Who Was Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster, 630 pp
by Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster, 630 pp
When Isaacson asked Jobs why he wanted him to be the one to write his authorized biography, Jobs told him it was because he was “good at getting people to talk.” Isaacson, who had been both the editor of Time magazine and the head of CNN, professed to be pleasantly surprised, maybe because two of his earlier, well-received, popular biographies were of men who could only speak from the grave: Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. More likely, Jobs, who considered himself special, sought out Isaacson because he saw himself on par with Franklin and Einstein. By the time he was finished with the book, Isaacson seemed to think so as well.
“So was Mr. Jobs smart?” Isaacson wrote in a coda to the book, published in The New York Times days after it had come out. “Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius.”
While the whole “who’s a genius” debate is, in general, fraught and unwinnable, since genius itself is always going to be ill-defined, in the case of Steve Jobs it is even more fraught and even more unwinnable. In part, this is because the tech world, where most of us reside simply by owning cell phones and using computers, is not unlike the sports world or the political world: it likes a good rivalry. If, years ago, it was Microsoft versus Apple, these days it’s Apple versus Android, with supporters of one platform calling supporters of the other platform names (“fanboys” is a popular slur) and disparaging their intelligence, among other things. Call Steve Jobs a genius and you’ll hear (loudly) from Apple detractors. Question his genius, and you’ll be roundly attacked by his claque. While there is something endearing about the passions stirred, they suggest the limitations of writing a book about a contemporary figure and making claims for his place among the great men and women in history. Even though Isaacson has written what appears to be a scrupulously fair chronicle of Jobs’s work life, he is in no better position than any of us to know where, in the annals of innovation, that life will end up.
The other reason nominating Jobs to genius status is complicated has to do with the collaborative nature of corporate invention and the muddiness of technological authorship. Jobs did not invent the personal computer—personal computers predate the Apple I, which he did not in any case design. He didn’t invent the graphical interface—the icons we click on when we’re using our computers, for example—that came from engineers at Xerox. He didn’t invent computer animation—he bought into a company that, almost as an afterthought, housed the most creative digital animation pioneers in the world. He didn’t invent the cell phone, or even the smart phone; the first ones in circulation came from IBM and then Nokia. He didn’t invent tablet computers; Alan Kay designed the Dynabook in the 1960s. He didn’t invent the portable MP3 music device; the Listen Up Player won the innovations award at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show, four years before Jobs introduced the iPod...
