Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it

I believe the confusion arises from the use of the term "existing one". That could be construed as referring to NeXT, so it would mean they decided to evolve NeXT by making changes to it over many years, instead of switching to it at once.

If you read "existing one" as Mac OS 9, then that sentence would mean a completely different thing.

I don't think anybody was expecting a hagiography; Jobs has too many failures and flaws for any biographer to write that book. But just because Isaacson captured how Steve Jobs could be both terrible and compelling doesn't mean Isaacson succeeded. He didn't. He missed the point entirely about why people want to read about Jobs. We didn't buy the book to learn about Jobs' strained relations with his children or what he remembers about ex-girlfriends from 30 years ago. We bought it to find out how he managed to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, time and time again, realigning entire industries to his interests.

Isaacson had a chance to uncover what made Steve Jobs tick. To understand how Jobs made the company that made the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and put giant footprints on the PC, music, filmmaking, and telecom industries. Instead we got armchair psychology and a rehash of "he's demanding to the point of being unbearable but he usually makes good calls." Why could Steve Jobs create Apple and not anybody else? He's not the only visionary in Silicon Valley and certainly not the only asshole. So why, with unprecedented access to Jobs and everyone he's worked with, could Isaacson not tell us anything new?

Maybe if you think Jobs wasn't anything special, just a fortunate narcissist, you'd be satisfied with the book. Obviously he'd be nothing without people, like Woz, Hertzfield, Tribble, Tevanian, Ive, Catmull, Lasseter, and many others who did incredible work that he could never do himself. But even that perspective leaves the question of why so many geniuses did their best work when they worked with Jobs.

Isaacson doesn't even address how Jobs learned how to run companies. I'd argue that the pivotal moment for this occurs during the NeXT days, covered by Isaacson only superficially. But NeXT is clearly the turning point of Jobs' career. Everything he did up till and including NeXT ended in flames. But after, it's success after success. How then did he finally manage to not alienate everybody and go down in a blaze of glory? How did he hang onto his team from NeXT use them to remake Apple? Not to mention Isaacson failed to understand that how NeXT's system became the foundation of everything important Apple has done since (OS X and iOS are both direct descendants of NeXT's OS).

Nor do we learn about how he worked with any of his trusted lieutenants besides Ive, like Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Phil Schiller, or Scott Forstall. We don't even get a sense of why they stuck by him or bought into his vision. We get some insight into the Woz relationship, but still not why they succeeded when others failed.

Isaacson had the chance to tell the story of a remarkable life in business, but he demurred. Judged against the life it chronicles, Isaacson's book is a failure.

My favourite bits of the book were the bits dealing with his personal life. It's a side of Steve that was never really revealed before.

> Do you think there's an even remotely interesting, non-obvious answer to that question?

I'm sure of it. The answers to those kind of multi-faceted, tradeoffs no matter which direction you favor questions are precisely what provide real insight into someone's character and decision making, and precisely what Isaacson failed to pursue.

> And do we really need Steve Jobs to answer questions about PA Semi? Is that how you would spend your limited time with Steve?

Getting answers to questions that no one else could answer about what his thoughts and motivations were for making moves that still aren't really understood by many observers? Absolutely.

It would be so much better than a 600 page mess of regurgitated material from folklore.org and fluffy, uncritical overviews of the last ten years.

Take the App Store. Isaacson devotes all of a couple of sentences to mentioning that Jobs was initially against it, but was talked around to the idea. He completely squanders a fascinating exploration of Apple, Jobs, the myth of Jobs as font of all of Apple's good ideas, and the dynamics of one of Apple's most critical successes in the last few years. What were his objections then, and what are his thoughts on it now? Who talked him into it, and how did that play out? How did they approach the idea once Jobs was convinced?

We get no investigation, no insight, nothing of value. Just a declarative sentence from Isaacson stating the obvious, and it's on to the next facile overview.