Becoming Steve Jobs is the most recent biography of the famous former CEO of the American company, it was written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, two journalists with many connections within the American company, one of them even being a close friend of Jobs in the final period of his life. Despite this and the support provided by the company Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), for the promotion of this biography, Andy Hertzfield, one of Apple's first employees and a close friend of Steve Jobs in his youth, claims that the former CEO would have been angry with the authors of his biography.
Working with Steve Jobs to the Macintosh project, Hertzfeld says that the biography Becoming Steve Jobs presents in a negative tone the first part of Steve Jobs' career, presenting in a very good light only the final period, the one in which the Apple company began to be successful with the iDevices used by hundreds of millions of people people. He goes on to say that the authors did not focus enough on the presentation of the mature side of Steve Jobs and on his evolution into the leader we know, criticizing the fact that the first employees of the Apple company did not participate in interviews to provide details about the way in which Steve Jobs acted then.
In the early days of Apple, Steve helped instigate the personal computer industry with the Apple II, starting from scratch, and then revolutionized it again with the Macintosh, achievements which would be the most significant of a lifetime for practically anyone else. The authors hardly interviewed any Apple employees from the early days, so there's no new reporting here to justify their negativity; they seem to be trashing Steve's early career simply to accentuate the contrast with his later one.
Hertzfeld claims that the biography written by Walter Isaacson, which is based on no less than 40 interviews with Steve Jobs, best presents the life of the former CEO of Apple, stating that Becoming Steve Jobs would be a creation requested by Jobs' family for to present in a much better light the one who changed the world in which we live.
