An Abandoned Apple
By Harish Bijoor
When Steve Jobs first landed at my desk (Please note: the book at hand
has just no title. It is called Steve
Jobs by Walter Isaacson), I fell in love with the jacket design. Pure and
pristine ‘Apple white’ background with a huge mug shot of Steve Jobs in stylish
contemplation, ready for the camera.
‘Apple white’? Remember, if God
defined the apple to be red, Steve Jobs did it differently. If you think of an
Apple today, the color you think of is white! Not red! Thanks to Steve Jobs!
Back to the jacket then. The
jacket design was as clean and clear as Steve Jobs would have wanted it to be.
Impractical AS Jobs himself: yes. The jacket will soil with the continued long handling it will
require to read this 571 page tome. But clean. And single-mindedly focused on
Steve Jobs. The guy behind it all.
Who hasn’t heard of Steve Jobs by
now? My driver says he knows the guy. My cousin’s mother-in-law says she saw
him on television the day he died. Many know Mr. Jobs only after his death, but
the fact is that the man is known by all. Steve Jobs, in some way or the other,
touched every life there was to touch, either with his products, or with the envy
or glee, for what he has done to the world of friendly technology that touches
lives and makes them richer for it.
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the
Aspen Institute does a great bit of elaborately researched justice to the
persona of Steve Jobs. This is true at least of those parts of the persona
Steve Jobs chose to part with for public consumption. This is of course not to
say that Isaacson has not done justice through an elaborate process of work and
interview, and it is equally not to say that Isaacson tells us only what is
palatable to the persona of Jobs. Isaacson does a lot, but as I discovered on
going through this massive tome, no one book can do justice to the multiple
persona of Steve Jobs. There are
pieces of Steve Jobs painstakingly put together, but somehow the jig-saw that
is Jobs is not complete. The
pieces are all there, but there is something missing for sure.
The small little pieces put
together painstakingly in this book tell us many things about this guy who revolutionized
several spaces. Personal computers, animated movies, music phones, tablet
computing and digital publishing to name a few. The 140 interviews that went to
make this book happen just as Steve Jobs breathed his last, bring to us a guy
who is not all that perfect as all of us would want to believe. Steve Jobs got
his girlfriend pregnant when he was 23, and botched it all up in terms of how
he handled it . Steve jobs was greedy all the time and there are live accusations
from all around that some of the best ideas he commercialized were stolen from
someone else. Either stolen outright, or paid just too little for what was delivered.
The guy was obsessive about quality and crazy as a coot as well, when it came
to exciting new ideas that even told him that he need not have to bathe for
days if were to be on a full fruit diet. Never mind the stink he created all around
his personal living and working space. He followed it diligently, to the
chagrin and smelly-discomfort of all around.
Steve Jobs was therefore as
flawed as they come, “self-centered” as most call him, mercurial as ever,
cranky and tough always, and more. Never mind. He was a genius. And that made
up for it all!
Walter Isaacson does justice not
only to Steve Jobs in this big white book of Jobs, but gives us some very
special glimpses of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Mike Scott as
well. All persons who dared to cross the path of Steve Jobs at some point of time
or the other. With some he got his way, and with others such as Bill Gates, he
fought his way, but didn’t quite get there.
The book has an India-twist to it
as well, as it describes this avid
Beatles’ fan’s experiences with India and his brief but truncated spiritual
journey with Neem Karoli Baba( a pronounced and adopted Guru of the hippie movement of the sixties), who
he just does not get to meet as he is dead by the time he arrives. Steve Jobs
wanted to get onto this quest of spirituality as he seems to have had a professed hole in his persona, which
he was trying to fill. India was a journey in that quest. India was meant to be
the filler.
In many ways, as one reads
through Walter Isaacson’s brilliantly laid out prose, one cannot but help feel
for a fact that the one constant theme in Jobs’ life was the theme of
abandonment. Something that seemed to have come by as a fact of his abandonment
in early life. Having led the life of an adopted kid, Jobs forever juggled with
the thought of being left aside from it all. As someone abandoned. As someone
not wanted. In many ways, this is one theme Jobs turned turtle. The desire was
clear. Steve Jobs was to be one of the best names there was in the business of
touching people’s lives through technology. He wanted it. He got it. And how!
This is a
nice book to rad. A nice book to keep on your book-shelf as well. It looks
good. It reads good. Not as good as what Steve jobs himself wrote though. And I
am referring to his moving Stanford commencement address in 2005. Read this
book and then read that. You get a better glimpse of the man, his passion, and
indeed his mercurial madness.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Twitter.com @harishbijoor
Nicely written review!
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