Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 25.10.11

I have four biographies - all unofficial - of Steve Jobs and another seven about Apple or Silicon Valley  including Robert X. Cringely's: Accidental Empires (1992) & the even better book: Insanely Great by Stephen Levy (1994). So I am pretty familiar with the territory. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding his sad death two weeks ago, I was eagerly awaiting Walter Isaacson's tome. It arrived via Amazon and I haven't been disappointed. IN fact, I've hardly put it down.

Of course, the difficult bit for Jobs was that he was adopted and his lovely new parents, Paul and Clara, simply dotted on him. He was fortunate that his Dad enjoyed tinkering and had some clever instincts about total design. The rest as we know is history. Has there been another resurrection of a company at any time which has been as successful as Apple? I doubt it. In the end Bill Gates bought DOS for $50k and put a front end on it and called it MSDos. Jobs also wasn't adverse to using other people's ideas and inventions especially the mouse but he knew how to make these "borrows" into must-have consumer goods. That was his brilliance: he had an absolute commitment to design and latterly was fortunate to have found and employed Jonny Ive, a British born designer.

Go read.