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I agree with Gruber, but I'd like to add that these are not small errors on Walter Isaacson's part. They're huge errors. The biggest errors any biography author
by tjogin 15y ago
I agree with Gruber, but I'd like to add that these are not small errors on Walter Isaacson's part. They're huge errors. The biggest errors any biography author could make about Steve Jobs.
Why? Why are we even interested in reading a biography about Steve Jobs to begin with? Because he was a narcissistic asshole? Really? Because that's the part Isaacson nailed. There are plenty of assholes, and that characteristic alone does not make for a best-selling biography. No, the reason anyone is interested in reading Steve Jobs's biography is because of his work.
And yet, Steve's work is the part Isaacson doesn't get. Isaacson falls into the same traps that the media does with regularity; thinking Apple's design obsession is about veneer, thinking it's about marketing, about fooling people, about lying. It's not, that might sell a few products, but it does not sell record quantities of products and achieve top customer satisfaction.
You'd think a person with full access to Steve Jobs and people close to him would be able to at the very least ask a few questions about what he saw that others could not, that lead to the successes of eg. the iPhone. Recall other industry big wigs laughing it off, from RIM to Nokia to Microsoft. The iPhone was a joke to them. What did Steve see that they did not? What was his thought process? What made Steve Jobs so different for him to be able to upset industry after industry? These are things I'd have wanted to know and I can't help feel a bit sad that now we will never know. Because Isaacson squandered the only chance we got.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoYou shouldn't really get upset at CEOs trash-talking their competitors. It's their job. In fact, it's a compliment. Trash talking something means it's registered as a threat. How many of them trash-talked OpenMoko? (Conversely, what did Jobs trash-talk? Kindle and Android mainly) Ironically enough Gruber is a big fan of taking offense at these entirely predictable comments from CEOs. He's basically trolling himself by taking obvious talking points seriously and trolling his massive readership by continually re-broadcasting these comments that are entirely without merit or interest.
- tjogin 15y agoI'm not even a little bit upset about CEOs trash talking each other. I'm sure Gruber doesn't care either. Not sure what lead you to believe that. Observing something happening and writing about that doesn't mean that it upsets you, or that you like it, or that you dislike it. It only means you find it interesting or telling in some way.
- jonhendry 15y ago"You shouldn't really get upset at CEOs trash-talking their competitors." There's nothing wrong with that in general, but if you have special, unique access to an important industry figure, who is not going to be around for very long because he's dying, and you're writing what ought to be the canonical biography of the man, you really shouldn't be wasting your time putting false competitor trash-talking on the page, and certainly not without adding "but in fact Gates is wrong about this" and similar qualifiers.