60 Minutes on Steve Jobs: Hear icon’s last pitch
Even if you have no opinion on the Apple co-founder, the man who gave us some of the most culture-changing devices of our times, the show is worth watching. Included in the broadcast are tapes of the hyper-secretive Jobs discussing intimate details of his life and character as well as his impending death with Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs’ biography that goes on sale this week.
Jobs died on October 5 at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
For those of you on the West coast, the show will air at 7 p.m. on CBS, which is parent company of CNET.tiffany outlet The broadcast just concluded on the East coast. I don’t want to spoil it but just two-and-a-half weeks since Jobs died, it’s a bit eerie to hear him talking about his death.
The show, however, isn’t morose. It’s a character study about one of the great visionaries, industrialists, and pitchmen of our time. There are places where its obvious Isaacson is a little of in awe of Jobs and there are others where the author digs into Jobs grittiest personality flaws.
As I said before, the haters will love this show because the warts are all there.
In the show as well as in the book, Isaacson discusses how Jobs was sometimes arrogant, sometimes petty, and often abrasive. Isaacson cites one anecdote about Steve Wozniak, the gentler of the two main Apple co-founders, who was concerned after Apple started making big money that not all the top employees were sharing in the bonanza. So he started giving away his options. Jobs refused.
Isaacson discussed one anecdote about how one of Apple’s engineers went to Jobs and told him he would give stock to another employee if Jobs matched it. Jobs responded: “Yeah, I’ll match it. I’ll give zero and you give zero.”
Later in the show, we hear Jobs, via hear Isaacson’s tapes, explaining his ability to be critical without worrying about other people’s feelings.
“I feel totally comfortable going in front of everybody else, you know, (and say) God we really f***d up the engineering on this, didn’t we?” Jobs says. “That’s the ante for being in the room. So we’re brutally honest with each other and all of them can tell me they think I’m full of s**t, and I can tell anyone I think they’re full of s**t. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments where we’re yelling at each other.”
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