"oPtion$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody"
by Daniel Lyons
Link: http://www.amazon.com/Options-Secret-Life-Steve-Parody/dp/0306815842/
Reading history and reviews
Finished in 2008
This is a fictionalised account of the Apple "options scandal" written by someone calling himself "Fake Steve Jobs", and like all good books published these days it's based on a blog. I think that Kyle bought me this for my birthday because she knows how much I love my iPod shuffle, and I'm always raging about Steve Jobs (that's another story).
While this is ostensibly about the aforementioned scandal (whereby the award of share options had alledgedly been backdated to a time when the share price was low, ensuring that the recipient instantly made a profit on them), really it's a send-up of Jobs and Apple generally - for example, Apple's design of new products always beginning with the advertising campaign - and the character of Fake Steve is particularly unappealing. The real Steve Jobs is quoted as describing the parody as "pretty funny", so he must be made of sterner stuff than me.
But it *is* pretty funny, and it's made me go out and read up a bit about the real Steve Jobs. And interestingly, of course it was using a NeXT machine (the computer built by Jobs after being dumped by Apple in 1986) that Tim Berners-Lee began to develop what ultimately turned into the world-wide web. (Perhaps less impressively but still personally significant, the NeXT was also used in the development of the computer game Doom.)
Daniel Lyons is still writing his Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, and information on the real Steve Jobs can be found in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs. Thanks Kyle!