HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Loading...

Steve Jobs (original 2011; edition 2011)

by Walter Isaacson

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
9,215285852 (4.14)82
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues, the author has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. -- From publisher.… (more)
Member:gallogom
Title:Steve Jobs
Authors:Walter Isaacson
Info:Simon & Schuster (2011), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 656 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:None

Work Information

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011)

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 82 mentions

English (266)  Spanish (5)  French (3)  German (2)  Dutch (2)  Arabic (1)  Piratical (1)  Finnish (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (282)
Showing 1-5 of 266 (next | show all)
Please take this review with a grain of salt. Full disclosure: I make my living selling Apple products. Most of them are pretty darned good. Some of them I have Steve Jobs to thank for bringing them to market. So I cannot be entirely objective assessing the value of a biography of the man. More full disclosure: I read a lot of books. This is nowhere near the best biography I have ever read. On the other hand, it's a book I should read to understand a little more about my principal supplier: Apple Inc. The book tries to be fair assessing Jobs life, his personality, and his legacy. I think it tried a little too hard. I feel like some of the best stories about Jobs didn't make it into the book. So much for political correctness. He was a surly character....and smelly, it seems. There are some very funny stories in the book, among my favourite the reactions of his friend Larry Ellison and business competitor Bill Gates. There is also the takeover of Pixar by Disney. But the book strays into hagiography more than I would have liked. Also: this is only the second book I have read in electronic form, but the first in which i really appreciated reading on my iPad. There was the mention of a lot of old Jobs girlfriends (whose pictures I looked up on the Internet), businessmen and technologists. It was great being able to put the book on hold for a few seconds while I did further research on some of the people. It gave the stories more resonance. Early in the book I came upon a reference to Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, an influence on Jobs. It forced me to put the book on hold while I read a biography or two on Land. the are many parallels between the two men. Both pushed their employees very hard. Both, I think, believed in the primacy of the user experience. And both believed in really great product launches. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Excellent treatment of a fascinating character--genius, maddening, brutal.
( )
  fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |
Easily gets 5 stars despite being too long *and* too short. I recognize it was an impossible challenge to write this bio and the author did well enough for a person who who led such an interesting life and interacted with so many other people in momentous ways.

Others have already noted a fair amount of repetition so I won’t repeat other than to say it became too much too quickly. Even the coverage of his childhood seemed far too intrusive with details that we didn’t need to hear and ultimately had no relevance such as what people were wearing, eating, doing, on a particular day. This carried through the entire book.

Nonetheless, I appreciated the depth in other places but was surprised by omissions that I thought had to have been significant enough to cover such as: a better explanation of the technical improvements of Next and the decision to initially release the iPhone only on AT&T. Jobs surely must have had incredible fights over the latter issue - possibly even considering building his own cell network to fit the closed ethos.

I also found the closed vs open debates that the author slaps on everything to be rather superficial. Just because you couldn’t easily open the cases didn’t mean you couldn’t add 3rd party hardware and software. Another example: pentalobe screwdrivers were available days after the decision was made to use the screws. Tell me that wasn’t predictable? And Macs have always had their share of error conditions/messages that indicate a lack of thought. And I actually purchased a Mac clone during that rare period when Apple allowed clones. It worked great and I couldn’t afford the “real thing” so it was the only way Apple would have made money on me at the time.

I would have also liked to have heard more about the technical debates that had to have happened. To this day, I found click-to-focus a terrible idea and would think most people would be better off with focus-follows-mouse.

The choice of photos were awful. I didn’t need to see 20 photos of Jobs. I would liked to have seen photos of his products that were being described textually. So much of the text would have been better understood with a simple photo of what was being described.

Lastly, the book ended oddly. I didn’t need a description of Jobs’ last day but hey, no actual date of death, no description of how he thought to distribute his vast wealth? Lastly, the section marked “Coda” added nothing of value. The book would have ended better without it.
( )
  donwon | Jan 22, 2024 |


Extraordinary: a compelling portrait, in the person of Steve Jobs, of the often messy properties of the compound we call genius.
  Mark_Feltskog | Dec 23, 2023 |
Well, after a very enjoyable, promising first book, this is terrible.
Ridiculous turns, cheap romance, cutting through major happenings with no explanation or details. It was a waste of time, I've expected much, much more :( ( )
  bert42 | Nov 2, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 266 (next | show all)
Steve Jobs dreamed of a legacy that awed people. He wanted to be in the pantheon of great product innovators, indeed surpassing Edwin Land and even his early icons William Hewitt and David Packard. But, Jobs created more than great products. Just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And, he created two of the best of his era: Apple and Pixar.
 
Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK. It is not Isaacson’s fault that Jobs from early on had a “admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment,” as Isaacson describes it, or that Jobs abandoned friends, thought almost everyone else was a shithead, showed little interest in his daughters, and made life generally miserable for anyone who had to provide a good or service to him. But it is Isaacson’s fault that the biography is so narrowly focused on one moral theme. The reader is left to judge, with plenty of evidence both ways—and a clear idea of where Isaacson’s sympathies lie—whether Jobs deserves the Artist’s Exemption.
added by Shortride | editn+1, Gary Sernovitz (Dec 20, 2011)
 
As Walter Isaacson says in this incisive biography, Jobs behaved like a Nietzschean superman, using his will – transmitted through an unblinking stare – as a remote-control device that compelled others to do his bidding.
added by SqueakyChu | editThe Guardian, Peter Conrad (Oct 30, 2011)
 
While Jobs was a vigorous competitor, he also came to view himself as an elder statesman with a responsibility for giving advice to Google’s Page, Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other emerging technology executives, according to “Steve Jobs,” an authorized biography by Walter Isaacson and published by CBS Corp. (CBS)’s Simon & Schuster. It goes on sale Oct. 24.
added by Serviette | editBloomberg, Adam Satariano (Oct 22, 2011)
 
Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.”
added by LiteraryFiction | editNew York Times, Janet Maslin (pay site) (Oct 21, 2011)
 

» Add other authors (47 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Walter Isaacsonprimary authorall editionscalculated
Baker, DylanNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Defert, DominiqueTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Delporte, CaroleTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gittinger, AntoinetteTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Grasmück, OliverTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mallett, DagmarTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Martin, ElfiTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Parés Sellarès, NúriaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Stumpf, AndreaÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Werbeck, GabrieleTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. -- Apple's "Think Different" commercial, 1997
Dedication
First words
(Introduction - How This Book Came to Be) In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs.
When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues, the author has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. -- From publisher.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
À partir d'une quarantaine d'interviews exclusives et de multiples rencontres avec sa famille , ses proches , ses collaborateurs , ses amis comme ses adversaires , l'auteur a constitué d'une façon magistrale et passionnée la vie , l'œuvre et la pensée d'un des plus grands innovateurs et visionnaires de notre époque .

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
Haiku summary
Steven P. Jobs/Innovative, genius mind/Rough around the edge(njvroom)

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (4.14)
0.5 1
1 16
1.5
2 49
2.5 7
3 290
3.5 43
4 786
4.5 79
5 703

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

Recorded Books

An edition of this book was published by Recorded Books.

» Publisher information page

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,187,874 books! | Top bar: Always visible