Love or hate him, there is no denying that Steve Jobs was a control freak. As Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Jobs notes, Steve’s control freakery was so intense that he couldn’t stand sharing the stage while he was making one of his beloved whiteboard presentations. So what was the impact of this on Apple and how did it shape the company’s products and organization?
“Sometimes,” Walter Isaacson told me last week when he came into our San Francisco TechCrunch TV studio, “it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.” That’s because, he explained, “promiscuity leads to crappy products.” And it’s that obsessive end-to-end control of products – from chip manufacture to the retail experience – that most defined Steve’s remarkable tenure as Apple CEO.
This is the final part of my four part interview with Isaacson. Last week, he told me why Jobs wasn’t a tweaker, evaluated his historic significance and how he could sometimes be a tyrant.
Walter Isaacson is the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). Isaacson was born on May...
Steve Jobs was the co-founder and CEO of Apple and formerly Pixar. Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California to Joanne Simpson and a Syrian father. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California then adopted him. In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. One semester later, he had dropped out, later taking up the study of philosophy and foreign cultures. Steve Jobs had a deep-seated interest in...
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...
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