Jonathan Brown » business

Review of ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson

Jonathan Brown — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:40:02 +0000

I’ve been sitting on this review for three weeks. I started reading ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson at about 11:45PM on Sunday, October 23. I finished it at around 4:00AM on Wednesday, October 26. Suffice it to say, that’s the quickest I’ve ever read any book that was over 600 pages. I read it, appropriately, on my iPad.

If Steve Jobs were a fictional character, he’d be one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes—brash, narcissistic, ambitious, bratty, and willful. He thought he could change the world he lived in just by thinking about it. Whether by willing an engineer to do better (which often they did) or by implementing his vision technology, he did in fact change his world and the world around him. He could even will himself to believe that truth didn’t exist—his first daughter, Lisa, and his cancer. He was a walking contradiction. Consider:

A hacker, hippie who wanted to turn everything he saw into commerce
An orphan with a fear of abandonment who abandoned and then denied paternity of his own child
A defiant, anti-authoritarian who ended up building a draconian company
An anti-materialist who created products hordes of people lust for
An obsessive control freak who, at times, had no idea how to control himself
A man whose results were about making profits, but he didn’t care about money and lived simply
A man who sought out father figures, but didn’t end up being much of one himself
A man so smart, yet so stupid–thinking diets would make him clean enough that he didn’t shower, or that they could cure his cancer

The book reads more like a history of Apple than a book about a man. There are bits and pieces that aren’t about Apple, NeXT or Pixar—his adolescence, peeks into his family life, his love life—but Steve Jobs and Apple are one, and above all, this is that story.

For those looking to get a deeper understanding of how Jobs treated people and his philosophy on design and creating products, the book amply does that. My take-aways are:

Jobs was even more of an asshole than I already knew
Jobs was even more integral in the development of Apple products than I knew
Jobs cried a lot

While it’s clear that the core of Steve Jobs is a passion for perfection whose fear of abandonment and betrayal guided much of what he did, the decisions he made, the people he palled around with, but we never get to the core of why he treated people as he did. There’s no real explanation for his behavior. The best we can figure is that’s “just how he is.”

This baffled even his dearest friends, including his “design soul mate”, Jony Ive:

“He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that makes his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable.”

Of course Steve’s “reality distortion field” is a frame for a lot of interactions with Steve. It was a powerful force. Time and time again people are quoted as saying they were fully aware of it and still got trapped by it. Andy Hertzfeld, the primary architect of the original Macintosh Operating System, most eloquently defines Jobs’s “reality distortion field”:

“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”

Death, like a light blanket, is draped over the story of Steve Jobs. Not only because the writing of the book commenced after Jobs became sick, but also because the story ends just weeks before he died. Jobs had a lot of premonitions early in his career. One of those was that he always thought he would die young. Isaacson writes,

Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history.

This notion of an early death as a reason to work fast and hard is repeated a few times in the book, recounted by multiple people.

There are many interesting and entertaining passages in the book that provide a lot of insight into how Steve Jobs and Apple worked. Mike Markkula, Apple’s first investor and third co-founder, wrote a one-page paper called “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” which turned out to be the guiding principles that stuck with Jobs inside and outside of Apple. The philosophy stressed three main points, which I’m paraphrasing:

Empathy. Understanding what the customer needs
Focus. In order to do a good job, unimportant opportunities and distractions must be eliminated
Impute. Perception is everything and the best stuff must be presented in a way to avoid shoddiness

And then there’s Bill Gates, a recurring character throughout the book as Jobs’s best frenemy. I think the book helps Gates’s reputation by positioning him as Jobs’s polar opposite–the calm, stable, thoughtful, level-headed competitor. That’s not really who Gates was, but that’s what Isaacson makes him seem like compared to Jobs. Gates has quite a few zingers which I found endearing. My favorite quote from Bill Gates comes in an interview with the Washington Post regarding Jobs’s NeXT computer:

“His product comes with an interesting feature called incompatibility. It doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-nice computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done as well as he did.”

And then there’s a lovely passage involving Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning Glass, the company that made the Gorilla Glass used on the iPhones. When Jobs attempted to contact Weeks by phone, his assistant answered and refused to connect him even after explaining, “No, I’m Steve Jobs.” Jobs complained to Weeks that it was “typical East Coast bullshit” to which Weeks then called Apple and asked to speak to Jobs and was told, “to put his request in writing and send it by fax.” Classic.

When Jobs finally met with Weeks, Jobs insisted that the glass wasn’t good enough and tried to explain how to make glass.

This amused Weeks, who of course knew more than Jobs about that topic. “Can you shut up,” Weeks interjected, “and let me teach you some science?”

One would think, when facing death, that it changes you in some respects. There are quite a few passages in which Jobs breaks down crying when reflecting on moments and people in his life. It seems like he did truly care and had some regrets, but death didn’t change his stubbornness or his taste. When recovering from a liver transplant…

Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it.

I think taste and a designer’s eye can be learned over time. Some people are just born with it and it’s so buried, so engrained in their spirit that it defines them. This is the case of Steve Jobs. He had an opinion on everything and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind regardless of who it was or what the object was. When Jobs met with record label executives for the first time…

After four slides, he waved his hand and broke in. “You have your heads up your asses,” he said.

Even if you’ve closely followed Steve Jobs over the years, the book is an interesting read. But I can’t help but be disappointed. It seems like Isaacson missed an opportunity. At times I wondered when I’d learn something new about the early years of Apple, and other than the courtship and betrayal by John Sculley, it reads like many of the Apple books I already own.

But there’s a deeper reason why I was disappointed. I didn’t get a sense of finality. Unless I totally missed it, he doesn’t even mention the date Steve Jobs died. Isaacson didn’t include any post-mortem thoughts or any sense of the magnitude of his death and the media coverage and global outpouring that followed. It seems to me that’s a pretty important part of the Steve Jobs story. It just feels like Isaacson took the easy way out.

I finally cracked it

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:22:38 +0000

One of the more revealing passages in the book, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, is this passage about the rumored Apple TV:

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

A lot of techy sorts have weighed in how they think Jobs “cracked” it. “It,” they think, means the user interface based on that quote. What we don’t really know, whether because Isaacson didn’t go deep enough or Jobs didn’t reveal, is what “it” really is (Bill Clinton jokes aside). We presume, as many bloggers have, that “it” is the user interface. I don’t think that’s the case.

In 2008, at All Things D’s D8 conference, Jobs was asked about Apple TV and its future. He responds,

“The problem with innovation in the television industry is the go-to-market strategy. The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everybody a set-top box for free or for $10 a month. And that pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation because nobody’s willing to buy a set-top box. Ask Tivo. Ask ReplayTV. You know, ask Roku. Ask Voodoo. Ask us. Ask Google in a few months. Sony’s tried as well. Panasonic’s tried. A lot of people have tried. They’ve all failed.”

He goes on to describe the technical landscape of the current television industry…

“So all you can do is add a box on to the TV system…Well you just end up with a table full of remotes, cluster full of boxes, a bunch of different UI’s, and that’s the situation we have today.”

He continues on describing how a complete tear-down of the TV is required, topping it off with a consistent UI and finding a way to get it to the consumer where they are willing to pay for it.

Apple’s history is full of taking an existing product, tearing it apart and redesigning it from scratch. The personal computer, the mp3 player, the phone, the tablet computer. That’s not the problem to crack. Apple can crack any technical problem. They know that and have the track record to back it up.

Jobs most keen insight, and by the far the biggest problem to crack, is getting an Apple-esque end-to-end solution to the market with cable companies in the middle. In other words, how do you get the television industry to be more like the mobile phone industry? Where a single company, like Apple, can control the hardware, software and content, but run across someone else’s pipes?

That is what I think Jobs cracked. It will get interesting from here.

Steve Jobs, Dead at 56

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:21:26 +0000

I shut down TweetDeck hoping to muster one more ounce of focus. I’m starting to burn out. It’s a cycle for me. I invest all I have into a project and within a few months I get that feeling. I wake up and there’s nothing. Not a worthy thought or a single idea of what I should be doing. So I start pacing myself.

I mess around with my baseball card collection I gathered from my parents’ house over the weekend. I watch some playoff baseball. I walk to the coffee shop.

But I feel guilty. I’m supposed to be working. I’m supposed to be creating. It’s what I’ve done since as long as I can remember, really.

So I clear all distractions and try to put a rally together. I just need to get this one feature working then I’ll call it a day. Then the text message came.

“Omg…steve is dead?”

I open TweetDeck hoping to find it’s just another poorly designed rumor.

It’s not. He really is dead.

“Shit,” I replied.

And for the next five hours I’m enveloped by a hurricane of emotion. The knot in my stomach. The heavy heart. The lump in my throat.

All for a man that I didn’t know. A man I never met.

When I stopped being insane for sports and Dale Murphy and Dan Marino, I started to be insane for computers and Steve Jobs. He became an idol for the grown-up version of myself.

But exactly why did I have so much feeling for him and why was I so emotional about his passing? And why was I seeing the same sentiment being expressed in my Twitter stream by just about everyone?

Beyond the products that Apple delivered over the years, Steve Jobs inspired an entire generation of makers. We all try to reach a level of design purity that Jobs stood for and brought to us in the form of a computer, phone or a piece of software. We’re all smarter and more savvy because Jobs trusted intuitiveness and bet that us users would just get it. He could’ve been wrong. But he wasn’t. He was rarely wrong.

Jobs embodied that one thing we all truly wanted–to be the best at what we do.

The people I want to work with, the people I want to associate with, the people I love most dearly are all like Steve Jobs. They focus on being the best whatever it is they are trying to be and if they ever have to accept anything short of the best, it’s because they just ran out of time.

Here’s to hoping time doesn’t run out on us before we do our best work.

Small Business, government, taxes, etc.

Jonathan Brown — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:16:23 +0000

Mark Cuban lays out some ideas surrounding the topic of taxes and job creation…

What bothers me are not the taxes I pay to help others and to support the services our country needs. What bothers me is the mis-allocation and inefficient distribution of our tax money. Particularly when it leads to taking more money from those who can not afford it, and in this economy, even those making 250k per year can not afford it.

I don’t know where this $250,000 number Obama came up with in his campaign, but that imaginary line that’s been drawn between “rich” and “not rich” has stuck and it’s what scares a lot of small business owners. That’s a number that all small businesses must break through to really begin making things happen. And if you’re a sole owner/member of a company, that’s where it begins to hurt.

There is no better example of how politicians lie to themselves and the American people than the fact that our budgets are framed within a 10 year plan. There is no business person on the planet who would think that a 10 year plan would have even a remote possibility of playing out as planned.

Totally agree. Most people can’t predict what 10 years will look like in their own very controlled bubble of consistency. Trillions and trillions of variables at play with an entire nation and 10 years just doesn’t make sense. Look where we were 10 years ago. And then look 10 years before that.

The risk of starting a business. The risk of making an investment in the sweat equity of someone else’s efforts. The risk of starting a charity. The risk of taking a new job. The risk of adding a new employee, etc, etc, etc. I have NEVER met a motivated person who has said they would not chase their goals because of tax rates.

The only person I know who is afraid to earn more money because of higher taxes is my grandfather. I agree that most businesses don’t factor in tax rates when making decisions to compete because they already have capital to do so. But I think it’s also fair to say that there’s never a time a business, or individual for that matter, doesn’t think about tax rate implications. And for small businesses, that means just about every decision, including hiring employees.

How many times have you bought a bigger dollar purchase on Amazon.com to avoid local sales taxes? Why? Because you think about the other things you could be doing with that tax money? Bingo. That’s what happens when I send a check to the government every month. I don’t look at that money and think I could be $x thousand dollars richer. I look at that money and think, “I could probably use this money to grow my business faster.” Isn’t that what job creation is?

The argument we should be making against taxes is that the government does a very, very poor job of effectively distributing our tax dollars where they are needed.

I doubt there’s a person in this country who would argue otherwise.

On the topic of job creation via infrastructure, a topic I’m adamantly opposed to…

With the possible exception of the enhancement and building of schools, the only infrastructure investment that makes sense is where COMMERCE THAT WAS NOT PREVIOUSLY ABLE IS NOW ENABLED BY NEW INFRASTRUCTURE.

Well played, Mr. Cuban. I’ve not thought about that particular angle, but I have thoughts that go in a similar direction. My problem with creating infrastructure jobs is that, by and large, they are crap jobs. Don’t get me wrong, these are important jobs, but they aren’t booming next-generation jobs we’re creating. We aren’t introducing people to new skills required for a 21st century, knowledge-based job market. We’re creating temporary jobs that just about anyone can do or be trained to do in a short amount of time.

The BIGGER PROBLEM WITH INFRASTRUCTURE is that in the name of creating jobs we actually inhibit commerce and possibly cost jobs. How? When we rebuild or expand roads as a way of creating jobs, what happens ? We shut down or reduce the traffic on the roads to be rebuilt. The net effect is that during the construction period we CREATE PROBLEMS rather than solve them.

Another astute point. We’ve all experienced these benefits of infrastructure. How many store fronts can’t survive an infrastructure project? I avoid messy parts of town caused by construction and therefore ignore the small businesses that I otherwise might’ve done business with.

And finally, the point that hits closest to home for me right now at this minute…

Do the President and Speaker of the House know that every little modification to the tax laws is a tax itself because it requires hiring a professional to help navigate the taxation and human resources mine field?

Just yesterday I got a letter from IRS about one of my quarterly filings. Here’s the deal. I don’t care. Trying to run a business (albeit a small one) is my number one priority. It’s how I feed myself, take care of my daughter, etc. There’s not enough time in the day as it is trying to build a lasting business. Last thing I need is to spend time (or money) to debug the IRS and my accounting software. But if I don’t pay attention to the IRS, eventually someone will show up at my door with a gun.

Rumors of a real AppleTV

Jonathan Brown — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:26:55 +0000

Another follow-up on the most probable new market for a post-Jobs Apple (which if true, has Jobs’ fingerprints all over it).

Not another Apple TV black box but a real 50” flat-screen TV, “Designed by Apple in California” — and Made in China, like most Apple products. Or Made In Korea, if the company concludes a new pact with its best frenemy, Samsung, the new king of TV sets, the new Sony.

via An Apple TV Set In Our Future? | Monday Note.

Besides the issues Jean-Louis Gassée brings up, I think the product size would be more than just a field tech problem. Do Apple retail stores have stock rooms big enough to store plenty of 50″ televisions to keep pace with demand? I don’t know, I’m just posing the question. Would it be an in-store demo and an online order? What about shipping damage issues and expenses? This all sounds really risky for Apple. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing more I’d like to replace than my current TV and cable box combo–a miserably slow experience with AT&T U-Verse running some flavor of Windows Media Center. It doesn’t feel right to me yet, but I’ll continue to wish this happens.

About that AppleTV…

Jonathan Brown — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:07:13 +0000

So about that AppleTV product I wrote about just a few days ago…

Something cable providers are going to absolutely hate.

WSJ: Apple working on ‘new technology to deliver video to televisions’ | This is my next….

Guitar Frets: Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fear | Postmodern Times – WSJ.com

Jonathan Brown — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:12:37 +0000

This is crazy. So one of the few storied manufacturers left in the US has to deal with this kind of crap every few years? We have no shot at rebuilding our manufacturing base with the overreaching environmental community, I’m afraid.

On border patrol and customs:

It’s not enough to know that the body of your old guitar is made of spruce and maple: What’s the bridge made of? If it’s ebony, do you have the paperwork to show when and where that wood was harvested and when and where it was made into a bridge? Is the nut holding the strings at the guitar’s headstock bone, or could it be ivory? “Even if you have no knowledge—despite Herculean efforts to obtain it—that some piece of your guitar, no matter how small, was obtained illegally, you lose your guitar forever,” Prof. Thomas has written. “Oh, and you’ll be fined $250 for that false (or missing) information in your Lacey Act Import Declaration.”

Guitar Frets: Environmental Enforcement Leaves Musicians in Fear | Postmodern Times – WSJ.com.

Hat tip to @stringsn88keys

My New Guitar

Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:03:29 +0000

A phone call on a Sunday from Steve Jobs to Vic Gundotra, who led Google’s mobile apps at the time:

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

Gundotra closes his piece with…

But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.

via Vic Gundotra – Google+ – Icon Ambulance One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was….

My Favorite Steve Jobs Quotes

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:00:14 +0000

Here are a few of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes:

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

I once had an employee of mine say that I don’t give enough compliments on people’s work. That’s because I expect good work to be done. That’s why I pay you.

In the same vein,

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

One reason I’m not a huge fan of user requirements:

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

And…

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

A huge problem at a lot of companies, including a few I’ve worked at:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

This is appropriate for where I’m at right now. I’ve started a lot of entrepreneurial projects and finished few.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Can you imagine being 28 years old or so and saying this to the guy running Coke or Pepsi today?

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

I think a lot of companies get this one wrong, putting their tails between their legs in tough financial times:

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

Apple After Steve Jobs

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 02:35:58 +0000

My business and technology hero, Steve Jobs, resigned his CEO post at Apple today. I can only assume his battle with pancreatic cancer has finally caught up with him. I say finally because the 5-year survival rate of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is a mere 4%. I’m fortunate enough to know another incredibly brilliant man who was diagnosed over ten years ago with pancreatic cancer and has beaten the odds–Denis, my former Father-In-Law and the Grandfather of my daughter. It takes a real man to beat those odds.

My first encounter with an Apple product was at a computer programming class during summer camp at my elementary school between 2nd and 3rd grade. We wrote BASIC applications (look at that rocket go across the screen!) on an Apple IIe and played awesome games like Spy Hunter, Oregon Trail, and Karateka.

I’ve closely followed Steve Jobs and Apple for the last 20 some-odd years. I fell in love with my first computer, a Macintosh Plus (with a 10 MB hard drive!), and since have owned quite a few Apple products–a Macintosh Centris, a Power Macintosh 6100, a PowerBook G3, a bondi blue iMac, a purple iMac, 2 MacBook Pros, 3 iPods, 3 iPhones, an iPad, 2 AppleTVs and an LED Cinema Display. Hell, I even own Apple’s rechargeable AA batteries–which, by the way, are awesome.

I religiously followed Apple during the dark days of the 1990s, ogling at the new products even though I was developing primarily on Windows machines. I never did get that Powerbook Duo 230.

Our history is full of innovators who disrupted the status quo in a big way and created new rules to play by. It’s an amazing feat to change the world like that, but usually the greatest only do it once in a lifetime. What makes Steve Jobs and Apple so amazing is that they’ve changed our world a few times over the last 34 years. Our computers, our phones, the way we consume music and movies–all changed because of Steve Jobs’ unparalleled vision and Apple’s near flawless execution.

The question on everyone’s mind now is what will a post-Jobs Apple act like? Will it continue to push out highly innovative and successful products? Will it be a softer, gentler, more “open” Apple? Or will it fade into another post-Jobs era like we saw in the late 80′s and 90′s?

The immediate answer is nothing will change. We know that the iPhone development process is about two years, so I think it’s a safe bet that Apple’s product road map is set for the next couple of years. We know we’ll get a new iPhone this fall, a new iPad early next year. We know we’ll get Mac OS improvements, hardware updates to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines (both lines will probably merge when manufacturing and processors will allow).

Perhaps the most interesting product question is what will Apple do with the AppleTV? Jobs has called it Apple’s “hobby.” Will they eventually make a proper TV? I don’t think so, and that would most definitely be a post-Jobs rookie mistake. The current AppleTV a great little box, but it needs a greater purpose. That purpose may come from apps. It’s plausible that the AppleTV could be the best gaming console since the 8-bit Nintendo. It’s also not impossible to imagine TV channels being applications that wrap a video feed, building on the concepts in MLB.TV, HBO Go and the ABC Player. One could argue that the last disruption in the entertainment business is cable television. At an All Things D conference a few years ago, Jobs had a few wise remarks for Google who was entering the cable box fray with Google TV, which has been a miserable failure.

If we look at Apple’s new management team (which is the same team, but one guy has a new title), it is the team that’s been responsible for executing Apple over the last decade. There’s no reason to believe anything will dramatically change over the next couple of years.

If anything, Apple doesn’t have a rock star leader who can walk into any boardroom on the planet and demand that things go his way because he is the smartest man in the room with a visionary track record to prove it. “What have you ever done?”

The deals that Jobs negotiated to perfection over the last decade are why Apple is so outlandishly successful today. He influenced the music industry and movie studios to be a part of iTunes and, in turn, saved them from Napster-like demolition. He demanded that Apple have full control of the iPhone design while persuading AT&T to make changes to their networks and systems to adapt to the iPhone. Those were major milestones that undoubtedly gave rise to the biggest corporate turn around in history.