Steve Jobs - Mayor of Cupertino

By 2006, Steve’s company was worth more than his wife’s old boss, Goldman Sachs.[1] Steve needed more room for his exploding population of engineers. He needed to buy more land to build a larger campus. 

On April 18th, 2006, he stood up at a Cupertino Council meeting to talk about a bigger boat to carry all his pirates. 

This small event in Steve’s calendar was one of the finest examples of Steve in the ‘zone’.  Although his audience was neither staff nor customers, and the hall was practically empty, he was still Mister Charisma. Council member, Dolly Sandoval introduced him, “We purposely set a very light agenda tonight just to highlight your presentation”. There were some knowing chuckles from the small gathering. His reputation had preceded him as a long-winded sales-man. Citizens are given three minutes to make their case. Steve took seven. He approached the microphone playing the role of the humble citizen. However, everybody recognised the man in the black turtleneck was a far cry from their humblest voter. Steve wasn’t there to ask permission from the council. He simply told them what was going to happen. He told them:
(1) He has been a Cupertino businessman for thirty years.
(2) His business has grown into a twenty billion dollar company.
(3) He is going to expand his business site, because he has already bought the property, and that’s that.
(4) They should feel lucky that he chose Cupertino because it’s cheaper to build on the land of the council next door.
(5) They should feel happy because he is their biggest tax-payer.
It could be argued that since Apple is so similar to a religion, shouldn't the company be tax-exempt like churches?

Considering the council’s delighted applause, he needn’t have pitched the ball so hard. The doe-eyed Councilwomen were especially happy for Cupertino’s favourite pin-up boy. Vice Mayor, Kris Wang fumbled an awkward analogy comparing buying property to educating a child. She just couldn’t think straight in front of Steve. He is now the largest landowner in Cupertino.[2]
Five years later, Steve had to drag his ass back into City Hall once again to talk about his proposed new campus – possibly his swan-song. This time it was an effort to stay on his A-game considering that his immune system had almost ground to a halt. By now he may be wracked with fever, chills and chronic lower back pain.

From the opening few words, one can’t help but feel a little misty-eyed at the inner strength of this outwardly frail man who made a such a palpable effort to go through the bureaucratic protocols. Rather than the “congrats and looking forward”, that he received last time from City Hall, the ill CEO had to cop some attitude from the Clueless Councillors. Luckily, the room was packed this time with posse of fan-boys who applauded as he stepped up to the mike.

He was armed this time with a well-orchestrated slide-show. The mayor tried to be helpful by advising him he can use a light-pointer. The presentation maestro brushed off the youngster and said, “I don’t really need to draw on the screen, it’s okay. You can see it clearly.”

Steve’s gallery of images revealed the most wondrous office that could ever be constructed. In fact, it wasn’t an office so much as a utopian vista.

For almost twenty years, Apple’s current campus has been surrounded by a circuit called The Infinite Loop. It was named after a computer program that repeats itself without end. It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for Steve’s constant recreation of himself, the self-reflexive ouroboros serpent eating its own tail, or perhaps a lab-rat on a wheel. In 1999, Michael Malone felt that The Infinite Loop was an apt title for his well-received book about Apple Inc.[3]

His proposed new campus adhered to the same curvilinear theme. The building is a perfect circle.

His illustrations reveal a curvaceous oasis of glass and foliage among an urban sprawl of asphalt. His plan is to boost the tree population by 60% and strip the land of its ugly asphalt by 90%. It’s an appropriate design considering that Steve is often critiqued for building a walled garden out of Apple. Now, he literally is building one. Steve said, “Apple’s grown like a weed.” - a weed, indeed.

On a darker note, one is reminded that his Silicon Valley Eden stands in stark contrast to the bleak and overcrowded dorms in the Chinese sweatshops that manufacture his product.

Steve explained why he selected that particular piece of land by way of a heartfelt story that will surely become part of Silicon Valley folklore:

This land is kind of special, to me. When I was thirteen, I think, I called up – Hewlett and Packard were my idols – and I called up Bill Hewlett, ’cause he lived in Palo Alto and there were no unlisted numbers in the phone book, which gives you a clue to my age (laughter). And he picked up the phone and I talked to him and I asked him if he’d give me some spare parts for something I was building called a frequency counter, and he did, but in addition that, he gave me something way more important. He gave me a job that summer. A summer job at Hewlett-Packard, right here on - in Santa Clara - right here off 280, the division that built frequency counters, and I was in heaven. Well, right around that exact moment in time, Hewlett and Packard themselves were walking on some property over here in Cupertino, in Pruneridge, and they ended up buying it. And they built their computer systems division there. And as Hewlett-Packard has been shrinking lately, they decided to sell that property and we bought it. We bought that and we bought some adjacent property that all used to be apricot trees.”

Steve continued to explain that he’s hired the senior arborist from Stanford University to replant the area once again with thousands of apricot trees.


His painfully careful presentation took twice as long as the last time he stood before the council. He said approximately the same things:

(1) He has been a Cupertino businessman for thirty-five years.
(2) He is going to build another campus, because he has already bought the property, and that’s that.
(3) Regarding power consumption, we don’t need your power supply, we’ll make our own - and cleaner. We’ll use your filthy grid as back-up.

(4) They should feel lucky that he chose Cupertino rather than the council next door.
(5) They should feel happy because he is their biggest tax-payer

This should have been an open-and-shut case. Unfortunately, Steve made the fatal mistake of asking, “I would love to answer any questions, if you have any”. 

Introducing, Cupertino’s Council of The Three Stooges: Chang, Wang, and Wong:

Council Member Kris Wang was Steve’s doe-eyed cheerleader at the last meeting - not this time, however. Perhaps she’s a little bitter because she got bumped down from the Vice Mayor job in the interim. "How will this benefit the people of Cupertino?", she asks. How will this benefit the people of Cupertino?!!  Let us expand on this phenomenally stupid question. This woman is asking how further business expansion and environmentally-conscious property development by their biggest tax-payer will benefit the people of Cupertino. It’s difficult to imagine a dumber question, but Kris managed to procure one nonetheless. She wanted him to be more “pacific” as to how Cupertino could benefit, for example, will he provide free Wi-Fi for the city’s entire ten square miles? “Yeah, no,” was Steve’s bored response.

Kris was flamed across the twitterverse for her faux-funny demand for Wi-Fi. Business Insider offered Kris a right of reply. Her emailed explanation was even more hilarious. After wading through all the self-promotion that she copied and pasted from her curriculum vitae, the reason for her asinine question can be summarized by saying that she assumes some kind of camaraderie with Steve and claims the question was a long-running private joke.[4] Steve didn’t seem to get the joke. Perhaps the rapport she claims to have with Steve exists only in her imagination. Perhaps Kris pretends she is cosy with Steve when she is dropping names at Rotary luncheons. Steve could buy City Hall three times over and then forget all the names of the councilors he sent into early retirement.

Councillor Barry Chang is apparently a long time Cupertino businessman. In theory, he should know something about running a business. However, his puerile question makes one suspect his business was no more complicated than the local laundry. Numbnut Chang asked Steve if he had considered the safety and fire regulations. Steve almost sighed. It’s safe to assume that safety may have come up somewhere in the planning considering Apple has spent a small nation’s budget hiring British architect legend, Norman Foster, to draw up the plans.[5] He’s the guy who designed London’s iconic “gherkin”, so he’s no slouch.

Mayor Gilbert Wong, is a drooling fanboy who looks and sounds like Lloyd from Entourage (and just as lame). He proceeded to whip out his iPad only to demonstrate how he can’t even use the “slide to unlock” properly.  Despite his apparent  love for the company, he introduced Steve as the CEO of Apple Computer. Apple Inc hasn’t been called Apple Computer since 2007. 

He then asked Steve for an Apple Store in Cupertino. Steve’s tired response felt like he was explaining to a country child that building a Disney World in his little hometown is probably a dumb idea. If Gilbert wants to visit the Church of Apple, the nearest Store is Los Gatos – a mere fifteen-minute drive from Cupertino City Hall. Perhaps that’s still too far away for Dilbert, I mean Gilbert. 

Apple made Cupertino. Its council getting all “gimme” with Steve is like the Columbian Government touching up Pablo Escobar for more money than they’re already getting. Local governments like Cupertino are forever broke and regularly extort “favors” from businesses looking to expand. However, these thinly-veiled mercenary tactics don’t usually receive almost two million hits on YouTube.You have to admire Steve's spiritual tenacity to stand up to the Council despite his physical pain. Philip Elmer-Dewitt observed that Steve "could serve as a lesson to CEOs around the world in how to bend a local government to your will." [6]

When he wasn’t answering stupid questions, Steve was forced to repeat the math of his proposal to the councilors who were having trouble following probably the simplest presentation in Steve’s stage history. This may have a lot to do with the fact that some of the council is made up of those to whom English is a second language.The only old white guy on the council waited toward the end to offer some gentlemanly words of encouragement. His name was Orrin Mahoney and he worked some thirty-five years for HP.

Among the audience were teenaged volunteers from the Organization of Special Needs Families and some fifth graders from Portal Elementary. They had arrived to receive rewards for their community work. One wonders how these young people reacted to watching the icon who brought them the toys they play Angry Birds upon.[7]

This final fact was reported by one of only two members of the press in the room, local lady, Ruby Elbogen. After Steve’s speech, she spotted him by the refreshments table: A familiar looking man was standing there, all alone, facing the coffee pot.”[8] - All alone.

This author hopes Steve is still around to see the last pane of German-engineered glass slide into place by 2015.




[1] Elkind, P. (2008 March 5) The Trouble With Steve Jobs. Fortune Magazine.
[2] International Business Times (2010, November 26) Apple Buys HP Campus, Becomes Biggest Landowner In Cupertino. Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/86003/20101126/hp-apple-iphone-ipad-cupertino-california-campus-real-estate.htm
[3] Malone, M. (1999) Infinite Loop. Doubleday Business: New York.

[4] Yarrow, J. (2011, June 10) Cupertino Councilwoman: Here's Why I Asked Steve Jobs For Free Wifi. BusinessInsider.com Retrieved from: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-spaceship-cupertino-councilwoman-2011-6

[5] Elmer-DeWitt, P. (2010, December 6) Norman Foster to build 'City of Apple' [Blog] From Apple 2.0. fortune.cnn.com. Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/06/norman-foster-to-build-city-of-apple/

[6] Elmer-DeWitt, P. (2011, June 8) Video: Steve Jobs' pitch to build a 'spaceship' in Cupertino [blog]. Apple 2.0. CNNMoney. Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/08/video-steve-jobs-pitch-to-build-a-spaceship-in-cupertino/

[7] Elbogen, R (2010, June 6) Steve Jobs Shows Up At City Council To Introduce Apple’s New Campus. The Cupertino News. Retrieved from: http://cupertino-news.com/?p=1569

[8] Elbogen, R (2010, June 6) Steve Jobs Is In The Building Part Deux – The Rest of The Reveal. .The Cupertino News. Retrieved from: http://cupertino-news.com/?p=1585 

iCloud - MobileMe Not.

Back in 2008, Steve’s software guys had dropped the ball on Apple’s cloud storage service. MobileMe was supposed to allow people to upload their email, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, pics and video to the internet ether so it could be plucked from the cloud and synced with all their devices. It failed with flying colours.
For US$100/year, Steve’s customers paid for the joy of losing their emails for days on end, or losing them entirely to MobileMe’s black hole. This mistake was not just another amusing train-wreck like the G4 Cube, MobileMe was actually ruining people’s daily digital lives. At the very least, it exposed how people were willing to trust their lifestyles to Apple. Two of Steve’s most influential pet journos, Walt Mossberg[1] of Wall Street Journal and David Pogue[2] of New York Times, each broke from their dog-collars and served up a steaming bowl of vitriol to MobileMe on the same day.
"Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us," intoned Steve to the gathering of crestfallen employees at his Cupertino ‘Town Hall’. "You've tarnished Apple's reputation. You should hate each other for having let each other down."[3] Where did that curious line come from – “You should hate each other”? Did Steve want his workers to join in on his self-loathing?
The ass-kissing began with a free month of storage for disgruntled customers – and there were many of them. Nothing changed. MobileMe maintained its MobileMess and customers continued to send irate mail to every publication – on and offline. By August, Steve was offering three months free subscription.
Then Dropbox entered the cloud storage market. They offered the same price for twice the space, none of the glitches, and a two gigabyte ‘freemium’ for tightwads who don’t want to pay anything. Dropbox is available on both iPhone and Android. The unholy cross-platform marriage of Dropbox was considered the better option for those wanting to dump their stuff in the cloud. Google stepped into the ring a few months later with their own calendar/contacts sync service. It paired with their Gmail storage service which had been around a few years more than MobileMe. Google offers a seven-gigabyte freemium in exchange for perhaps monetizing your personal information. Is that a small sacrifice? Even The Unofficial Apple Website asked the question – what’s the point of MobileMe?[4]
ArsTechnica.com’s ‘Infinite Loop’ section exposed an internal email from Steve to his employees regarding the MobileMe cockup.
Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour.  There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple's standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.  We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love.  One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe.  Eddy's new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve.[5]
That never happened. For the next three years, the cloud became more important to the end-user who had begun to buy anorexic tablets stingy on storage space. MobileMe remained a much-maligned mess. Many wondered if perhaps Apple should give up on software and stick to what they know best - making pretty objects.
Steve embarked upon a mission to redeem himself. He needed to launch a program without the distraction of shiny hardware launches. He would do this at the risk of disappointing fan-boys who, since they habitually molest their iPad/Phones, only seem to love new Apple products they can fondle.
As the dawn broke on June 6th, 2011, a crowd 5,200+ developers and media choked the Moscone Center at Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference. A thousand of them wouldn’t fit into the 4000 seat hall. Apple tradition, of course, is to oversell and undersupply. Each punter had paid US$1600 a ticket to see what’s next. The event had sold out in ten hours. The worst kept secret in Silicon Valley was that Steve was going to do some cloud busting.
Fortune Magazine writer and fellow Steve-Watcher, Phillip Elmer-Hewitt, reported on the scene,
Holding pride of place at the head of the line is a portly developer who says he got there at 1:30 a.m., eight and a half hours early. He has bad knees, he explains, and might not make it to the hall at all if he doestn't get a good head start.[6]

 
For those waiting in the foyer, the overhead speakers played, "Hey, You, Get Offa My Cloud" by The Stones, and "[I've Looked At Clouds from] Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell. Young Guardian journo Jemima Kiss begged, “Something more recent (please)?” [7]
Steve took to the stage and received the usual standing ovation as every live blogger tapped furiously on their devices detailing that Steve was “looking disturbingly gaunt, while the audience shouts ‘we love you’.” He wore a roomy black jumper this time, sans the turtleneck. His faded jeans seem to be getting looser on his hips with each new presentation.  His sleeves kept falling over his thin forearms, and he habitually pulled them back up again.

Rebel tech blogger, Gizmodo were barred from these Apple events since “The lost iPhone prototype” (read the whole story in a previous post on this blog). Guardian journos at the event reported that Gizmodo were caught live blogging onsite and Steve’s heavies escorted them to the “naughty step”.[8]


Steve was only there to talk about his baby in the cloud. He let his other lackeys chat about the lesser stuff. Steve’s money-quote had a biblical ring to it: “Some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky (the crowd laughs)… We think it's way more than that and we call it iCloud”
“Now… you might ask, ‘why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe” There was an explosion of laughter, which felt more like an emotional release of end-user frustration. He then repeated what he said in that staff email from three years ago. “It wasn’t our finest hour.”
Apple is the last of the major tech companies to enter the cloud market with earnest. This allowed Steve to watch the other players show their hand before he crafted a more tasty product. One could only imagine Steve’s inner monologue:  

“These pricks with their Androids want everything free, eh? I’ll give them free. I’ll give everything for free. But there’s another price: Everything you own must be made by me.”


Steve’s five-Gig free cloud locker stores everything: Contacts, calendar, mail, apps, data, books, documents, (bookmarks, settings?) photos, music, and video. A file change on one gadget is automatically reflected on your other gadgets - so long as that gadget is made by Apple, or it’s a PC loaded with iTunes.

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy” When the audience cheers, he takes the opportunity to cough discreetly. Thank you, Steve. He must be watching this author and his girlfriend argue over who wants to tackle the simple task dragging photos from a PC to an iPad. This is normally a simple job for an Android/PC jockey; but a royal pain for those who decided to take the “switch of faith”. 

However, what if you don’t want automatic synchronicity of every move you make, and every breath you take (apologies, Sting)? Will there be a yes/no dialogue box before each individual sync? What if you are nervous about Steve having everything of yours in his cloud?

Songs are the most interesting issue in the iCloud proposition. Music not purchased via iTunes must be synced via iTunes Match for US$25 a-year. Steve enjoyed pointing out that his price is half the price of Amazon’s similar service. Nevertheless, it could be argued that you are paying to access songs you’ve already purchased, just for the convenience of not using your own drive space. However, that is not a problem for those who haven’t paid a dime for the music on their hard drives. All of their low-quality pirated songs will be recognized by iTunes Match and laundered into a lossless legal copies from the iTunes library - that’s’ twenty-five bucks well spent. Thanks again, Steve.

On the other hand, what if you’re into Dollshead? What if you enjoy listening to Closed On Account Of Rabies – the poems of Edgar Alan Poe? Neither of those are in the iTunes library. It seems that Steve’s eighteen million tracks may not be nearly enough to iMatch everything.

To set up the music end of iCloud, Steve sealed a deal with the big four record labels for the second time since iTunes. This is the ace card his rivals in the cloud DON’T hold in their sweaty hands. Once again, the Big Four find themselves at Steve’s door, hats in their hands, needing Steve’s help to rescue their floundering business - but they weren’t doing it free. Steve paid them US$100-150 million each. Steve gets his usual 30% cut.[9]

“If you don’t think we’re serious about this, you’re wrong,” Steve intones with gravitas. He is immediately dwarfed on stage by a gigantic image of his latest one billion-dollar, half-million square, data warehouse.[10] The humming digital database in the desert looks like the foreboding corridors of The Death Star. One begins to suspect that this dog and pony show is just a taste of what he has planned. Steve doesn’t want us to let the cloud, nor his iCloud, be the centre of our digital lives. He wants Apple to be our centre. His mission is to pull us like a tractor beam from the Microsoft orbit. Microsoft beat Apple in the PC war, so Steve’s payback is to kill the PC.


“The PC will be the most visible casualty of the cloud revolution,” stated a former engineer, Steve Perlman. “Apple knows it.” The 25 million iPads sold so far have eaten away at PC sales. Both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard disappointed investors with their earnings last quarter.[11]

The cloud idea was brought up fifteen years ago by Steve’s best friend, Larry Ellison who runs Oracle, who incidentally make cloud servers. He touched upon the subject in the documentary, Trumph of The Nerds, while Steve was still chasing his tail with the NeXT Cube. The doco’s script said, 

Larry believes the PC will be replaced with a cheap device he calls an information appliance. It will be a glorified television which will access information and computing simply by connecting to giant computers via the Internet. Just like turning on a tap - and the PC will go the way of the well and the bucket.

Larry Ellison: ”I hate the PC with a passion. Me going down to the store and buying Windows 95, I've got to get into my car drive down to a store buy a cardboard box full of bits you know encoded on a piece of plastic CDROM and you bring it home and read a manual install this thing - you must be kidding you know, put the stuff on the net - it's bits, don't put bits in cardboard, cardboard in trucks, trucks to stores, me go to the store, you know, pick the stuff out, it's insane. OK I love the Internet - I want information you know it flows across the wire.”

So who supplied the servers to apple’s server farm? Was it Larry?

As usual, the most clever readers’ commentary came from The Guardian:

“Now that there has been an admission that it sucks, can I please have my MobileMe subscriptions back?”

“Can't be having anything with the cloud - I am sorry to say. Until these services are reliably running for some years, have a history of no hacking, aren't going to have the FBI knocking on my door asking about my blueprints for mass mind control ... my stuff stays on my laptop.”

“I live in Africa - a 4GB download will take about a month on my present dodgy connection and cost about 200 quid in airtime alone assuming the connection stays up for that long and does not have to be restarted.”

“All that automatic uploading and downloading seems to assume all you can eat data accounts which seem to be disappearing.”

“Only snag I can see with this service is that you have use that steaming pile of monkey shit (iTunes) to use it.”

“Hey nerds - cheer the truck up. Who cares? We all know you'll buy it anyway despite moaning about it!”

“It isn't an Apple announcement until there's an oleaginous quote from Stephen Fry attached.”

“is it just me, or is the bite out of the Apple logo behind Steves head getting bigger?”

[1] Mossberg, W. (2008, July 24) Apple's MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable. Wall Street Journal.

[2] Pogue, D. (2008, July 24) Apple’s MobileMess [blog]. Pogue’s Posts. From New York Times. Retrieved from : http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/apples-mobilemess/

[3]Lashinsky , A. (2011, May 23) How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup. Fortune Magazine.

[4] Hirsch, L. (2010, June 15) Enter Gmail syncing and Dropbox; Exit MobileMe? From tuaw.com. Retrieved from: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/15/enter-gmail-contact-syncing-and-dropbox-exit-mobileme/

[5] Cheng, J. (2008, August 5) Steve Jobs on MobileMe: the full e-mail.arstechnica.com.


[6] Elmer-DeWitt, P. (2011, June 6) Live from San Francisco: Steve Jobs unveils the iCloud [Blog]. From Apple 2.0. In money.cnn.com. Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/06/live-from-san-fancisco-steve-jobs-unveils-the-icloud/#comments

[7] Arthur, C. & Kiss, Jemima (2011, June 6) WWDC 2011: Steve Jobs on iCloud, iOS5, Lion – live [blog]. Technology Blog. From The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jun/06/apple-wwdc-liveblog-steve-jobs-icloud  

[8][8] Arthur, C. & Kiss, Jemima (2011, June 6) WWDC 2011: Steve Jobs on iCloud, iOS5, Lion – live [blog]. Technology Blog. From The Guardian. Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/jun/06/apple-wwdc-liveblog-steve-jobs-icloud  

[9] Sandoval, G. & Sowensohn, J (2011, June 3) Apple signs Universal Music to iCloud? Rom zdnet.com.au. Retrieved from: http://www.zdnet.com.au/apple-signs-universal-music-to-icloud_print-339316168.htm

[10] Arthur, C. (2011, June 5) Apple pins its hopes on the iCloud as users drift away from computers. From The Guardian.

[11] Satariano, A. & Burrows, P. (2011, June 8) Steve Jobs Uses ICloud to Pick Apart Industry He Helped Form. Bloomberg. Retrieved from: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-07/apple-s-jobs-using-icloud-to-dismantle-the-pc-industry-he-helped-build.html

Steve Jobs vets his life story

Classy author, Walter Isaacson, is putting the finishing flourish on Steve’s first authorised biography. There were whispers of this book in The New York Times as early as February, 2010. [1] Within ten days, The Huffington Post ran a competition inviting entrants to design the cover. One reader suggested that the book’s title be iSaySo. [2] The publisher, Simon and Schuster, decided upon iSteve – close enough. 

Forbes said that iSteve, “was a remarkably tasteless title…If, as they say, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever, that title was getting very close to it.” [3] The rich man’s magazine may have a point. How did Simon & Schuster's publicity department miss that Steve Wozniak's 2007 bio was similarly entitled iWoz? Nevertheless, iSteve climbed to Amazon's top 50 best-seller list before it was even finished.

Walter, his wife, and his daughter felt the title was “too cutesy”. The author pushed his publisher to rename it simply “Steve Jobs”.  [4] The new title is commonly described as more elegant - using one of Steve’s favourite Jobsian adjectives.

Cnet claimed the original title was a lazy. [5] It could be argued that the safer revision was even lazier. Anyway, Cnet’s critique was surprisingly courageous considering Simon & Schuster is a unit of CBS, whose “Interactive unit” publishes Cnet.

Huffington Post is taking a poll as which title is best. Currently 60/40 in favour of new title, Steve Jobs. [6]  “You had me at Steve”, swooned one doe-eyed Apple Insider commentator. [7]

The difference between authorised and un-authori­zed is often just a different flavour of embellishment. Steve has never been happy with the un-authorised bios. One month before John Wiley & Sons released their un-authorised biography, iCon, all the publisher's books were pulled from the shelves of Apple stores. John Wiley probably had two reactions: Big friggin' deal - no one goes to an Apple store to buy a book anyway; and thanks for the free publicity, Steve. The book’s co-author, Jeffery Young was less than casual about Steve's tantrum. ''This guy is out of control. I'm just a little guy. I'm just one of many guys Steve has destroyed over the years." [8]

Author Leander Kahney took out a million dollar defamation insurance policy just in case Steve didn't like his biography, Inside Steve’s Brain. [9] Considering Steve’s reputation, you can understand why Leander covered his ass.  

There’s no doubt Steve will vet every word of iSteve (and possibly trademark anything he can get legally get away with). The hagiography is bound to be a beautifully-crafted iYawn

Steve has previously demonstrated, not only his desire to rewrite his own history, but also rewrite the history The United States of America so that it can dovetail nicely with his own view of himself. One of the coolest myths about Steve is the idea that he was a child of the sixties zeitgeist. Unfortunately for him, he actually grew up in the tacky seventies - a fact that can't be refuted no matter how many Bob Dylan albums he owns. Nonetheless, in an interview in the documentary, Triumph of The Nerds, Steve never lets an irksome fact get in the way of a good story:
 
"Remember that the Sixties happened in the early seventies, right, so you have to remember that and that's sort of when I came of age. So I saw a lot of this and to me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It's the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit."

"The sixties happened in the early seventies"? Really, Steve? I wonder if your biographer will agree with your reinvention?

Who is the man Steve trusts with his legacy? Walter is a Harvard Man and a Rhodes Scholar. He once ran TIME Magazine and CNN. He’s been honoured with diplomatic appointments by both George.W. [10] and Hillary Clinton [11]. Obama has asked him to chair the Broadcasting Board of Governors.[12] The company-man plays by the rules and never paints outside the numbers. Whereas Steve is the original entrepreneur who doesn’t care what you or I think.  Both men have only one thing in common: neither has changed their company website photo since the '90s.

Walter has already written biographies about Kissinger, Ben Franklin, and Steve's hero, Einstein. The opening lines of Wally’s bestselling biography of Franklin demonstrates that Steve’s story is something he has visited before:


His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky, yet with a pretence of humility straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street. [13]

Perhaps iSteve will be Memoir 1.0. It may be more prudent to wait another six months for Memoir 2.0 - thinner and lighter.



[1] Stone, B. (2010, February 15) Jobs Is Said to Assist With Book on His Life. New York Times.

[2] Bosker, B. (2010, February 25) Steve Jobs’ Biography: Design the Cover of Steve Jobs’ Book [Blog]. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/25/steve-jobs-biography-desi_n_473864.html

[3]Caulfield, B. (2011, July 5) Truly Terrible Title Of Authorized Steve Jobs Biography Changed [blog]. From Shiny Objects. Forbes.com. Retrieved from: http://blogs.forbes.com/briancaulfield/2011/07/05/truly-terrible-title-of-authorized-steve-jobs-biography-changed/

[4]Elmer-DeWitt, P. (2011, July 5) Steve Jobs' bio gets a new title [blog]. From Apple 2.0. Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/05/steve-jobs-bio-gets-a-new-title/

[5]  Westaway, L. (2011, July 6) Steve Jobs' biography renamed from iSteve to something less cheesy [blog]. From Crave at  Cnet.com. Retrieved from: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/steve-jobs-biography-renamed-from-isteve-to-something-less-cheesy-50004328/

[6] Huffington Post (2011, June 6) Steve Jobs Biography Renamed: 'iSteve' Becomes 'Steve Jobs . Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/06/steve-jobs-biography-title_n_891194.html?view=print

[7] Apple Insider (2011, July 7) Authorized Steve Jobs biography gets 'more elegant' title. Retrieved from: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=127665

[8] Hafner, K. (2005, April 30) Steve Jobs's Review of His Biography: Ban It. New York Times.

[9] Kearney, L. (2010, Februray 15) Steve Jobs Is Collaborating On Authorized Biography — Report. Retrieved from: http://www.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-is-collaborating-on-an-authorized-biography-report/30460

[10] Elmer-DeWitt, P. (2011, April 10) The man who won Steve Jobs' trust [blog]. From Apple 2.0. CNNMoney. Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/10/the-man-who-won-steve-jobs-trust-2/

[11] U.S Department of State (2010, April 27) Closing Remarks at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. Retrieved from: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/04/140968.htm

[12] Whitehouse Press Release. (2009, November 11) President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts.

[13] Isaacson, W. (2004) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.