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Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane is a new book from Doubleday by Michael S. Malone. The book takes a look at Apple, and three of the main personalities of the company's history, and comes out with a pronouncement of doom for the company's future according to the book's publisher.
Malone is a former Apple employee as well as a journalist who has been covering Apple since the beginning. According to Doubleday:
The iMac computer is the latest in a long line of Apple products to capture the public's imagination with its slick ad campaign and fashionable appeal. For those who remember back 15 years, this aggressive marketing of the iMac creates a sense of deja-vu. As it once did for the Macintosh, Apple again appears to be selling itself primarily with hip, edgy image rather than context. And that, according to author and journalist Michael Malone, has been Apple's whole problem, preventing this once-promising company from holding onto the extraordinary success of which it seemed so assured.
Malone tells the eye-opening story of how the Apple company rose from humble beginnings in a suburban garage into a multi-billion dollar company lauded for initiating the personal computer revolution and beloved for its youthful, rebellious image -- then proceeded to self-destruct. In the process, Malone paints a devastating portrait of the company and its key players, demonstrating how, despite its spectacular successes, it has been doomed to repeat its spectacular mistakes in a seemingly endless and maddening destructive cycle.
Malone, currently the editor of Forbes ASAP and host of his own public television interview series, is ideally suited to tell the dramatic story of Apple's insane rise and fall. Beginning his journalism career covering the hot new company with the seemingly absurd name of Apple Computer -- and one of the first to interview its two young founders, whom he'd also happened to grow up with -- Malone proceeded to report on the company for several years before going to work for it himself. These experiences provide him with a unique dual perspective, as he brings to this expose both an insider's understanding as well as a journalist's objectivity. More than any other book on Apple, "Infinite Loop" combines a comprehensive history of the company with a probing analysis and critique. Not only does Malone reveal the truth behind the various myths and legends that have surrounded the company and often clouded its actual inner-workings, he also highlights the various patterns and policies, decisions and disasters that set the company on its insanely ruinous path.
Malone's main argument is that the company's successes and failures can be directly tied to the specific strengths and weaknesses of those who founded and ran it. Laying out intricate, brutally honest character studies of each of the main Apple players -- Steve Wozniak ("a genius with no allegiance to any institution but his own mind"), Steve Jobs ("a protean inconstant figure who seemed composed of nothing but charm and a pure will to power"), and John Scully (a man who held the fate of the world's most exciting company in his hands but "understood neither the company nor its world") -- Malone proceeds to show how these qualities led to the creation of a company without guidance or vision, where collective madness seemed to be the order of the day.
These figures would each plant seeds that, hidden by the extraordinary success of its first decades, would fester and grow, eating away at the company's heart, until it would be revealed in the latter half of the 1990s as hollow, without purpose, and on the brink of financial ruin. The tragic irony that Malone's book so expertly explores is that many of the traits that fostered Apple's success -- its brilliant marketing of itself as a youthful rebel fighting monolithic Goliaths --would also foster an arrogance and narcissism, as well as an internal structure marred by vengeance, paranoia and chaos, that would be the roots of its undoing. Seen in this context, even the introduction of the glitzy new iMac, while recapturing some of the old Apple magic, also, as Malone describes, 'had about it the air of a twilight act."
With all the drama and conflict of a Shakespearean tragedy, not to mention the absurd plot developments of a daytime soap, "Infinite Loop" weaves a history that is almost as exhilarating and insanely unpredictable as Apple itself.
We apologize for the length of the quote, but all of it seems relevant in conveying the thoughts behind the book.
Infinite Loop sells for US$27.50 retail.
The Mac Observer Spin: It is of course not uncommon for authors and journalist to pronounce doom and gloom for our favorite computer manufacturer. In fact, this has been the norm since the introduction of the Mac itself in 1984. We have not read the book yet, and all our information is coming from Doubleday, but it would seem that this book may be taking a fresh approach to Apple's inevitable destruction [Editor's Note: Please note the irony in that statement] and would at least be a good read.
Our opinion is that the very center of Mr. Malone's criticism, the thought of selling computers based on image, rather than technology, is the key to the future. The commoditization of the computer is as natural and inevitable as the commoditization of the telephone. The key to consumer acceptance is far more style and image than it is technology. Those companies which can successfully hide the technology behind the function and form of computers, the driving force behind Steve Jobs's passion for years, will be the companies that survive this commoditization. We think Apple will be one of these survivors.
We will be reading this book and offering a full review of it as soon as we can.
Doubleday
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