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The book, not very pleasant to read, full of digressions and repetitions, focuses on Steve Jobs’s dark times, from being fired by the Apple board to coming back triumphant — and, despite its flaws, it’s a must-read if you’re interested in any of its topics (either Apple, NeXT, Pixar or star CEOs).

The contents are worrysome: Steve Jobs isn’t only described as a psychotic tyrant (which everyone already knows he is) but also this close to imcompetent, as a CEO as well as a visionary. The Macintosh? Not his project, he didn’t really believed in it but took it over because that’s all the board would let him toy with (that part isn’t in the book, I read it somewhere else). NeXTstep? All he was interested in, according to the author, was the sleek black machine, and he never quite realized that its real strength was the OS. (And I have some trouble fully believing that one.) Pixar? In that case, too, he only wanted to sell machines, and it’s only a miracle that he didn’t fire the five-person kernel, led by John Lasseter, before it met the success we know.

His only quality would be his charisma: being able to attract, manipulate, consume (and throw away) the most talented individuals in every domain, and then knowing how best to sell what they made — except when his ego takes precedence over reason, which happens all too often. Scary. And it’s hard having faith in Apple’s future after such a read.

Here’s to hoping the author was very biased against Jobs — but looking at the evolution of the iMac or iPod lines would rather validate his theories (and I was only recently wondering why Apple had stopped making cute, fun designs like my old clamshell… not zen enough, this style dates back to before his return). One thing’s for sure: if the depiction is accurate, then Jobs will go to the greatest lengths to prevent OS X from ever running on anything but a white (or aluminium) monolith with an half-eaten apple on it.

He seemed locked into a cycle of stunning success leading to egotistical excess and hubris which set him up for failure followed by denial, humility, and then the insight that would return him to success once again.