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fbroom's review
4.0
It’s really hard to review this after reading Walter’s book. Many things were in common. This one is focused more on Apple, if you’re an Apple fan then this is a better book.
Summary
Prologue
- The author also talks about how Steve is a different person from what the media shows. Steve is a private person and has changed profoundly over the years, the media though is still stuck at showing the reckless Steve from when he was in his 20s
Chapter 1: Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
- Steve was emotional and passionate about what he believes. An example is Steve’s visit to a retreat center in 1979. During the meeting Steve was annoyed that people didn’t see the problem clearly. He started arguing and telling them about what needs to get done. He was kicked out eventually. They later found Steve crying and apologizing
- His healthy childhood. His parents moved just so that he can attend a better school. Steve’s adopted father was a repair man and taught him about making perfect products
- Meeting Woz and how together they made their first product, the blue box that was used to make free calls in 1972 until making the Apple I and registering Apple on April 1st 1976
- Several other stories from different decades
Chapter 2: "I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”
- Meeting Regis McKenna the marketing guru who helped Apple making it’s public image
- Meeting Mike Markkula who eventually invested in Apple and became its third employee. He recruited Michael Scott (Scotty) as Apple’s first president and CEO
- Apple II’s great success (Floppy Drive and VisiCalc) and massive sales
Chapter 3: Breakthrough and Breakdown
- Denying his daughter Lisa
- Denying hourly/not so important employees Apple stock after its IPO
- The Apple III project was a failure. Things went wrong (one thing was requiring backward compatible with Apple II)
- Visiting Alan Kay at PARC and seeing the graphical user interface
- After PARC, Steve abandoned the Apple III and turned to the project Lisa that would have the capability to power what he saw at PARC
- Steve was later kicked out of the project by Scotty in 1980
- Scotty suggested Jef Raskin’s Mackintosh project to Steve. Steve eventually drove Raskin to leaving the company
- Steve insisted that the Mac project stay separate from Apple
- Scotty was let go in 1981 after clashes with Steve
- Steve meeting Sculley and chasing him until he agreed to be the CEO
- Although the 1984 Macintosh Ad was a success and the presentation was a success too, the product had too many issues and was expensive so sales never took off
- Sculley kicked Steve out of the Mac team. Steve tried to convince the board to buy George Lucas company but the board refused
Chapter 4: What’s Next?
- Buying Daniel C. Jackling House
- Starting NeXT after Apple with extravagance spending like paying Paul Rand $100,000 for the NeXT logo
- Open salary policy, family events, hiring the best in the world even if they cost a lot more
- NeXT event showing its first machine was a success but the machine was too expensive for the market. Gates refused to make software for it
- Killing the IBM deal to put the NeXTSTEP operating system on the IBM machines, at that point many NeXT cofounders quit the company
Chapter 5: A Side Bet
- Buying the graphics group from George Lucas (Pixar)
- Ed Catmull was smart and knew how to keep Steve at a distance from the every-day management, they kept their small offices in San Rafael so that it is an hour and half away form NeXT
- Meeting Laurene Powell in 1989
- Pixar in 1989 winning an Oscar for a best short animated movie
- in 1991, Steve sold the hardware division at Pixar and kept the software and animation division only
Chapter 6: Bill Gates Pays a Visit
Chapter 7: Luck
- The huge success of Toy Story and Pixar going public a week after making Steve Jobs a billionaire
Chapter 8: Bozos, Bastards and
- Steve Making NeXT vs Sun commercials and eventually shutting down the hardware division and focusing on software. One example was WebObjects
- Sculley was fired from Apple in 1993 and in 1996 Fred D. Anderson was hired to be the CFO
- Apple buying a new OS, they first tried to buy JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE’s OS Be but Gassee wanted more money. Apple declined and instead got NeXT
- Steve wanted CEO Gil Amelio out, so he dumped all his shares, the board fired Amelio and offered Steve the job
- Steve’s first Move was to insist that the board reprice all employee stock options to $ 13.81. It was a dramatic gesture and his second big move was to replace virtually the entire board of directors
Chapter 9: Maybe They Had to Be
- The “Think Different” campaign
- Canceling the contracts that licensed MacOS to clone manufacturers
- Tim Cook was hired in March 1998 to get the inventory in order
- Reducing the number of employees from 10,000 to 6,000
- Restructuring Apple to focus on specific projects
- Steve put it this way: “You hire people who are better than you are at certain things, and then make sure they know that they need to tell you when you’re wrong. The executive teams at Apple and Pixar are constantly arguing with each other. Everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves at Pixar. Everybody’s totally straight with what they think, and the same is beginning to happen at Apple.”
- The iMac, the first product of the new Steve era
- Mac OS X (team lead by Avie Tevanian)
Chapter 10: Following Your Nose
- Releasing iTunes in March 2001 along with the PowerBook and OS X
- Assigning Tony Fadell to lead the new audio product “iPod”
- Introducing the iPod in October 2011
Chapter 11: Do Your Level Best
- Assigning Eddie Cue to create an online store for Apple, opened in 1998
- Steve wanted more and so the first Apple store opened in Glendale, California in May 2001. Everyone thought it was a bad move
- The iTunes Music Store in 2003 and signing deals with all major recording companies
- In 2003, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that was treatable but decided to try other alternatives before doing a surgery 10 months later
Chapter 12: Two Decisions
- “Restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one’s entire life”
- "Steve’s restlessness hadn’t always been an advantage. When he was younger, his attention could flit from one project to another”
- In 2003 Steve and his team were look at integrating the iTunes software into phones, they looked into collaborating with Motorola first but that didn’t go far
- Also in 2002, another project was going on: making a tablet (Christie and Ording)
- Steve wanted to combine all of these efforts into making a phone, he didn’t think the tablet would go so far yet and the Motorola was just too ugly
- Mac Mini, IPod Shuffle and iWork in 2005
Chapter 13: Stanford
- Steve’s commencement speech at Stanford: (can be watched on youtube)
- "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”
- "So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating”
- “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
- "Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
- "I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something”
- "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.”
Chapter 14: A Safe Haven for Pixar
- Steve fighting publicly with Eisner over the new distribution rights of Pixar movies, demanding more for Pixar
- Iger becoming the CEO of Disney and reviving the broken relationship between Disney and Pixar
- Lasseter, Catmull and Steve meeting with Iger and eventually selling Pixar to Disney
- Steve becoming the largest shareholder in Disney
- Steve’s cancer is back in 2006
Chapter 15: The Whole Widget
- The deal with AT&T favoring and making Apple very rich
- Getting closer to Ive when they worked together on the iPhone
- iPhone event on January 9th, 2007
Chapter 16: Blind Spots, Grudges and Sharp Elbows
- grudges against Adobe and refusing to support Flash on the iPhone
- grudges again Google because of Android
- His relationships with his closest early executive staff: Tony, Avie, Fred and Ruby and others and how they left Apple
- SEC case against Apple backdating stock grants to senior management
- Fortstall, Fadell, Cue got promoted to fill the positions of those who left
- Fortstall and Fadell hating each other until Fadell left in 2009 to found Next Labs
- Another scandal: "Starting in the mid-2000s, Steve was the informal leader of a group of Silicon Valley CEOs who agreed not to poach senior employees from one another. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a complaint in 2010 against Apple, along with Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, alleging that the companies had entered a series of agreements, recorded formally and informally, to not hire from one another.”
- Another scandal with ebooks: “That same attitude hurt Apple in another case it had to settle, in which the government alleged that Apple conspired with book publishers to raise the price of ebooks."
Chapter 17: Just Tell Them I’m Being
- Steve’s sickness and Tim offering him a part of his liver
- Tim not liking Walter’s book because it showed a different Steve than the one he knew
- Introducing the iPad
- His close relationship with Bob Iger
- Making Tim to be the new CEO
- Tim, Katie, Eddy, and Jony attended Steve’s service from Apple
- "He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility— an epic sense of possibility.”
-
Summary
Prologue
- The author also talks about how Steve is a different person from what the media shows. Steve is a private person and has changed profoundly over the years, the media though is still stuck at showing the reckless Steve from when he was in his 20s
Chapter 1: Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
- Steve was emotional and passionate about what he believes. An example is Steve’s visit to a retreat center in 1979. During the meeting Steve was annoyed that people didn’t see the problem clearly. He started arguing and telling them about what needs to get done. He was kicked out eventually. They later found Steve crying and apologizing
- His healthy childhood. His parents moved just so that he can attend a better school. Steve’s adopted father was a repair man and taught him about making perfect products
- Meeting Woz and how together they made their first product, the blue box that was used to make free calls in 1972 until making the Apple I and registering Apple on April 1st 1976
- Several other stories from different decades
Chapter 2: "I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”
- Meeting Regis McKenna the marketing guru who helped Apple making it’s public image
- Meeting Mike Markkula who eventually invested in Apple and became its third employee. He recruited Michael Scott (Scotty) as Apple’s first president and CEO
- Apple II’s great success (Floppy Drive and VisiCalc) and massive sales
Chapter 3: Breakthrough and Breakdown
- Denying his daughter Lisa
- Denying hourly/not so important employees Apple stock after its IPO
- The Apple III project was a failure. Things went wrong (one thing was requiring backward compatible with Apple II)
- Visiting Alan Kay at PARC and seeing the graphical user interface
- After PARC, Steve abandoned the Apple III and turned to the project Lisa that would have the capability to power what he saw at PARC
- Steve was later kicked out of the project by Scotty in 1980
- Scotty suggested Jef Raskin’s Mackintosh project to Steve. Steve eventually drove Raskin to leaving the company
- Steve insisted that the Mac project stay separate from Apple
- Scotty was let go in 1981 after clashes with Steve
- Steve meeting Sculley and chasing him until he agreed to be the CEO
- Although the 1984 Macintosh Ad was a success and the presentation was a success too, the product had too many issues and was expensive so sales never took off
- Sculley kicked Steve out of the Mac team. Steve tried to convince the board to buy George Lucas company but the board refused
Chapter 4: What’s Next?
- Buying Daniel C. Jackling House
- Starting NeXT after Apple with extravagance spending like paying Paul Rand $100,000 for the NeXT logo
- Open salary policy, family events, hiring the best in the world even if they cost a lot more
- NeXT event showing its first machine was a success but the machine was too expensive for the market. Gates refused to make software for it
- Killing the IBM deal to put the NeXTSTEP operating system on the IBM machines, at that point many NeXT cofounders quit the company
Chapter 5: A Side Bet
- Buying the graphics group from George Lucas (Pixar)
- Ed Catmull was smart and knew how to keep Steve at a distance from the every-day management, they kept their small offices in San Rafael so that it is an hour and half away form NeXT
- Meeting Laurene Powell in 1989
- Pixar in 1989 winning an Oscar for a best short animated movie
- in 1991, Steve sold the hardware division at Pixar and kept the software and animation division only
Chapter 6: Bill Gates Pays a Visit
Chapter 7: Luck
- The huge success of Toy Story and Pixar going public a week after making Steve Jobs a billionaire
Chapter 8: Bozos, Bastards and
- Steve Making NeXT vs Sun commercials and eventually shutting down the hardware division and focusing on software. One example was WebObjects
- Sculley was fired from Apple in 1993 and in 1996 Fred D. Anderson was hired to be the CFO
- Apple buying a new OS, they first tried to buy JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE’s OS Be but Gassee wanted more money. Apple declined and instead got NeXT
- Steve wanted CEO Gil Amelio out, so he dumped all his shares, the board fired Amelio and offered Steve the job
- Steve’s first Move was to insist that the board reprice all employee stock options to $ 13.81. It was a dramatic gesture and his second big move was to replace virtually the entire board of directors
Chapter 9: Maybe They Had to Be
- The “Think Different” campaign
- Canceling the contracts that licensed MacOS to clone manufacturers
- Tim Cook was hired in March 1998 to get the inventory in order
- Reducing the number of employees from 10,000 to 6,000
- Restructuring Apple to focus on specific projects
- Steve put it this way: “You hire people who are better than you are at certain things, and then make sure they know that they need to tell you when you’re wrong. The executive teams at Apple and Pixar are constantly arguing with each other. Everybody wears their thoughts on their sleeves at Pixar. Everybody’s totally straight with what they think, and the same is beginning to happen at Apple.”
- The iMac, the first product of the new Steve era
- Mac OS X (team lead by Avie Tevanian)
Chapter 10: Following Your Nose
- Releasing iTunes in March 2001 along with the PowerBook and OS X
- Assigning Tony Fadell to lead the new audio product “iPod”
- Introducing the iPod in October 2011
Chapter 11: Do Your Level Best
- Assigning Eddie Cue to create an online store for Apple, opened in 1998
- Steve wanted more and so the first Apple store opened in Glendale, California in May 2001. Everyone thought it was a bad move
- The iTunes Music Store in 2003 and signing deals with all major recording companies
- In 2003, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that was treatable but decided to try other alternatives before doing a surgery 10 months later
Chapter 12: Two Decisions
- “Restlessness is far more important and powerful than simple ambition or raw intelligence. It is the foundation of resilience, and self-motivation. It is fueled by curiosity, the ache to build something meaningful, and a sense of purpose to make the most of one’s entire life”
- "Steve’s restlessness hadn’t always been an advantage. When he was younger, his attention could flit from one project to another”
- In 2003 Steve and his team were look at integrating the iTunes software into phones, they looked into collaborating with Motorola first but that didn’t go far
- Also in 2002, another project was going on: making a tablet (Christie and Ording)
- Steve wanted to combine all of these efforts into making a phone, he didn’t think the tablet would go so far yet and the Motorola was just too ugly
- Mac Mini, IPod Shuffle and iWork in 2005
Chapter 13: Stanford
- Steve’s commencement speech at Stanford: (can be watched on youtube)
- "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”
- "So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating”
- “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
- "Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
- "I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something”
- "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.”
Chapter 14: A Safe Haven for Pixar
- Steve fighting publicly with Eisner over the new distribution rights of Pixar movies, demanding more for Pixar
- Iger becoming the CEO of Disney and reviving the broken relationship between Disney and Pixar
- Lasseter, Catmull and Steve meeting with Iger and eventually selling Pixar to Disney
- Steve becoming the largest shareholder in Disney
- Steve’s cancer is back in 2006
Chapter 15: The Whole Widget
- The deal with AT&T favoring and making Apple very rich
- Getting closer to Ive when they worked together on the iPhone
- iPhone event on January 9th, 2007
Chapter 16: Blind Spots, Grudges and Sharp Elbows
- grudges against Adobe and refusing to support Flash on the iPhone
- grudges again Google because of Android
- His relationships with his closest early executive staff: Tony, Avie, Fred and Ruby and others and how they left Apple
- SEC case against Apple backdating stock grants to senior management
- Fortstall, Fadell, Cue got promoted to fill the positions of those who left
- Fortstall and Fadell hating each other until Fadell left in 2009 to found Next Labs
- Another scandal: "Starting in the mid-2000s, Steve was the informal leader of a group of Silicon Valley CEOs who agreed not to poach senior employees from one another. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a complaint in 2010 against Apple, along with Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, alleging that the companies had entered a series of agreements, recorded formally and informally, to not hire from one another.”
- Another scandal with ebooks: “That same attitude hurt Apple in another case it had to settle, in which the government alleged that Apple conspired with book publishers to raise the price of ebooks."
Chapter 17: Just Tell Them I’m Being
- Steve’s sickness and Tim offering him a part of his liver
- Tim not liking Walter’s book because it showed a different Steve than the one he knew
- Introducing the iPad
- His close relationship with Bob Iger
- Making Tim to be the new CEO
- Tim, Katie, Eddy, and Jony attended Steve’s service from Apple
- "He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility— an epic sense of possibility.”
-
mikkelmiguelon's review against another edition
5.0
Once I found out there was another biography of Steve Jobs (yet “unauthorized”), I quickly got my hands on an audio copy. “Becoming” is more nuanced in describing Jobs’ temper and irate behavior (and its softening over time) than Walter Isaacson’s book. A well told story, especially since Jobs’ genius and impact on Apple never bores.
leanneland's review
5.0
I devoured this book in two days after I found it one and a half weeks early (before its on sale date) at my local book store! It was a very unique read. It covered a timeline of Steve Job's professional career, much like his autobiography did, but the interviews with those who were closest to him show a different perspective on those moments than what's highly publicized in the media. I really enjoyed seeing this side of him and marvelling again at the true genius he really was. It's a crazy loss to humanity and technology advancements that we no longer have him around.
cristiangarcia's review
4.0
I will never get bored with reading stories about the management in Apple. Jobs, being the main figure, has so many lessons when it comes to his way of managing this behemoth. Although the learnings are up to you. By connecting the dots and reading between the lines. This book is just another side of the story. A good one I must say. If you read Walter Isaacson's book, you might get bored with this one. But both volumes blend pretty good. And for a good cocktail, I would add Creativity Inc. by [a: Ed Catmull|5618463|Ed Catmull|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1404701341p2/5618463.jpg]
dodgson's review against another edition
4.0
A fascinating, holistic view of a singular personality and the process of honing his genius creative instincts into a reliable model of leadership and business acumen. I miss him—more than any product, Apple itself was his creation. It’s far from perfect, but our world would be considerably poorer without it.
ruptes's review against another edition
3.0
Well, to begin with he really doesn't get into much detail about the life of Steve Jobs. I found this book to be too much on the superficial of everything and not really diving in. The ending was almost rush. He dedicate just a slight bit and then abruptly ended the book. I think that Walter Isaacson did a great job in his biography of Steve. I have given this books 3 stars to be nice because he did touch around in many different places, but Walter gives you all the details.
I recommend you read the one written by Walter Isaacson.
I recommend you read the one written by Walter Isaacson.
stevenyenzer's review
3.0
A fascinating and balanced account of one of the most influential people of the last few decades.
joeholmes's review
2.0
While there were some wonderful new anecdotes sprinkled throughout, the book suffers from being so single-minded in its thesis about Jobs' transformation that sometimes it felt as though there was barely a paragraph that wasn't explicitly arguing the case.