Steve Jobs and Apple: How his vision transformed the way we work and play

During the time he was away from Apple due to an internal company dispute, Jobs bought computer-animation studio Pixar from George Lucas for $10 million, then later sold it to Disney for $7.4 billion in stock. It’s fun to note that one of Pixar’s greatest triumphs during that time was “Toy Story,” which might have been the title of Jobs’s biography, describing a world of cell phones that can also hold thousands of songs, surf the Internet, take photos, and run a zillion apps.

Actually, his story by noted biographer Walter Isaacson (who wrote best-sellers on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, two other American notables), to be released in November, is titled simply “Steve Jobs.”

“Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against,” blurbs Amazon. “His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.”

Jobs liked to quote Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And there were times when he may have crossed some notion of business ethics.

At ZDNet, tech writer James Kendrick notes Jobs’s reputation as a hard-nosed businessman unwilling to compromise.

But that, Mr. Kendrick says, is part of his genius.

“If Apple couldn’t produce what his vision dictated, then the product wasn’t released,” Kendrick wrote. “Instead of releasing a compromised product to market, Jobs sent the bright teams at Apple back to the drawing board to make his vision a reality.”

The bottom line for many Jobs-watchers has been in the results.

“Apple makes more devices, at lower cost, with fewer defects than any other firm in the world,” asserts technology writer Farhad Manjoo at Slate. “And it does this year after year, on a schedule so strict we follow it with the seasons (iPhones in the summer, iPods in the fall, iPads in the spring). As a result, Apple can now beat most of its competitors on price and profit.”

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