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

days.
“This will 
go down in history as a turning point for the music industry,” Jobs declared.
Microsoft
“We were smoked.”
That was the blunt email sent to four colleagues by Jim Allchin, the Microsoft executive in 
charge of Windows development, at 5 p.m. the day he saw the iTunes Store. It had only one other 
line: “How did they get the music companies to go along?”
Later that evening a reply came from David Cole, who was running Microsoft’s online business 
group. “When Apple brings this to Windows (I assume they won’t make the mistake of not 
bringing it to Windows), we will really be smoked.” He said that the Windows team needed “to 
bring this kind of solution to market,” adding, “That will require focus and goal alignment around 
an 
end-to-end service
which delivers direct user value, something we don’t have today.” Even 
though Microsoft had its own Internet service (MSN), it was not used to providing end-to-end 
service the way Apple was.
Bill Gates himself weighed in at 10:46 that night. His subject line, “Apple’s Jobs again,” 
indicated his frustration. “Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people 
who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things,” he said. He 

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too expressed surprise that Jobs had been able to convince the music companies to go along with 
his store. “This is very strange to me. The music companies’ own operations offer a service that is 
truly unfriendly to the user. Somehow they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty 
good.”
Gates also found it strange that no one else had created a service that allowed people to buy 
songs rather than subscribe on a monthly basis. “I am not saying this strangeness means we 
messed up—at least if we did, so did Real and Pressplay and MusicNet and basically everyone 
else,” he wrote. “Now that Jobs has done it we need to move fast to get something where the user 
interface and Rights are as good. . . . I think we need some plan to prove that, even though Jobs 
has us a bit flat footed again, we can move quick and both match and do stuff better.” It was an 
astonishing private admission: Microsoft had again been caught flat-footed, and it would again try 
to catch up by copying Apple. But like Sony, Microsoft could never make it happen, even after 
Jobs showed the way.
Instead Apple continued to smoke Microsoft in the way that Cole had predicted: It ported the 
iTunes software and store to Windows. But that took some internal agonizing. First, Jobs and his 
team had to decide whether they wanted the iPod to work with Windows computers. Jobs was 
initially opposed. “By keeping the iPod for Mac only, it was driving the sales of Macs even more 
than we expected,” he recalled. But lined up against him were all four of his top executives: 
Schiller, Rubinstein, Robbin, and Fadell. It was an argument about what the future of Apple 
should be. “We felt we should be in the music player business, not just in the Mac business,” said 
Schiller.
Jobs always wanted Apple to create its own unified utopia, a magical walled garden where 
hardware and software and peripheral devices worked well together to create a great experience, 
and where the success of one product drove sales of all the companions. Now he was facing 
pressure to have his hottest new product work with Windows machines, and it went against his 
nature. “It was a really big argument for months,” Jobs recalled, “me against everyone else.” At 
one point he declared that Windows users would get to use iPods “over my dead body.” But still 
his team kept pushing. “This 
needs
to get to the PC,” said Fadell.
Finally Jobs declared, “Until you can prove to me that it will make business sense, I’m not 
going to do it.” That was actually his way of backing down. If you put aside emotion and dogma, 
it was easy to prove that it made business sense to allow Windows users to buy iPods. Experts 
were called in, sales scenarios developed, and everyone concluded this would bring in more 
profits. “We developed a spreadsheet,” said Schiller. “Under all scenarios, there was no amount of 
cannibalization of Mac sales that would outweigh the sales of iPods.” Jobs was sometimes willing 
to surrender, despite his reputation, but he never won any awards for gracious concession 
speeches. “Screw it,” he said at one meeting where they showed him the analysis. “I’m sick of 
listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.”
That left another question: When Apple allowed the iPod to be compatible with Windows 
machines, should it also create a version of iTunes to serve as the music-management software for 
those Windows users? As usual, Jobs believed the hardware and software should go together: The 
user experience depended on the iPod working in complete sync (so to speak) with iTunes 
software on the computer. Schiller was opposed. “I thought that was crazy, since we don’t make 
Windows software,” Schiller recalled. “But Steve kept arguing, ‘If we’re going to do it, we should 
do it right.’”
Schiller prevailed at first. Apple decided to allow the iPod to work with Windows by using 
software from MusicMatch, an outside company. But the software was so clunky that it proved 
Jobs’s point, and Apple embarked on a fast-track effort to produce iTunes for Windows. Jobs 
recalled:
To make the iPod work on PCs, we initially partnered with another company that had a jukebox, gave 
them the secret sauce to connect to the iPod, and they did a crappy job. That was the worst of all worlds, 
because this other company was controlling a big piece of the user experience. So we lived with this 
crappy outside jukebox for about six months, and then we finally got iTunes written for Windows. In 
the end, you just don’t want someone else to control a big part of the user experience. People may 
disagree with me, but I am pretty consistent about that.

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Porting iTunes to Windows meant going back to all of the music companies—which had made 
deals to be in iTunes based on the assurance that it would be for only the small universe of 
Macintosh users—and negotiate again. Sony was especially resistant. Andy Lack thought it 
another example of Jobs changing the terms after a deal was done. It was. But by then the other 
labels were happy about how the iTunes Store was working and went along, so Sony was forced to 
capitulate.
Jobs announced the launch of iTunes for Windows in October 2003. “Here’s a feature that 
people thought we’d never add until this happened,” he said, waving his hand at the giant screen 
behind him. “Hell froze over,” proclaimed the slide. The show included iChat appearances and 
videos from Mick Jagger, Dr. Dre, and Bono. “It’s a very cool thing for musicians and music,” 
Bono said of the iPod and iTunes. “That’s why I’m here to kiss the corporate ass. I don’t kiss 
everybody’s.”
Jobs was never prone to understatement. To the cheers of the crowd, he declared, “iTunes for 
Windows is probably the best Windows app ever written.”
Microsoft was not grateful. “They’re pursuing the same strategy that they pursued in the PC 
business, controlling both the hardware and software,” Bill Gates told