Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Focus: How Saying “No” Saved Apple
Chapter 2 - Despotism: Apple’s One-Man Focus Group
Chapter 3 - Perfectionism: Product Design and the Pursuit of Excellence
chapter 4 - Elitism: Hire Only A Players, Fire the Bozos
Chapter 5 - Passion: Putting a Ding in the Universe
Chapter 6 - Inventive Spirit: Where Does the Innovation Come From?
Chapter 7 - Case Study: How It All Came Together with the iPod
Chapter 8 - Total Control: The Whole Widget
Chapter 9 - Steve Jobs’s Battle with Cancer
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
PORTFOLIO
Published by the Penguin Group
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This expanded edition published in 2009 by
Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Leander Kahney, 2008, 2009
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kahney, Leander.
Inside Steve’s brain / by Leander Kahney. -- Expanded ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14019-2
1. Jobs, Steven, 1955- 2. Apple Computer, Inc.—Management.
3. Computer industry—United States. I. Title.
HD9696.2.U62J636 2009
338.761004’092—dc22 2009016641
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For my children, Nadine, Milo, Olin, and Lyle; my wife, Traci; my mother, Pauline; and my brothers, Alex and Chris. And Hank, my dear old dad, who was a big Steve Jobs fan.
introduction
“Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could—I’m searching for the right word—could, could die.”
—Steve Jobs on his return to Apple as interim CEO, in Time, August 18, 1997
Steve Jobs gives almost as much thought to the cardboard boxes his gadgets come in as the products themselves. This is not for reasons of taste or elegance—though that’s part of it. To Jobs, the act of pulling a product from its box is an important part of the user experience, and like everything else he does, it’s very carefully thought out.
Jobs sees product packaging as a helpful way to introduce new, unfamiliar technology to consumers. Take the original Mac, which shipped in 1984. Nobody at the time had seen anything like it. It was controlled by this weird pointing thing—a mouse—not a keyboard like other early PCs. To familiarize new users with the mouse, Jobs made sure it was packaged separately in its own compartment. Forcing the user to unpack the mouse—to