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While Isaacson’s last chapter "Legacy" sums up Steve Jobs and his phenomenal career beautifully, this review focuses on two of his cardinal traits: An eye for detail, simplicity and beauty and showmanship at launch. Fine-tuned engineering, tinkering with electronics and eye for beauty came from the dad who picked up and adopted this child abandoned by his unwed mother and made his living by refurbishing used cars and reselling them . He developed an added interest in electronics, which was just making an entry into cars. Jobs began assembling his own electronic devices as a schoolkid. Fulfilling the promise which his poor uneducated dad made to himself to give this adopted son the highest levels of education, led to Reed College after school, even though it meant scrounging for every cent. Steve soon found most lectures boring. Financial strain on the father who doted on him added to his arriving at the decision to drop college, moonlight into lectures like calligraphy and humanities which he enjoyed, scrounge meals off a Hare-Krishna Temple and sleep wherever he could. Simplicity and self-confidence came from an interest in the Hare Krishna cult and Eastern philosophy which led him to a monk’s trip to India, a stay in the Himalayas, LSD, fruit-vegetarian diet and poor-bathing habits. He returned to California and Palo Alto dissatisfied, just as clumsy and difficult-to-use PCs were making an entry. Joining video-game maker Attari as a worker at $5 per hour led to an interest in computers. This was followed by a meeting and friendship with Wozniak, the electronic gadget designer freak working at HP ( Woz’ Dad was an electronics grad from Caltech), and their joint incorporation of 50:50 Apple in 1976; capital $1000. Woz was part-time designer and Steve, the astute and confident businessman, assembled them in his dad’s garage and sold them for good profit. Seeing the good response to their Apples and realising the need for creating confidence in their enterprise, the two kids decided to make father-figure Marakula, from Stanford, the chairman and it was he who spelt out the Apple philosophy: To understand customer needs better than anybody else. No shyness from stealing good ideas. Focus: To do a great job, eliminate all unimportant opportunities. Every step in presentation must impute value since people form an opinion of a product by how it is presented and the signal it conveys. These formed the cornerstone of Jobs throughout life: Meticulous attention to every detail; clean lines; exciting to see, touch and hold. Friendly organic looks. Relentless pursuit of perfection. Minimalist design; every detail crafted, even those hidden deep in innards. His role model in design was Dieter Rams of Braun in domestic appliances. The grand mastery of product launch led to the conception of the tag-line "Think Different" by Chiat Day for every Apple Product. Jobs felt that it was his destiny to innovate and make great products. Lassetter at Pixar and Jony Ive at Apple were great partners. This led to his design philosophy: Market research was meant for fools; customers don’t know what they want till we show them. Did Graham Bell do any market research before inventing the telephone? Also important was the emphasis on end-to-end control of product, as was understanding the essence of a product. The essence was to dictate appearance, not engineering. Since man likes to dominate physical products, products must encourage playfulness. Simplicity is not only visual; it also meant absence of clutter deep in the interior. To ensure simplicity, designers must see how it is manufactured. No power-point presentations. Discussions only on proto-models. Make computer as hub of every human activity and only Apple was equipped to do it. Hence computer extensions into iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
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