Steve Jobs (2011) de Walter Isaacson, e o seu Manifesto

Acabei de ler Steve Jobs (2011) de Walter Isaacson. A minha primeira impressão, é que este é um relato poderoso. Para quem acompanhou a informática desde muito cedo, a Apple sempre fez parte do nosso imaginário. Para quem sempre se interessou pela animação, e em especial a animação 3d, a Pixar sempre fez parte do nosso imaginário. Ler este livro é revisitar todo esse imaginário, é preencher espaços com informação desconhecida, é construir uma visão mais alargada e aprofundada destes dois universos. É entrar adentro da essência destas duas marcas culturais da nossa contemporaneidade. Porque conhecer Jobs, é conhecer o seu trabalho, o seu legado.

Apesar das críticas, o livro está repleto de detalhes, provenientes de centenas de entrevistas que nos permitem compreender melhor quem era Steve Jobs. Isaacson procura manter a distância, ser imparcial. Mas é verdade que os factos dificilmente nos poderão deixar indiferentes. Aquilo que Jobs conseguiu realizar durante apenas uma vida, é impressionante. E por muito que odiemos a sua quase dupla personalidade, que por vezes na leitura do livro cheguei a categorizar mesmo como bi-polaridade. Para Steve Jobs, nunca existiu meio-termo, não havia lugar ao polite, ao protocolo. Para ele alguém ou alguma coisa, era "totally shit" ou "brilliant". E este comportamento é a fonte de todos os seus problemas, e que levanta muitos ânimos contra ele.

Steve Jobs numa sessão em Stanford em 1982, perguntando aos alunos,
"How many of you are virgins? How many of you have taken LSD?"

Mas para mim, este comportamento está na raiz de tudo aquilo que ele conseguiu. Não existiria a Apple sem esta atitude, nem a Pixar. E por isso não teríamos tido o Macintosh (1984), Toy Story (1995), iPod (2001), iTunes (2001), iPhone (2007), App Store (2008) e o iPad (2010). Cada um destes produtos, ou melhor destas invenções, teve um tremendo impacto directo nas suas indústrias, mas não só, o seu impacto foi tão forte que as ondas fizeram mudar muita da indústria à sua volta ao ponto de mudar comportamentos e atitudes em toda a sociedade.

Com o seu pai adoptivo Paul Jobs. Steve Jobs reencontrou a sua mãe biológica, e a sua irmã Mona Simpson. Mas recusou-se sempre a conhecer o seu pai biológico.

A base do trabalho de Jobs foi a busca pela essência do Design Perfeito. Como diz Morozov "The cult of the designer is the foundation of Apple’s secular religion". E claramente que este culto o deve também, como diz o Morozov à "functionalist ideology of Bauhaus and its successors", e que é espelhado no livro do Isaacson.

Steve Jobs em sua casa em 2004

Claramente que um livro de 630 páginas não se pode resumir num curto texto. Mas por isso mesmo, irei realizar um recensão sobre as questões do Design e do Design de Interacção e a sua ligação à atitude de Steve Jobs para o nº 22 da revista científica Comunicação e Sociedade sobre as Tecnologias Criativas. No qual procurarei trabalhar mais a atitude de Jobs face ao mundo, e os seus impactos sobre aquilo que foi e ainda é a Apple.

Steve Jobs em sua casa em 2004

Não quero fechar este texto apenas dizendo que escreverei mais sobre este livro, vejo-me obrigado a transcrever para aqui a carta do Steve Jobs que fecha o livro de Isaacson. Esta carta é um verdadeiro manifesto de Steve Jobs e espelha toda a ideologia que este procurou incutir em si e no seu trabalho. Depois da morte de Jobs e ao fim de 600 páginas, ler este texto, faz-nos sentir que tivemos o prazer de ter tido esta pessoa connosco durante a nossa época neste planeta. Se não puderem ler o livro, leiam pelo menos esta carta.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. 

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive— and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.

I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like shit” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.

I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a Rolling Stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.

Steve Jobs