Last week I finished the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson and this week I’m finishing In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives by Steven Levy.*
The similarities between the two are startling and if Isaacson were to forgo the beauty in simplicity mantra of Apple, he may have had a similar tagline. Both books are written with a journalist touch, trying to tell an objective comprehensive story citing multiple direct and indirect sources but at the same time a clear sense of fascination permeates the text and the sense that they were witnessing something really great.
Reading the books back to back gave me an interesting sense of the awkward relationship of Google and Jobs. From Jobs’ perspective it was unequivocal that Google had been evil in entering into the smartphone business by stealing iPhones magic while the Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board and while Jobs was mentoring Sergey Brin. From Google’s perspective they never admitted to such outright deception but made it pretty clear that it was a natural evolution and if you were smart enough, you should have seen it coming.
This difference, seemed to get to the heart of how two companies that are so often compared to each other are so different. Apple is a deeply personal company that believes that their magical leaps forward are just that, magical and hence of and belonging to the magician (Steve Jobs) and wouldn’t have been created without him. Google, on the other hand, lives in an optimized mirror world where logic rules and the seemingly magical leaps are a natural evolution of lots of small things smartly coming together and scaling out (e.g., they just execute better).
I’m almost finished with In the Plex and will follow up with another posting. Some reflections in store about Apple and Google will be on the nature of creativity ? What motivates more challenge of problem solving or vision? Really interesting stuff! Stay tuned.
* a shout out to TED who sent me the book as a must read!