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Biographer: Why Jobs finally opened up
Steve Jobs
Before his death, Steve Jobs told his chosen biographer that he wanted to leave a documentary record so that his children would have a better understanding of their larger-than-life father.
"I wanted my kids to know me," Jobs told Walter Isaacson, who is the author of an authorized biography of Apple's co-founder, titled "Steve Jobs."
Isaacson recounted his time interviewing Jobs in an essay published on Time's website. In particular, he noted their final conversation when he asked this very private man why he agreed to reveal so much in a book?
"I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did," Jobs answered, referring to his four children.
The world pays homage to Steve Jobs
Meanwhile, pre-orders of the biography pushed the book high on best-seller lists within hours of Apple's announcement of Jobs' death. And publisher Simon & Schuster announced Thursday that the release date has been moved up from Nov. 21 to Oct. 24. By today, Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" was No. 1 on Amazon.com and No. 3 on Barnes & Noble.com. Fittingly, the book also tops Apple's own list: the iTunes books best-seller list.
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Walter Isaacson
/ APWhen Jobs asked him to write his life story, Isaacson passed on the request.
"Not now," he wrote. "Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire."
"But I later realized that he had called me just before he was going to be operated on for cancer for the first time. As I watched him battle that disease, with an awesome intensity combined with an astonishing emotional romanticism, I came to find him deeply compelling, and I realized how much his personality was ingrained in the products he created. His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business, so I decided to try to write his tale as a case study in creativity."
Isaacson offered more details about Jobs' obsessive pursuit of aesthetically pleasing designs - a quest some described as perfectionism. For Jobs, though, it wasn't a question of being a control freak; rather, he said Apple was trying to create the best user experience for customers who routinely put up with kludgy hardware and software.
"They're busy doing whatever they do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded. They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices," he's quoted saying.
Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56.
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Having kids... i wanted them to have discipline, got them to church, they because 'servers' at Mass, watched and cheered most of their growing up 'games' of softball, baseball and cross country including track.
in college visited them plenty... support them today, built my oldest daughter (divorced) a 'deck' on her house, just helped my youngest daughter in dealing with a car salesman on her first car last night. Do a lot of stuff with my son, 'road trips' to car meets, race for fun at the local drag strip and Nelson Ledges Road course... even gone golfing though i hate it.
MESSAGE: DO STUFF WITH YOUR KIDS.. but don't spoil them too much.
What little I have read has NOT impressed me with JOBS... cancer or not, was he much better than a minority father from ...Detriot ghetto? for example.
Summary... inexcusable, wanted his kids to know him.. try being there when then needed
If it took 50 interviews from Isaacson to get an answer to that question then the biography is going to stink to high heaven. That would have been the most natural first question asked.
I think I'll wait until the UNAUTHORIZED biography comes out. There isn't any way to really understand a man until you understand both his flaws and his strengths. Authorized biographers never do more than a cursory look at the flaws because they don't want to tee off the subject, or the subject's family. And Jobs had flaws, from screwing up the launch of MacOS by allowing Microsoft a preview look (which resulted in a crash program to develop Windows) to getting fired from the Apple board the first time, to stealing the work of subordinates and passing it off as his own, which he was famous for doing at Apple in the latter years.
Jobs may have been a great man but was he a good man?
One thing I will say about Bill Gates is that while I hated what he did to the computer industry, and by all accounts when he was at Microsoft he was as personally nasty as Jobs was reputed to be, Bill is at least now, attempting to atone for his former sins by handing out his ill-gotten gains through his foundation. There is a Bill and Melinda Gates foundation out there but no Steve and Laurene Jobs foundation - and the best that anyone could come up with was that "they were thinking about these things" (that's a quote from Bono, lead singer of U2) Gates also signed the Giving Pledge and Jobs refused.
Developing a lot of cool products for a profit-making company is not philanthropy.