Yet Another Steve Jobs Biography Book Review

First of all, I am not a hero-worshipper. Never have been. Never will be. Second, I am not an Apple fanboy. Never have been. Not sure, if I can say, "Never will be!" But, over the years, having worked in technology, having used Apple products and having closely followed product launches (Apple product launches, GoogleIO keynotes and sessions, Kindle announcements, CES etc.), I gradually began to have special regard for Steve Jobs and the products that he championed, even though I hated some of the Apple approaches to dumb down user interface and technology. However, after reading the biography, I have a new found respect for Steve Jobs - his creative talents, his visionary mind, his attention to detail and also the unsung heros at Apple behind those amazing products that they make. I think I have a better understanding of how and why they did the things the "Steve Jobs way."


Being a techie, I choose to judge only things that have "computer science" associated to them and hence I have chosen to neither judge nor comment on any of the personal, emotional or inter-personal aspects (relationships with family, friends, monetary dealings with Wozniack and the others etc.) of Steve. I believe that you have to be one of the parties really involved with the situation to be able to make a judgement and even then, I think, without actually peeking inside ones head and putting all the situational elements (circumstances, past history, personal biases etc.) together, it is really hard to judge somebody, unless you are a psychotherapist. One can argue that everything about him and his accomplishments finally boils down to his personality but since my degree is in computers and not human psychology, I would like to only address things that I can understand and glean from the book.


Some of the thoughts here may not have been explicitly mentioned in the book but may be the way I inferred or interpreted the various scenarios. At times, to drive the point I have added my own 2 cents, since this is what I learnt from the book rather than merely regurgitating sections from the book.

1. Be persuasive.
2. Believe in yourself. Never give up. Be obsessive.
3. Work with and around people who share your vision. Without this, it will seem like sitting in a car with each of its wheels going in a direction that it feels like.
4. Build an "A team". "A team" members can only with "A team" members and working with "C team" members is a huge drag on productivity and employee morale. Picture the car engine of a high performance race car - every piece in it is for a reason and every piece is giving its 100% and was hand picked to produce that level of overall performance. Even as small a thing as a loose nut can bring down that race car.
5. Never do a sloppy job. Never. Not even if nobody is looking. Even if this is an internal tool, even if this is for personal use. Redo it how many ever times it takes to get it right. Visualize everything you do as a work of art that somebody is going to look at.
6. Make technology less scary and more human. Nobody needs a user manual to operate most functions of a refrigerator or a washing machine. Why should technology be any different?
7. If you build a classy product with the end user in mind they will buy it. Don't think about profits. Think only about the product and the end user. Profits will follow.
8. Everybody judges a book by its cover. Even though we know not to do it and we are taught in school not to do it, everybody does it. Admit it. You do it at the grocery store - you buy only products that are packaged in an appealing manner. In fact, grocery stores sell you stuff that you don't need, merely by placing it in an appealing manner. It is very essential to make a great impression. Apple products, starting from the Apple store, to the buying experience there, to the packaging of the product,  to the feeling when you hold the product, to the experience when you use the product all culminate to give you the "Apple Experience".
9. Iterate on your product. Do it multiple times. But do it internally. Don't make your end users your beta testers. Treat products like other consumer electronic devices. Imagine how it would be if your washing machine was released in beta and you would have to work through its water leaks, poor washing capabilities, keep taking upgrades hoping that the next release would give you all the features and finally start working perfectly as advertised? Using the washing machine should not entail having to read through a mass of documents or having to search the web for specific problems or having to ask questions on news groups on how to perform its basic operations.
10. Anybody can construct a building but not everybody can build the Taj Mahal. When you build something, make it grand. Make it a work of art. Make it something that people will appreciate and remember.
11. Focus on a few things. Have laser focus. Do a few things and do them well.
12. Rally your troops by being hands on. Unlike leaders of today, who sit in the luxury of their office and send orders to the poor soldiers who fight in the front, be like the kings of historic times - fight the battle, shoulder to shoulder. Motivate your team. Push them to show them that they can excel.
13. Don't build products like an assembly line - each group (chassis, hardware and software) building their piece in isolation and throwing it over the wall once they are done and the next team picking it up and repeating the same process. Rather than that, build it as one cohesive piece. Once built, it will work like that too. Again, analogy with the automobile. The entire car is envisioned as one piece - otherwise you might land up with a strange car having the chassis of a boat, the wheels of a tractor and a joystick instead of a steering.
14. Don't build things that merely replicate functionality that is already out there. Leapfrog your competition by building something orders of magnitude better.
15. Don't compromise on your key beliefs. Even if it will allow you to get an initial not-so-fully-baked version of your product out sooner. Not even if it will allow you to get a foot in the door first. Compromise is a slippery slope.

When I started writing this blog post, I chose not to comment on personality. However, it is hard for me to resist the opportunity. And since this is my blog, I am going to do it anyway. I think Steve was a genius, one of a kind, passionate, "artistic engineer", who strived to build technology that was more human and resembled art rather than merely the embodiment of product features from a marketing list that were slapped together on a piece of hardware. Most successful engineers (and artists) have made one or two brilliant products but he was able to make so many of them. He was a man way ahead of his times - a visionary. Of course, he was not perfect, especially when it came to inter-personal relationships and he may have burnt a lot of bridges by his abrasive personality. But, like I said in the beginning of the blog, I choose to only absorb the aspects that relate to his geeky part and possibly learn from the mistakes of his inter-personal relationships. I think his son, Reed Jobs, sums it up really well in the book:


"... was not a cold profit-seeking businessman but was motivated by a love of what he did and a pride in the products that he was making"


If you survived reading this post all the way up to this point, you are probably thinking that I am actually a hero-worshipper and an Apple fanboy! It is hard for me to convince you otherwise and all that I can tell you is that if you haven't read the book please do so. I always remember what Dr. Mike Bailey, former Professor of Computer Graphics at UCSD, once said that dramatically changed my thinking. Bill Gates was going to give a talk at UCSD and I was in my "Microsoft is Evil" frame of mind and did not want to attend the talk, which happened to be at the same time slot as the computer graphics class. Dr. Bailey, not only canceled his class but also encouraged us to attend the talk and told us that, weather we liked it or not, Bill Gates was certainly a man who had largely influenced the digital revolution and as computer scientists it was essential for us to have an open mind and listen to what he had to say. If you are curious, yes, I stood in line for more than an hour and listened to Bill Gates but I was really underwhelmed by the contents of his talk and his passion. But that is another story ...

Steve Jobs - My Five Stages of Grief

Although it was not a secret that Steve Jobs was unwell, it came as a big shock to me when I heard the news of Steve's passing from a colleague at work. I felt like wind got knocked out of me and I was finding it really hard to believe the story. I was hoping it was one of the bad viral "jokes" that some people like to play on the internet. However, visiting the Apple website, confirmed the news and his photo there looking straight into you, served as an even harder blow to my already sad state of mind. As I drove home from work, I tried hard to distract my thoughts by trying to listen to some podcasts but it was really difficult to do take the news out of my thoughts. Various YouTube videos of his keynotes, his inspirational keynote at Stanford and the iconic devices that he launched kept running in my mind.

Once I got home, I was hoping that the routine of taking care of my 3 month old daughter and my 3 year old son would engulf my thought process and I would not have to deal with the grief at that time. On the contrary, as I sat there in the couch, I could not control my urge to browse the incoming stream on Facebook, Google+ and the posts on various websites. However, some of the posts that I saw made me angry such as posts from my friend "iSad" or a response to that "i2". I somehow felt these posts were mocking the iconic figure and the great products that he launched. Then I saw Jeff Jarvis's post on Google+ that said "iGratitude" and this somehow made me angrier and I stopped reading the posts. Taking care of the kids help me put the loss to the background and the rest of the evening I tried hard to not think about it. What I failed to realize was that everybody was going through the grieving process just like me but in different ways and were in its different stages.

I woke up really early next morning to take care of the crying infant but after feeding and burping her and putting her back to sleep, I could not get sleep myself and as any geek would do, I fired up my MacBook and resumed reading posts about the tragedy. There were so many posts by people I follow on G+ and reading each of them helped some of the healing process but I was on some sort of an emotional roller coaster. Some posts made me feel inspired, thinking about how great a person Steve was, while other posts made me sad thinking of how big a loss it was to technology, his family and to society at large. Reading through his Wikipedia entry, his lifestyle, his past, his career and his humble beginnings, about him sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple filled me with a mix of emotions.

I was never an Apple fanboy. On the contrary, I own and use an Android phone - DroidX and do not own an iPhone. In fact, way back in 2006, when I completed my Masters thesis, I decided to buy an MP3 player and although iPod's were the rage and style at that time, I chose to buy the Creative Zen as it was supposed to have superior specifications - better display resolution, bigger hard drive, FM tuner and the ability to record audio. However, as I started to use the device, it became abundantly clear why people chose the iPod over the other mass of MP3 players. It was a real pain in the rear to locate podcasts or other paid content on the web using its software and sync to the device. Sure enough, I stopped using the device in a couple of months but I chose to not buy any Apple device because it was "closed" and vertically integrated. A couple of years later, in order to familiarize myself with the iOS platform, I chose to buy a MacBook and over time, I started to see why people flocked in such large numbers to buy the latest devices that Steve convinced you that you really needed it. It was not about intentionally building "closed" systems but rather taking ownership and responsibility of all elements that go into building a system and delivering a product and consumer experience where the end user was more than satisfied and did not have to go through the maze of finding out who to contact in case there were issues - the hardware manufacturer, the OS vendor, the software vendor who wrote the app for managing the device or the clueless sales guy who was just driven by commission. Anybody who owns an Apple product or has visited an Apple store knows exactly what I mean.

Personally, I was very disappointed with the announcements in the Apple keynote the previous day with the iPhone 4S announcements. It seemed like Steve's absence from the keynote had somehow made it less interesting. Deep inside, live everybody else, I was hoping that Steve would show up at some point in the keynote and announce something that would shake up some aspect of our lives. As I mulled over the announcements at the keynote, Steve's loss and read through the huge amount of posts and discussions about him, it became abundantly clear that he had made such a huge impact on our lives, weather we liked it or not, weather you were an Apple fanboy or not. He was able to raise the bar of technology, smartphones and mobile computing to such high levels in such a short time. What he accomplished was so huge, so dramatic and so fundamentally game changing, it was something that most tech savvy CEOs would not be able to accomplish even if they all put their minds together and took double the amount of time.

Looking at the timeline of the key things he launched (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and iOS), it seemed like he had a huge burst of energy after he realized how short his stay was going to be. Most people in this situation would choose to do things that would give themselves and their near-and-dear ones happiness but this man chose to spend it in building revolutionary devices that would change the world. Sure, there were PDAs, smartphones and tablet computers with touch interfaces before the iPhone but his obsession to detail and with only the consumer and their experience in mind he was able to bring this to the masses. Consumers could now use a device that, although "closed", provided them with great features and functionality and made them want more. My 3 year old is so accustomed to the natural touch interface that he occasionally touches the movie icons on the TV assuming it to also have the same interface. Most iPhone/iPad users are not technically savvy but they now have access to technology and functionality that was only used by geeks. His tough years at college, his strange career struggles (being pushed out of a company that you founded), his battles with cancer, his simplistic lifestyle and his passion and obsession with technology, all showcase the multiple facets of this great person.

Steve Jobs, you have changed the world for generations to come. You will always serve as an inspiration, a constant motivator, to push us to raise the bar of technology, to excel at whatever we do and do it with passion. May your soul rest in peace. My deep condolences to your family and relatives. You will always be remembered.