Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Business Week.
“We’ve 
always done things a little bit differently than Apple in terms of giving people choice.” It was not 
until three years later, in November 2006, that Microsoft was finally able to release its own answer 
to the iPod. It was called the Zune, and it looked like an iPod, though a bit clunkier. Two years 
later it had achieved a market share of less than 5%. Jobs was brutal about the cause of the Zune’s 
uninspired design and market weakness:
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people 
at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. 
We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or 
family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra 
mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Mr. Tambourine Man
Andy Lack’s first annual meeting at Sony was in April 2003, the same week that Apple launched 
the iTunes Store. He had been made head of the music division four months earlier, and had spent 
much of that time negotiating with Jobs. In fact he arrived in Tokyo directly from Cupertino, 
carrying the latest version of the iPod and a description of the iTunes Store. In front of the two 
hundred managers gathered, he pulled the iPod out of his pocket. “Here it is,” he said as CEO 
Nobuyuki Idei and Sony’s North America head Howard Stringer looked on. “Here’s the Walkman 
killer. There’s no mystery meat. The reason you bought a music company is so that you could be 
the one to make a device like this. You can do better.”
But Sony couldn’t. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record 
company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets 
to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. 
Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company, like AOL Time Warner, that was organized into 
divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving 
synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.
Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his 
teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss 
bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L 
for the company.”
In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player 
and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record 
division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you 
don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might 
cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
That July, Sony appointed a veteran of the music industry, Jay Samit, to create its own iTunes-
like service, called Sony Connect, which would sell songs online and allow them to play on Sony’

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s portable music devices. “The move was immediately understood as a way to unite the sometimes 
conflicting electronics and content divisions,” the 
New York Times
reported. “That internal battle 
was seen by many as the reason Sony, the inventor of the Walkman and the biggest player in the 
portable audio market, was being trounced by Apple.” Sony Connect launched in May 2004. It 
lasted just over three years before Sony shut it down.
Microsoft was willing to license its Windows Media software and digital rights format to other 
companies, just as it had licensed out its operating system in the 1980s. Jobs, on the other hand, 
would not license out Apple’s FairPlay to other device makers; it worked only on an iPod. Nor 
would he allow other online stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this 
would eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of the 1980s. “If 
Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the Harvard Business School professor 
Clayton Christensen told 
Wired
, “the iPod will likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this 
case, Christensen was one of the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply 
influenced by his book 
The Innovator’s Dilemma.
) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s 
nothing unique about music,” he said. “This story has played out on the PC.”
Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, tried to circumvent Apple’s restrictions in July 2004 
with a service called Harmony. He had attempted to convince Jobs to license Apple’s FairPlay 
format to Harmony, but when that didn’t happen, Glaser just reverse-engineered it and used it with 
the songs that Harmony sold. Glaser’s strategy was that the songs sold by Harmony would play on 
any device, including an iPod or a Zune or a Rio, and he launched a marketing campaign with the 
slogan “Freedom of Choice.” Jobs was furious and issued a release saying that Apple was 
“stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod.” 
RealNetworks responded by launching an Internet petition that demanded “Hey Apple! Don’t 
break my iPod.” Jobs kept quiet for a few months, but in October he released a new version of the 
iPod software that caused songs bought through Harmony to become inoperable. “Steve is a one-
of-a-kind guy,” Glaser said. “You know that about him when you do business with him.”
In the meantime Jobs and his team—Rubinstein, Fadell, Robbin, Ive—were able to keep 
coming up with new versions of the iPod that extended Apple’s lead. The first major revision, 
announced in January 2004, was the iPod Mini. Far smaller than the original iPod—just the size of 
a business card—it had less capacity and was about the same price. At one point Jobs decided to 
kill it, not seeing why anyone would want to pay the same for less. “He doesn’t do sports, so he 
didn’t relate to how it would be great on a run or in the gym,” said Fadell. In fact the Mini was 
what truly launched the iPod to market dominance, by eliminating the competition from smaller 
flash-drive players. In the eighteen months after it was introduced, Apple’s market share in the 
portable music player market shot from 31% to 74%.
The iPod Shuffle, introduced in January 2005, was even more revolutionary. Jobs learned that 
the shuffle feature on the iPod, which played songs in random order, had become very popular. 
People liked to be surprised, and they were also too lazy to keep setting up and revising their 
playlists. Some users even became obsessed with figuring out whether the song selection was truly 
random, and if so, why their iPod kept coming back to, say, the Neville Brothers. That feature led 
to the iPod Shuffle. As Rubinstein and Fadell were working on creating a flash player that was 
small and inexpensive, they kept doing things like making the screen tinier. At one point Jobs 
came in with a crazy suggestion: Get rid of the screen altogether. “What?!?” Fadell responded. 
“Just get rid of it,” Jobs insisted. Fadell asked how users would navigate the songs. Jobs’s insight 
was that you wouldn’t need to navigate; the songs would play randomly. After all, they were 
songs you had chosen. All that was needed was a button to skip over a song if you weren’t in the 
mood for it. “Embrace uncertainty,” the ads read.
As competitors stumbled and Apple continued to innovate, music became a larger part of 
Apple’s business. In January 2007 iPod sales were half of Apple’s revenues. The device also 
added luster to the Apple brand. But an even bigger success was the iTunes Store. Having sold 
one million songs in the first six days after it was introduced in April 2003, the store went on to 
sell seventy million songs in its first year. In February 2006 the store sold its one billionth song 
when Alex Ostrovsky, sixteen, of West Bloomfield, Michigan, bought Coldplay’s “Speed of 

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Sound” and got a congratulatory call from Jobs, bestowing upon him ten iPods, an iMac, and a 
$10,000 music gift certificate.
The success of the iTunes Store also had a more subtle benefit. By 2011 an important new 
business had emerged: being the service that people trusted with their online identity and payment 
information. Along with Amazon, Visa, PayPal, American Express, and a few other services, 
Apple had built up databases of people who trusted them with their email address and credit card 
information to facilitate safe and easy shopping. This allowed Apple to sell, for example, a 
magazine subscription through its online store; when that happened, Apple, not the magazine 
publisher, would have a direct relationship with the subscriber. As the iTunes Store sold videos, 
apps, and subscriptions, it built up a database of 225 million active users by June 2011, which 
positioned Apple for the next age of digital commerce.

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