Category Archives: Updates/Announcements

Happy birthday!

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As many of you probably know, Steve Jobs was born on February 24. He would have turned 57 today.

What you may not know, and shame on you for that, is that, coincidentally, I —perhaps the greatest Jobs-fanboy that ever lived— was also born on that day, some 32 years later. And, less coincidentally, I launched the first iteration of this website on my 19th birthday (Steve’s 51st, follow please!), on 24 February 2006.

I had set a deadline for myself to launch the new all about Steve Jobs.com no later than today, its 6th birthday. I’m glad I could meet it.

We’ve come a long way, baby!

The new ‘all about Steve Jobs.com’ is out

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After five months of inactivity, this blog is coming back in a big way with the new version of all about Steve Jobs.com. I have been working on this new site since Steve Jobs’s resignation in late August 2011, exactly six months ago. This sad event, which seemed to close Steve’s career, made me think already then that the website would need to start a different life, more that of an extensive museum than that of a chronicle. Of course the tragic news of Steve’s death only reinforced this conviction.

I have been working like crazy since then, redesigning the website from scratch —while keeping up with all the new Jobs-related content that sprung up in the months after his passing. Those of you with web development skills would be shocked to learn how much hand-coding there was in the past version of all about Steve Jobs.com. This has changed a lot, and although I do not have a full-blown CMS yet, the creation, publishing and updating of content should be much faster now.

But let’s talk about the new content. The biggest change all of you will notice is the presence of Google AdSense ads. Believe me, I am the guy who wants them out the most —but the truth of the matter is, I don’t have the choice to do without them. Since Steve’s resignation, then death, traffic on the website has gone up by a factor of five (that’s +400%), and my hosting simply could not keep up. I had to upgrade to a more reliable host, which of course was more costly. AdSense is the only monetization service that can provide me the resources for this. I wish I could join a quality (read: with less intrusive ads) affiliate network but I do not have a large enough audience for that. Still, there are only two banners per page and I think this is a fair enough trade-off for the great content I added to the site.

Indeed, to compensate for the addition of ad banners, I worked very hard to provide you with great new content dedicated to Steve Jobs. From the start, my goal with all about Steve Jobs.com has been to gather as much information and media content about Steve as possible — as the name of the website is a clear indication of… and this new update brings me closer to that goal. You can now find:

The work is not completely finished. I will keep adding more videos (esp. the ‘Best Moments’ section), more anecdotes and quotes… and I hope to release in the coming month an updated long biography taking into account all the information that the Walter Isaacson biography provided. What’s more, I am planning to release the long bio in the iBooks format, thanks to Apple’s iBooks Author software, and make it available for free on the website.

I hope you enjoy the new website — do not hesitate to comment on the new design and content, here or on Twitter.

Thanks everyone for your support and kind words!
Romain

Status report

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Three weeks have passed since Steve has left us.

Never before in my life have I felt that time is our most precious resource.

Right now I am facing several time constraints. As most of you know, all my work related to Steve Jobs is done in my so-called ‘spare time’, time that is not blocked by professional or social imperatives. I am striving to use that time as best as I can to achieve two things:

  • first, keep up with the continuous influx of new information, new pictures, new stories about Steve that have come out since his death. Right now this includes reading and analyzing the much-anticipated biography by Walter Isaacson.
  • also keep working on the next version of all about Steve Jobs.com which has been in the works for the past two months. Obviously the two are linked, because that version will integrate, in one form or another, the aforementioned content.

The idea of a completely refurbished and much more complete website came to me this summer. It was reinforced and re-thought out in the wake of Steve’s resignation as Apple CEO. Then I understood his career ‘as we knew it’ was over.  The website had to reflect that. Mind you, I never expected him to leave us so soon. But the outpouring of emotions from all over the world that followed his passing, which translated to record-breaking traffic to all about Steve Jobs.com, was only more evidence to me that I was on the right track. The world can’t get enough of Steve Jobs — and that’s a good sign.

I like to think that my work on the website is similar to Apple’s approach of designing a product. This is why for this new version I am rewriting the code and redesigning the visual elements from scratch. That’s also why I will not speak up on a release date, as I don’t want to be constrained by my own promises. I will only release it when I am proud of the result. Let me just say that I think you will all enjoy the enhancements, both in terms of content (some of it badly needed an update) and of form.

Obviously, I do not have time to update the current website and this blog in addition. It will likely stay in this current form until the new website is ready. If you are eager to keep up with the latest news on Steve Jobs — and boy, there sure are things not to miss — I suggest you follow me on Twitter. This is the main medium through which I will communicate both SJ news and news on the website. You can also easily reach out to me through that service.

Newfound pictures of Steve from the NeXT era

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I recently discovered this video straight from Stanford, which depicts the famed collection of Apple memorabilia that Steve Jobs donated to the university when he came back to Apple. This so-called ‘Apple museum’ includes exclusive documents and pictures from Apple’s early days, namely its first twenty years (1976-1996). Steve Jobs himself mentioned it in the D5 interview with Bill Gates in 2007, saying it was important to focus on the future rather than the past. Still, I wonder if such a collection is being built for Apple 2.0, especially now that Steve is no longer CEO.

On that subject, I was blessed with two recent findings of great sets of photographs of Steve during his NeXT days (my favorite).

First, thanks to reader JB Durand who shared this with me back in July, you can find on Flickr a great set of pictures (by Esther Dyson) from the PC Forum shows of the late 1980s, including pictures of Steve for the 1984, 1985 and 1990 instances. One example below:

I was also fortunate to be contacted by photographer Robert Holmgren three weeks ago about portraits of Steve Jobs he made while Steve was still CEO of NeXT. Again, awesome pictures:

Robert has a couple of blog posts where he explain how he took those photographs and dealt with a difficult subject (complete with the hi-res versions of these pictures). He also has fun stories about his signed Macintosh and a trip to the Jobses’ garage, including an encounter with Steve’s father, Paul. Be sure to check it out.

I am not adding these pictures to the website just yet, because I am working hard on the next version of the website, which I hope to be able to release after the iPhone 5 introduction. They will be on that new version. Thanks Robert!

Lastly, compliment of a friend of mine, and still along the lines of a “Steve Jobs Museum”, a great find on the original booklet made by Paul Rand to explain his work on the NeXT logo to Steve Jobs (scroll down to Identity Presentations). Steve loved it so much he hugged Paul as a sign of gratitude, as told by Randall E. Stross in Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. The booklet was actually the only piece of branded marketing made by NeXT in 1987, along with a Tshirt (before the NeXT Cube was introduced).

For more about Paul Rand, check out this YouTube video where Steve talks about their work relationship.

About blogs, biographies and apricot orchards

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I have been thinking about the next version of the website for some time, and it’s time for Phase I to roll out.

I have moved the website to a new host last week. It should now be faster and more reliable. And today, I moved the blog to that same host. It is now really 100% under all about Steve Jobs.com, since all things Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to be catching on, and is just too confusing. Even though I am keeping the URL allthingsstevejobs.com, it will now point to allaboutstevejobs.com/blog. You might have noticed the better cosmetic integration with the rest of the website too.

I don’t think any of you has missed the two big pieces of Steve Jobs news from the past two weeks:

  • the city of Cupertino has published the plans for the upcoming Apple ‘spaceship’ campus. It’s not bigger than the Pentagon — but close. If you’ve had a thorough look at the plans, Steve’s favored apricot orchards are showing up in the north east garden of the campus (see picture below).

Another strike from Getty Images

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Bad news folks.

For the second time now I got a complaint from Getty Images about using pictures from their collection on all about Steve Jobs.com. This time photographers Diana Walker and Doug Menuez were CCed in the emails, as it was their work that was the focus of Getty. This was kind of a big deal for me, because their pictures of Steve Jobs are among the best in his career. This is not surprising, because both have had a very special relationship with him.

One could argue that Doug Menuez was the ‘official photographer’ of NeXT. The reason Steve made this decisions is indirectly related in his biological sister’s book, Mona Simpson’s A Regular Guy.

He stacke dup beautiful black-and-whites of the team, the automated factory on its first day of operations, the intricate assembly line, evvery element picked by him, even the corrugated floor. “Maybe it was all better before,” he said. There were no good pictures of [Apple]‘ early days. Just snapshots, Polaroids with cluttered  backgrounds and thumbs over the lens. [...] But he’d tried to keep the scraps and pieces of [NeXT] together, to make one clear book to hand on. And the documents were there, ordered and elegant. Yet this time, maybe no one would want them.

Continue reading →

Batch of 11 new vintage Steve Jobs pictures

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With the thousands of pictures of Steve Jobs that are already present on the website, you might think that it’s impossible for me to find new ones apart from new Apple events and iAppearances of iSteve.

But no (and frankly it continues to amaze me) — I sometimes stumble across never-seen-(by-me)-before pictures of Steve’s past, and it’s always refreshing.

Today is one of those occasions:

  • the first two pics are from the very early days of Apple, 1976. They’re of very fine quality, for once.
  • the following two from 1980 and 1981
  • the following pic with John Sculley and Woz, is from the Apple IIc introduction event in February 1984. It is not new but of better quality than the previous version, and it’s corrected, as I had (like many) misattributed it to the Mac introduction of January 24
  • the following two are from the April 24 1984 Apple event (anyone knows what that one was?)
  • the following is from Apple’s Annual Shareholders Meeting of 1985
  • the following from 1988
  • the second to last is very interesting. I only had a cropped version of it. This is the only pic I’ve found of Steve with Peter Van Cuylenburg, who was brought in as COO of NeXT by investor Canon in 1992. He only stayed one year, as he betrayed Steve (even worse than Sculley) by calling up Sun’s Scott McNealy to have him buy NeXT and install him as CEO. It was a professionally fatal blow to Steve.
  • the last pic is from Steve’s ‘wildest wilderness year’, 1994. He is posing with Morgan Stanley execs for a NYT article about NeXTSTEP. I have found the article in the NYT archive, have a look at it, it’s pretty telling that Steve is barely mentioned in there…

Our website featured in the San Jose Mercury News

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This happened… whew, two weeks ago already.

On March 11, I got an email from Mike Cassidy, columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. He said he wanted to speak with me about the website. We talked using Skype (on iPhone, on my part) a couple of days later. The conversation itself lasted for almost an hour. I was surprised by Mike’s interest, especially since I thought he wanted the story to feature in a larger piece about Apple or Steve Jobs in general.

The following week, the article was published on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the San Jose Mercury News. For those of you that don’t know, the Mercury News is the local newspaper of San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley. It’s basically Steve Jobs’ local newspaper! Gasp. Pictured right is a scanned version of that first page.

The online version of the article is here: Cassidy: Romain Moisescot makes Steve Jobs a full-time job

For those of you wondering — Mike was very polite and courteous during the interview. All that is mentioned in the article we talked about, including the sentence ‘Yes, the site can feel a little creepy’ which he mentioned as an echo of Fake Steve’s 2006 post (which I am very proud of). My stance on the ‘creepiness’ of all bout Steve Jobs.com is that I want to cover really *all* about Steve Jobs. However I have the greatest respect for Steve Jobs, so I never cross certain lines on the website or the blog (if you see what I mean — especially after the recent health episodes…). But for example since anyone can find Steve’s home address simply by typing it into Google Maps, why not have it properly and neatly presented on my website? That’s why I decided to cover more of Steve’s private life on the website for the past two years. But I don’t think that there’s anything borderline on the website.

Anyway, to come back to the article, my fear of course was what would come out of it. My conversation with Mike was pretty long and I knew he would have to select what he would write about. He did choose some aspects of our conversation that were anecdotal, and distorted them a bit; I’m referring to the anecdote with the “Contact” button, the truth being that I put it back because I am more often than not amused by the emails I get from people who think I am/know Steve Jobs. But overall the article is very close to the truth and I am very happy with its portrayal of the website.

Ha, and the picture — no, it wasn’t a professional photographer who flew from San Jose to my home in Paris to take a picture of me. It’s actually by one of my best friends who is also a pretty good amateur photographer at his lost hours.

Anyway, an interesting remark to close this narcissistic piece. Here are two screenshots of my Analytics stats: Continue reading →

5 new pictures added

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I just added five interesting pictures of Steve to all about Steve Jobs.com:

  • the first one kind of made a sensation some time ago on motorcycle fans forums… so that’s why it escaped my careful watch. It’s a 1981 picture of Steve (when he was 26) riding an old BMW motorcycle. As most of you know, he later gave such a motorcycle to the Mac team, who put it in their lobby — it might be the same one. Find the pic in the ’1981′ album
  • the two following pics are from an interesting photo shoot that was made to illustrate the launching of NeXT Cube in mid-1988. As you can see, Steve strikes his favorite namaste pose, and made it to the cover of BusinessWeek (Oct 24 1988 issue). He was also on the cover of their arch-rival Newsweek the same week. The story is, he promised both magazines exclusivity in exchange of the cover ;) Find those in the ’1988′ album
  • the two latter pics are from the opening of the first Apple mini retail store, on October 16 2004. You can see Steve pose with his neighbor and former employee Dan’L Lewin on the second picture. Dan’l was the brilliant salesman behind the Macintosh University Consortium in 1984, then co-founded NeXT with Steve in 1986 as head of marketing. He left NeXT for Microsoft in 1991. The album is here.

Website updated with new pictures

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I am very pleased to announce that all about Steve Jobs.com was updated with pictures from the exciting keynote of Thursday. Needless to say that I was very excited as all of you to watch Steve take the stage again, in great shape — quite a change from the horrors one could read or watch these past three weeks.

In addition to iPad 2 in the Products Page and 34 pictures of the event, I also added the following new 6 pictures of Steve:

Respectively:

  • a (better) picture of Steve with Lisa in the 1989 album
  • a new picture of the NeXT Cube introduction (12 Oct 1988)
  • a new picture of Steve in the 1989 album
  • a new picture in the Special Event of 10 Nov 1997
  • a new picture of Macworld SF 1999
  • and a new picture of Steve at Apple Expo 2005