Well it is no secret that Walter Issacson was working with Steve Jobs on his autobiography before his last few days and its said that Steve had revealed a lot about him in the book so that his family and the world could know the man better. There are reports doing the rounds which suggests that Huffington Post has got hold of an early copy of the autobiography by Walter Issacson and have shared some intimate secrets on the life of Steve Jobs.
Walter Issacson’s book named “Steve Jobs” is supposed to be a tell all 656-page book which is to be released on October 24th. There are a lot of rumored fragmented excerpts being shared on the internet revealing intimate details about Steve Jobs life in Apple, we have collated a few here for you.
We all know that its the app ecosystem made by Steve and Apple that’s one of the major reason for the success of iOS / iPhones. But as per an excerpt from the book, Steve Jobs was initially opposed to the idea of having apps as he was apprehensive about his in house team being able to pull it off successfully. As Issacson in his boook reveals that when Art Levinson, one of the Apple board members, contacted Steve to garner support for the apps concept he was initially averse to the idea and even annulled discussion in favor of the same.
Issacson writes, “partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
This excerpt from the Walter Issacson’s book points at how annoyed Steve Jobs was upon Google supposedly ripping off the app grid layout. Steve considered the apps concept as a unique innovation of Apple and wanted to protect it from being copied and apparently was ready to go to any lengths to ensure the same, as you can already make out from the excerpt above. Reportedly Steve Jobs also told Eric Schmidt that he wasn’t looking to gain any money by filing those lawsuits and his only intentions were to protect Apple’s IPR. Eric Schmidt was a board member at Apple and CEO at Google. After Android’s launch and increasing competition between Apple and Google, he had to step down.
Jonathan Ive, one of the most talented designers in the world and a Design Chief with Apple since 1996 apparently has “more operational power” in the company than anyone else, obviously except for Steve and we would assume Tim Cook now as per Issacson’s book. As per Steve Jobs revelations in the book, Ive reported to no one and worked in conjunction with Steve who viewed Ive as his “spiritual partner” in the firm.
“My intuition told me that joining Apple would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius,” Cook said. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable.”
“I trusted him to know exactly what to do,”
Tim Cook who joined Apple from Compaq in 1998 was one of the executives closely working with Steve Jobs after Jonathan Ive. And as per Walter Issacson’s book, Steve trusted Cook a lot. When Cook joined Apple, Jobs was extensively working hard on the supply chain and trying to get “just-in-time” going for the firm in order to reduce the inventory holding of the firm which was financially struggling at the time.
So when Cook joined the company Jobs trusted him to take over the important task (at that time) of managing the inventory. Cook not only managed to limit the stock keeping but also shut down about 10 of the 19 warehouses thus effectively reducing the inventory from one month to six days.
And when Jobs had taken ill he entrusted Cook the responsibility of taking over the affairs at Apple and the rest is history.
Walter Issacson’s book titled Steve Jobs will be available starting next week on Amazon and Apple iBook store.