I just finished the Steve Jobs biography. It was unique because the
author had so many interviews with Jobs while he was alive. I can't
recall another biography I have read that wasn't completely posthumous.
After recovering from all the stories and accounts of reconciliation
near his impending death (the three-hour talk he had with Bill Gates
seemed to affect me the most) I was left with some questions. First,
Steve's philosophy was that a closed hardware and software system
resulted in better quality and a simplified, more effective user
experience. Although I believe he was correct, no one challenged him on
the fact that Mac OSX was built on Unix, a software system that is just
about as open as it comes. If Unix wasn't open, then Next and OSX would
not have been developed as quickly and reliably. The second question I
pondered was whether his lifetime of fasting, purging and eating extreme
food (e.g. nothing but apples or a single vegetable for extended
periods) stressed his pancreas and produced the tumor. If Jobs had
lived longer, his next target was textbooks. His plan was to recruit
great textbook writers to write books, install them on the iPad and
distribute them for free. This would sidestep the prehistoric laws
governing the purchase of textbooks by the public schools. In this way,
he planned to make money for Apple by selling iPads in the same way that
iTunes music generated sales of the iPod. I can only hope that the
Steve Jobs story is repeatable in America today: "He started a company
in is Dad's garage that became the most valuable company in the world".
Mike Williams
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