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Imagine for a moment that you're a master of the Cyber Universe. You've just been given the news that you have a mortal illness. What do you do? If your Apple founder Steve Jobs, you actually start to think even longer term. You get deeply involved in the planning of a new Apple campus, surrounded by Eden-like gardens and fruit trees, to shield Apple's creatives through the decades ahead. And you ask Walter Isaacson, who just published an epic biography on Einstein to chronicle your life and legacy. Jobs, who worshiped Einstein, hoped Isaacson would script an account that put jobs in a similar pantheon of greatness. While Isaacson didn't see jobs on this level, he still found him a fascinating subject, and agreed to write a biography. To write his bio, Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than three dozen times during the last two years of his life, along with more than 100 of Jobs' closest relatives and friends, colleagues, competitors, and admirers.
Decades earlier, it would have been impossible to imagine this Buddhist Bohemian would one day become one of the biggest names in computing. As a young man, Jobs abandoned his college studies to seek enlightenment in the foothills of the Himalayas. Returning to California in the garb of a Buddhist pilgrim, he worked nights, troubleshooting video games, audited engineering classes at Stanford, and meditated with a Zen teacher from Japan.
Jobs' immersion in Zen and his love of art would combine with his engineering leaps as he formed Apple. The ingenious devices he helped create from titanium laptops to mobile music players would all follow Zen principles. But this wonderkind would be ousted from his own company due to his wild mood swings, terrible people skills, and absolute perfectionism at all costs. Isaacson charts Jobs' rise, fall, and restoration at Apple, all powered by his gifts as a technological seer.
In this book Insight, we'll follow Steve Jobs launching these world-changing revolts. First, we'll track Jobs as he shuttles between the worlds of Zen and computer Geekdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Second, in an era when supercomputers were viewed as tools of government control, we'll see how Jobs teamed up with a friend to create small computers aimed at giving computing power to the people. Third, after being exiled from Apple, we'll see Jobs buy a small computer imaging company from George Lucas and transform it into one of the globe's leading film studios. Fourth, we track Jobs as he remakes Apple to help shape the internet explosion, connecting explorers and creators to the expanding worlds of music and media appearing across the web. Fifth, we'll see how toward the close of his life Jobs helps design the new Apple HQ to carry the company's designers and engineers into the future. It's a symbol of his legacy as a pioneer at the intersection of the arts, design, and technology. We'll end by reviewing Jobs' impact across the spheres of computing, the web, and industrial design.
Steve Jobs was a master of radical reinvention, first of himself, and later of the technology surrounding him. He dropped out of Reed College in Northern California to go on a pilgrimage to Buddha's birthplace. When he arrived back from India, his head was shaved and wearing Indian cotton robes. His skin was turned a deep chocolate brown red from the sun. His own parents didn't recognise him. Like a comedian, he skipped across California's cultural spheres at whim. His Jobs, during a 2005 commencement speech to Stanford, describing those days.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with. And I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hari Krishna Temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Working nights at Atari, designing games for Stone Freshman, Jobs immersed himself in books on Buddhism by Japanese and Tibetan writers. He attended talks at the People's Computer Company, a free-wheeling meeting place for hackers and geeks. As a hippie, he seemed a bit out of place. He continued his spiritual search, and at one point even considered entering a Japanese monastery. The Temple of Eternal Peace. Jobs recalled, for me it was a serious search. I'd been turned onto the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things. The Buddhist wisdom he gained during his quest included the realization that intuition was more powerful than intellect. He told Isaacson that it's had a big impact on his work.
In some ways, Jobs was a microcosm of the trends swirling through society. California was the capital of counterculture, but also of the exploding tech sector. As defense technologists and chip makers converged on the West Coast, they faced off against rebellious cyberpunk and free speech activists. Surrounding them were remnants of the utopian commune founded in the 1960s. Then there were the gurus of Miriad's self-discovery movement. He and friends liked to spend time at a commune that had an apple orchard. The experience would later service in the form of a particular brand name.
Some tech firms were viewed as invaders of the liberal coastal enclave. Isaacson writes, many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and all-wellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. For example, supercomputers were being deployed in government weapons labs to model the explosion of thermonuclear weapons, instruments of the Cold War warriors who held sway. But as jobs sought alternative routes towards utopia, some visionaries in the tech sector began proposing that computers might be co-opted by individuals as a powerful new means of free speech and creativity. In the hands of the counterculture of artists and techno-utopians, computers could become tools of radical change.
In the spirit of California's new Cyberpunk movement, jobs teamed up with his longtime friend Steve Wozniak. They wanted to create an ingenious hacking device that allowed their first clients, mostly college students, to make free calls across AT&T's worldwide network. But neither partner would be content to remain a mere hacker, both aimed to ignite a technological revolution. It was Wozniak, who, while contemplating a microprocessor, just released by Intel, had an epiphany. This miniaturized processor could make it possible to shrink the basic functions of a supercomputer onto a desktop machine. Wozniak recalls, this whole vision of a perpetual computer just popped into my head. That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple One.
When Wozniak showed jobs of prototype, he was elated and began envisioning the future. A single computer could be linked into an expanding network of microcomputers. Jobs proposed creating a first run of these machines with a new partnership called Apple Computer. An initial order for 50 Apple One desktops set the company in motion. Apple lit the fuse of the personal computing revolution. Wozniak recalled, I was so happy to be a part of it. Jobs sold his Volkswagen to finance assembly of the first generation Apple computers. But the garage start-up sales were strong from the start. When Apple went public four years later, Jobs, then only 25, discovered he had helped build a billion dollar company. His shares in Apple were valued at $250 million.
The reigning powers in the IT sector were alarmed by the upstart's rapid expansion. IBM launched its own personal computer. In the ensuing competition with IBM, Apple and Steve Jobs portrayed themselves as idealists and insurgents arrayed against an ominous Titan. Isaacson writes, Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel, pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil.
Apple unveiled the first Macintosh, which launched the colorful icons and interface of visual computing that we take so for granted today. Jobs helped design a campaign that would project the battle with IBM, like an epic film on the fate of freedom. He hired Ridley Scott, who had just directed the dystopian Blade Runner, to replicate the same dark angst about a future dominated by IBM.
The resulting mini-film, tracked a rebel running in the garb of an Olympic athlete and chased by the thought police. She hurls a sledch hammer that shatters a screen broadcasting a speech by Big Brother. With a tagline on averting the totalitarian future projected in George Orwell's novel 1984, the video was a sensation. The film, which generated news coverage across America, also reflected Jobs' mastery of the media.
Virtually every declaration he made about the future would be transmitted into glowing magazine and newspaper articles. Let's break for now. But before we go, let's recap what we've learned. We've tracked the early years of Steve Jobs.
After a life-altering India trip and some early jobs in the technology field. Jobs partnered with Steve Wozniak to produce hacking products. Wozniak dreamed up personal computers and Jobs soon developed a billion dollar company. To position Apple as good-hearted rebels amongst a cold corporate field, Jobs hired hotshot filmmaker Ridley Scott to make the famous 1984 short film commercial.
When we pick up next time, we'll learn about the start of a tiny animation studio. Enjoying this episode of Book Insights? If so, people listening and learning. There's a collection of over 100 titles you can read or listen to now at memodeapp.com slash insights. We're continuing our look into the authorised Steve Jobs' biography. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Jobs contracted popular biographer Walter Isaacson to cover his life's journey.
Last time, we heard about Jobs' early years. From an upstart ZenHacker, Jobs developed Apple with Steve Wozniak into a billion dollar personal computer company. Now we'll talk about Toy Story and Tinseltown Stardom.
Gliding ever higher in the mind space of fame, Jobs built a constellation of friendships with musicians, artists, and global piece activists. The Apple inventor, who idolised the Beatles as a youth, befriended Yoko Ono, and jetted into New York to give Sean Lennon a Macintosh for his birthday. Mesmerised by the machine, Pop Art Star and Warhol abandoned the party to begin playing with the computer's painting tools. Despite Jobs' status as an icon of Apple's repel culture, Apple ultimately banished him.
Like one of his heroes in art, Michelangelo, Jobs combined a fiery artistic temperament with an intense drive to constantly reach new heights in design. But Apple's board, furious with delays triggered by his endless redesigns of a new Macintosh, finally forced him out of the company. Jobs was devastated. Spending time in Europe, he wondered where it had all gone wrong.
Returning to the US, Jobs realised he still had some love for the computer industry. He discovered that filmmaker George Lucas wanted to sell his computer graphics division, which generated 3D images for the first Star Wars films. The Lucas Workshop developed a sophisticated imaging computer and software to produce super-real animated clips. But its technology was so advanced that were few players in the market who understood how to exploit it, or could afford the $125,000 price tag. Steve Jobs fell in love with the computer, paid $10 million for the workshop and renamed it Pixar.
Pixar's artist produced a series of short animations, but initially only to plug the firm's hardware and software potential. The tiny group of animators was headed by John Lasseter, whose quest for artistic perfection rivaled Jobs'es. Lasseter immersed himself in Walt Disney's films and set out to surpass the classic animations created at Disney Studios.
Over the following years, with only sporadic sales of Pixar's software and computers, Jobs would be forced to pump $50 million into the operation, but he always protected his animation artists. Isaacson writes, it had become for him a little island of magical artistry that gave him deep emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it and bet on it. He also had an intuition that combining great art and digital technology would transform animated films.
Here's Jobs talking about Pixar's potential. And even though Pixar is the most technologically advanced studio in the world, John has a saying that's really stuck, which is no amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story. When Pixar's mini-film, Tin Toy, won an Academy Award, it showed Hollywood and the world the potential power of computer-generated films. But the studio was still on the brink of bankruptcy. Then the Pixar team created a storyboard for a fantastic feature-length animation called Toy Story.
Although Jobs loved the idea, Pixar didn't have the $30 million needed to make the film. So he approached Disney Studios, which already purchased an array of Pixar computers to co-produce Toy Story. The heads of Disney agreed, but because they put up most of the money to make the film, they dominated the partnership.
Toy Story turned out to be a blockbuster, recouping its entire investment in its first weekend of American screenings, and generated glowing reviews across the US media along with an Academy Award. As Pixar burned through tens of millions of dollars, Jobs considered selling the film.
Instead, he began planning an initial public offering or IPO. His timing of Pixar's stock offering, a week after Toy Story's stormed American cinemas, was brilliant. Pixar became the biggest IPO of the year and its share price skyrocketed in the first day of trading.
Isaacson writes, by the end of the day, the shares he had retained were worth an astonishing $1.2 billion. Armed with Toy Story's astounding success, Jobs quickly renegotiated a more equal partnership with Disney. This highlighted Pixar's role as the main creative force in future joint productions.
With his reinvention of Pixar from a small graphics workshop into one of the world's leading animation studios, Jobs showed he was still superb at building and nurturing centres of creative talent. That power would speedily attract the attention of the leaders of Apple Computer, which had gone into decline in the years of his absence.
While transforming Pixar, Jobs had also created a new company called Next. Next designed leading-edge computers aimed at universities. Jobs' extreme perfectionism manifested at Next, as it had at Apple.
Brightly coloured robots in a futuristic workshop assembled circuit boards that would animate computers in the shape of perfect cubes, all powered by next-generation chips. The only thing was, the new software developed for the avant-garde operation pushed the price for Next Computers higher and higher. Jobs' perfectionism was making the machines too costly for many potential buyers.
At the same time, Apple, which sorely missed Jobs' design vision, was searching for an acquisition target that could instantly provide an advanced operating system and a turnaround in its fortunes. Apple's board quickly approved an agreement to purchase Next, with Jobs slated to rejoin the firm as a part-time advisor.
Apple's takeover of Next provided the perfect opening for Jobs to reconquer the outfit he created two decades earlier. In Trojanhor's fashion, he began positioning his lieutenants throughout Apple's leadership, then named himself CEO. He replaced the entire board of directors with his own candidates.
苹果公司收购 Next 为乔布斯提供了完美的机会,重新掌控他二十年前创建的这家公司。乔布斯采取“特洛伊木马”的方式,开始将他的下属安排到苹果的管理层中,并取名为CEO。他用自己的候选人替换了整个董事会。
Will pause for now. Before we go, let's recap. Jobs' dominating presence and lack of personality skills pushed Apple to fire its co-founder. Lost and confused, Jobs purchased Lucasfilm tech and slowly nurtured this into Pixar, a powerhouse animation studio from its first theatrical release, Toy Story. This contributed to Apple acquiring Jobs' follow-up tech business Next, and his eventual climb back into Apple's top spot.
We'll conclude next time with how Apple turned around its sharp decline into becoming the prime example of innovation. Enjoying this episode of Book Insights? If so, keep listening and learning. There's a collection of over 100 titles you can read or listen to now at memodeapp.com slash insights. That's m-e-m-o-d-a-p-p.com slash insights.
We'll be concluding our look into the life of Steve Jobs, as told by best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson. Last time, we've gone over Apple's firing of Jobs, followed by Jobs, founding animation studio Pixar. Apple re-hired Jobs as a consultant after acquiring his college targeting tech company. Next, we'll now cover Apple's rise to becoming the leading innovative company. We'll end by reflecting on Jobs' legacy.
Jobs began developing a product strategy that aimed to captivate the digital artists, website creators, and start-up publishers of the new economy, with a generation of stunning computers. Jobs' aim was to help transform individuals worldwide into filmmakers, music producers, and publishers, with the Apple Computer acting as an increasingly sophisticated arts production centre.
Recalling the 1984 campaign, he helped craft a new ad that would restore Apple's image as an avant-garde force for cultural change. immense posters featuring Einstein, Gandhi, John Lennon, the Dalai Lama and Picasso, were plastered across major boulevards from Hollywood to Hong Kong.
They were accompanied with an Apple logo and the line, think different. With the iconic figures drawn from Jobs' own pantheon of heroes, he co-wrote the script for the parallel video, which would be broadcast worldwide via the web. Here's a clip.
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, they push the human race forward. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Jobs remade Apple to evolve with the exploding use of the web. By the start of the new millennium, more than half a billion people were online. Web-based file sharing services, developed for scientists, were adapted into peer-to-peer networks that allowed people across the planet to trade music tracks. Aiming to ride the trend, Apple released the first generation iPod, a small Zen-like music player that could hold up to a thousand songs.
The iTunes software that launched a few months later helped transform Apple computers into music, download and recording stations. People could load their iPods with music, gathered across the web. After a US appeals court ruled in 2001 that music sharing site Napster violated American copyright laws, by allowing members to freely exchange music tracks.
Some technology analysts predicted the demise of the iPod. But the iTunes store was designed to stay on the right side of the law. Jobs reasoned that worldwide peer-to-peer trading that generated no royalties could destroy musicians, and presented this argument to music fans across the globe. It worked, and iTunes became the planet's biggest distributor of digital music.
As sales of iPod sawed, Jobs headed a secret project aimed at miniaturizing the basic functions of a laptop into a small, super light computer. It would include a web browser, music player and cell phone, inside a glowing Zen Minimalist case embossed with the Apple logo. Launched in 2007, the iPhone would become the world's most advanced mobile computer to watch YouTube videos, flip through Wikipedia and communicate with friends via messaging.
As tens of millions of Apple fans began using the iPhone to scan web-based editions of the New York Times, Wired or Time. Their publishers were blasted by the Internet Revolution's fallout. As print subscriptions plummeted, they still provided online articles for free, moving like sleepwalkers toward a financial precipice.
Jobs flew into New York to offer a solution. Meeting with the leaders of the New York Times and Time, he proposed that they offer digital subscriptions via the iTunes store while limiting free online access to their web editions. He explained, I would love to help quality journalism, we can't depend on bloggers for our news. We need real reporting and editorial oversight more than ever. So I'd like to find a way to help people create digital products where they can actually make money.
He wanted to throw a lifeline to the New York Times, whose survival he thought was important to the country. As it started constructing a guarded digital gateway to the newspaper, the Times launched a subscription option through iTunes, which helped shield its future.
iTunes would evolve into a world spanning media, music and education marketplace of contending media and ideals. The software was pebbled by traditional giants alongside web-based startups, later joined by film studios and book publishers. iTunes gave musicians, magazines and film studios a showcase to present their creative advances to a worldwide audience. This likely helped them survive in a web era populated by peer-to-peer networks and sophisticated digital replication technology.
Most people think of the iPhone itself as Jobs' greatest achievement, forgetting that it was the iTunes ecosystem that really made the device useful and powerful for its users.
It became clear that Jobs' particular form of pancreatic cancer couldn't be reversed. He raced to craft his last great work, a Silicon Valley oasis that housed Apple's designers and engineers into the future. Jobs gave the job to Pritzker Pricewinner Norman Foster, whom he viewed as the best architect on the planet. Through 2010, he reviewed plans and models in provided direction and feedback. The structure would be so vast, he boasted, it could surround the Vatican's St Peter's Square.
Jobs exclaimed, it's like a spaceship has landed, as he unveiled the futuristic design for the local city council. With a super light structure balanced on curved glass panels, the project almost appears to float. Viewed from the air, it looks like the rotating space station that orbits the Earth in Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001 a space odyssey.
Inside Apple, Jobs always pushed his designers and engineers to view themselves as artists. He'd tell them, we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When New York's Museum of Modern Art began collecting Apple's computers as symbols of the new Zentech design aesthetic, with it doesn't models entering the permanent collection.
Pre-eminent among Apple's designers was Johnny Ive. Ive was a Brit who fully understood that the way something is manufactured is as important as how it looks and performs. The object had to have purity and seamlessness. This design sense, bringing art to technology, would separate the iMac iPod iPhone and the iPad from the rest of the computer market, turning Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
On the engineering side, Jobs was a co-creator of myriad Apple Leaps in computing technology, and is listed as one of the inventors of more than 200 Apple patents in the US. Yet he once stated that tech companies don't understand creativity. They don't appreciate intuitive thinking. I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline. Isaacson wrote a coder for Smithsonian Magazine after Steve Jobs was published. Key wrote, Many Jobs Special, sometimes even a genius, was his fiery instinct for beauty and his talent for creating it. And because of that, he was able to build a company that became the greatest force for innovative design and the best proof of its importance in our time.
Visionaries are often difficult people, and Jobs was no exception. People couldn't cope with his withering scorn, massive temper, and general, I know best outlook. On the other hand, many Apple staffers maintained that their years under Jobs were the best in their career. His esoteric sense of mission didn't make Apple an easy place to work, but the mission was deeply inspiring.
Before we end, let's go over everything we've learned. Jobs started his career as a Zen cyberpunk, developing hacking tech with his partner Steve Wozniak. Wozniak dreamed up personal computers, and they created Apple computers. Apple fired Jobs, but then re-hired him after he developed animation giant Pixar. Upon his return, Jobs developed technology that has come to define the modern world, iTunes, iPod, and iPhone, to name the biggest names.
Andy Hertzfeld, who worked on the first Mac, said of Jobs, He thinks there are a few people who are special, people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India, and he's one of them. Jobs's wish to make a dent on the universe was partly to do with his premonition that he wouldn't live a long life. He talked at length with Isaacson about his time in India and his thoughts on reincarnation. Jobs said he wanted to believe that the individual soul lives on through an endless odyssey across the ages.
At any rate, Jobs certainly lives on in his products, platforms, and the way he brought stunning design to a tech industry that seemed unable to think beyond a grey plastic boxes. Here's Jobs again from his Stanford commencement speech. I decided to take a calligraphy class, it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Mac and Tosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. Jobs didn't just make our everyday lives better. He made it more beautiful.
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