Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing

by Randall E. Stross

Book Overview

Describes how Steve Jobs started Apple Computer in his garage in the late 1970s and how, after his colleagues ousted him, he founded NeXT, in a work that discusses Bill Gates, Ross Perot, George... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689121350
• ISBN13: 9780689121357
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A little dose of reality

Stross' sources are impeccable, which isn't all that surprising since he's a historian. Despite the fact that he was prevented from interviewing Steve Jobs, and presumably a number of other higher ups in the NeXT management, the book doesn't really suffer from the absence. Stross appears to have gone through each and every document related to NeXT's finances to compile a staggering testament to the various untruths NeXT, as a corporate entity, appears to have told its customers, the media and everybody else willing to listen. At the same time, it's a scathing critique of Steve Job's attitude, he can only be described as an enfant terrible. Stross goes to great lengths to illustrate his judgement of Jobs as a mean-spirited, perhaps "greatly insane", person with numerous anecdotes. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has read about Steve Jobs. We all know he's notorious for pushing people to their limits, the stories of people leaving Jobs' projects in a state of physical and mental fatigue are well known. What comes as a surprise is Jobs' capacity for deceitfullness and disloyalty and his utter disregard for the people working for and with him. Stross marvelously brings out Jobs' ego in all its filthy manifestations. The book is really an intriguing history of Steve Jobs at NeXT, complete with the gory financial details, the stories about mismanagement, Jobs' fetish for perfection in little things he latched on, the hype around NeXT and the failure. Still, the book lacks a sense of the things NeXT let its customer accomplish, from developing the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) and creating Quake, to WebObjects and cryptography (NSA and CIA). That said, it is probably a good idea to read this book along with, or after reading Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Insanely Great is a more balanced book, Stross at times seems to detest Jobs passionately (which is certainly not surprising), Levy presents a much more considerate view of Jobs. Of course this has to be balanced ! with the fact that Levy is writing about the successful Macintosh project, and Stross is writing about the comparative failure that was NeXT. What Stross' book could do with is a little more knowledge of NeXT's products (especially the later slabs and cubes) and some sense of the palpable advances NeXT made. There was technology in the NeXT that was not fully realized (Optical media and the DSP for instance), but this was true of the Macintosh as well (who had heard of 3.5" disks). We cannot dismiss NeXT simply on the grounds of the technology being new, untested, and expensive. As a NeXT user, it seems to me that Stross greatly underestimated the conceptual leaps made by NeXT, in designing Interface Builder and tying the software to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), using Display Postscript, the Installer application, the NetInfo server, successfully creating a multi user machine which a single Unix novice user could operate and run. I know people who have owned