(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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
(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).