I don't know what I'm more surprised at - Isaacson's piss poor job of doing Jobs' life justice, or that Jobs chose him to write the book. Either way, I walked away very disappointed, ready to never think about the book again.
This is what puzzles me the most about Jobs fans, such as Gruber: they think Jobs is a genius who just can't get anything wrong, except... when he picked the person to write his biography.
Eh. I agree with the Siracusian critique (echoed by Gruber) that Jobs "picked the wrong guy", at least for us hackers. But I don't think Jobs really gave a damn what Isaacson wrote about what went on under the kimono at Apple. If anything, he'd probably have preferred a biographer who would have left the TV "cracked it" quote on the cutting room floor, lest Samsung know what was about to hit them.
He wanted a bio that would help his kids get to know him better, and that's what he got. It's not a coincidence that the most intimate moments in the book all revolve around Jobs outside of Apple. That's what he talked to Isaacson about, and that's what Isaacson put to paper.
"I don't think Jobs really gave a damn what Isaacson wrote about what went on under the kimono at Apple."
You nailed it.
That's the opinion I heard from Gruber on The Talk Show podcast and it makes sense - that Jobs would've picked someone like Steven Levy if he really wanted to explain the inner workings of Apple and alternatively, Isaacson was perfect for a human interest puff piece.
All of the stuff that I wish Isaacson would've written about well - the years in the NeXT wilderness, lessons learned from Pixar, the inner workings of Apple from 97 on - are the things written about and examined in the exactly one place in the planet where it can help only Apple: the secretive internal executive training program known as Apple University, formed in 2008 and headed up by Joel Podolny, the former dean of Yale Business School. You didn't think someone that planned things at the scale that Jobs did would just have a succession program that stopped at Tim Cook taking over, did you?
Jobs' greatest creation wasn't any one product, it was Apple itself, a company engineered to innovate on a regular and ongoing basis for years to come.
Honestly curious, what was wrong with it and how do you think it could of been improved? – I really enjoyed it, though admittedly I'm a complete fanboy.
I'm a fanboy, but thought the book went far too deeply into personal relationships, lacked objectivity, and diminished Jobs' accomplishments in an effort to make him seem more human.
