Apple:: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders | 
 enlarge | Author: Jim Carlton
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $3.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  58 reviews
Sales Rank: 952236
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 463
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8
ISBN: 0812928512
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.761004165
EAN: 9780812928518
ASIN: 0812928512
Publication Date: October 15, 1997
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Amazon.com Review
Computer users who favor Macintosh products are truly enthralled with their machines. But after reading Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders, even the most zealous may be hard-pressed to defend the company that produces them. Here, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jim Carlton chronicles the missteps that have befuddled the fallen giant of Cupertino between the initial and current regimes of cofounder Steve Jobs. Carlton combines a keen sense of observation with a slew of previously undisclosed facts to produce a damning history that will leave many wondering how the firm has managed to survive.
Product Description
This book, written by a Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is the most detailed study to date of the past decade of Apple's turbulent history.Jim Carlton walks us down company corridors, into the boardroom, and through barriers to research laboratories, and reveals a seething cauldron of petty infighting and buried secrets.
Through exhaustive interviews with more than 160 former Apple employees, industry experts, and competitors--including Bill Gates, Scully, and Amelio--Carlton discovers confidential memos, late night rendezvous, and fateful decisions that forever changed the company's path.He portrays a company very different from the glamorous technology leader that designed computers for "the rest of us" and illuminates what might have been and what really happened to this once-great icon of American business.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 53 more reviews...
 Interesting to see the accumulation of "could haves" December 8, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
While others have noted the writing style (tolerable - I've seen far worse), the book as a whole is rather thorough and interesting. Granted, it was published before Apple's comeback, so there is (perhaps) too much emphasis upon the failures. However, the accumulated "could have" stories are interesting fare, things that may have been overlooked in the tale of a successful company's history. Here we see the flirtations with Sun, with Apollo, the AIM alliance and PowerPC, porting to x86 hardware, the Newton, and the spin-offs: webTV, Be, etc. Using hindsight 20/20, it seems that Jobs is under-represented. Yet, at the time of publication, I think that this book provided an accurate picture of how things seemed to line up.
I recommend this book, particularly to Apple fans and those interested in the history of computing. Additionally, this book is prime material for those interested in business blunders, particularly related to technology. For the latter group, this book makes a fine companion to the history of Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning. The works together provide a chilling view of how tecnhological innovation is often antithetical to business interests. I think that Carlton's work alone can make one consider the fate of technology in the hands of "big business".
 Jim Carlton Was Wrong June 2, 2002
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.
It's OK . . . February 18, 2002
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Jim Carlton's "Apple" is a fascinating account about the growth, the fall, the rebirth, and the slow decline of one of Silicon Valley's original PC pioneer. It provides an exhaustive account of the egos and problems within the top ranks that prevented Apple from being a great company. Again and again, Carlton shows how Apple blew opportunities to become a "standard" in the PC industry if it had licensed its technology, merged with a partner like IBM or Sun, or just had the competence to execute effectively and efficiently.For the most part, I do agree with Carlton's account. However, one cannot help but feel after reading numerous accounts of Apple's "failures" or "lost opportunities" if Carlton is making too much out of Apple's strategy. Carlton also implicitly believes that becoming "the standard" could have been and should have been Apple's only goal. Naturally, like another reviewer, I got tired of reading Carlton's 20/20 hindsight version of history that harps on every failure as somehow contributing to the company's decline. The book was also published around 1999, so while it does include a section on Job's return and Apple's introduction of the iMac, it naturally missed out on some of Apple's more recent accomplishments: the new TiBook, the iBook, OS X, the "digital hub" strategy, and the fact that Apple is sitting pretty these days as other Wintel box makers are seeing their companies disintegrate under brutal price wars and commoditization. Overall, Carlton's book provides a good history of the company, but its propensity to apply a 20/20 hindsight type of history that harps on every mistake the company made gets annoying after awhile.
 Missed Opportunities February 15, 2002
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Carlton relates time after time after time (after time) how Apple rose to great heights of genius and creativity, and then threw opportunity away with both hands and ran the other direction. The title is descriptive of the downs (but the book also covers the ups) of this amazing company. One of the few critical and unbiased (mostly) looks at Apple. All Macintosh fans and Steve Jobsians should read this book to get the other side. I was actually going to interview with Apple until I read this story.
 The biggest blunder is this book July 27, 2001
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
I'm not a big Apple Computer fan, but I was very disappointed by this book. Covering the tumultuous period just before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the book attempts to provide all the 20/20 insight necessary to explain the company's short-comings. Unfortunately, though, the book is so poorly written -- and doesn't at all hide the disdain the author feels for Jobs -- that it's nearly unreadable. Rather than tell the story in a linear timeline, the book jumps back and forth in a very confusing way. If you didn't already know the Apple story, you wouldn't know what was going on. Also, considering all the success Apple has had since then (with the iMac and Titanium PowerBook), this topic is moot now anyway.
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