Overview
The inside story of how one of America's most beloved companies--Apple Computer--took off like a high-tech rocket--only to come crashing to Earth twenty years later.
No company in modern times has been as successful at capturing the public's imagination as Apple Computer. From its humble beginnings in a suburban garage, Apple sparked the personal computer revolution, and its products and founders--Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--quickly became part of the American myth.
But something happened to Apple as it stumbled toward a premature middle age. For ten years, it lived off its past glory and its extraordinary products. Then, almost overnight, it collapsed in a two-year free fall.
How did Apple lose its way? Why did the world still care so deeply about a company that had lost its leadership position? Michael S. Malone, from the unique vantage point of having grown up with the company's founders, and having covered Apple and Silicon Valley for years, sets out to tell the gripping behind-the-scenes story--a story that is even zanier than the business world thought. In essence, Malone claims, with only a couple of incredible inventions (the Apple II and Macintosh), and backed by an arrogance matched only by its corporate ineptitude, Apple managed to create a multibillion-dollar house of cards. And, like a faulty program repeating itself in an infinite loop, Apple could never learn from its mistakes. The miracle was not that Apple went into free fall, but that it held up for so long.
Within the pages of Infinite Loop, we discover a bruising portrait of the megalomaniacal Steve Jobs and an incompetent John Sculley, as well as the kind of politicalbackstabbings, stupid mistakes, and overweening egos more typical of a soap opera than a corporate history. Infinite Loop is almost as wild and unpredictable, as exhilarating and gut-wrenching, as the story of Apple itself.
Editorials
David Pogue
...Malone's searing indictment of Steve Jobs and almost everyone else in Silicon Valley....[He] reserves his most caustic remarks for Jobs, with whom he attended elementary school.βThe New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly -
Two years ago, this could have been the definitive book about why one of the world's most well-known brand names almost went out of business. But Apple has since bounced back, rendering some--but not all--of Malone's analysis moot. (In fact, in his foreword, Malone admits that, having abandoned his Mac for a PC, he is now eyeing an Apple G3--though he calls the iMac "Steve Jobs's triumph of image over reality.") Still, even given the bad timing, Malone presents a cogent account of how Apple ran into trouble. Malone, editor of the technology magazine, Forbes ASAP, grew up near Apple's founders, worked for the company for a time and has covered the firm since its inception. He unearths new information about the company's founders, Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, and he puts them in a far less flattering light than the common hagiography, which presents the two as a pair of garage-bound tinkerers and idealists. The story he tells is how hubris, arrogance and IBM-sized egos prevented Apple's execs from diversifying the company's product line. Determined to write the definitive revisionist history of Apple, Malone takes special aim at the company's famous corporate culture: "Of all the great companies of recent memory, there is only one that seemed to have no character, but only an attitude, a style, a collection of mannerisms. It constructed a brilliant simulacrum of character, in a way a man without empathy or conscience can pretend to have those traits." Such sentences abound in a book that--at least among Apple execs and the company's famously loyal customers--will be greeted with something other than a smile. (Apr.)Library Journal
Apple Computer arguably started the PC revolution in this country. To this day there is still a cultlike Apple following, but the company has fallen on hard times. Malone, editor of Forbes ASAP, presents an authoritative account of the rise and fall of Apple and its iconoclastic founders, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Yes, truly creative things happened in the early years of Apple, and much has been written about the corporate Woodstock culture that spawned technological wonders like the Macintosh. Unfortunately, there was a darker side, and Malone captures it perfectly, revealing mercurial, arrogant leadership; betrayed friendships; the squandering of valuable resources; and corporate skulduggery. A high-tech soap opera? You bet. Malone takes the reader through 1998, focusing on Jobss reinvolvement and the introduction of Apples new iMac. Will the company survive? Malone is skeptical, but he freely admits his book may not be the last word. Highly recommended for public libraries and information technology collections.Richard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, DCFrom The Critics
It's instructive to know that Infinite Loop author Michael S. Malone is the same guy who wrote the controversial 1990 Upside article Has Silicon Valley Gone Pussy? On the cover of the high-tech magazine was an illustration of ex-Apple CEO John Sculley in a sandbox, his eyes welling with tears as a black boot prepared to smash a sandcastle of the Apple logo.In Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane, Malone, now editor of Forbes ASAP, is dead-on in his appraisal of the now-famous missteps of Sculley and company. Better than anyone before him, Malone puts Apple in its proper place in the history of Silicon Valley.
While he's deservedly harsh in his critique of Steve Jobs, Malone goes easy on ex-Apple board member Mike Markkula, the grown-up from historic Fairchild Semiconductor who watched the Apple empire swirl down the drain. The end of Markkula's reign on Apple's board is treated as little more than an aside.
There are other complaints Β the book is riddled with troubling typos and too much of the material is sourced to other books about Apple Β but as a whole, Infinite Loop tells a good story. What's left out, however, is that the story isn't finished yet.
Β Jim Evans
David Pogue
...Malone's searing indictment of Steve Jobs and almost everyone else in Silicon Valley....[He] reserves his most caustic remarks for Jobs, with whom he attended elementary school.β The New York Times Book Review