Bestselling author says former Apple CEO wanted honest book
In one of their final conversations, a four-hour chat at Steve Jobs’ Palo Alto, Calif. house before the Apple founder’s death, Jobs and Bill Gates talked privately about the digital age, and came to a joint conclusion: Almost everything has been changed by computers except education.
And though Jobs ridiculed Gates’ extensive, public philanthropy and himself never left a multimillion-dollar foundation, according to Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, “the iPad will do what no reform or donation will.”
Isaacson spoke to a capacity crowd Tuesday night in USC’s Capstone House Campus Room that, fittingly, included longtime USC benefactor Darla Moore. And while his speech was the most anticipated of the Moore School of Business’ Wells Fargo Lecture series and could have focused on just the inventor’s accomplishments in the world of business for an hour, Isaacson instead chose to tell the story of a terrible manager, a creative genius and, above all else, an incredibly complex individual.
“Life is messy at times,” Isaacson said. “But the messiness is part of the passion. This is not a management book, it’s a biography.”
Isaacson said he met Jobs in 1984 when Jobs was introducing the Macintosh to the public. And in one of their first interactions, Jobs told Isaacson, who was then managing editor of Time Magazine, he was perturbed he hadn’t been named Time’s Person of the Year.
At the time, Isaacson had been working on his biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
“Why not me?” Jobs asked.
Isaacson was incredulous the young upstart would ask such a question.
“He was a jerk in many ways,” Isaacson said. “I thought, what an arrogant guy.”
But Isaacson was quick to also point out Jobs’ monumental and revolutionary effects on the world — in music with the iPod, in movies with Pixar and throughout the technology world with Macintosh.
He spent much of the time, though, talking about Jobs’ relationship with his counterpart, Gates. The two were polar opposites, Isaacson said, and compared them to a “binary star system.”
“They were very different,” Isaacson said. “Steve was all about artist control, every element of the experience. Gates had the open model. Neither is the exact right answer, but the two extremes defined the digital age.”
Jobs believed in end-to-end vertical integration, controlling every aspect of a product, from the design in the factory to the store in which it’s sold, whereas Gates believed in a system that allowed lots of different companies to use his operating systems and hardware in their products.
At the end of Gates and Jobs’ conversation, Gates, reportedly a warm, kind man, admitted that he never knew the end-to-end integrated model could work. Jobs, who Isaacson characterized as anything but warm, responded “you proved your model could work as well.”
Isaacson said he considered the dialogue for the ending to the biography, but couldn’t end it there.
“Bill told me afterward, ‘What I didn’t tell Steve is this: The end-to-end process only works when you have someone as creative and artistic as Steve,’” Isaacson said.
When Isaacson told him what Gates had said, expecting a positive response, Jobs instead responded with anger.
“What an a------. Anyone could have made it work if they’d cared, he just has no taste,” Jobs said.
And Jobs, after all, had specifically told Isaacson he wanted it to be honest.
“Make it honest, I’m brutally honest. I want you to write an honest book,” Jobs had said to him.
Moore said she’d read the book and thought it was “riveting.” She said she had known Isaacson for the last 10 to 12 years, as she serves on the national board for Teach for America with his wife.
“This talk was terrific,” Moore said, joking that she had wanted to ask her friend a bunch of questions during the Q & A session.
Sali Sumer, an international masters of business administration student, said she’d also enjoyed Isaacson’s book.
“I couldn’t put it down,” Sumer told Isaacson as he signed the book for her. “And I have an exam this week.”
Second-year international business student Emily Craft agreed it was an engaging read.
“Don’t start reading this before exams,” she warned.