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Title: Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton ISBN: 0-88730-965-8 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (58 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Unbiased Account of one of the Biggest Business Tragedies
Comment: I found Carlton's book to be well-written, stimulating and unbiased. It seems that other reviewers feel that Carlton was flat wrong in his prediction that Apple will ultimately not succeed (he devotes only a few pages at the end to this). To these individuals, I suggest that you reread the book. Carlton did not say that Apple has always been a complete failure. His book was about how the company, which was YEARS ahead of others in terms of technology and design, lost its market share. His prediction is simply that Apple will most likely not thrive in the LONG-term.
To those who thought that Carlton's book was overly negative: What else could you call what happened to Apple? A success story? Of course not. Apple DID create an unbelievable company with brilliant design, technology and marketing. But the tragedy is that it chose to ride on its past successes without devising a strategic plan to maintain its lead in the ever-changing technology industry.
I suggest that anyone interested in learning how to manage a company over the long-haul read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A 'mostly' well-read history of the management of Apple
Comment: This book focuses on the business side of Apple Computer, from the departure and return of Steve Jobs. Little is mentioned of the history before John Sculley took over as the 'sole' CEO of the company. The book starts off with a bang, but ultimately it gets tougher and tougher to digest the information; not because of the writer's ability, but because of the repeated failures of the company to recognize success. You are constantly dumbfounded by the repeated mistakes that are made over and over, which ultimately sealed Apple's fate and made Microsoft billions! I found the chapters on Spindler and Amelio to be particularly difficult to follow.
I must admit that before reading this book I had a low opinion of Bill Gates, but the book has shed new light for me on the whole history of the GUI wars, and my opinion has certainly changed; Gates had no choice, but to create the Windows platform, since Apple was destroying itself internally and not advancing the Macintosh platform successfully.
I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand why Apple did not succeed beyond it's wildest dreams.
Rating: 3
Summary: Jim Carlton Was Wrong
Comment: 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.
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Title: Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy, Stephen Levy ISBN: 0140291776 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 05 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman ISBN: 0767904338 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 11 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Macintosh... The Naked Truth by Scott Kelby ISBN: 0735712840 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 07 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
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Title: On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple by Gil Amelio, William L. Simon ISBN: 0887309194 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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