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

Review:

Apple Computer has made for good copy over the years. From its beginnings in the garage owned by Steve Jobs's parents and the launch of the Macintosh to the regimes of John Scully and Gil Amelio, Apple's story is irresistible and has been captured in books such as The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz, The Macintosh Way by Guy Kawasaki, Insanely Great by Steven Levy, and Apple by Jim Carlton. Now in Infinite Loop, Michael S. Malone offers what may be the best rendition yet of Apple's storied past.

Malone's account begins deep in the heart of Santa Clara Valley and the early lives of Apple's two founders, Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Malone seamlessly interlaces his accounts of the forces that shaped the two Steves--from the nascent electronics industry of the '60s and companies such as Sylvania and Hewlett Packard to Jobs's work at Atari and his repeated, and often deceitful, manipulation of his genius friend, the Woz. From these early beginnings, Malone takes the reader through the life of Apple Computer: its founding and launch of the Apple I, the return of Steve Jobs, the rollout of the iMac. In the end, Malone, a journalist who grew up in Silicon Valley and first covered Apple in 1979, writes that Apple was a company with lots of attitude but one that was bereft of character, and only when that fact was laid bare "did the essential hollowness of the enterprise stand exposed." Infinite Loop is a wonderfully written, even gripping, corporate biography that anyone who has fallen under Apple's spell will enjoy. Recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

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.

About this edition

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