iCon: The Story of Apple, NeXT and Pixar

The back cover of my copy of iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business had a review that said “… Once you start reading, you won’t want to put it down“. In my first sitting I covered 31 pages and that review proved to be true.

iCon is a biography of Steve Jobs and tells the story of his journey with Apple, NeXT and Pixar. I was expecting to read more about Steve Jobs, the man, but it turned out to be more of Jobs as a Entrepreneur with flashes into his personal life here and there.

If you are new to Jobs, after reading the first half of the book, you will hate him. I saw my all time favourite Steve Jobs Speech about that time and for the first time ever didn’t feel anything throughout the video. But it all comes back towards the end of the book: the second coming of Steve Jobs.

One trait of Steve that made an impression on me is his attention for detail and his love for the cool looks. He is always concerned with how things look; no wonder the iPods are cool and MAC’s are awesome.

I wouldn’t say that the book is well written, scenes change without any relation and here is something that irritated me the most: using First names in half the places and Last names in another half. Usually authors pick the part of the name that can be easily identified by the reader, like Lasseter for John Lasseter or at least would stick to one part of the name. The authors of iCon choose to use John and Lasseter to their liking.

But the story is exciting and comments from the authors to behavioural traits and events is amusing enough to win the reader. A good read overall, inspiring too.