“Harmut Esslinger was already a big name in the field of industrial design in 1982, when his firm, Frog Design, bid on a secret project to help Apple become the company that would transform computers from ‘business machines’ into consumer goods,” Christopher Mims reports for Quartz. “After he submitted the Red Book—a binder full of design inspirations ranging from Walt Disney cartoons to the pioneering Sony Trinitron televisions designed by Frog—Esslinger won the Apple contract, and an intimate, decade-long relationship with Steve Jobs began.”
“Now retired from Frog Design, Esslinger wants to set the record straight about the history of design at Apple. In a new memoir, Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple, to be released October 9 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he claims that almost everyone has missed the true lessons of Apple’s early days,” Mims reports. “Throughout the book, Esslinger slams the bad guys—mostly John Sculley, the Apple CEO who pushed Jobs out, but also other project leads and executives at Apple—and describes his own work with the kind of superlatives that Jobs was famous for applying to Apple’s products. Ultimately, Keep It Simple is either a monumental act of egotism or the epitome of the inspired bluntness that Jobs was famous for—most likely it’s both.”
Mims reports, “Quartz got an exclusive advanced look at Esslinger’s book, and what follows are some of the more interesting excerpts: ‘I make no secret of my disgust for all those books written by outsiders who, if they mention design at all, describe it as Steve’s hobby or some kind of whimsical ‘add-on’ to his main product focus. Even Walter Isaacson’s much-touted Jobs biography falls into this disappointing category.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Esslinger, Apple’s first Jony Ive, is right: Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography is disappointing. While it’s certainly a worthwhile and recommended read, something’s missing. Ultimately, it lacks verve. Hopefully somebody (maybe Esslinger?) will nail it someday.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ellis D.” for the heads up.]
I didn’t finish it; I got bored. Gruber also had some great criticisms of the biography, pointing out awkward passages that demonstrate lack of understanding.
It certainly was. However, I hope that the audio interviews Isaacson conducted with SJ will be released at some point.
Some of the stuff Frog Design came up with back then was brilliant.
Good article. Great read.
Isaacson’s book presented Steve Jobs as a human being – not a god. I suspect that’s the reason some people found it disappointing
Your suspicions may apply to a small group of people, but more knowledgable individuals think that Isaacson simply had no feel for writing about the tech industry.
Yeah, either that or the fact that he completely misunderstands key aspects of Steve/Apple’s story.
@Martin
Yes. He was a human being. But he was NOT just the same as a million other average corporate execs. The book gave zero insight into what was exceptional about him.
It read like the white pages: he went here, then he talked to that person, then he chewed out this person, then he drove over here. Boring. I just couldn’t finish it. Kept thinking there was going to be something. Eventually realized there wasn’t.
Martin, you are correct to a certain extent. However, I worship no man, and I found Isaacson’s work to be surprisingly poor. The MDN take is correct.
The issue with the biography was Isaacson’s unwillingness to be investigative.
He simply handed people with clear agendas a microphone.
In writing Anatomy of an Apple – the lessons Steve taught us, I took a forensic approach.
Most of the time the truth wasn’t hard to find. People made claims that were contradicted by their earlier interviews, disproven by their colleagues.
For example, the much ballyhooed handicap parking? The fact is that Steve Wozniak called the police on Steve’s car. The cops came out, looked at it and said Steve was right. It wasn’t a legally marked handicap spot. There was nothing they could do.
When put in the context of a lifetime of pranks and tweaking authority’s nose, its hardly the outrage it gets presented as.
Another great example was the battle over Lisa. Steve was never the project manager, he was pushed off the project by Couch. The project was taken entirely the direction Steve opposed. Why in world is he blamed for Lisa failing?
Really? the same Esslinger who says shit like this: http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/it/kultmarke-warum-apple-es-ohne-jobs-so-schwer-hat/8856132.html
(in german – example: is apple still creative? no, because cook only presents slightly improved versions of ipod, iphone, ipad). i think those guys of yesteryear want a day in the limelight at the expense of apple. idiot! btw: the german article mentioned above is so bad, it hurts!
Tracy Kidder (“Soul of a New Machine”) might have been a better choice than Isaacson to write Jobs’ bio.
If you really want to read a great book about the early years at Apple, see if you can find a copy of: The Journey Was The Reward. It came out sometime around ’87.
In this, I’ll agree with Bob Cringely’s opinion (so I give credit to whom who deserves it, instead of claiming it for myself)
Neither Isaacson’s book, Pirates of Silicon Valley (which so far I think it’s the best impersonation of Jobs) nor the latest Jobs movie (which I expected to be way worse, since I was one of the early bashers) covers an era in Steve’s life which transformed him:
The NeXT Era.
When he left Apple, he was a diamond in the rough. Brilliant, but with a lots of flaws. The original Mac had some serious flaws, like the original amount of memory (128k, which they upgraded soon after launch to 512k) and the inability to expand it. I’m not saying it was not brilliant. I’m just saying there were issues. Sales were dissapointing (granted, pricing was not Steve’s call) and that’s why they kick him out. But the young Steve loved R&D and loved to put a lot of money in it, without much focus. There was a lot of ego in there.
When he came back, after NeXT, he was sharp as a razor. I’d suggest the 1996 and 1997 presentations where he lines up the new Apple strategy. He cut down all the fat. He was still an R&D guy, but with laser precision. He placed the resources where they needed to be. He focused on the “collective good” of Apple before his own ego trip, to the point that he tried it once with the Mac Cube (beautiful machine), it flopped and he scrapped it. Other than that, it was home run after home run.
And, until now, nobody tells us the story of “what happened at NeXT”. We can grab bits and pieces from interviews, but nobody has studied that journey, where the world got a young brash Steve and produced a shaped mature Steve. And all that happened at NeXT.
That’s a documentary and movie I’d love to see: “Steve Jobs: The NeXT years”.
Perhaps I’ll start a Kickstarter project to make it happen!
You bring up a good point. NeXT was the place where Steve was transformed into the man who came back to Apple and turned it all around.
Would be interesting to know about the NeXT part of the story.
The cube was not a failure! It did not sell because of hairline cracks that appeared on its perspex casing plus the rather expensive price it cost at first. If you are interested read this:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
The cube has been reborn as the Apple TV, Mac mini and the Mac mini pro which are successful because Apple built an eco-system first before launching them having learnt some hard knock lessons. Remember too at the time, M$ was all pervasive and Apple’s eco-system was still in its infancy.
Let me rephrase:
The Cube was a COMMERCIAL failure.
The machine and the concept was a thing of beauty.
Having said that, the Cube did not fit any place in the Jobs Quadrant: Home/Pro vs Desktop/Laptop. Steve Jobs knew that, and saw that it was not going to be a home run. And he knew it was going to be distracting from the main objective.
True, it lives in the Mini and the Apple TV. The concept of it is amazing. But at the time, it was not what Apple should have focused on back then. Steve loved the Cube. He build it for himself. But he knew it was not what the marked needed. And he did what a responsible CEO should do. Focus on what the market needs.
I doubt the pre-NeXT Jobs would have done that.
Absolutely agree with this. This period seems to be missing from most of the Apple/Steve Jobs documentaries, and I think it is one of the most important, pivotal points that ultimately shaped Steve Jobs into the man that gave us iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
I believe part of the change is from working with Disney and Lasseter, but part of it is that NeXT’s output was so truly and amazingly special.
Steve believed in object technology, and he knew that NeXT had spawned the World Wide Web which was already transforming everything.
But I suspect he also felt that the web was a rip-off of his creation (being inspired heavily by the NeXT file browser, as it was) and wanted to see it done right. Eddie Cue has taken WebObjects and made hit after hit with it, including iTunes Store, and the future of iCloud looks distinctly different to the visions of Google, etc.
NeXT is hugely unappreciated and a strong force in our lives today.
“Ultimately, it lacks verve. ”
It’s tricky. It was written by a man who doesn’t really give a shit about the tech industry. On the other hand, if John Gruber had written it, we’d be talking about the rampant fanboyism.
Actually Gruber himself noted that WIRED’s Stephen Levy should have written it. And FYI, Levy has written lots of GREAT stuff about Jobs. Skip the book, read WIRED. 😉