I’ve always thought that the only positive thing that would result from Steve Jobs’ withdrawal from the public spotlight would be the flurry of stories to pour out from all corners of the Wold Wide Web. His recent resignation proved me right. To save you time and effort, here is my personal selection among the several dozens of articles and stories I have read in the past three weeks. If you think a worthy one is missing, do not hesitate to mention it in the comments.

The big news

• Steve Jobs’ resignation letter this one will go down in history
• Tim Cook’s internal letter to all Apple employees  leaked to Ars Technica

Homages

• Walt Mossberg: Essay: Jobs’s Departure as CEO of Apple Is the End of an Extraordinary Era Walt Mossberg comes back on Steve Jobs’ career (disclaimer: no emotional or particularly insightful comments)
• David Pogue: Steve Jobs Reshaped Industries nice article
• Steve: Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now? by former Apple France boss Jean-Louis Gassée, including a perspicacious metaphor about Steve riding the animal inside him
• Michael Moritz: Jobs founded Apple not once but twice Michael Moritz wrote The Little Kingdom, the first book about Apple — in addition to the infamous TIME portrait The Updated Book of Jobs. He later went on to fund Google and became a millionaire.
• Om Malik (GigaOm): Steve Jobs and the sound of silence a poignant hommage by Om
• No, Apple Won’t Be the Same Without Steve Jobs Mike Elgan over at Cult of Mac pretty much sums up my opinion on the post-Jobs Apple, including a personal favorite:
  

  The trouble with dictatorship or absolute monarchy is that success or failure depend entirely upon the quality of the despot. That’s why they fail. And that’s why a democracy that limits the power of leaders is best — it still works, more or less, even when incompetent morons are in power.
  But what about when the dictator is literally the single best person to lead? In those almost non-existently rare instances, despotism is by far the best form of government. Heaven, for example, is not a democracy.

• Apple Employees React to Steve Jobs’s Resignation (The Daily Beast)
• Where Some Earn Enmity, Jobs Won Affection (New York Times) about Steve’s uniqueness
• The NY Times has a very nice page with most of Steve Jobs patents – possible source of inspiration for the next version of all about Steve Jobs.com
• YouTube tribute: “We are all Steve”
• Adweek released an edited version of the Think Different ad with Steve Jobs in his right place at the end (the shot is from the 1981 video before he goes on TV for the first time)

Steve Jobs stories

• The Wall Street Journal’s compilation of Steve Jobs quotes good selection
• The First Time I Met Steve Jobs… Fast Company has a very nice compilation of a number of Steve Jobs stories that have come out after the resignation
• Icon Ambulance Vic Gundotra, former Microsoftee and current VP of Social at Google, tells the story of a call from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning
• Steve Jobs’ Two-Minute Lesson by Forbes editor Quentin Hardy
• An Inspiring Story About a Young Apple Fan’s Experience With Steve Jobs an encounter at the NY 5th Avenue Store opening
• My one question for Steve Jobs in 2000 recollection from a former Apple intern
• So, Steve Jobs has left his role as Apple’s CEO nice anecdote of an encounter on Apple’s campus by former employee David Cairns
• Apple all-star alumni recall Steve Jobs’ lessons on SFGate
• You’re the ones internal Apple employee meeting
• An encounter at a restaurant by Ryan at Gdgt

Rediscovered treasures

• Joe Nocera at the NY Times gives away (PDF) a great profile on Steve Jobs he wrote back in 1986 (during the early NeXT days) for Esquire
• How Apple works: Inside the world’s biggest startup the Fortune article is finally released. Apparently author Adam Lashinsky will turn it into a book later next year
• David Pogue dug out an old article of his from 1998
• The old story (related in Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming) on the joke played by Steve and Larry Ellison on a naive guy who thought he could run Apple, back in 1998

On Steve’s health

• Steve Jobs: ‘Unfortunately, That Day Has Come’ BusinessWeek reports Steve spent a full day at the Apple campus before he tendered his resignation, including an ‘emotional’ meeting with his executive team
• Rarity of Steve Jobs’ cancer and treatment provides few predictions, few options The San Jose Mercury News confirms that no media/doctor, unless directly involved, know and can predict anything about Steve’s condition
• Jobs Struggled With Health Problems for Years The Wall Street Journal comes back on a decade of fight
• My Neighbor, Steve Jobs a touching story from a Palo Alto resident

Here’s what I put aside for you:

• July 9: A weird video surfaces from Taiwan. A tea brand shamelessly used an actor to play Steve Jobs and sell bottled tea in a TV commercial. See for yourself:
  
  
  (via Cult of Mac)

• July 8: French magazine Le Point reveals that Steve almost purchased a castle in the South-East of France. Pictured below, the property is valued at around €25m ($36m). Apparently Steve’s wife, Laurene, toured the property herself.
  The article also relates that back in 1985, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist close to President Francois Mitterrand, apparently asked of the head of state a special present to Steve Jobs for his 30th birthday. I’ve read many stories about that famed birthday, where tons of celebrities attended, including Ella Fitzgerald who was the party singer. Anyway, JJSS (as he is often called) reportedly suggested that the French nationality was offered to the Apple co-founder as a special gift. The French President nonchalantly refused. I think Steve would have appreciated the gift, as he has often testified of his love of France (I have made a compilation of the many times he uses France in Apple demos).

• July 11: a new Tshirt made it to the Apple Gift shop in Cupertino… making fun of the company’s cult of secrecy. I’m buying it next time I go there! (via Macrumors).
  
• July 21: John Gruber of Daring Fireball spotted a nice anecdote about Steve and his legendary curtesy. I am quoting the same thing he did:
  

  The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

• July 21: Philip Elmer-Dewitt dug out a nice chart that compiles all the public data about Apple’s reiumbursements of the expenses of Steve’s famed private jet airplane. I think it is worth mentioning that Steve can use the jet for his personal use, but then of course the company doesn’t reiumburse him of the cost of operating it. The chart is below:

• July 23: after all the nonsense we’ve come to read about Steve’s succession lately (which did grant us a new Steve Jobs quote: “it’s hogwash”, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal) — John Gruber wrote a very good article, the kind that only he knows how to write, on the topic: On Succeeding Steve Jobs. His conclusion: “the obvious structure for a post-Jobs Apple is simply Apple as we know it, without Steve Jobs.” I believe he is 100% right and that’s what we will see, perhaps as early as next year. BUT, and it’s a big BUT, I am not sure Tim Cook can keep the fire alive as Steve did for the next decade. And as I’ve stated before, I think he will have trouble running the company unchallenged the way only the genius-founder Steve Jobs can. His authority to run the super-disciplined fruit company will probably be challenged a couple of years after Steve is gone… Time will tell.

And it’s cool. See for yourself:

Old design

New design

(expert eyes will recognize Albert Watson’s portrait of Steve from 2006).

This is the kind of decision in which, although it has zero importance in the grander scheme of things, I’m 100% confident Steve Jobs has a say. It explains why it’s the first time we’re seeing this picture in color… And why, just like last time, Steve’s portrait is quite dated (the one before was a picture from 1998 on which Steve posed with a 1st-generation iMac).

One thing that hasn’t changed though is the mention of one Steve’s pet peeves, the “apricot orchards” of Silicon Valley that he misses so much:

Steve grew up in the apricot orchards which later became known as Silicon Valley, and still lives there with his family.

There are countless examples of his using these exact words, e.g. this 1995 interview where he said:

My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards —apricot orchards and prune orchards— and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other.

or even the recent presentation he gave to the Cupertino city council when he announced Apple’s plans for its next campus — during which he actually insisted that the campus would host actual apricot orchards in its park!

As a side note, it’s also actually quite telling that the bio is much shorter than some of the other executives’ ones, although of course they have achieved much less than their boss….

I am, as I imagine you are, incredibly excited by the coming of this book.

The biggest news is of course that the book is ‘authorized’, meaning Steve, as opposed to previous biographies, helped its making instead of blocking it. What usually happens is that whenever a journalist or writer tries to interview someone from Steve’s entourage, he faces a wall of silence, akin to an omerta. Indeed, they should be wary of what they say, because historically Steve has shown some pretty harsh un-forgiveness with indiscreet friends and relatives.

The most famous example of this trait is Michael Moritz’s 1982 piece, The Updated Book Of Jobs, which he wrote as Time Magazine’s Silicon Valley correspondent (Moritz later wrote the first good book on Apple, and arguably the first Steve Jobs biography, The Little Kingdom). Moritz had been given carte blanche at Apple to write the portrait of Steve Jobs who was a serious candidate to become Man of the Year 1983. Instead, he turned out this much more critical piece, including a testimonial from Steve’s college friend Dan Kottke: “something is happening to Steve that’s sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He’s less sensitive to people’s feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them”. Steve apparently broke all ties with Dan after that article was published.

But this time, Steve is said to give biographist Isaacson acces to his closest friends and relatives. I imagine among the friends there will be Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell, Bob Metcalfe, perhaps Al Gore. I am curious about Steve’s relatives. Will Laurene speak up on her husband? I’ve never found any trace of her speaking of Steve in public. Or perhaps his biological sister Mona? That’s more likely.

The active collaboration of Steve will have of course positive as well as negative effects. So far, previous biographies (such as my personal favorite, Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) only could be based on interviews of ghosts from Steve’s past life (I’m referring to you, Dan Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld), or of pissed off former employees who had regained their ‘freedom of speech’. This is nicely put by Chris Smith in an article I will refer to below:

In recent years, several biographers have gamely tried to chart the depths of Jobsʼ psyche, with little help from the man himself. He rarely speaks to the press, save for tightly scripted sound bites, so all these accounts are based on talks with old colleagues and Apple Deep Throats, supplemented by occasional in-depth interviews heʼs granted to a few lucky reporters over the years.

Any journalist who’s tried to go a little deeper had to endure Steve’s legendary wrath, as described by Rich Karlgaard in his 2006 WSJ article Vladimir llyich Jobs? (for the heck of me I can’t find a link to it, but I have a scanned version on my Mac):

Years ago, he phoned me on a Saturday morning and tried to squash a story my then-magazine, Upside, was about to print on NeXT, Inc. NeXT was his second startup after Apple. But it was failing and our story said so. On the phone Mr. Jobs cooed and threatened, including warnings to “watch my backside” and strangely, “don’t ride a bicycle alone on dark roads.” We ran the story. Michael Moritz, before he was a venture capitalist funding Yahoo and Google, once covered Apple as a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Jobs repeatedly tried to get him fired. Dozens of journalists have stories like this.

Of course, it’s no wonder in these circumstances that Steve Jobs portraits tend to be dark. What’s to be feared from an authorized biography is the opposite, that it’d be too polished. The only example I can think of is the excellent TV documentary on the history of Pixar, The Pixar Story (2007). Jobs appears in the film, but in exchange, there is barely any mention of Alvy Ray Smith, one of Pixar’s visionary co-founders , whom Steve fired in the early 1990s (after they’d had a rough argument in which Alvy criticized NeXT and Steve, Alvy’s Southerner accent).

An excellent article was posted by Michael Wolff on this precise issue, it’s called The Steve Jobs Biography: What Story Will Be Told? Wolff makes a wish that Isaacson will perhaps criticize Steve to sell even more copies. Quote:

If Isaacson likes to associate with great men, to imagine himself as a great, too, what he really understands is the shape of the modern career, the strategic, even Faustian mastery of the commercial world that produces epic success. That’s the darkness that animates Isaacson’s Kissinger book— preternatural talent depends on preternatural ruthlessness.

Finally let’s come back to the title of the book. It’s not only interesting because it re-uses the clever pun Moritz made up in his 1982 article (as well as the not-so-clever use of Apple’s trademark i prefix, already used by Steve Wozniak in his own autobiograhy, iWoz). It’s also to me the latest in Steve’s many whimsical allusions to biblical culture. I can think of several, including the Tablet of Commandments during the iPad introduction, or the clever quote pictured below: “we’ve consulted every possible higher authority“ (to make the G5 run cooler), during the Macworld 2006 keynote.

Which leads me to the article I mentioned earlier, by Chris Smith, which is three years old now, but which I only stumbled across very recently, appropriately called Is Steve Jobs God? It is definitely one of the finest (and most delightful to read) pieces I’ve ever read on the state of Steve Jobs literature, and it’s error-free to boot. I agree with its final stance, that basically the best Steve Jobs portrait so far is perhaps by Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve (in his blog and his derived book, oPtion$):

Much like Hunter S. Thompsonʼs Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, whose phantasmagoric, not strictly factual probing of the rot at the core of the American dream told us more about the shifting cultural winds of ʼ60s-era America than any number of straight histories could, oPtion$ digs deep into the zeitgeist and comes up with a foundation myth that resonates.

The last two paragrahs are too good to be left out. They put the justification for my enthusiasm to build and maintain all about Steve Jobs, which Mike Cassidy called “a digital shrine to a tech god”, in beautiful words:

The gods donʼt have to play by our rules, and Jobs, bless his sometimes Grinchlike heart, is a god for our times, a secular deity who for years has offered us a better tomorrow courtesy of technology and design. Now he has his finger on the pulse of three major industries—computers, music, and movies—and is busily threading them together. In the process, heʼs forging a whole new world. Such is the power of his vision that we cheer his victories as if they were our own and forgive his occasional missteps (remember the underpowered and overpriced Cube?), because, well, God created both the peacock and the mosquito, and his ways are sometimes inscrutable.Even if you spend your Sunday mornings with the Times instead of the Bible, youʼre probably still looking for the meaning of it all. I know I am.
Jobs, the computer geek who elevated design to high art—and who once dressed up as Jesus for a Halloween party—has provided that spiritual heft for many of us. Thereʼs a reason Apple fans used to make Kool-Aid jokes. Forget the legions of politicians, prognosticators, and fire-and-brimstone preachers: When Jobs talks of a new day rising, we canʼt wait for dawn to break.

Steve, I’m definitely not the only one waiting for your Holy Book!

Although it’s mostly accurate (gee, all about Steve Jobs.com is quoted twice in the source list), it has its shares of mistakes. Where would the fun be if it hadn’t?

• Steve Jobs is NOT dyslexic. This is a recurrent fantasy that was never verified.
• the brand of his turtleneck is not St Croix but Issey Mikake (whole story here or here on Quora). Who knows how many pairs of jeans he has? I doubt it’s a hundred.
• he is not a fruitarian. He certainly *has been* a fruitarian, during his hippie days, when he was 19. But those days are long gone

Here’s the infographic anyway (source):

One day I was watching Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a phrase caught my attention. It’s a line when Augustus Gloop starts eating out the river, and Johnny Depp/Willy Wonka asks him to stop, insisting his chocolate must stay ‘untouched by human hands’. The phrase reminded me of Steve during his NeXT years. He used the exact same phrase to describe the robots that built the NeXT Cube in his automated factory (see an example here).

This got me thinking of the many similarities that could be found between Steve Jobs and the Willy Wonka character. The most obvious are:

• they’re both widely-acknowledged geniuses at their art (respectively, creating chocolate and great technological products)
• their products are magical and admired all around the world
• they both work in super-secret environments (the chocolate factory, and Apple), and everyone wonders what must be going on behind the doors
• they both have kind of a quirky personality (of course this is more obvious in Willy Wonka, but still, Steve Jobs is not your typical Fortune 500 CEO)

I didn’t think about that metaphor much back then… But it came back to me four times, the latest of which was yesterday.

First, of course, Fake Steve wrote about it in one of his earliest posts. The Bono character said to FSJ:

Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, you’re like Willy fookin Wonka in his fookin chocolate factory, out there baking up your fookin iPods, and meanwhile the fookin planet is fookin meltin, ya fooktard. I tell him, Bono, look, we all gotta do what we do, right?

The second instance was from more ‘respectable’ sources. It was the flurry of articles that got published when Steve was seen in Manhattan in early 2010 to pitch publishers about iPad. They all mentioned he was wearing “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing” that evoked Willy Wonka (see here). Unfortunately there were no pictures — that’s why the caricature above was drawn, to compensate for this lack.

Then there was Mike Daisey, the now-famous writer/comedian who is currently playing a show in Berkeley entitled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The show has been greatly covered in the tech press/blogosphere, and I wish I could give my own opinion on it. Unfortunately as you know I am a student in France, so I can’t afford to buy airplane tickets just to see one show in California… so I didn’t see the show. I hope it’s been recorded and we’ll see the video pop out at some point.

What’s interesting is the way Mike pitched his own show:

In The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey dives into the epic story of a real life Willy Wonka. He examines how the CEO of Apple and his obsessions profoundly shape our everyday lives—and travels to China to investigate the factories where millions toil to make iPhones and iPods.

The metaphor finally reached its climax in the video I discovered this week, from CollegeHumor.com. They have gone all the way with a 4-minute video portraying Steve as Willy Wonka. He let 5 Golden iTickets in iPhone boxes to let children discover his magical Apple factory… It’s very fun and enjoyable: so, enjoy. It’s even got Oompa-Loompas/Apple Geniuses

What do you think?

It is a fascinating read to say the least. The conclusion is not a surprise for me, just a confirmation: despite popular belief, Steve Jobs hasn’t changed much in all these years. I have gathered my favorite quotes from the interview to prove it:

In their foreword, Playboy makes a pretty accurate description of young Steve, which is just as true for old Steve (try replacing IBM by Google in the quote below):

But to hear Jobs tell it, the money isn’t even half the story, especially since he does not spend it very lavishly—and, indeed, claims to have very little time for social life. He is on a mission, preaching the Gospel of salvation through the personal computer—preferably one manufactured by Apple. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products…

Unable to relent in his mission to spread the Apple word, he talked with solemn ferocity about the war with IBM—but then would punctuate his enthusiasm for an idea with ‘Neat!’ or ‘Incredibly great!’

Once the interview starts, you can read that some ideas that Steve had at 30 are still deeply ingrained in him today:

1. Making technology accessible to anybody:

That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work.

2. The tools metaphor

A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it’s going to go.

The tools metaphor is pretty interesting, because it was first used in an Apple PR campaign before Apple’s IPO. I refer to it in the Long Bio on all about Steve Jobs.com (“the biggest IPO since Ford”). You can see Steve using it again in this late 1980s video from the NeXT era. It’s doubtful Steve initiated it — it was a PR scheme — but he has used it for years, and still does today. It’s become his best paradigm to describe what his machines do.

3. Apple is for the people, not for businesses

We expressed very high hopes for Lisa and we were wrong. The hardest thing for us was that we knew Macintosh was coming, and Macintosh seemed to overcome every possible objection to Lisa. As a company, we would be getting back to our roots—selling computers to people, not corporations. We went off and built the most insanely great computer in the world.

4. Steve Jobs, a “one-man focus group”

It’s a well-known fact among Apple insiders that the fruit company does not rely on market research or focus groups to design their products. They rely almost exclusively on Steve himself (and the design & senior staff) for assessing a product’s quality. that was already true in 1985:

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

5. Changing the world

Steve plays modest and avoids mentioning his desire to change the world in current interviews. He wasn’t that humble in the 1980s, which helps clarify what his true opinion probably really is:

We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

6. Products, products, products

We’ve never worried about numbers. In the market place, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference.

7. His own future

Below, Steve somehow talks of leaving Apple and coming back, “hibernating” like an artist… it’s pretty funny, because that’s what actually happened when he was in the wilderness. But he certainly had not planned it!

JOBS: And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

Finally, this last quote is about his retirement… in the early 1990s It’s fair to say that Steve’s opinion of older people has evolved in 25 years.

It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.
(…)
I think an interesting challenge in this area of intellectual inquiry is to grow obsolete gracefully, in the sense that things are changing so fast that certainly by the end of the Eighties, we really want to turn over the reins to the next generation, whose fundamental perceptions are state-of-the-art perceptions, so that they can go on, stand on our shoulders and go much further. It’s a very interesting challenge, isn’t it? How to grow obsolete with grace.

Please, Steve, don’t grow obsolete too soon!

As a side note, I’d like to point out that Steve already used “we” when he meant “I” at the time:

PLAYBOY: We were warned about you: Before this Interview began, someone said we were “about to be snowed by the best.”

JOBS: [Smiling] We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.

1. Context

As most of you know, Steve has owned a mansion in Woodside since 1984. He bought it with the money he made at Apple after the company’s IPO in 1980. The mansion — 14,540 sq.— was built in the 1920s by a copper magnate, Daniel Jackling, hence its nickname “the Jackling house”. It is located in the exclusive neighborhood of Woodside, not too far from Larry Ellison’s Japanese estate. Steve lived in it when he was a bachelor, roughly from 1984 to the early or mid-1990s (shortly after his marriage with Laurene). You can see pictures of Steve inside his mansion on all about Steve Jobs (I chose one of my favorites here).

Steve in Woodside in September 1985, the day he announced he was quitting Apple.Note the mansion on the right, which looks really nice.

One thing you will note is that most of the rooms are devoid of furniture. As a matter of fact, the only room that was fully furbished inside the mansion was the kitchen — not that Steve was a great cook, he hired a couple who cooked for him.

Understandably, Laurene refused to live in this empty mansion, and had Steve and their new family move to a less reclusive — and slightly more furnished — house in Palo Alto. The Woodside mansion has been abandoned since then. For a long time, Steve has had plans to tear it down and replace it by a perfect home that he designed for his family (unlike their Palo Alto house, which they bought). It is famed that in the late 1990s, he had plans by I.M. Pei for this new home, but they never went further than a scale model. Pei has also worked with Steve on the refurbishment of his New York apartment in the San Remo towers, in which he never lived either. It’s now the home of U2 singer Bono.

There are two reasons this dream house was never built. One, Steve is a perfectionist, and was never satisfied enough by what the architects had to propose him. It’s the same reason he lived with a mattress, Ansel Adams prints and a stereo system as his only pieces of furniture for so long — he could never decide on what to buy. The second reason though is an even more decisive one: Steve was simply never allowed to tear down his house. Not that he didn’t try.

2. The Jackling mansion affair

Billiard room in the abandoned Woodside mansion

Let’s come back briefly on the legal imbriglio surrounding the destruction of the Jackling mansion:

• in 2004, Steve gets the permission to tear down his house from the city of Woodside
• the destruction is blocked by a trial, which ends in January 2006 with the victory of “Uphold Our Heritage”. This local group of conservationists argued it was a piece of history which could not be destroyed. Steve Jobs appealed to the decision.
• in January 2007, he lost the appeal.
• in 2008, he applied for a new demolition permit. He associated this new demand with a pledge from another millionaire willing to move the mansion brick by brick to a new location.
• in May 2009, the demolition permit was granted by city council. Plans were submitted and made public. Their only purpose was to give a vague idea of what the new project could look like, and that it was less costly than renovating the old mansion.
• in March 2010, the Superior Court upholds its rejection of that construction permit. Work on the new house can legally start.

3. Gizmodo announces it has the exclusive plans of Steve Jobs future home

This is where we stood before Gizmodo claimed in great fanfare that they had obtained the plans for Steve’s future home in their Sep. 28 article.

A whole sea of blog posts and other sorts of media attention followed. One example I will highlight: the Forbes article entitled The Marxist Foundations of Steve Jobs’ New Home. It’s interesting for two reasons. One, it’s from Forbes magazine, i.e. it illustrates how mainstream the subject of Steve Jobs’ private life has now become. The second, because it shows how much journalists can talk about a subject they know nothing or very little of. In our case, the supposed “Steve Jobs’ new home”.

The general feeling people got about the plans was: wow. It’s so simple. It’s so humble. It looks like… an Apple product! Well, had they been a little more familiar with the subject of Steve — by visiting certain websites — this is not what should have surprised them. Steve is very well known for leading a very humble life. He has no chauffeur, private bodyguards, and doesn’t live in a 20-bedroom mansion (although he does a private jet). He doesn’t go out much and entertains very rarely. His life is focused on only two things: Apple, and his family.

Hence the only thing I was surprised by: the lack of any noticeable office space. Indeed, Steve is well known for working from home, sometimes very late at night — yet although all the furniture appear in the plans, I couldn’t see a single desk anywhere, much less a separate office.

4. The truth is revealed

Thank God there still are a couple of real journalists out there who do their job right — instead of publishing whatever they have at hand that is likely to make sensation. I am not sure who uncovered it first, but the first time I read it was in Philipp Elwer-Demitt’s blog (Philipp covers Apple for Fortune Magazine) :

To make a long story short, the plans uncovered by Gizmodo were in fact from the 2009 city council, “for the sole use of estimating the environmental costs of various demolition alternatives”. If I understand correctly, they were submitted even earlier, in 2008. You read right — they’re not the real ones. The only thing Gizmodo could claim to defend themselves is that the plans could actually have been real. I myself think that the actual house will not be that much different from what the plans showed.

Conclusion

Apart from the widespread incompetence and lack of professionalism of journalists (no news to me), this whole affair shows how pervasive Steve Jobs has become in our culture. I could not have begun to imagine that only five years ago; the whole Web and even traditional media covering a fake leak of plans for his future home? Another comment: I don’t think Steve must have appreciated this much attention. Maybe Gizmodo did use that as payback for the charges on Gizmodo-gate. Who knows?

—

Bonus link for you guys : from one of my favorite place on the web, the Joy of Tech comic, a cartoon showing the hidden features of Steve’s new home. Reminds me of their classic, What’s really behind a Steve Jobs Keynote.

Comparing yourself with Steve Jobs is not healthy. Never mind that it’s probably the pastime of every alpha male and female businessperson on the planet these days.

There are two reasons why the article caught my eye:

- one, some people who (sadly) don’t spend enough time on the website think that the section “Being Steve” refers to “how to emulate Steve Jobs”. Maybe the name is a bad choice — though I like it and don’t intend to change it, sorry folks. But if you spend a couple minutes on the website, you’ll see it’s a description of Steve’s personality, things that have to be dealt with on all about Steve Jobs but have nothing to do on the biography. So — no, it’s not a manual on how to “be like Steve”.

- second, and more importantly, during my current studies in business school, I do have often heard Steve Jobs quoted in many a class by my teachers as a great inspiration. This is quite ironic to me.
I have been a Mac user and Steve Jobs admirer for several years. And let me tell you that back in 2000, talking of Steve Jobs and Apple as models was odd to say the least. The prevalent idea was that Macs were expensive toys for losers and that it was a good thing Windows was ruling the world. I can’t imagine how it was back in the 1990s, when Steve was struggling with NeXT. At the time, he was a common example of what a manager must not be and a model never to follow. Read the biography Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross and you’ll see what I mean.

The interesting thing about Steve is that he hasn’t changed much between the 1990s and today. His ideas and management style during his NeXT years are not all that different from his current ones. Yet at the time he was failing, and now he’s on top of the world. I think there are two reasons that explain this change: the world has caught up with his vision (the come-together of computers and consumer electronics, hence the succes of iPod and iPhone), and luck (with Pixar, which he never thought would be that successful, and made his return possible).

Conclusion: don’t believe what you read in business articles and books (especially if they start mentioning Steve Jobs ). There are no rules in how to be successful, have a good strategy, and so on.