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Randall E. Stross

Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing Hardcover – November 18, 1993

by Randall E. Stross (Author)

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Describes how Steve Jobs started Apple Computer in his garage in the late 1970s and how, after his colleagues ousted him, he founded NeXT, in a work that discusses Bill Gates, Ross Perot, George Lucas, and other figures

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Scribner
Publication date

November 18, 1993
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0689121350
ISBN-13

978-0689121357
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Brent Schlender
1,209
Paperback
42 offers from $3.61

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jobs, who with Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer and made the list of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, emerges as a mesmerizing, irrational, self-deluding and ultimately pathetic person in this portrait by the author of Bulls in the China Shop and Other Sino-American Business Encounters . Having been forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs sought in vain to recover his "boy wonder" dominance in the ultra-competitive computer world through lavish spending on his new company, setting the tone early by paying a designer $100,000 to devise the name "NeXT." With no market profiles clearly in mind, Jobs unilaterally chose a small, black, cube-shaped "personal mainframe" box, noncompatible and overpriced, to be the firm's sole hardware item with exclusive software applications--a "retrograde" posture, notes Stross. NeXT consistently fell far short of sales and production targets--while rivals Microsoft, Sun Systems and IBM forged ahead with innovations--to which Jobs responded with outrageously fanciful boasting at trade events and in the press. The book serves as an instructive case study of the power and peril of the computer industry. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

$24. BUS Steve Jobs, the charismatic cofounder of Apple Computer, is widely viewed as a hero of the computer industry, one of its founding fathers. Stross ( Bulls in the China Shop and Other Sino-Japanese Encounters , LJ 7/91) describes Jobs's attempt to recreate his success at NeXT, the company he founded after being forced out of Apple in 1985. The resulting picture is one of a megalomaniac who has been unable to recreate his original magic. Indeed, Stross questions Jobs's "magic," attributing much of Apple's success to its position in a nascent, booming industry and to the efforts and innovations of others. In his own atempt to produce "the next big thing," Jobs has focused on the impractical and revealed a critical lack of business savvy. This is an engrossing and cautionary tale, with a supporting cast including Bill Gates, Ross Perot, and George Lucas. Recommended for public libraries.
- Robert Kruthoffer, Lane P.L., Hamilton, Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hollywood and the computer industry seem to have much in common. Aside from the fact both headquarter in California, each relies on razzle-dazzle and larger-than-life egos to grab headlines. This is why Stross' analysis of the shortcomings of Steve Jobs' NeXT is so striking: he delves beyond the newsprint and the speeches and the glamorous events to underscore reasons for the business' failure. This impartial account of hubris, however, leaves space for some balanced conclusions: the founder's insecurity, the company's inability to listen to customers, the glitz factor, and budgetary misdemeanors all contributed to the pending demise of NeXT. With accuracy (and without cooperation from the company), he unfolds historical details and personalities involved, in the end evoking some understanding of the guy who just couldn't shoot straight. Barbara Jacobs

From Kirkus Reviews

A searing portrait of Steve Jobs, the California boy wonder who--having co-founded Apple Computer in his garage in 1979--went on to make a ``bid of entrepreneurial history'' with a $600-million disaster of a high-end, high-tech company called NeXT. Stross (Business/San Jose State; Bulls in the China Shop, 1991--not reviewed) seems to have a passionate dislike for Jobs, whose stake in Apple won him widespread notoriety--and a great fortune. According to the author, college-dropout Jobs's main talent was self-promotion; in business, he was technically unskilled and was ``considered an incompetent manager of at best'' by Apple, where, in 1985, he was stripped of his duties by a CEO he himself had hired. After that debacle, Jobs sold his Apple stock and, in 1985, announced the formation of NeXT--whose purpose was no less than to ``build computers to change the world.'' Such was Jobs's aura of genius and infallibility that--without design specifications, a market, or any software for his promised new computer--he garnered significant backing from Ross Perot, IBM, and Canon. Jobs proceeded to make every management mistake Apple had made, and without producing the fabulous machines that had compensated at Apple: Instead of building a computer, he built lush new private offices, staffed them with 400 technicians and salespeople, and adopted a secretive, nearly paranoid, stance toward competitors and the press. By the time the pokey, limited, expensive, and not entirely reliable NeXT Cube computer appeared, two years behind schedule, in late 1988, the high-stakes technological race had gone to the swifter Sun Microsystem and IBM; a second generation of new and improved NeXT boxes did nothing to change the situation in 1991, when the company abandoned manufacturing. Stross's treatment of Jobs as a born megalomaniac and thoroughgoing devil leaches his narrative of the tension of a rise- and-fall tale. Nevertheless: a fascinating, though overlong, glimpse of glittering Silicon Valley in the 1980's. (Eight-page photo insert--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner (November 18, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0689121350
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0689121357
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #735,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #64,861 in Business & Money (Books)

Customer Reviews:
52 ratings

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Customer reviews

4 out of 5

52 global ratings

5 star		35%
4 star		42%
3 star		13%
2 star		5%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Amazon Customer

This book does a great job of detailing how NeXT built great software and computers but failed to find a market for them

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 25, 2016

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If you love computers and technology, and enjoy biographical information on the people that make them, you should thoroughly enjoy Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall E Stross. If you're a huge Steve Jobs fan and tear up at the thought of how he died so young, though, you might want to pass.

Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing doesn't sugar coat the life of Steve Jobs as it applies to his failed NeXT experiment. It instead goes out of its way to explore with agonizing detail how he failed, why, and by how much. It lists all of his sins and his amazing ego and how it helped him destroy the company he built.

The book stops about the same time NeXTSTEP for Intel was being completed, so it doesn't talk about how Steve Jobs sold his company to Apple, and how the company took NeXTSTEP and turned it into OS X. If it had, I'm sure it would've reminded us that when that transformation took place and Apple was tasked with making an Apple OS out of NeXTSTEP, Steve Jobs didn't run the show and wasn't allowed to also run Apple into the ground.

I'm not a big Apple fan and have no love for Steve Jobs. My first exposure to Macs was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and all I knew is they weren't anywhere near as fast as my trusty Amiga 1000. They seemed okay, but real computers have operating systems that multitask, and at the time the Amiga was the king of that particular mountain. Later, other consumer operating systems joined the fray, including OS/2, Windows 95, and Windows NT.

Mac OS, I'm afraid, was not a modern OS by any stretch of the imagination.The computers may have excelled at desktop publishing, but as far as general computing goes, they were too slow, too expensive, and too limited. And while NeXTSTEP may not have suffered the same problems as Mac OS did, it was tied to computers that were astronomically expensive, and to a company that makes Commodore look well run by comparison.

I didn't really know about NeXT, though I had heard about it in passing back in the mid-1990s. It's only recently that I've become more interested in the company, and Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, while not very technical, does at least inform us about the circumstances surrounding the development of NeXTSTEP and the computers that ran it.

The book is a bit pretentious, though, so unless you're reading it on dedicated reader with a built-in dictionary, you might want to have one near by so you can look up the countless words that you'll likely not know the meaning of. It's also long winded but thorough, and appears to accurately depict an interesting time when computer technology moved forward despite the visionary who tried his best to stop it.

While Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing doesn't tell the story of how Steve Jobs helped Apple ultimately succeed, bringing its operating system up to current standards and finally giving users of Macs multitasking, but it does tell us of a visionary who failed to predict market trends, and was unwilling to listen to those who might have helped him save the company he built and others funded.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mat H

Well written, a little biased

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 14, 2010

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Good book, but a little biased, and in retrospect (seeing the successes of Jobs afterwards) not right in its main contention: that after the Mac, Jobs was not able anymore to come up with another successfull product. Jobs did come up with new successes, as we know now.

Still, NeXt was not a success, and Stross's analysis and description of that episode seems right.

Well written.

2 people found this helpful

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Paolo Bertolo

Worth reading it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 14, 2015

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Honestly, not the most entertaining book ever, but definitely an interesting one that is casting a black light on this unfortunate venture of Job's.
Written in 1993, before the later merge with Apple, this book illustrates a picture that is largely incomplete, being the finale completely missing.
Don't expect the book to be over-detailed when it comes to describing the genesis of NeXT hardware and software (the latter still shining today in millions and millions of Apple branded devices), since focus is more on the (ill-fated) entrepreneurial spirit behind.

3 people found this helpful

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Arvind

Nice book to know what was happening in Silicon Valley

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 8, 2012

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first part of the book that succinctly recounts what was happening in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s. The book captures about all the people and organizations that played their part during Steve Jobs' stint at Apple and later at NeXT when he desperately tried to find success.

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Robert Livingston

Vivid look at how hard it is to predict the future. MUCH easier to explain the past.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 20, 2014

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Well written. Fascinating because it is so entirely wrong, but on the other hand so plausible.

If you ever want to know how difficult it is to predict the future, read this book. Written at the nadir of Jobs career. 15 years later Apple is one of the largest companies in the world with Jobs as its leader.

4 people found this helpful

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Varied reader

Excellent companion to the Jobs biography

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 1, 2014

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Steve Jobs is a fascinating character, but failed almost as spectacularly as he succeeded. Well recommended to anybody how like the Steve Jobs biography

3 people found this helpful

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Trent Waddington

The real Steve Jobs

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 20, 2014

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The word "sociopath" is thrown around a lot these days...

Stross does a fantastic job of capturing the Preacher-Conman that was Steve.

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cct

A Good Balance to all the other "Steve is God" Stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 24, 2014

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The is the intriguing story of the "Dark Side" of Mr. Jobs during a very trying episode of his life.

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Top reviews from other countries

Dr. Sebastian Knuckledick

A thoroughly compelling account of the fiasco that was NeXT.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 30, 2020

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This book is an authoritative and beautifully written account of the wilderness years between Steve Jobs' departure from Apple in 1985 up until the book's release in 1993, during which time Steve Jobs ran his own company NeXT, and continued to do so for a number of years afterwards.

Stross has drawn from a large number of resources in order to write his highly-detailed account of NeXT, including interviews conducted with 160 people connected with NeXT in one way or another. This is despite him not being able to secure approval from NeXT to interview any of its staff, a number of whom he was able to interview off-the-record. As one delves deeper into the labyrinthine corridors of NeXT's history and its opaque and often dishonest business practices, one can clearly understand NeXT's reluctance to grant Stross access to its staff.

I was particularly staggered to see just how little regard Jobs had for investors' money, which, in addition to his own dwindling supply (still in the millions of dollars however), he would fritter away on one delusional extravagance after another (the black leather seats in the lobby of the NeXT factory that cost $20,000 each were the thin end of the wedge).

As we are now aware, Jobs learned a great deal from his experiences with NeXT and ultimately returned to Apple with NeXT technology in hand and, with the help of others at Apple, took the company from the brink of disaster and into one of the world's most successful companies.

I have read a large number of books on Steve Jobs, Apple, Microsoft and the personal computer industry that blossomed in the mid-seventies and beyond and I consider Stross' account of NeXT to be amongst the very best books of its type. I found it an utterly enthralling read. Thank you Mr Stross! (-:

Highly recommended!

One person found this helpful

Edward B.

Great Story, well written by a professional historian

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 5, 2022

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This book was an interesting read, Steve Jobs wasn't really the genius that he was made out to be later, in his second tenure in Apple. The guy was apparently an egotist( at Apple too) and a complete nightmare to work for, he treated his employees appallingly (just like a present day tech company founder , I think we all know who I am referring to ) it was a certain amount of luck, his deep pockets and unbelievable arrogance that allowed him to survive at all in the business world.
Why he wasn't charged with investor fraud is a mystery, others have been much more harshly treated for technology claims that turned out to be lies. (Elizabeth Holmes Theranos for instance she also promised the moon and never delivered)
The author's writing style and attention to detail made this a great read.

James Weiner

Rethink Steve Jobs “the genius”

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 22, 2018

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An enjoyable dismantling of the tiresome myth of Steve Jobs as visionary genius. The slew of mistakes born from arrogance and hubris at NeXT was probably what helped him to not repeat the same glorious mess when he went back to Apple and went on to lead such huge successes as iMac, iPod and iPhone

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Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing Hardcover – November 18, 1993

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