The Right Guy for the Wrong Job

The latest episodes of Hypercritical and The Talk Show talk about the official Steve Jobs biography, giving it serious criticism. On Hypercritical, John Siracusa calls him the wrong guy - because he had no interest in technology, and that the book should have both been more accurate and also have made a better effort to educate the reader about the ins and outs of the things that Apple and NeXT produced, which contributed to Jobs’s success.

On The Talk Show, John Gruber raises a good point that maybe Jobs knew all along that Walter Isaacson would not focus on technical details. The idea is that Jobs gave him complete access to his life and the people at Apple, while knowing that he wouldn’t dive very far into the details of Apple’s technology because of Isaacson’s disinterest.

That could well be true, but I think there is another level to that: perhaps the book’s specific purpose was not the purpose that Siracusa believes it was. The context that it seems to me Siracusa is operating under, based on an earlier segment in the Hypercritical episode, is that the book was written to teach why Steve Jobs is important. In that context, getting details related to his success is vitally important. What if the book’s purpose, however, was not to say why he was important, but to tell the reader what kind of person he was? If so, then the book should focus and expand on, more than anything, the details that affected his life, and not the world around him.

Siracusa stated, as an example of the book’s deficiencies, the lack of detail that Isaacson wrote about Apple’s involvement with ARM chips. There was a larger story there that Isaacson glossed over, about Apple’s early involvement with ARM, it’s relationship to the Newton, and the reasons Apple considered it to be important. Siracusa argues that Isaacson should have researched into it more, teaching the reader about the significance behind the ARM architecture and its relationship with Apple.

However, Jobs gave this reason for the book’s existence: “I want my kids to know me.” I don’t think that means that he wanted his kids to know his accomplishments, but rather that he wanted his kids - and readers - to know what made up his personality, his experiences, and his relationships. By including those details about ARM, Isaacson could have underscored Apple’s importance to today’s mobile architectures.

As far as its importance to Job’s life, however, ARM was a mere implementation detail. ARM was merely a part used in his creations; it wasn’t even a creation that he was involved in. There may have been things that he did later on that affected it, including the purchase of PA Semi that occurred before the introduction of Apple’s A4 & A5 processors, but at best it was a small example of his forward thinking, and at worst there was no direct relationship with Jobs at all. If this had been a book about his success first and foremost, then it would deserve more attention, but such stories wouldn’t further the goal of defining Steve Jobs as a person.

Contrast this with the Sculley-era Apple sections, which were much more detailed. Siracusa criticized this, saying that Isaacson “spent so much time talking about the company, and the politics of the company, and the industry, that Jobs was barely even featured”. Most of these events, however, if not all of them, would culminate in the wrenching events that terminated Jobs’s first time at Apple. That would have to rank highly in the list of events that defined the man, and those are not things that could be glossed over in a book about him.

Siracusa was dead-on with many of his criticisms, particularly with regards to inaccuracies and specious statements that Isaacson wrote. The choices of what to cover and what not to cover, though, seem more purposefully written than it may seem. I don’t think it’s the book that most of us wanted to read, but I wouldn’t be quick to claim that Jobs would have said he was the wrong guy in hindsight.

Update: After getting a helpful tidbit of information, it’s fairly clear that Jobs’s stated reason for the book that I quoted isn’t the right statement to draw conclusions from. So, I read Isaacson’s words from the introduction. He states that in addition to being a book about “the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur”, he also writes “this is also, I hope, a book about innovation”. On the second point, Siracusa’s arguments have much more merit, in that the details of how innovative technologies are created are critical to understanding how the innovation occurred.

Of course, those statements might have been written after the fact as well, however. In that case, we can only guess as to what his objectives really were as he wrote it.