Steve's Bio
 

I'm not much of a bio reader, but I'm finding this piece to be brilliant, and I can already see how its going to impact my business thinking. Anyone else reading it?

Techweenie: I find the late 70s descriptions of Jobs to be a bit hard to believe... any truth in your experience?

I came into the Apple fold as both a consumer and business person around 1985. Lots of the early stuff is really resonating with me.

Link to the bio?

From the 60 minutes episode I found that part about is real dad & sister very interesting. He actually met his dad and neither knew it.

LOL, I think its analog. A "book".

I'm also reading it and find it fascinating. I'm at the point where he was thrown out of Apple and about to start NeXT. It's incredible that Apple was so disfunctional at that time and still able to operate, not to mention the loyalty he had from the Mac staff despite his abuses.

Stockholm syndrome.

I believe he cheated his partner Woz. At that point he is scum.

While I've not yet read the book, I will. I was listening to an interview with the author on NPR and it was fascinating. Makes me want to be less compromising and more exacting. He cared about the screws inside the case. How the circuit board was laid out. It permeates the company today.

FYI: The most recent 10K discloses that they have over $80 Billion in Cash. That's with a B, folks. An increase of more than $7.5B since the last Q.

Just started it, and it's looking good.

I also bought my first Mac late 1980's for home use. I used PC's at work, and for the next 20 years was constantly amazed how much I preferred my computers at home to those in the office, and wondered why everyone didn't "get it".

It's taken a while, but the rest of the world seems to be slowly coming round.

Hmm... Think I can get in a kindle version? ;)

I'll pick up a copy somewhere though...

:D I remember books.

Irreplaceable
Saturday, October 8, 2011 1:38 AM

To: crose@bloombergcom

Watching the show memorializing Steve Jobs was frustrating to watch, because nine tenths of the show was about the visceral world or this idea, that product or that deal. What was hard to gather was the measure of the man, or the essence of who he was. Many people when faced with a grave illness come to understand that life is bittersweet in the sense that we only have a short time in the in the sun to enjoy the great beauty of the world. So this is not as extraordinary as it sounds..

The key to Steve Jobs came in the very simple telling of seeing him taking walks. Jobs was a very introspective man given to figuring things out, putting the pieces of the puzzle together with an attention to detail. The second thing that was striking and is the most important key to his success was that Jobs was concerned with the interface between the user and the technology in accomplishing a task. Jobs would imagine what and how he would like that interface to be as a user, with an eye on making it ever simpler and seamless for the user. His great dilemma was the limitations of the technology available and in trying to advance it to get to that perfect interface. Thus it is no surprise that he would know what the technology available was capable of doing.

One can bet that the last several years of Jobs life was spent in developing a pipeline of products or guideline of products going into a future without his presence. This must have been the driving force of not only pushing the envelope in the present but imagining the future. The downside to that endeavor would be what events or limitations in technology might arise and effect product development without his guidance. In that he has to have relied on his assembled team and that was where his efforts must have been directed in trying to instill in them the same kind of fearless vision and thinking.

The prognosis for Apple is that it will run like a scalded dog for the next half a dozen years or so. However once the attrition of life starts to disassemble the team that Jobs personally assembled Apple will be faced with either renewing or finding a new vision. This is where Steve Jobs is virtually irreplaceable at Apple, because how do you replace a guy with that much vision.. The bright side as Jobs alluded to was that there is another fast gun working in some garage somewhere out there to carry on.

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