Infinite Loop - Hardcover

Malone, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385486847 ISBN 13: 9780385486842

Publisher: Doubleday Business, 1999

Synopsis

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 political backstabbings, 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.

About this title

About the Author

Michael S. Malone has written for The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other national publications. He is currently the editor of Forbes ASAP, as well as a contributor to Upside and Fast Company magazines. Among his books are The Big Score and Intellectual Capital. He also hosts the PBS show "Malone," an interview series now in its ninth season.

From the Back Cover

From Infinite Loop:

Before and after everything, companies are about character--

Good companies have strong characters. Great companies have heroic characters.

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--

This was Apple Computer Inc., and there has never been a company like it. The company [Jobs and Wozniak] built seemed to have everything: great technology, superb products, talented employees, rabidly loyal customers, an arresting vision, even a lock on the zeitgeist. But, like its founders, it lacked character.

More than any other great company, the seeds of Apple's future glory and its later humiliation--even its last-minute efforts to resurrect itself--were planted long before the company ever began.For bend and prune as it might, Apple Computer could never free itself of its roots.

From the Inside Flap

tory 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 grippi

Reviews

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 someAbut not allAof 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 G3Athough 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 thatAat least among Apple execs and the company's famously loyal customersAwill be greeted with something other than a smile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A long-winded invective against Steve Jobs, infamous co-founder of the Apple Computer company. Malone relates with glee how Jobss brilliance, his blindness to the demands of industry, and his charisma together nearly killed the company, which stands today as a small player in the midst of the industry it created. Malone grew up with Jobs and cof-ounder Steve Wozniak, and has covered Apple and Silicon Valley as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among others. He exhibits a techies obsession with detail, listing the date of every occurrence from minor memos to the yearly MacWorld Expos, where the board of directors almost routinely got fired and reassembled. Malone begins with his own memories of Jobs in highschool, the lonely, brilliant nerd who defied authority and got his way by pure charm. He describes the young Wozniak, an engineering wizard who created a disk drive in time for the biggest computer show in the country, then realized he needed programs to make it workwhich he wrote the night before the show. Together, Jobs and Wozniak lifted the personal computer from the domain of techie geeks to the wide world of business and the individual comsumers. But they didnt create a company. They incited a cult. Where the company went wrong, according to Malone, was in its utter lack of management and foresight. Jobs consistently and contemptuously stymied his colleagues efforts to instill workable operating systems and consistent product quality. The company inspired serflike loyalty, but Apple had no core. Malone calls the company a Chinese stacking box: when it is unpacked layer by layer, nothing is left. By association, he implies, Jobs was the same: an egomaniacal spin wizard who managed to fool the world into thinking Apple (and he) had direction and credibility, when in fact all it (and he) had was a bunch of ingenious ideas, with no method for integrating them. An exhaustive eulogy to a once-great company that changed the world but fell prey to its own antiestablishment fervor. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword

It has often been written that Silicon Valley is merely a very large and very wealthy small town in which everyone at some time has worked for, with or against everyone else.

If that is the case, then Apple Computer for me has always been the curious neighborhood just down the street. I have encountered it in some way almost every day of the last quarter century--sometimes just passing by, on other occasions stopping for a visit, but never out of my life. Indeed, so ever present, for good and bad, has Apple been in my life that I gave a second thought to ever beginning this book. The prospect of having to relive the Apple story, with all its hopes and heartbreaks, hypocrisies and disasters, was almost too exhausting to contemplate.

My dealings with Apple Computer began two decades before the company was even founded. I saw a nine-year-old Steve Jobs on the playground of our elementary schoolyard in Mountain View. I even found one of his homework assignments in my papers.

A few years later, having coincidentally moved to Sunnyvale at the same time as Jobs, I watched Steve Wozniak ride up Bernardo Drive on his way home from swim practice. I looked over Woz's primitive adder at the local science fair. For a short time, I was part of the Boy Scouts Explorer post that was one of the roots of the Homebrew Computer Club. And I saw, but didn't recognize, Woz, Jobs and Bill Fernandez (whose father was my Sunday school teacher) as they shopped for parts in Owen Whetzel's hobby shop. A year after that, I saw a lonely--and apparently unremarkable--Apple I on a shelf at the first Byte Shop.

When I was just out of college and working in public relations at Hewlett-Packard, one of my divisions was APD, Woz's employer. And during that period, handling publicity for Dave Barram and Dianne McKenna in their run for Sunnyvale City Council, I stood in the Wozniak living room as Mr. Wozniak cornered Regis McKenna over his concerns about his son and Steve Jobs. Ten years later, I sat in Barram's office at Apple just days before he was nominated to the Commerce Department.

When I began my journalism career at the San Jose Mercury  News at the end of 1979, one of my first assignments was to profile a new young company with the absurd name of Apple Computer. I interviewed Jobs and Woz in their chaotic offices just days after their move to Bandley Drive. There I found two bright, if eccentric, young men whom I nevertheless recognized as fellow children of Silicon Valley.

I visited Apple many times in subsequent years, writing about it for the Mercury News, the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I was in the audience, as a stringer for The Economist, at the extraordinary Macintosh introduction. Then, broke and hungry, I quit reporting on Apple for several years and went to work writing for it. Writing on an Apple III given to me by Mike Markkula in exchange for ghostwriting an article, I authored one of the many drafts of the notorious 1984 Apple annual report--and saw firsthand both the eerie bond between John Sculley and Steve Jobs and the emotional damage that Jobs was wreaking on the company. I heard the grumbles of the Apple II group as their product was eclipsed by the Mac.

Having been a reporter and a contractor, my third relationship with Apple was as a beggar--that sophisticated version known as an entrepreneur. In the middle of the Sculley era, I spent some time as part of the start-up team of a new Valley company. Like many such teams of the period, we imagined the answer to all our prayers was to convince Apple to become a customer, an investor or a strategic partner (these days, such teams dream of the same deal with Microsoft). For two years, we used every connection we had--Barram, Del Yocam, Debi Coleman and dozens of others--to no avail. Most of the problem lay with our company--it is only now preparing to go public  after a decade--but as we sat through endless meetings, being ignored by Apple executives as they jockeyed for power among themselves, it became apparent to us that this was a company in serious trouble, one that had lost the edginess and drive that had once made it great.

In 1996, the world saw what we had seen during those long, posturing meetings: a hollow company that had lost its purpose, a company searching for a charismatic figure to save it. And so, once again a reporter, I found myself in the crush of true believers in a ballroom in San Francisco to hear Gil Amelio describe his plans to turn Apple around--and more important, to see the return of Steve Jobs. Sitting there on the floor, I thought about the distance we had traveled in three decades. We were all now middle-aged fathers, some rich, some mythical, some still just trying to cover their mortgage--as old as our own fathers had been when the personal computing revolution began. Now that revolution seemed to be coming to an end, replaced by new technologies and new products that rightly belong to a younger generation. It had been thrilling and degrading, noble and base--and it would ring down through history.

That was when I knew I had to write the Apple story. The true story that lay beneath the accretion of thirty years of legends and lies. I figured getting all the truth was probably impossible, but at least I could make a start. Apple had defeated every other attempt to capture its story, so I had no illusions. But at least I could stake out a path for that definitive Apple biography that waits to be written by some future generation. For now, here is a look, from inside and outside, at a deeply human institution that is unlike any other, yet is somehow emblematic of America at the end of the twentieth century.


Roots

Before and after everything, companies are about character.

Before the first idea, the first money, the first employees, the first distributor, retailer and customer, before the creation of the company itself, there is the character of the founders. Their ambition, talent, creativity and will to succeed are what make them successful entrepreneurs and distinguish them from the millions of people who only dream of creating their own company. Character also distinguishes these rare individuals from the thousands who try to create their own companies but are defeated by the market, competition, bad luck and an unwillingness to do whatever it takes to win.

After the company has grown rich and safe and mature, character tells as well. After the founders have left or died, after the excitement has moved elsewhere along with the best employees, after the company's products and logo and image have grown synonymous with staid and predictable. After hot new firms have appeared on the scene, start-ups that most resemble the company of old, and begin to carve away great chunks of the market. Then once more it is character, in the company's institutional memory, its community and in the philosophy with which the founders imbued it, that may spell the difference between another generation of success, or a slow, ugly corporate death.

Good companies have strong characters. Great companies have heroic characters. The greatest companies of the twentieth century all had extraordinary characters: Royal Dutch Shell, De Beers, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Intel, Microsoft. They weren't necessarily "good" characters. One need only think of De Beers and Shell and their rape of underdeveloped nations, Ford and its crushing of workers early in this century, Microsoft and its alleged monopolistic destruction of the software industry. But they were bold, fearless and consistent. And it was this inner strength that enabled these companies not only to win their early competitive battles but to survive wounds that would (and did) kill their lesser counterparts.

Ford, battered first by GM, and then by the Japanese in the 1980s, struggled and regained its leadership in the 1990s with a new family of brilliantly innovative cars. IBM suffered one of the worst business collapses in the century at the end of the 1980s, then restored itself in just five years. HP slid into complacency and inertia, then somehow righted itself in the 1990s to become the most innovative large company on the planet. During this same period, Microsoft missed the most important technological revolution of the era, the Internet, then accomplished a breathtaking turnabout and gained the leadership of that industry.

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 the way a man without empathy or conscience can pretend to have those traits. But it was never really there--even though two generations of employees convinced themselves otherwise. It was only when that character was finally tested did the essential hollowness of the enterprise finally stand exposed, and the employees and customers shrieked with betrayal.

This was Apple Computer Inc., and there has never been a company like it. It was founded by two young men, one a genius with no allegiance to any institution but his own mind; the other a protean, inconstant figure who seemed composed of nothing but charm and a pure will to power. The company they built seemed to have everything: great technology, superb products, talented employees, rabidly loyal customers, an arresting vision, even a lock on the zeitgeist. But, like its founders, it lacked character. And because of that, from the first minute of the first meeting of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, a decade before the company's founding, Apple Computer was set on a path from which it could not escape, even after those founders were gone. And that path would in time lead to the company's destruction.

More than any other great company, the seeds of Apple's future glory and its subsequent humiliation were planted long before the company ever began. And bend and prune as it might, Apple Computer ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday Business
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385486847
• ISBN 13: 9780385486842
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608