Finding Fault with El Jobso

Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, has a memoir of her childhood coming out September 4^th. To whet our appetites, Vanity Fair magazine has published excerpts from it. 

I haven’t read it. I may read it and her mother’s memoir of her life with Steve at some later date. 

I certainly do not dispute the facts of their accounts or the truth that Steve Jobs often behaved as a Grade-A Asshole. I suspect many of those who idolize him secretly carry the fear in the pit of their stomachs that the price of such business accomplishment is to behave like a Grade-A Asshole toward family and colleagues. 

Woody Allen’s aphorism, “As an artist, you couldn’t touch him. As a person, who would want to?” applies to Mr. Jobs. 

Having said that, I suspect many of us would prefer the answer to: “How in the Hell did he manage to turn UNIX into a commercially viable product?” Everyone acknowledged that the UNIX operating system, developed at Bell Labs, was far superior to Windows. No one had figured out how to market it to the retail market. Least of all AT&T. 

It was the genius of Steve Jobs and his team from Next Computing that turned Apple’s Classic OS, a visually beautiful but technically flawed operating system, along with the reliable guts of BSD Unix into the reliable, beautiful macOS of today. It was the genius of those individuals that turned the guts of macOS into the world-beating operating system iOS for iPhones and iPads. 

That’s how you make a trillion bucks worth of company.

I would hope Mr. Jobs arranged for Chrisann Brennan and Lisa Brennan-Jobs to share in that bounty. I am glad that neither one has sought to involve themselves in Apple’s management. 

 

Yes, Tim, you and your team are doing a splendid job. No, we don’t want to know the details of your private life. 

Tom Briant

Editor, Macvalley Blog