The Steve Jobs story you should see isn’t told in ‘Jobs’

The “Jobs” movie starring Ashton Kutcher that debuted Friday is not as bad as many reviewers say it is. It’s actually a decent if semi-accurate biopic that depicts Jobs’s flaws only when it serves the plot, then whitewashes its hero where it serves the movie’s purposes — which is as much to tell the story of Apple as it is to profile Jobs. But “Jobs” misses the Steve Jobs story that should have been told and ultimately does a disservice to the remarkable redemption he experienced.

I’ve followed Apple since 1991, when I joined the staff of Macworld magazine as its “PC guy.” Jobs had long been fired as CEO, and the company under John Sculley had lost its way. Sculley had created a chasm between the marketing message and the reality of the products. Later, when Michael Spindler became CEO, the company became a walking insult to the initial Apple vision, producing crappy PCs that even the PC clone makers of the time would have thought twice about releasing.

In the fall of 1996, I met with Jonathan Ive, who had recently been hired by Apple — and, of course, is Apple’s current senior vice president of design. Ive was clearly a brilliant but beaten-up designer with terrific ideas, none of which Apple was implementing. “Jobs” the movie is right to showcase Jobs’s discovery of Ive as the kind of creative partner needed to reinvent Apple in the way we all think of it today.

I get the appeal of a storyline that culminates in the 1997 return of Jobs after he engineered the firing of then-CEO Gil Amelio, a man smart enough to seek Jobs’s help earlier that year, but not smart enough to realize he couldn’t fix Apple and would have to step aside for any real change to occur.

But the focus on the founding of Apple and the development of the Mac, with a fast-forward to a struggling Apple that seeks Jobs’s help, isn’t the story that should have been made into a movie about Jobs the man.

There’s a great book that tells the story of Apple’s early years and another that tells the whole story of Steve Jobs’s life. The first, “Accidental Empires,” is by InfoWorld’s own Robert X. Cringely, and the second is Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” The movie covers mainly the “Accidental Empires” period, but misses the powerful Jobs story line that played out later.

“Jobs” the movie portrays the man as a brilliant but difficult visionary who had the cunning and force of will to get what he wanted and to inspire people to deliver beyond their own expectations — which is true, as far as it goes. The movie, though, provides only a few examples of how cruel Jobs could be, such as the scene where he kicks out his pregnant girlfriend and later denies that the child could be his — because he was just starting Apple and couldn’t handle the distractions of being a parent. There are several scenes where he grows cold to one-time friends and cuts them off, and one vignette at Atari (which never happened, by the way, just as several other major scenes that never happened, such as Steve Wozniak’s goodbye) showncases his rudeness.

Those character flaws are all true, but missing are the explosions of abuse he would hurl on friends and coworkers, as well as the utter ruthlessness he would use to hurt his enemies. Instead, the mean scenes in the movie are ultimately used to set up a “why Jobs was ultimately right” segment.

The firing of Macintosh project lead Jef Raskin is a great example. In the movie, Raskin is shown as an ineffective manager who couldn’t accept Jobs’s takeover of the project after the Lisa fiasco — which the movie doesn’t seem to realize was named after the daughter Jobs had abandoned. The implication is that Raskin had to go for the Mac to succeed. In truth, as “Accidental Empires” details, Raskin helped lay the groundwork for the Mac, and Jobs’s removal of Raskin was far less clean or honest.

Furthermore, the Wozniak character in “Jobs” is a rube, not the co-visionary and partner that he was in fact. The Woz portrayal is both inaccurate and insulting, all to make Jobs look better. Jobs didn’t need a weak Woz to be strong, and the two in fact fed off each other (as Jobs and Ive later did), but the filmmakers sadly decided to make everyone else inferior to Jobs.

Also missing is the corrosive pirate culture that Jobs created as he tried to use the Macintosh product not just for personal redemption, but also as a payback weapon against the rest of the company. That pirate culture persisted more than a decade later when Amelio was there and was one reason the company was dying. The engineer-pirates had mutinied, and although Amelio wasn’t the right guy to lead the company, he at least could have been a partner for them to reinvent it — unlike predecessor Spindler. In Apple’s culture of internecine warfare, pulling together was not an option.

The most interesting part of the Steve Jobs story occurs after Jobs was fired from Apple, and that’s where I wish the movie had focused its attention. It would have provided rich material for a more compelling drama.

After Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, he vainly tried to create another Apple with the Next Cube, a beautiful black box that was overengineered, underpowered, innovative, and self-limited all at the same time. The Next Cube expressed Jobs’s arrogance and blindness while showing the deep appreciation for the intersection of form and function Jobs believed in deeply. Jobs was widely unloved then, with many people feeling he deserved failure after his arrogance and meanness at Apple. He was talking to lowly trade press like me at the time, but you could feel the distaste in his body language and locution.

Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” masterfully shows how Jobs reflected and reinvented himself during his wilderness period. Once it was clear the Next Cube wasn’t going anywhere, Jobs pulled off the remarkable feat of becoming a major Hollywood player through his purchase of Pixar Studios, which under his guidance reinvented the animated movie and enabled Jobs to learn how to play effectively with others in Hollywood. This, in turn, served him well when he later cut the music deals for iTunes that transformed the music industry. Although Hollywood can handle big egos, it also requires compromise, which had not been a Jobs strong suit up until that point.

This Next Cube and Pixar period would have made great material for the “Jobs” movie, letting us follow his downward spiral after being fired from Apple and the struggle he undertook first to understand his own failings, then to adjust himself so he could succeed again. And where, as in the case of his fatal cancer, his old habits prevailed. If the “Jobs” movie has focused on that period, the redemption at Apple would have both made more sense and been more powerful. The movie’s attempt to portray the genius of the man also would have been more compelling.

Also missing, though perhaps too hard to depict on film, is the tension that a long sojourn to India seems to have caused in Jobs: a conflict between the utter simplicity of life that he learned to appreciate there and the wanton materialism of Apple’s products. “Jobs” goes nowhere near this. From what I can tell as a longtime Apple observer, Jobs never reconciled that tension, but instead made it essential to his success after returning to Apple.

Jobs continued to be a difficult visionary after his return, but he was vastly more effective. He produced the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad in a single triumphant decade while also making OS X the best personal computer operating system bar none and revitalizing the tired old Mac into the leading light for the PC industry. As epic as the founding of Apple and the birth of the Mac were, those look accidental compared to the steady series of game-changing innovations brought to market after the post-failure Jobs returned to Apple.

Understanding how Jobs transformed himself enough to succeed over such a long period, both at Apple and in his personal life, would have resulted in a much more absorbing story with greater lows and highs to explore. Here’s hoping someone makes that movie.

This story, “The Steve Jobs story you should see isn’t told in ‘Jobs’,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.