Jobs Report

Finally got around to reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. It was excellent. Very readable, very balanced, lets you see Jobs was both brilliant and an asshole. Compulsively readable.

After I finished I watched the Ashton Kutcher movie "Jobs."  They got so many things wrong,  and left out vast swabs of important stuff. It was disjointed and failed to get inside the character like the book did. I heartily de-recommend the movie.

As per usual, the book is better than the movie.

I can't imagine why anyone would be interested enough in Steve Jobs (or any other businessman) to read a book and/or watch a movie about him.
Not a criticism, NoCo, just a lack of understanding.

Glad you asked Howard.  Steve Jobs had a life of Wagnerian drama.  He was adopted and pined for his birth parents, yet he had a child out of wedlock at the same age as his parents and refused to have any contact with his daughter.  He later discovered he had met his biological father without knowing who he was.

Jobs founded Apple and was the driving force behind turning it from a hobby in a garage to a multi-billion dollar company -- yet he got fired from Apple, and demoted several times.  During his layoff from Apple he created the NeXT computer which was a pretty huge flop.  Yet Apple was in serious trouble at the same time, and ended up buying NeXT to get their operating system. Jobs came with the deal -- at first only as an advisor.  Eventually he began power plays and managed to get all of the old board members removed and himself reinstalled as CEO.  He brought the company back into prominence through some incredibly risky moves.

Jobs was insanely rich, yet paid himself only $1 per year and lived frugally.  He had no security staff.  He drove himself.  He had no yachts or racing cars.  He lambasted Microsoft's founders for their excesses.

Jobs had weird diets throughout his life, and shortened his life after the cancer diagnosis by refusing to eat healthily.  He pursued so-called alternative treatments until his relatively-treatable pancreatic cancer had metasticized, which eventually killed him.  He probably could have been cured had he gone the conventional routes of surgery and radiation.  Thus one of the richest men in the world died unnecessarily.

There are fascinating facets to his life story on almost every page.  His taunting of Bill Gates was especially delicious.

Did you notice that nothing you wrote praised Jobs as a decent human being?
Most of the things you noted were fairly well-known in the industry (a few years back, of course). I never met anyone who had worked at Apple who didn't despise Steve Jobs, regardless of the way they felt about the company and its products.

I had a friend who was a founder and CEO of a major computer hardware company. He was also fired from the job - more than once - and he was also talked into coming back and fixing the damn thing. A big difference between him and Steve Jobs is that he was almost universally well liked. Another difference is that he began his career as an engineer and actually invented and developed products - he wasn't just a businessman (and huckster) as Steve Jobs was.

Both the book and the movie make it clear Jobs was a flaming asshole. He doesn't come off as likable in either treatment.

That doesn't make his story any less compelling.

Different tastes is what makes the world interesting. I personally find business and businessmen very uninteresting. I am required to spend far too much time in the company of bank executives, and I find them to be the most boring and narrowly-informed people I have ever met. Not a one of them would know the difference between a pan head and a shovel head. Sad.

One of the weird traits of Jobs was not only the billion dollar deals he brokered, but he was also compulsive about the tiniest design details, like the type of screws used and the radius of bends in the case. He most assuredly knew the difference between pan head and shovel head screws.

There is a screw called a pan head, but I don't believe there is a screw called a shovel head.
I was speaking of different engines in Harley Davidsons.

Well you see, there I went, showing my own ignorance.

Not really, NoCo. I was trying to illustrate the absurdity of resentment based on taste differences. My expecting bankers to be knowledgeable about Harleys is the absurd bit.