Steve Jobs's Real Genius
----------------------------------------<p>Jobs, we learn, was a bully. <i>"He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe"</i>. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. <i>He cries like a small child when he does not get his way.</i> He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 pm ...  the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. <i>When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting".</i> Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme, Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties.  He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery. ...<i>when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does.</i> In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes...<p>...Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for other's ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, <i>"He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one.' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea."</i><p>----------------------------------------<p>Was Jobs really such an <i>asshole</i>? If so, I think he was really lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder. I know a lot about Woz and hardly anything about Jobs, and I do know that Woz in addition to being a first rate engineer is also a very good guy. Maybe if Woz was even half the asshole that Jobs seems to be, he might have kicked him out before Apple went public and Jobs would have been just another tantrum throwing hippie hanging around some starbucks in Berkeley or wherever angry hippies like to hang around.