Silicon Valley's Dark Hero

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BOOKS

Silicon Valley's dark hero

The Nation

Steve Jobs gets another visit as Nation Books re-launches his biography in Thai

BANGKOK: -- Steve Jobs was pretty much a perfect human being as far as Suthichai Yoon and Nonglak Jaruwan are concerned. He was a design genius and a revolutionary thinker, and he was also full of contradictions and had a less endearing side. The combination was ideal.

Suthichai, chairman of Nation Multimedia Group, which publishes this newspaper, edited the Thai edition of Walter Isaacson's best-selling authorised biography of the founder of Apple. Nonglak translated it for Thai readers.

Quite a few copies were sold at the just-ended Bangkok International Book Fair, where Suthichai and Nonglak gave a presentation, joined by Sunat Thanasarnaksorn, the big winner on a recent Steve Jobs episode of the TV quiz show "Fan Pun Thair" ("Die-hard Fan").

A large crowd of Steve Jobs fans listened in as they acknowledged that the man draws mixed reactions whenever his name is mentioned. Jobs had millions of admirers and perhaps nearly as many detractors.

"Jobs had a sort of love-hate relationship with colleagues and friends," Suthichai noted. "His private life could be dark and messy." In one instance, Jobs refused to take responsibility for impregnating his first real girlfriend in 1977 until a court-ordered blood test proved he was the father.

"Some episodes in Jobs' private life deserve a kick from me," Suthichai said.

But Sunat pointed out that Jobs had three children and was indeed a family man. "He had profound love. He'd been born into a not-so-perfect family. He was abandoned as a child. Even though he fathered a baby as a young man, he ultimately took care of the child.

"He asked Isaacson to write his biography because he wanted his children to know him better," Sunat said. "He was too preoccupied with his work, but I think he loved his family."

Regardless, all three speakers agree that Jobs' achievements eclipsed his personal flaws, not just with computers but in animated film. He founded Pixar, the award-winning animation studio, and transformed the music industry with iPod MP3 players and the iTunes online shop for digitised song tracks.

It is the iPhone, though, that he will be primarily remembered. It heralded the shift to mobile computing, paving the way for mobile networking and entertainment on the go. Then came the iPad, Jobs - the dawning of the "post-personal computer era", which fired up the lacklustre market in tablet computers.

"To achieve such things you have to think thoroughly," Nonglak said. "To produce complex devices that look so simple on the outside, you need detailed thinking."

Sunat called Jobs a master at tailoring products that would resonate with consumers - all those "cool products". He first encountered the Apple logo while using an iMac computer to help with the family publishing business.

Suthichai continued to caution against adoring Jobs without taking stock of his pros and cons. It was, in fact, that combination of light and dark sides that impressed him most, not his hi-tech devices.

"No matter how much you might hate him for what he did in his younger days, you've got to accept that everyone all over the world wants to have their hands on Apple's newest product."

As to Jobs' final words before dying - "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow!" - Suthichai admitted he was perplexed, but thinks it sounds cool, and he'd like to repeat the sentence on his own deathbed.

"He was probably seeing another land as he lay dying - maybe Heaven or some other place awaiting his arrival. Maybe he was seeing an opportunity to make an iPad in Heaven. Who knows?"

Good Jobs

The Thai translation of "Steve Jobs", published by Nation Books, is available at leading bookstores for Bt395, in paperback.

-- The Nation 2012-04-09