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

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.

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.

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.

Love it.

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

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.

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.

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