Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

Clear, penetrating, insightful criticism, indeed.

1)Awesome design not just has aesthetic value but also a lot of practical business value

2)Focus Focus Focus on a few things to make them as perfect as possible - may be expensive in the short run but generally pays off in the long run

In a nuthsell, Isaacson doesn't understand computing, or the computing industry, and so he let a lot of errors in (OS X contains no NEXT code) and spends a lot of time focussing on things that don't matter.

It's more important because he was the one and only guy that was given that much access and he blew it. He didn't ask hard questions, he didn't perform a lot of research; all the bits in the book that seem extensively well researched were cribbed from other sources (hello folklore.org!) and for everything else he takes people at their face value.

It's slow moving, but once Siracusa gets rolling, you can taste his frustration with the crappy job that Isaacson did with it.

edit: typo.

Isaacson is at his best when he dives into the more human and social aspects of Jobs's life. As soon as things get remotely technical, the book begins to fall a part. He misquoted Bill Gates as saying that the problem with the NeXT computer was that the optical drive had too low latency. Either Gates didn't say this and Isaacson got it backwards because he doesn't know any better, or Gates had a momentary slip of the tongue that Isaacson should have known enough about to correct.

Isaacson asserts that Apple did not use NeXT for the basis of OS X, which is just patently false (Isaacson also refers to OS X as OSX). He claims that Apple evolved the existing Mac OS into something NeXT like. The truth is that Apple took the NeXTStep operating system and added some classic Mac OS APIs and features to it. OS X wasn't a complete break from the past, but it's entire core and its Cocoa API (and objective-C) are pure NeXT.

Because Isaacson doesn't understand this distinction, he completely glosses over the importance of OS X to Apple's revival. Without OS X, Apple would probably be dead today or maybe just making portable music players. Classic Mac OS was not going to cut it and it was falling behind Windows.

Classic Mac OS was significantly worse than NT-based Windows OSes, and would have been completely crushed by XP. OS X, on the other hand, provided a viable alternative to XP and it successors. Apple has gained market share because of OS X and how good of a modern OS it is. The Classic Mac OS was about to sink the entire company.

There are plenty of other examples like this in the book. Isaacson also doesn't ask many followup questions or do in-depth research. The best researched parts of the book are the beginnings chapters which are based on previous books by other authors.

This is a good biography for people not that into technology, but for anyone remotely interested in the technology, it's not that good. I'd still give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, but it could have been so much more. This is the only guy who ever got this kind of access to Steve and the people close to him and he botched it.