Customer Reviews

Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

While others have noted the writing style (tolerable - I've seen far worse), the book as a whole is rather thorough and interesting. Granted, it was published before Apple's comeback, so there is (perhaps) too much emphasis upon the failures. However, the accumulated "could have" stories are interesting fare, things that may have been overlooked in the tale of a successful company's history. Here we see the flirtations with Sun, with Apollo, the AIM alliance and PowerPC, porting to x86 hardware, the Newton, and the spin-offs: webTV, Be, etc. Using hindsight 20/20, it seems that Jobs is under-represented. Yet, at the time of publication, I think that this book provided an accurate picture of how things seemed to line up.

I recommend this book, particularly to Apple fans and those interested in the history of computing. Additionally, this book is prime material for those interested in business blunders, particularly related to technology. For the latter group, this book makes a fine companion to the history of Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning. The works together provide a chilling view of how tecnhological innovation is often antithetical to business interests. I think that Carlton's work alone can make one consider the fate of technology in the hands of "big business".

Aside from some negatives described below, I really enjoyed this book. Jim Carlton has obviously assembled an extensive history of Apple and it's people. You really get an inside look at Apple.

On the negative side, there are endless criticisms of Apple's blunders that are all too easy to make in hindsight.

It's also interesting to see how far Jim Carlton was off the mark in predicting Apple's demise. Since the book was completed Apple has made a tremendous turnaround. His book gives the impression that Apple's collapse was just around the corner. Now his book can be subjected to some 20/20 hindsight!

But this is still an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

Interested in all things Apple, I obtained this book to add to my existing corpus of knowledge on the subject of Apple. While I would recommend the book simply because it contains some information you won't readily find anywhere else, the writing quality is poor. I don't mean that the writer is inept, just that, like others have mentioned, the author repeats himself and jumps around from different dates, which gets confusing. Also, it reads like it was just quickly pieced together from a set of loosely organized notes, and then edited for grammar, spelling, etc.

But those who say he takes too negative a tone... I don't agree. He highlights something important that 90% of other writers on the subject don't: the failure of John Sculley. He is spot on with his view on Sculley, and how Sculley made a series of bad decisions and was generally wrong for Apple. For instance, the Apple Newton project bled Apple of over $500 million. It was because of projects like these, in part, that Apple, as a company, was facing the threat of going bankrupt. To be sure, Sculley approved many projects without knowing much about them, and was not involved with product development to any great extent. What was clear from this book is that Sculley was tired, and wanted to leave Apple. It's not hard to derive from this that if a company's leader is no longer motivated, the company can and will suffer.

Jim Carlton writes masterfully the story of Apple Computer. In so doing he provides a comprehensive picture of the computer industry as a whole. Even the novice will be quickly absorbed by this intriguing account of a once innovative company, trashed by greed, arrogance and huge egos from within. Microsoft chose "evolution over revolution." The Apple passion was to "change the world." Carlton describes in unbiased detail how after years of mismanagement, the world would change around Apple.

This book is recommended reading for Mac evangelists.

I, personally, could not stop reading this book, despite the mind-numbing repitition and poor metaphors. It is somewhat saved because (I understand?) it is fairly accurate. What compelled me the most about this book was not the combination of bad decisions and bad luck, with some bad economics thrown in, that made the downfall of the company that invented the personal computer equally as fast as its rise. What I found the most compelling was the obvious pride of the fantastically intelligent think-factory that was Apple. Read between the lines, at it is obvious that Apple engineers had a genuine love for beautiful code: code that was thrown out at Apple is the code that Microsoft SELLS. Look especcially for the famous story of shaving the seconds off the startup of the mac 128K. The work was worth it, wasn't it? No matter how hard Carlton paints Apple as a failure of generals following different trails, he cannot hide the success and hope of the individuals who invented, reinvented, and most recently, fully made good on the promise of the personal computer.

Jim Carlton's book takes a fascinating story and re-tells it - badly.

The prose is deadly, even when the story is at its most compelling. Anyone who is familiar with the years of failure and foul-ups at Apple will find little that is truly new or original here, but anyone else will be appalled at the way the company threw away opportunity after opportunity.

Having said that, Apple's story is not only a story of failure, it is also a story of success - just think of the great products the company has put out. Jim Carlton pays no attention to that. The book is a depressing read because it only sounds the one note: failure, failure, failure. And that is as hard on Apple as it is on the reader.

The bottom line: would I recommend this book to a friend? No.

Carlton relates time after time after time (after time) how Apple rose to great heights of genius and creativity, and then threw opportunity away with both hands and ran the other direction. The title is descriptive of the downs (but the book also covers the ups) of this amazing company. One of the few critical and unbiased (mostly) looks at Apple. All Macintosh fans and Steve Jobsians should read this book to get the other side. I was actually going to interview with Apple until I read this story.