I think “Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson" was till date, just the second book (first was India After Gandhi) for which I have waited for more than a couple of months to get my hands on, partly because of it being priced a bit higher (At Rs.799 and cheaper paper-back edition is yet to be released) and also because of me being lazy to get a pirated or a used book. But luckily my current organization has a library, wherein we can suggest some good books(non-fiction) and I was lucky on a couple of occasions, wherein they made a couple of my suggestions available in the library(“Straight from the gut” -Jack Welch being the other).
I have always been fascinated about the autobiographies of successful people because we can learn a lot from such books (Straight from the Gut, Made in Japan, An Autobiography by Lee Iococa, iWoz being others).
I always admired Steve Jobs and products of Apple (they both are almost synonymous and incomplete without each other), they always have a great design and also make a style statement. When I was in college I always wanted to have an iPod (but I couldn't afford it then) and was able to have it after I started working (was gifted by one of my best friends), "Designed by Apple" was first thing that struck me the most and that was the first time I have seen such a statement for a product and after reading the book I came to know how obsessed Steve was with design.
This is an amazing book I would like to recommend and I’m pretty sure it will not disappoint you.This book is very well written paying a lot of detail into each and every aspect of Jobs life, I felt as if I was watching a movie, I could imagine almost every character while reading it. It starts with Jobs early days about his family, education and how Imogene Hill (teacher) used to bribe him by handing him a math puzzle book so as to keep him engaged. How Apple was staying in his father's Garage with other Steve (Steve Woznaik) and how the Apple-I was born as the first ever desktop computer in the world. The success of Apple-II. The failure with Lisa and how he got Sculley (from Pepsi) and the famous question that he asked Sculley-"Do you want to spend rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" , which Sculley couldn’t turn it down in their honeymoon and how Jobs was kicked out the company(which he co-founded).
His struggle at Next and success with Pixar and Steve's re-entry to Apple, when it was almost at the brink of a bankruptcy. The iMac, Apple Stores, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, iPad, iPad-2 and iCloud. It also tells how Steve was so adamant about getting what he wanted both in terms of design and engineering.
His relation with Bill Gates and how they both competed with each other, with Windows licensing its software and Apple tried to build both Software and Hardware and not licensing Mac, Windows winning in the case of computers but Apple came back strongly with iPod, iPhone, iPad and at the end beating Windows in terms of revenues.
The most painful part of this book was Steve's struggle with Cancer and at last how he succumbed.
I was so into the character of Jobs,that when I saw a couple of pages not properly cut(since it was a new book),I suddenly started thinking if Jobs was behind the manufacturing of the book he would have rejected it the person who worked on it would have been fired.
Lastly, the author mentions that the reason behind writing Steve Jobs biography was because Jobs wanted his children to know him and he felt that he wasn't there for them and wanted them to know why and understand what he did.
I would like to end this on a note that Steve Jobs is the only person in the history who has revolutionized six industries Personal Computers, Animated Movies, Music, Phones, Computing and Digital Publishing. As said by Leaonardo Da Vinci “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, became the defining percept for Job’s design philosophy and for Apple.
