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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good insights... lousy writing...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Apple:: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Hardcover)
As an Apple employee I liked Jim Carlton's book because of the behind-the-scenes glimpses at a company that I love. But, geez, I've never read a book that needed a good editor more... there are literally sections that repeat themselves word for word (and how many times can we read a gushing description of Steve Jobs' "long flowing hair and rock-star good looks"? Give me a break. I also disagree with people here who say that he gives Apple a "fair shake". I found his portrayal quite biased and one-sided. Carlton's history of Apple is one that is full of major blunders that would have saved the company (his view). The reality is that, for all its missteps, Apple did a lot of things amazingly well... but you won't find that history in this biased book.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jim Carlton Was Wrong,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Paperback)
Useful history and inside looks, but reading his 1998 back-of-the-hand dismissal of Apple's chances of survival is pretty humorous nowadays. His opinion that Apple should have licensed earlier is similarly wrong-headed and lacking in any technical appreciation of the downsides of licensing (dilution of brand,difficult QA processes, cherry-picking, loss of platform homogenieity ).He similarly doesn't understand the silliness of Apple developing an x86 MacOS in the early 90's, and again reveals his technical ineptitude by failing to pursue the ramifications of an Apple-brand x86 offering (ie a Mac with an x86 CPU) vs a software-only offering like Windows or NeXT's Yellow Box. He also repeatedly blows the 5300 battery issue out of proportion. But I think the weakest theme in the book is that an alternative platform with less than 10% "marketshare" is automatically doomed to failure. While there is a strong positive network effect for the 'standard' and a negative effect for the alternatives, in his near-hagiography of Gates & Co he simply missed the bigger picture that the lamosity of the Wintel platform's inherent legacy issues is and was a countervening force. 5-10% of the total market is sufficiently large for Apple, given a) it's the top 5-10% and b) Micros~1 continues to [stink] as it always has.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book gave me the answers I was looking for...and more.,
By tmex@qni.com (Kansas City, MO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Apple:: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Hardcover)
Apple Computer, in its heyday, was one of the most respected growth companies of this century. As a devoted Mac user, it's always been hard for me to comprehend how Apple managed to take one of the most innovative products of our time, the user-friendly personal computer, and fail to compete effectively long-term in the mass market.This book gave me the answers I was looking for...and more. Not a dry corporate history book, Jim Carlton has gone to the heart of what went wrong in Apple by focusing on the personalities that shaped this company...and later led it to the brink of ruin. The leaders of Apple could have come out of a Shakespearean play. As Shakespeare knew, hubris, or excessive pride, is the undoing of man. In the swollen egos of Apple's leaders, we see evidence of hubris with a capital "H". Although we may fool ourselves into thinking that technological prowess and All-American competitiveness has lifted us above the men of Shakespeare's day, Jim Carlton's Apple brings us back to earth and reminds us that, above all else, it's the human element that makes or breaks a company.
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