Anecdotes, photos not seen in official bio

Fortune magazine writer Brent Schlender has written his own essay on his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs across a 25-year relationship, one of the closer friendships Jobs had with working journalists. Calling Jobs "as charismatic as Clooney and as manipulative as Machiavelli," Schlender shared his own memories and some previously-unseen photos taken during his various meetings with Jobs, none of which appears in the new biography that has just been released.

Among the tidbits Schlender reveals, many of them kept quiet until now because they were either said off the record or because they didn't fit into the kind of business stories Schlender wrote for Fortune, was the fact that Jobs used his own kids (along with Schlender's) as a "focus group" for Toy Story; that he loved the Gulfstream Jet he was granted from Apple's board of directors; and that he called Schlender after hearing that he'd had a heart attack to berate him for being a smoker. Schlender interviewed Jobs during several stages of his career, starting in 1987 when Jobs was working with NeXT, up to the time surrounding his liver transplant in 2009.

Schlender, who goes out of his way to remind readers that he and Jobs both used each other for their own ends, did seem to "click" with Jobs on a personal level due to their shared taste in music and similar age (and later, health issues). Schlender was often one of a select few journalists who received regular phone calls from Jobs as well as sneak peeks on "embargoed" or unreleased products. Jobs also generally appreciated what Schlender wrote, though he would occasionally have issues with either a particular story or how the magazine portrayed him, such as when Fortune used Jobs' face for a cover profile of CEOs with outrageous salaries -- Jobs threatened to pull all Apple advertising out of the magazine indefinitely.

By 2003, Jobs' acumen in turning Apple around was already so legendary in business circles that former AOL Time Warner executive John Huey (now editor-in-chief of Time Magazine) tagged along with Schlender to ask Jobs' advice about how to clean up the struggling internet giant. Jobs first spent 20 minutes explaining why AOL's business model (which was still primarily dialup-based) was bad for Time Warner and its broadband business, then criticized AOL's "postcard production values" for its online content.

When Huey said he interpreted this to mean Jobs didn't think the conglomerate could be fixed, Jobs quickly went to a whiteboard and sketched out a new strategy for the company that would have basically turned AOL into a media content producer -- a path the company has now followed since spinning back out of Time Warner. "That what I'd do," Jobs said, capping off the spontaneous presentation. "But like I said, I'm not interested."

Steve Jobs, Schlender says, was ultimately more of a man than a myth -- though he both cultivated and used the legend that built up around him. "Yes, he had manipulated other people along the way, sometimes callously," Schlender wrote, "Likewise, we journalists exploited his fame and charisma whenever we could. But now that he's gone, it's plain to see that in the process of transforming our lies, Steve used himself up." [via Fortune]

by MacNN Staff