October 8, 2000 - Operating System
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A biography of Steve Jobs, founder and (again) C.E.O. of Apple.
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
THE SECOND COMING OF STEVE JOBS
By Alan Deutschman.
321 pp. New York:
Broadway Books. $26.
In the preface to ''The Second Coming of Steve Jobs,'' Alan Deutschman
explains why he chose to profile Apple Computer's founder and C.E.O.
Many people, he says, have written overawed articles about Jobs since
he returned to Apple in 1996 after nearly 12 years in exile, turning
the company from a has-been into a profitable trendsetter and
restoring his reputation as a visionary. ''I was looking for Steve
Jobs the person rather than Steve Jobs the icon,'' Deutschman writes.
''I set out to discover the deep sources of his character and
motivation. I strived to find where he got his unusual ideas about
leader****p, management and the creative process.''
This is a rather tactful description, since these ''management''
ideas, the author says, include screaming at employees to the point of
hyperventilation, firing a P.R. consultant and refusing to pay her for
completed work and taking enough stock options in his animation
company, Pixar, to make himself a billionaire while leaving squat for
all but a few of its longtime workers. Deutschman gives a truer
indication of his quest by quoting the computer industry pundit
Stewart Alsop, who posits that the major computer companies that are
still run by their founders (Apple, Oracle, etc.) have one thing in
common. They're all run by -- to paraphrase Alsop delicately --
complete jerks.
This is the unspoken question of ''Second Coming'': Just how big a
jerk is Steve Jobs? Pretty big, as Deutschman reveals in a study
bursting with damning anecdotes, gleaned from interviews with nearly
100 of Jobs's friends and colleagues. Big enough to have refused to
sup****t his young daughter, Lisa, financially for years. Big enough to
have played a pointlessly cruel practical joke on a nave underling,
pretending to offer him the position of Apple C.E.O. Big enough to
park his Mercedes in the handicapped spaces at Apple.
In ''Second Coming,'' which examines the period from Jobs's ouster in
1985 to today, Deutschman, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, links
Jobs's business innovations and personal failings -- the ''insanely
great'' products emerging from a great insanity. (Jobs has already
assailed the book as a hatchet job.) That Jobs is less than a
sweetheart is old news; and it would hardly be interesting if not for
the nature of his success. Even technophiles probably care little
about the real character of, say, Michael Dell. But Apple and Jobs
have long received attention far out of pro****tion to the company's
market share because, more than hardware and software, Apple makes
symbols. At its peaks under Jobs, it sold its loyal users an image of
themselves. In 1984, the graphics-based (rather than text-based)
Macintosh made computing accessible. In 1998, the fruit-colored iMac
epitomized today's cultural symbiosis of work and entertainment,
enshrining a business tool as an artwork.
In other words, an utter jerk helped change society by making
computers known for their niceness. Steve Jobs did not succeed so much
because he made better widgets but because, at some deep level, he
understands us. If he is a jerk, he is our jerk. To understand Jobs,
then, is to understand not just his personality -- vain, petulant,
cruel, yet irresistibly seductive even to those he abuses most -- but
his aesthetic.
It is an aesthetic, Deutschman writes, influenced heavily by modernism
and a back-to-the-land ethos -- the combo of spareness, sanctimony and
gourmandism now de rigueur at better housewares and fine-foods stores
across America. (Jobs wanted the original Apple computers to come in
cases made of beautiful blond koa wood.) It was an outgrowth of Jobs's
embrace of 60's counterculturalism -- he was a longtime, and rather
irritating, vegetarian and lived in a commune. Yet he came of age
after these movements were hip or cutting-edge. ''By the time Steve
tried LSD,'' Deutschman notes, ''suburban housewives were reading 'The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.' ''
In fact, Deutschman's most damning charge is really this: The aesthete
and visionary who saw himself and his engineers as artists is at best
a popularizer, at worst a poseur. Driven by ''an innate sense of the
im****tance of aesthetics,'' he was painfully insecure in his tastes,
compensating by making safe choices and spending a lot of money. He
furnished his home in Spartan chic fa****on -- some handmade wooden
furniture in the Craftsman style, a $100,000 stereo, a Persian rug''
-- as if to risk as few errors as possible.
Harnessed properly, this attitude made him a business success. He
became not so much an artist as a connoisseur -- an artist of spending
money, skilled at bargaining and obsessed with hiring the best. When
he adapted his spare aesthetic to mass tastes, the results were the
original Macintosh and the iMac. Pixar, which made the hit ''Toy
Story'' movies, made Jobs rich -- and possibly saved his career --
precisely because he left its artists alone in its crucial early
years. But, the author writes, when he let his perfectionist aesthetic
run unchecked at Next, the computer company he founded after leaving
Apple, he failed monumentally, building a powerful $6,500 machine that
many admired but few bought. A sleek, black cube, it was ''elegant,
yes, but . . . intimidating, even forbidding.''
That is, it was Steve Jobs rendered in silicon. Deutschman's Jobs is
an irresistibly charming man who can turn on a dime to cruelty, a man
practically alien in his ignorance of civil niceties. Unfortunately,
for all of Deutschman's well-chosen anecdotes, we never get a sense of
how Jobs came to be this way. We read that he was adopted but learn
little of his childhood; we see much of his behavior but only glimpses
of his feelings.
This may not be the author's fault; if the ''intensely private'' Jobs
has ever opened up to anyone, he or she hasn't talked to Deutschman.
In fact, he practically recommends supplemental reading: the novel ''A
Regular Guy,'' by Mona Simpson (Jobs's biological sister, whom he
discovered as an adult), a thinly veiled biography that captures ''the
emotional and psychological truths about Steve.'' Deutschman, with all
his research, finally seems to throw up his hands, drawing uninspired
conclusions like ''he is a man of great contrasts and
contradictions.''
But he also avoids the pat ending, so common in comeback stories, in
which the subject must be shown to have changed. Deutschman does
credit Jobs with going through a humble phase after Next's failure,
but by the end of ''Second Coming,'' ensconced as Apple's savior and a
Hollywood player, he is again humiliating underlings and, yes, parking
in the handicapped spaces.
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James Poniewozik is the television critic for Time magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/08/reviews/001008.08poniewt.html?scp=6&sq=%22steve%20jobs%22%20LSD&st=cse
- c.a.t.
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