilliant for article editing, but it more or less does the job (and given I don't have to pump out articles at the rate I did as a professional journalist, so be it). I produced this blog (and indeed have written almost all of my recent blogs, papers, essays and all the stuff one needs to produce at college) on it. A couple of weeks ago my laptop spontaneously combusted. It didn't matter, because by then I hadn't been using it for some months anyway.

The imminent update to the iOS takes the iPad one step forward. In comes multitasking, in comes midi support and a host of other upgrades that, gradually, remove more demanding customers' resistance to shifting down the iPad. Then along will come the next iteration, with higher resolution and more power, making it less attractive, in comparison, to own a laptop, and so on and so on.

It isn't just the iPad that's doing the disruption; it looks increasingly as if Apple's existing operating system, Mac OS, will soon be disrupted by its mobile OS, which has been inserted as a kind of trojan horse into the next update of Mac OS.

This is classic disruption, as laid out by Clay Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma. The interesting thing in this case is that usually the company that does the disrupting is quite independent from the one that gets disrupted. In this case, Apple is disrupting itself, which is quite an achievement for a giant company. The only question is whether they can keep it up.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/edmundconway/100008603/why-the-ipad-will-take-over-the-world/

Steve Jobs: key quotes

Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and former CEO, dies at the age of 56

Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder and former CEO, has died at the age of 56
after a long and highly public battle with cancer. "Apple has lost a visionary and
creative genius and the world has lost an amazing human being," Apple said.
"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations
that enrich and improve all of our lives."

Here are some key quotes from Steve Jobs, the legendary 

co-founder and former chief executive of Apple Inc, 

who has died aged 56 after a long battle with cancer.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds a new iPod shuffle MP3 player at the 2005 Macworld Expo January 11, 2005 Photo: Getty Images

8:00AM BST 06 Oct 2011

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.''

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.''

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
Commencement speech at Stanford University, 2005

"Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.''

"And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.''
Interview with Business Week, 2004

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"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.''

"My position coming back to Apple was that our industry was in a coma. It reminded me of Detroit in the '70s, when American cars were boats on wheels.''
Interview with Fortune Magazine, 2000

"These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.''
Interview with Wired, 1996

"I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a 5-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.''
Interview with Playboy, 1985

"You think I'm an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.''
Answering a New York Times reporter who asked about his health, 2008

"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life."
Interview with Fortune, 2008

"Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works."
Interview with The New York Times, 2003

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me."
Interview with The Wall Street Journal, 1993

"You can't just ask the cutomers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
Interview with INC magazine, 1989

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/8810049/Steve-Jobs-key-quotes.html