My review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is here.
From the review:
Steve Jobs' formal education and accomplishments challenged nearly every conventional notion of what a path to success should look like. A college dropout who was kicked out of the very company he founded, he valued intuition over analytical thinking and wasn't inclined to follow rules. He produced innovation after innovation while ignoring market analysis, case studies and expert advice, trusting instead to the future as he saw it.
Among the ostensibly foolish things Jobs did was to build high-end computer retail stores in expensive shopping malls. The fact that Gateway's stores had failed badly should have told him this was a bad idea, even if there hadn't been plenty of people warning it made no sense. "I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," declared retail consultant David Goldstein, echoing a chorus of experts.
Three years later, Apple stores were averaging 5,400 visitors per week (the Gateway stores had averaged 250), and by 2010 Jobs was able to boast that the Fifth Avenue store "grosses more per square foot than any store in the world."
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