Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders Expanded and Updated: Amazon.ca: Books

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42 Reviews

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3.5 out of 5 stars (42 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Jim Carlton Was Wrong, Jun 2 2002

By

Troy Dawson (Santa Cruz, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Expanded and Updated) (Paperback)

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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3.0 out of 5 stars fiendish, negative reading, but interesting, Dec 8 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Apple:: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Hardcover)

Apple can't suck that much, but after I was done with this book, I couldn't believe that the company is still around. It's interesting reading, but seems awfully negative.

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5.0 out of 5 stars What you never knew about Apple., April 22 1999

By

John S. Pritchett - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apple:: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders (Hardcover)

Jim Carlton writes masterfully the story of Apple Computer. In so doing he provides a comprehensive picture of the computer industry as a whole. Even the novice will be quickly absorbed by this intriguing account of a once innovative company, trashed by greed, arrogance and huge egos from within. Microsoft chose "evolution over revolution." The Apple passion was to "change the world." Carlton describes in unbiased detail how after years of mismanagement, the world would change around Apple.

This book is recommended reading for Mac evangelists.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbiased Account of one of the Biggest Business Tragedies
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... Read more

Published on April 7 1999 by Steve Shalansky (shalansk@bu.edu)

2.0 out of 5 stars Earth to Mr. Carlton: Think Different
Apple Computer company has, in the past two years, made a bona fide turnaround. It is easy to enumerate a few facts supporting this proposition, not the least of which is five... Read more