Product Reviews

With Apple's astonishing recovery - its stock price is rocketing up to a five-year high on the back of six successive profitable quarters and a steady recapture of market share - comes yet another book about how the creators of the Mac screwed up.

In the past 18 months there's been Jim Carlton's meticulously researched, but not always fantastically readable, Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders, and ousted CEO Gil Amelio's shrill and bitter 'expose' of Apple and current CEO Steve Jobs, On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple.

Indeed, author Michael Malone admits in the notes at the end of his hefty 584-page tome, Infinite Loop: How The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane, that 'Every book ever written about Apple has been obsolete from the day it arrived on the bookstands'. Gosh, it's not often you read an author alluding to the pointlessness of their work. But then Malone claims he alone had been able to 'capture all of Jobs' great turnaround as well as the introduction of the watershed iMac.' That may be true, but perhaps the most remarkable part of the Apple turnaround has been since the iMac's introduction.

Furthermore, Malone's whole book is based on the theory that Apple is inherently doomed to fail because of the characters of its founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the way they built their character flaws into the very soul of the company's corporate culture. Malone may have tacked on what appears to be a hastily written (and typo-strewn) chapter recounting Jobs' return to Apple at the end of his book, but nowhere does he provide any real insights as to how or even why Jobs succeeded in sensationally rescuing a company that was generally regarded as dead in the water.

But where Malone does succeed is in producing a strikingly vivid and in places quite literary account of the downright peculiar adolescence of Jobs and Wozniak. He makes a good job of explaining how these two unwashed maverick hippy misfits managed to found a US corporate legend, rather than terrorising their schoolmates with pipe bombs - although Malone recalls the time Wozniak was jailed for placing a mock bomb at his school.

Malone claims to have grown up with both the Steves, and he even

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worked at Apple for a while in its early days, so it's no surprise that the pre-Mac period of Apple is the best written and most interesting part of the book.

Jobs' early drug habits (acid and marijuana) and refusal to wash, the pair's first commercially successful product (a blue box that illegally produced free phone calls), and the way the young Jobs swindled Wozniak out of more than $3000 he was owed for a job at Atari are all detailed in potboiler style.

So too are the amazing talents of the two. Wozniak's technical wizardry and Jobs' spectacular feats of hucksterism in getting Apple started and attracting venture capital backing are fascinating, and impressive, too.

Up to this point Malone rarely puts a foot wrong, especially in the human drama stakes. But even the first half of the book suffers from a surfeit of hindsight. As early as page 62, Malone bemoans the choice of a cheaper non-Intel processor as the CPU in the first Apple computer, a result he speculates of Jobs' cheating Wozniak out of his Atari money: 'Instead of being bludgeoned by the team of Intel and Microsoft in the years to come, Apple might have led it in an unbeatable troika,' he suggests. But this was years before the first IBM PC, and it's like wondering if World War II could have been avoided if Chamberlain had never become prime minister.

By the time John Sculley appears, ejects Jobs from Apple and takes control of the company, Malone appears to have lost interest in his own book, apart from expressing his contempt for the man: 'In his person, he embodied almost everything wrong with the company, while lacking most things right. It was there in that eyes-averted limp handshake.'

'One of the problems facing any history of Apple Computer is how to deal with the Sculley era... Suddenly the headlong rush of the Jobs era comes to a screeching halt and narrative goes nonlinear and expansive... we are left with a different type of story, the kind that fills up shelves of endless, boring, authorised corporate biographies.' It's a surprising admission to make halfway through a book, and hardly induces you to finish it.

In the end, Malone, who admits he was months behind his publishing deadline, rushes through Sculley's tenure as CEO, followed by that of Michael Spindler, and on into the Gil Amelio and Jobs eras with little new to say. Indeed, the bizarrely fascinating period in which Amelio was undermined by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's professed interest in buying Apple, and the acquisition of 5% of the company by an obscure Saudi prince are only cursorily covered.

So while the first half of this book is possibly worth the price alone, the disappointing second half, together with the lack of any pictures and an overly negative tone, make this a flawed account of Apple's astonishing rise, decline and subsequent rebirth.