

Andy Hertzfeld's take on the Schlender-Tetzeli bio - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/would-steve-jobs-have-liked-the-new-biography-i-don-t-think-so-c9ceb4fc3005

======
setpatchaddress
The Isaacson book:

(a) contains some amount of content that seems to be ripped straight from
Hertzfeld's Folklore site. (b) reads in many places like a reporter's notebook
- a bunch of notes to follow up on, but no actual followup, no
contextualization, and no help to the reader. (c) contains very little factual
content new to me, and thus probably to any person well-versed in Apple's
history.

Based on that, I assumed at the time that it was rushed into production,
without any significant editing, to capitalize on the death of the subject.
Capitalism! It's simply not a very well-written book. The defense of it in
some quarters is puzzling.

Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore site, on the other hand, is a treasure. Someone
should put it out in book form again (and do it right this time -- O'Reilly
gave it an inappropriate and bad mid-90's cover design, saddled it with a
generic name, and made the images -- screenshots of early designs of the first
significant mass-market graphical interface -- so small as to be nearly
illegible).

------
IBM
Nobody is going to write a "definitive" biography of Steve Jobs. You're just
going to have to piece everything together from things people have written
that are well sourced.

~~~
gdubs
That's what's great about Andy's 'folklore' site. Oral histories are sometimes
the best way to get an accurate sense of a person/place/time. You get
overlapping impressions and can piece together the mosaic yourself as the
reader.

------
S_A_P
All biographies are going to have a narrative or else they would be laborious
to read. Some assumptions and shortcuts must be taken to summarize someone in
a few hundred pages. People follow patterns most of the time but not all the
time. Andy is correct in saying that you need multiple accounts to get some
idea of what a person is like. I read the first biography of Steve jobs and I
may get around to reading this one. It was inevitable but Apple just isn't as
interesting without Steve.

------
pa5tabear
Is it known that Apple leaders endorse the contents of Becoming Steve Jobs?

Perhaps Apple chooses to promote the work for the publicity _despite_ its
angle on Jobs' career stages. They might dislike the Isaacson biography now
but they promoted it plenty when it came out...

~~~
CamperBob2
The Kremlinological aspects aren't too surprising -- neither Cook nor Ive is
widely associated with the _ancien regime_ at Apple so there's no downside for
them in criticizing it. Mistakes Were Made, and so on, but the company is
doing So Much Better Now.

From the point of view of the current leadership, it's time to both praise
Jobs and bury him.

