Customer Reviews

The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer

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Steve Hamm's new book The Race for Perfect is finally released. Having led the design effort for the X300 I was thrilled to see it in market. The book builds and expands on the cover story BusinessWeek Magazine article that Steve co-authored about the design and development of the Lenovo ThinkPad X300. I finally managed to carve out enough time to read my advance copy of the book. Unfortunately it's been hard for me to squeeze in reading something other than e-mails lately. The book did not disappoint me, it's both entertaining and an accurate portrayal of the Kodachi story. It also goes beyond the X300 story to include a detailed history of portable computing. Yes, there was life before ThinkPad.

Of course I instantly scanned the index looking for Kodachi references and possible embarrassing David Hill quotes. After all, I did interviews on a monthly basis with Steve for well over a year and a half. Who knows what I might have told him in the heat of passion that ended up in print. I am pleased to report that Steve did a great job protecting me from myself, and more importantly telling a great story. I may have a bit of "cultural backwater" explaining to do the next time I head back to my hometown Bartlesville, Oklahoma, but the portrayal is certainly not without substance. Sorry but you will have to read the book to totally understand this reference. For the "backwater" record, Bartlesville is the home of the Price Tower, the only true skyscraper ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but I must admit that cultural milestone was a very long time ago in Bartlesville history.

In my opinion Steve has written a great book. It's a very informative chronicle of portable computing and the rich technology and design history that accompanies it. His writing style is engaging and the story is easy to follow. The early history of how ThinkPad was born is still fascinating to me. Congrats to my friends Richard Sapper for his design vision and Tom Hardy for his corporate perseverance. It was truly a pleasure working with Steve on this historic endeavour. My sincere congratulations to him for this accomplishment. I recommend that all fans of portable computing and especially ThinkPad design enthusiasts check it out. This one is a must read.

As Steve points out in his book , the race for perfect is never really over. We continue to strive to create the ultimate ThinkPad. Who knows, maybe Steve is already working on his next book.

David Hill, VP Design Lenovo

i wanted to like this book. It's the kind of thing I typically enjoy reading. But I can't give it a good review. First and foremost it wanders all over the lace with no coherence at all. The author mentions various devices i companies in parts of the book then drops them only to mention them later totally out of context. It's really annoying. It reads like a collection of loosely connected magazine articles. The other major flaw is how much the author focuses on hardware to the detriment of operating systems and application software. You can't have one without the other and its key to understanding a company and it's products. Finally I don't think the author understands at all why some of the companies he writes about are successful and others are not other that at a very superficial level. I really feel like i wasted my money.

Steve's book is a good review of the evolution of the mobile computing landscape. I have been fortunate enough to have met many of the people in the book and I am currently using a Kodachi laptop on a daily basis.
Having started with Thinkpads with the 701C and having stuck almost exclusively with them ever since, I can definitely say that this book puts some "soul" on these laptops and provides a very good explanation as to why I still keep many of them around me. Well done...

Michail Bletsas
VP, Advanced Technology and Connectivity
One Laptop per Child

It's probably no exaggeration that you take for granted your laptop, desktop, mobile phone, or smartphone. And you may think that Apple has always led as a designer of exceptional electronics. While Apple is certainly a leader in design, it isn't the only computer company that seriously uses design to bring consumers leading edge electronics. In The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, author Steve Hamm provides you with an intimate account of the development of the Lenovo X300. Interspersed with the story of the X300, Hamm revisits the early days of portable computing, moves through the development of several products and brands, and ends with the rise of the smartphone. After reading this book, you should have a new appreciation for your computing devices.

Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Quest
Chapter 2: Dynabook and the Legacy of Xerox PARC
Chapter 3: Compaq versus Apple
Chapter 4: Thinkpad
Chapter 5: Yang's Dream
Chapter 6: Kodachi
Chapter 7: The Dream
Chapter 8: Hype, FUD, and E-Marketing
Chapter 9: Very Small Computers
Chapter 10: The Convergence Converges
Chapter 11: The Future of Portable Computing
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author

Steve Hamm, a senior writer with BusinessWeek, was granted unprecedented access to the Lenovo X300 (code name: Kodachi) development team from concept to manufacturing. Starting with a vision of a handful of individuals, engineering new technology to include in the "perfect" notebook, and the use of bloggers to drive interest, the X300 comes to life and becomes one of the most successful product introductions of the Thinkpad line. But it wasn't easy - innovative parts, like solid state drives, and the release of the Apple MacBook adds suspense to the story. Even after it was released to glowing reviews and more demand than they could supply, the designers of the X300 knew that there was more that they could have done with the notebook. The quest for perfection continues.

While the story of the X300 would have made this an enjoyable book, Hamm makes this outstanding by revisiting early portable computers, like the Tandy TRS-80, GRiD, Dynabook, and Compaq LTE, the people that designed them, and the inclusion of mobile phones and smartphones. The amazing aspect is the thread of people that move through each of these stories; they were giants then, and remain so now. Their vision and designs are still being used today, as technology and engineering has advanced to allow their ideas to become realities. Further, you will appreciate that solid design principles, led primarily by Apple and IBM/Lenovo, and now used by all manufacturers, create products that allow people to connect on a personal level with their devices.

A well written, fascinating look at the development of one notebook, while providing excellent history of the notebook line and the future of portable computing. Highly recommended to anyone interested in business, computers, design, collaboration, or social networks.

Hamm wanders all over the world and the history of laptops, managing to aggravate and confuse readers. He starts with the Tandy 100, then wanders through Xerox PARC, Compaq, IBM, etc. Readers looking for a useful clue should look elsewhere.

"Useless clues," on the other hand abound - eg. IBM's strategy around ThinkPad was to "innovate like mad." "Engineers and designers had to learn to judge when a brilliant concept they ad would actually be doable, and how much effort it would take to make it work."

To make matters worse, it is difficult to convince myself that the Leveno X300 Thinkpad is a product worth trying to study. Hamm himself cites a recent survey of CIOs that concluded that new capabilities (eg. notebook thinness) have become the last item on large corporations' IT priority list - they jsut want them to work and be cheap. The Leveno X300 Thinkpad is quite expensive compared to other offerings. Further, the few comilations of user reviews I have found were not very laudatory.