So I’ve just finished reading this…

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography eBook: Walter Isaacson: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store.

Before the Talk Show, Gruber and Benjamin pollute my memory, here are my thoughts…

• I always thought that he got a bad press. Boy was I wrong. He comes over as a bigger arsehole in the book. It’s not a surprise, I met him for 10 seconds when he was selling NeXT machines in Earls Court in the early nineties. He was condescending and managed to kill my self-image in about 3 seconds. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one.
• He was lucky in so many ways. When he was born, where he was raised and that he was able to create a company very young and therefore never really had to accept someone telling him what to do. Imagine if he’d been raised in the North East of the US, France or South Africa, with that personality he’d probably been the village bum. at least he’d have been considered as mentally ill.
• Don’t play with your diet. I’ve often wanted to move to high fruit and veg diet but never done it. This book is a thousand reasons not to. I once worked with a guy who when on a diet was impossible to work with because of the anger. Jobs often comes over as a guy in need of a good meal.
• Everyone seems to think that the iPhone presentation was his best. My vote is the the G5 launch. Watch as he plays the PC spec game, the demos etc. but most of all watch him show the internals of the air flow in the box. Part 2 is the best bit…
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve3O6VtBmdc&feature=related
• In all of this, as a father of two girls, I felt sorry for his two daughters. I hope that they carry less demons than their father but I’d be surprised.
• Overall the book is slightly disappointing. It falls into the trap that the man is the company and vice versa. His political views arrive as a surprise at the end and we know what he liked in music and products but little else. He spent a year designing a jet but we don’t get a picture, and the last two years of his life on a yacht that is described in two lines.