A new Steve Jobs biography called Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, is now available for sale on both Amazon and Apple’s own bookstore and 9to5Mac has already combed through it to find some of the best revelations and details. Two revelations in particular stuck out to us and we’ll discuss them below.
DON’T MISS OUR REVIEW: ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’: Pulling back the curtain on Apple’s iconic founder
The first one is the revelation that Apple’s “digital hub” strategy that it employed successfully last decade was actually inspired by a Bill Gates speech at CES back in 2000. According to 9to5Mac, “Bill Gates used a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show to announce a vision for interconnected computers, appliances, car stereos, telephones, televisions, and PDAs initially called ‘Consumer-Electronics-Plus.'”
Jobs and company apparently heard this vision and worked to make it their own, with the goal of making the Mac the central hub for all devices in the home. We saw this strategy play out initially with the iPod and then the iPhone, which in recent years has become much more of the “Digital Hub” that Apple originally envisioned the Mac would be.
The other revelation concerns Jobs’ relationship with the media — if you can believe it, Jobs was even more anal about who got insider access to new Apple products than we ever thought.
“After returning to Apple and hiring Katie Cotton, Jobs adopted a strategy where he would only be personally available to a handful of print outlets — a policy that effectively continued until his death, despite the increasing prominence of online publications,” writes 9to5Mac. “Moreover, Jobs would be the near-exclusive Apple employee authorized to speak about the company’s products, as he was the company’s best and most experienced public speaker.”
This is something that has definitely lightened up a bit in recent years. Although Apple still keeps very tight control over who gets insider access, it’s definitely opened itself up more and has let more of its executives take public speaking roles on behalf of the company. So it’s not just Tim Cook serving as the company’s figurehead all by himself, it’s also Jony Ive, Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller.
As we said earlier, this are just a couple of the interesting revelations flagged by 9to5Mac. To get the rest, you should really check out its whole report by clicking here.
