Inside Steve's Brain
by Leander Kahney
Atlantic pp304
It is hard to be a Mac user and not to be a fan of Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak), creators of the first personal computer. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
While this new book may not disclose what it the promises in the title, it does supply a Mac fan with delicious snippets and a few glorious put-downs for Microsoft.
Did you know, for example, that the traffic light buttons at the top left corner of every Mac window were Jobs' idea?
Jobs was asked why MS was inferior to Apple. 'They have no taste' he said.
In the 80s Jobs was trying to recruite a reluctant chief executive of Pepsico to help him run Apple. 'Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?' he asked. The Pepsi man switched to Apple.
In the Jobs-Wozniak duo design and marketing side belongs to Jobs and the technical side to Wozniak.
Wozniak's recent autobiography is called iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
For UK readers: Inside Steve's Brain: Business Lessons from Steve Jobs, the Man Who Saved Apple
iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon
Picture: Steve Jobs holding a MacBook Air at MacWorld Conference & Expo 2008.
Photo by Matthew Yohe
Photo by Matthew Yohe
The Pepsi man was John Sculley, and he's anything but still at Apple!
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley
For starters: he pushed out Steve Jobs in 1985. Eep!
Thanks, John,
ReplyDeleteyou are right and I've corrected and republished the post.
I didn't want to mention the Pepsi man name, because, I hold to this minority view that things should be ultimately run by those who creat them, not by accountants or marketeers.
Cheers,
Alex