The "decade" of Steve Jobs actually began in 1997, when he returned to Apple after having been ousted from the company a dozen years earlier. There's not a lot of new material here, but Adam Lashinsky's look at how Apple's "imperious, brilliant CEO transformed American business" is an excellent round-up of Jobs' influence on the past decade in America -- not only in business but on the culture at large.
"I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, 'Give me the next iPod,'" writes product designer Tim Brown in his book "Change by Design." "But it's probably close to the number of designers I've heard respond -- under their breath -- 'Give me the next Steve Jobs.'"
It's not just fawning media types who admire Jobs as a showman, a perfectionist, a visionary and, despite the anti-corporate attire, one of the shrewdest businessmen to have ever created a distorted reality field.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently told The New Yorker that Jobs is their hero, Lashinksy writes, and the "Jobs envy was obvious" when Jeff Bezos released Amazon's Kindle 2. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape, tells budding entrepreneurs: "The threshold for the release of the first product should be, 'What would Steve Jobs do?'"
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