I was a big fan of Apple and it’s products and Steve Jobs, prior to reading this book. While my awe for the company and its products has gone up a notch, my perspective on Steve Jobs has changed significantly. Walter Isaacson beautifully traverses through the life of the greatest businessman of our times, and as we go along his journey from being an adopted son, to a college dropout experimenting with LSD and Zen culture, to founding Apple with the “other” Steve, being kicked out, starting NeXT, Pixar, and then returning for a second stint at Apple which transformed it into the world’s most valuable and creative company, we learn about jobs innate sense of design, his obsession to have total end to end contorl on all of his products, his vision, and the pleasure he takes from developing products which are at the interestion of art and technology.

Jobs’s relationship with Bill Gates is a recurring theme throughout the book, and one that I enjoyed the most. It was fascinating to learn how the two greatest pioneers of technology shaped the course of computers, software and hardware for decades to come, and how they were successful in their own approaches. The great debate of “open vs closed” systems, was in essence Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates.

There is also the highly temperamental, highly selfish, and highly arrogant nature of Jobs, which has been put into context by Walter Isaacson. He does not care about his friends, claims other’s idea’s as his, and makes unfair judgement on everyone. While that diminished my respect for the man, it shows how no one’s perfect and also what it takes to build a company which would stand the test of time, and how brutal and harsh life can be. Jobs never lets emotions stand in his way, he, in fact, goes the opposite way, by hurting people close to him in the most damaging way one can fathom, in order to make them realize their potential. His “reality distortion field”, is one which is emphasized throughout, and while it’s hard to believe it worked, the results proved otherwise.

Jobs is also not a model father, husband, son or brother, but very few people close to him, hated him for what he was. He was loved and respected by his family and colleagues, who knew how to stand up to his binary view of the world, and at the same time not alienate themselves.

As one reads about his thoughts as he approached his last days, as to what he wanted his legacy to be - that of building a company which stood the test of time,to make magical products resulting out of integrated hardware and software, to prioritize on product development driving profits rather than vice versa and contributing to the never-ending legacy of Silicon Valley, we realize he has achieved exactly that, in his relatively short lifespan.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is a must read for anyone interested in technology, and interested in learning how the industry has become what it has today. It shows us what it takes to build a company like Apple, and is an honest and untarnished summary of the man who revolutionized the computer, music and mobile phone industries.

Originally published here.