Isaacson

It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that Apple suffers from political infighting, fiefdoms, and dysfunctional relationships. What company doesn't, especially a large company full of big egos, with money to burn? And so we learned from various reports this week that CEO Tim Cook made a calculated decision to remove divisive software head Scott Forstall and hand over some of his responsibilities to hardware design guru Jony Ive. 

It also shouldn't be a surprise that Ive's power base is expanding. He already had the most powerful voice among Apple executives, if you believe what … Read more

A federal district judge has ruled that Steve Jobs biographer doesn't have to comply with a subpoena served on by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of its antitrust suit against Apple and some of the country's largest book publishers.

Publishers Weekly, a trade publication, reported last week that the DOJ in May served a subpoena on Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time Magazine and the author of the best-selling biography on the late Apple co-founder. The book, which was published by Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS, parent company of CNET), is a vital … Read more

Controversial quotes made by late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs last year claiming Google's Android operating system was a "wholesale" rip-off will be fair game as evidence in court, a judge said this week.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson, in the book, which hit shelves last October.

"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war … Read more

All rumors that "The Social Network" writer Aaron Sorkin was toying with Sony's offer to write a screenplay based on Steve Jobs' life have been substantiated. Sony announced today that the Academy Award-winning screenwriter has accepted the job.

"Steve Jobs' story is unique: he was one of the most revolutionary and influential men not just of our time but of all time," co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal said in a statement today. "There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the … Read more

The late Steve Jobs really was irate with Google for stealing the iPhone's thunder, according to his biographer.

Speaking last night at the Royal Institution in Great Britain, "Steve Jobs" author Walter Isaacson laid out the scenario under which Jobs' anger toward Android unfurled.

As described by MacWorld, Jobs was upset back in the old days when Bill Gates adopted Apple's graphical user interface for Windows and then licensed the OS to Dell, IBM, and a slew of other PC makers, giving Microsoft dominance in the PC market.

The late Apple chief then watched as history … Read more

John Sculley and Steve Jobs had a "terrific relationship when things were going well," the one-time Apple CEO told the BBC in an interview published yesterday.

Although he said he hadn't read Walter Issacson's biography on the late Apple founder, Sculley seemed pleased that it "cleared up some of the myths--that I never really did fire Steve Jobs and that Apple was actually a very profitable company."

Sculley, who was recruited by Jobs to run the company in 1983, said he was brought into the company to extend the commercial lifespan of the Apple … Read more

Klip, an iPhone video-app maker that launched in September, has scored an $8 million second round of funding, it said today.

Founded by serial entrepreneur and original Macintosh team member Alain Rossmann, Klip makes an app makes it possible to watch online videos almost no matter how bad your wireless Internet connection gets. Using what the company calls "adaptive streaming technology," the app adjusts the quality of the playback every four seconds depending on the strength of the connection.

So instead of giving users the spinning wheel of death, the Klip app will continue to play video unless … Read more

Following his death, Steve Jobs has been lauded by many as one of the world's most imaginative inventors. But a portrait of the Apple leader in The New Yorker paints him as more of a tweaker on a never-ending quest for perfection.

In a column for the magazine's new issue, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell relates several stories from Walter Isaacson's bio as evidence that Jobs' real contribution was zeroing in on an existing item, no matter how minute, and refining it until it fit his vision of perfection.

Jobs forced the designers of the original … Read more

The new biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson is flying off the shelves, according to the latest stats from Nielsen.

The book, titled "Steve Jobs," sold 379,000 copies in the United States just in its first week, said theBookseller.com, citing data from Nielsen's BookScan service.

The bio outsold the week's next-best seller--John Grisham's "The Litigators"--by three to one. It also outsold the second best-selling nonfiction title--Bill O'Reilly's nonfiction "Killing Lincoln"--by almost eight to one.

Released on October 24, Isaacson's biography was written … Read more