His Steveness: the flip side
When I was a kid I was brought up to believe that one should never speak ill of the dead, at least in the immediate aftermath of their demise. I made an exception for Charlie Haughey, but then so did many others. In the last two days we’ve seen an avalanche of affectionate, admiring stuff about Steve Jobs, and most of it has — understandably — tended to gloss over the fact that no omelette was ever made without breaking eggs, and no great corporate height has ever been scaled without cracking some heads.
So it’s been interesting to see two more detached assessments of Jobs emerge. The first, by John Cassidy in the New Yorker, takes issue with the idea that jobs was an ‘artist’. If he was, he writes,
he was a great artist only in the sense that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol are great artists: talented jackdaws who took other people’s half-baked innovations and converted them into beautifully made products with mass appeal. Apple didn’t build the first desktop computer based on a microprocessor: the Micral N and the MITS Altair predated the landmark Apple II. Steve Jobs didn’t create the mouse, either: he lifted it from a version he saw at the Xerox Parc research center in Palo Alto. George Lucas, and not Jobs, created Pixar. The Nomad Jukebox, a digital music player made by a company from Singapore, predated the iPod.
Jobs’s real genius was seeing, before practically anybody else, that the computer industry was melding with the consumer-goods industry, and that success would go to products that were useful and well designed, but also nice to look at and cleverly branded. He took genuine innovations and improved upon them. The Apple Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first PC that didn’t look like it belonged in the basement of the campus science center surrounded by math books and used pizza boxes. The iBook used bright colors to make laptops look cool. The iPod, unlike the Nomad, was sleek and light enough to carry around in your pocket. In a 1996 PBS documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds,” Jobs himself said, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Unlike Thomas Edison, to whom he has been compared, Jobs wasn’t really an inventor. In fact, by the standards of Silicon Valley, he wasn’t really a techie at all all.
Cassidy thinks that jobs is best categorised as a “hippie capitalist”.
Gawker, as you might expect, has few scruples about raining on the Jobs parade. In a post with a giveaway title — “what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs” — it lays into Jobs for censorship and authoritarianism, having products manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, and having a tyrannical managerial style.
I guess there will be more in this vein over the next few months.
Midnight in Paris
On a whim, we went to see Woody Allen’s latest film last night — and enjoyed it immensely. The trailer doesn’t do it justice: it’s clever, witty, subtle and occasionally outrageously funny. And it has a lovely sting in the tail. In some ways, it feels like a return to Allen at the top of his 1970s form. The only thing that’s changed is that instead of Allen himself playing the angst-ridden intellectual who can’t quite manage a full-on relationship with a sexy woman, we have Owen Wilson, broken nose and all, playing that role as Gil Pender, a successful hack screenwriter who really wants to be a great novelist. But here’s the weird thing: Wilson sounds and acts exactly like Allen.
The film also revealed how unobservant I am. At one stage there’s a scene in which the main characters are in the Rodin museum listening to a French guide expounding on the sculptor’s life. As I watched, I thought: there’s something very familiar about that guide. I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere before. It was only afterwards that I realised she is Carla Bruni, now France’s First Lady. Which left me marvelling at Allen’s cunning: what a way to ensure that filming in Paris is free from hassling by officialdom.
We watched it in a Cambridge cinema with an audience that clearly got the literary jokes: the wonderful send-up of Hemingway (brilliantly played by Corey Stoll), for example. Or the lovely joke about Bunuel in which the Allen figure gives the great director a suggestion for the plot of his most famous film — and Bunuel doesn’t get it! Adrien Brody’s portrayal of Salvador Dali at full throttle is side-splittingly funny. But in some places the film also gets serious things right: for example, the way Kathy Bates captures Gertrude Stein’s rock-solid dependability.
I left, still grinning at the lovely closing twist and making two resolutions: (a) to have a few days in Paris this Autumn; and (b) to read Gertrude Stein.
In his New Yorker review, David Denby describes the film as
a gently rapt fable, caressed with wonderment. Gil is a stumbling contemporary neurotic thrown in among artists with seemingly dauntless strength. It’s his trip, but it’s Allen’s, too—a dream curated by the fan of great musicians and writers, the culture-mad student, always renewing the pantheon.
He’s right. My verdict: unmissable.
Where we’ve got to
From an email circulating on the Net. Thanks to Douglas for forwarding it.
Jobs at the Pearly Gates
The New Yorker reveals what Steve Jobs discovered when he met St Peter.
The grand piano is gone
Nice New Yorker piece by Nicholson Baker on his first thoughts on hitting the Apple home page and finding that lovely B&W picture of Steve Jobs.
I was stricken. Everyone who cares about music and art and movies and heroic comebacks and rich rewards and being able to carry several kinds of infinity around in your shirt pocket is taken aback by this sudden huge vacuuming-out of a titanic presence from our lives. We’ve lost our techno-impresario and digital dream granter. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, in a letter, that when he’d finished a novel he felt like a house after the movers had carried out the grand piano. That’s what it feels like to lose this world-historical personage. The grand piano is gone.
The devil in the detail
Lovely story by Vic Gundotra about Steve Jobs’s attention to detail.
One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was attending religious services when my cell phone vibrated. As discreetly as possible, I checked the phone and noticed that my phone said “Caller ID unknown”. I choose to ignore.
After services, as I was walking to my car with my family, I checked my cell phone messages. The message left was from Steve Jobs. “Vic, can you call me at home? I have something urgent to discuss” it said.
Before I even reached my car, I called Steve Jobs back. I was responsible for all mobile applications at Google, and in that role, had regular dealings with Steve. It was one of the perks of the job.
“Hey Steve – this is Vic”, I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn’t pick up”.
Steve laughed. He said, “Vic, unless the Caller ID said ‘GOD’, you should never pick up during services”.
I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?
“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow” said Steve.
“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
Of course this was okay with me. A few minutes later on that Sunday I received an email from Steve with the subject “Icon Ambulance”. The email directed me to work with Greg Christie to fix the icon.
Wow! Can you imagine any other CEO of a Fortune 500 company working at that resolution?
Epitaph for Steve
On Christopher Wren’s tomb in his greatest building, St Paul’s Cathedral in London, is this Latin inscription. Translated, it means: “If you require a monument, look around.”
Much the same might be said for Steve Jobs and the iPad.
Wolfson @ dusk
Seen as I was walking out of College this evening.
Steve Jobs RIP
He’s gone, and the media are struggling to find a way of encapsulating his remarkable life. Tech Review had the great idea of going back to this interview he gave to Playboy in 1985. Excerpt:
Playboy: We survived 1984, and computers did not take over the world, though some people might find that hard to believe. If there’s any one individual who can be either blamed or praised for the proliferation of computers, you, the 29-year-old father of the computer revolution, are the prime contender. It has also made you wealthy beyond dreams‐‑your stock was worth almost a half billion dollars at one point, wasn’t it?
Steven Jobs: I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [Laughs]
Playboy: You can laugh about it?
Jobs: I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. But it makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a millionaire. When I went to school, it was right after the Sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. Now students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. They certainly are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of their time as they study their business majors. The idealistic wind of the Sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.
Playboy: It’s interesting that the computer field has made millionaires of‐‑
Jobs: Young maniacs, I know.
Playboy: We were going to say guys like you and Steve Wozniak, working out of a garage only ten years ago. Just what is this revolution you two seem to have started?
Jobs: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy‐‑free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution.
That last sentence is interesting given what we now know: that he made Apple briefly more valuable than Exxon.
It’s a great interview, worth reading in full.