“Make Something Wonderful,” a collection of Steve Jobs writing and photos is… well, it’s a good thing that I write these notes for myself. You’ll already know if you’re interested.

I’m not sure there’s much new and undiscovered here, but it’s nicely collated and fascinating reading.

One highlight is the script from his Stanford commencement speech. But what I enjoyed most were the notes. The speech was almost perfect, but the notes allow you to see the process that led there. The common perception of the lone genius having a eureka moment is a lie. Jobs worked and practiced and iterated and sought feedback. Much of his work he attempted to make everything look simple and obvious, but the reality is that ‘effortless’ takes a lot of hard preparatory work. Some might argue that this detracts from his achievements, but I’d say that the exact opposite is true.

Eric Schmidt says Google is the new Microsoft and it’s winning the war against Apple. I think he’s missing some perspective.

One of the key things that Steve Jobs realised when he returned to Apple in the late nineties was that the industry is not necessarily a zero sum game.

“We have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

• Coders are creatives too: Where’s our love? – “How did a person whose greatest educational achievement is crayoning without going over the lines get termed ‘a creative’, when the people who built our world are dismissed as geeks and bottom feeders?”
• Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004! – In a way this stated the whole microcomputer… I hate to say “revolution” but I can’t think of a better word.
• Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones – “It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people ‘here’s this great idea,’ then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.”

• Broadcast television is 75 years old today – “On 2 November 1936, the BBC began filling the airwaves, broadcasting from its Alexandra Palace facility in North London.”
• Broadcast television is 75 years old today – “On 2 November 1936, the BBC began filling the airwaves, broadcasting from its Alexandra Palace facility in North London.”
• A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs – Worth reading even if you’ve read all the other Jobs obituaries.

• Gallery: Iron Man, Other Pop Icons Become My Little Pony Sculptures – My Little Pony has a dark side too.
• What they’re “protecting” us from – “Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.”