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

Wall Street Journal.
Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, 
stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team 
members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the 
next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You 
should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing 
good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe 
team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As 
Fortune
’s 
Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly 
enforced.”
By 2010 it was clear that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others were aiming to be the 
company that could best store all of your content and data in the cloud and sync it on your various 
devices. So Jobs redoubled his efforts. As he explained it to me that fall:
We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams your music and 
videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data. Apple 
was the first to have the insight about your computer becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these 
apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad, and it’s 
worked brilliantly. But over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the 
cloud. So it’s the same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always 
have access to your content and you won’t have to sync.
It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the 
innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and 
we certainly don’t want to be left behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going 
to make syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina. We can provide all 
the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.
Jobs discussed this vision at his Monday morning meetings, and gradually it was refined to a 
new strategy. “I sent emails to groups of people at 2 a.m. and batted things around,” he recalled. 
“We think about this a lot because it’s not a job, it’s our life.” Although some board members, 
including Al Gore, questioned the idea of making MobileMe free, they supported it. It would be 
their strategy for attracting customers into Apple’s orbit for the next decade.
The new service was named iCloud, and Jobs unveiled it in his keynote address to Apple’s 
Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. He was still on medical leave and, for some 
days in May, had been hospitalized with infections and pain. Some close friends urged him not to 
make the presentation, which would involve lots of preparation and rehearsals. But the prospect of 
ushering in another tectonic shift in the digital age seemed to energize him.
When he came onstage at the San Francisco Convention Center, he was wearing a 
VONROSEN black cashmere sweater on top of his usual Issey Miyake black turtleneck, and he 
had thermal underwear beneath his blue jeans. But he looked more gaunt than ever. The crowd 
gave him a prolonged standing ovation—“That always helps, and I appreciate it,” he said—but 
within minutes Apple’s stock dropped more than $4, to $340. He was making a heroic effort, but 
he looked weak.
He handed the stage over to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall to demo the new operating systems 
for Macs and mobile devices, then came back on to show off iCloud himself. “About ten years 
ago, we had one of our most important insights,” he said. “The PC was going to become the hub 
for your digital life. Your videos, your photos, your music. But it has broken down in the last few 
years. Why?” He riffed about how hard it was to get all of your content synced to each of your 
devices. If you have a song you’ve downloaded on your iPad, a picture you’ve taken on your 
iPhone, and a video you’ve stored on your computer, you can end up feeling like an old-fashioned 
switchboard operator as you plug USB cables into and out of things to get the content shared. 
“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he said to great laughter. “We have a solution. 

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It’s our next big insight. We are going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just a device, and we 
are going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”
Jobs was well aware that this “big insight” was in fact not really new. Indeed he joked about 
Apple’s previous attempt: “You may think, Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who 
brought me MobileMe.” The audience laughed nervously. “Let me just say it wasn’t our finest 
hour.” But as he demonstrated iCloud, it was clear that it would be better. Mail, contacts, and 
calendar entries synced instantly. So did apps, photos, books, and documents. Most impressively, 
Jobs and Eddy Cue had made deals with the music companies (unlike the folks at Google and 
Amazon). Apple would have eighteen 
million
songs on its cloud servers. If you had any of these 
on any of your devices or computers—whether you had bought it legally or pirated it—Apple 
would let you access a high-quality version of it on all of your devices without having to go 
through the time and effort to upload it to the cloud. “It all just works,” he said.
That simple concept—that everything would just work seamlessly—was, as always, Apple’s 
competitive advantage. Microsoft had been advertising “Cloud Power” for more than a year, and 
three years earlier its chief software architect, the legendary Ray Ozzie, had issued a rallying cry 
to the company: “Our aspiration is that individuals will only need to license their media once, and 
use any of their . . . devices to access and enjoy their media.” But Ozzie had quit Microsoft at the 
end of 2010, and the company’s cloud computing push was never manifested in consumer devices. 
Amazon and Google both offered cloud services in 2011, but neither company had the ability to 
integrate the hardware and software and content of a variety of devices. Apple controlled every 
link in the chain and designed them all to work together: the devices, computers, operating 
systems, and application software, along with the sale and storage of the content.
Of course, it worked seamlessly only if you were using an Apple device and stayed within 
Apple’s gated garden. That produced another benefit for Apple: customer stickiness. Once you 
began using iCloud, it would be difficult to switch to a Kindle or Android device. Your music and 
other content would not sync to them; in fact they might not even work. It was the culmination of 
three decades spent eschewing open systems. “We thought about whether we should do a music 
client for Android,” Jobs told me over breakfast the next morning. “We put iTunes on Windows in 
order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except 
to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.”