Kiss and Tech
Web Exclusive by Mark Simmons
After digesting the 400-plus pages of Jim Carlton's clunkily (but descriptively) titled "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" ($27.50 from Random House's Times Books imprint), I have no doubt that this tome will be the definitive account of the first decade of the Macintosh computer and the company behind it. In short, Carlton's book is required reading for Mac addicts, Apple-watchers and high-tech gossip fiends. It's not without its flaws, but these don't materially detract from its value as a comprehensive account of Apple's lean years.
Random House
Amazon.com: Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders
EXECS TELL ALL!
The book's release has been accompanied by a flurry of gossip and muckraking, some old and some new; the legendary Bill Gates licensing memo has been making the rounds, and a recent San Jose Mercury article recounts the tale of the canned Star Trek project, which would have brought the Mac OS to Intel. While some of the material in Carlton's book has been unearthed before, many of the revelations are genuine shockers, and even the ones we've heard of before are given new depth and context.
Scripting News: 7/29/85 Gates to Sculley
San Jose Mercury News: The secret weapon Apple threw away
The credit for this goes in part to Carlton's prior work covering Apple for the Wall Street Journal, and in part to his unprecedented degree of access to former Apple movers and shakers and other industry figures. From John Sculley to Bill Gates, almost every major player in Apple's storied history spilled his or her guts to Carlton. While a couple of ex-execs who declined to talk to Carlton come off rather badly (Michael Spindler is portrayed as a complete basket case), those who did contribute juicy material are not exempt from Carlton's excoriation (for example, Allan Loren and Kevin Sullivan). But those who gave interviews at least get to put their own spin on the story, offering unconvincing denials of damning anecdotes and whining about how misunderstood they were.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
Though at first I found this accusation-denial routine frustratingly equivocal, ultimately it makes for a better book. It was particularly interesting to hear the Microsoft side of things - while some may find Carlton a bit too charitable towards Redmond, it makes for a refreshing change from the knee-jerk demonization of Bill Gates to which we've been subjected. Gates comes off as relentless and aggressive, but nonethless honest, cooperative and genuinely fond of the Mac platform.
Also surprising is the sympathetic portrayal of one-time chief executive officer John Sculley. While criticizing Sculley for being indecisive and letting his henchmen bully him into doing stupid things, Carlton gives him credit for twice pulling the company back from the brink (in 1985 and 1989), and recounts how Apple's board pressured him into staying long after he wanted out. And based on Carlton's account, it seems to me that Sculley's judgement, on those rare occasions when he dared exercise it, was actually quite sound - especially when it came to marketing, an area in which Apple has been consistently lacking since his departure.
SHOCKING REVELATIONS!
So you want to find out all the fabulous dirt? Want to hear about every scandal and bungled manuever that Carlton dug up? Then read the book. We're not craven enough to steal Carlton's thunder. But I can't resist pointing out a couple of intriguing points...
In 1985, with the Mac freshly launched and undergoing a series of badly needed hardware upgrades, Apple had a major lead on the rest of the computer industry. But rather than pushing the edge, the company sat on its laurels and frittered away its fat profits. I've always wondered why Apple missed this window of opportunity. Carlton's answer? In short, greed, arrogance, and Jean-Louis Gassée.
As Carlton tells it, Apple naïvely figured that nobody would ever be able to match the Mac's graphical interface, and that it could expect to extort a premium from its small but loyal customer base indefintely. (In my favorite line from the book, Carlton writes that "Gassée could not have been more blind if he had had a blindfold on.") Meanwhile, Apple flushed its profits down the research & development toilet. Engineers ran amuck, without direction or supervision; then timid and turf-conscious executives shot down every single project they came up with before it could actually ship. Ugh.
Once the narrative segues into the '90s, the book becomes a cavalcade of missed opportunities, as Apple's management continually chickens out of taking the drastic steps necessary to counter the emerging threat of the Wintel platform. The sheer pity of it is that Apple had so many chances to dig itself out. Of the many options that Apple weighed again and again over the years, Carlton's clear favorites are unrestrained Mac OS licensing, and a merger with another high-tech company (on the theory that this would give Apple access to enough cash to match the collective R&D resources of the Wintel platform's technology leaders). But you can take your pick from the cavalcade of rejected options and scrapped projects in this book - any one of them could perhaps have turned the tide, but Sculley and his successor Spindler elected to do nothing.
One of the richest veins of gossip in Carlton's book is Apple's ongoing effort in the first half of '90s to woo merger partners. Everybody from Philips to IBM to Sun Microsystems gets a turn - and Carlton details every weird detail of the negotiations - but each and every prospective partner is ditched at the altar.
DUBIOUS CONCLUSIONS
But while Carlton's compilation of business gossip is impressive, his grasp of the actual technology involved is surprisingly weak. One would hope that, in the process of writing the definitive history of Apple Computer, an author would perhaps have his manuscript proofed by somebody who knows that QuickTime isn't 3D software, that you can open two applications at once without preemptive multitasking, or perhaps what functions Apple events and QuickDraw actually perform. The continual technical gaffes don't detract much from Carlton's analysis, since most of the technologies at hand ultimately had little bearing on Apple's fortunes, but they're wince-inducing and unflattering to Carlton's status as a technology reporter.
There are, however, a couple of instances where Carlton's lack of tech savvy calls his conclusions into question. Perhaps he's right that System 7 was lame, that TrueType was a gratuitous slap at Adobe's PostScript, and that Apple should have dropped OpenDoc and embraced Microsoft's OLE; but when it's clear that he doesn't have a clue what any of these actually do or how they work, the reader can't help but question his assessment. Is Carlton reflecting the consensus of the computer industry, or just being bamboozled by his Microsoft sources or by a disgruntled ex-employee?
And then there's the licensing thing. This seems to me like one of the computer industry's greatest maybes. Had Apple recruited third parties to produce Mac compatibles from the outset, would it really have stolen Microsoft's thunder, or instead have crippled the company's finances? And if Apple couldn't muster a ten percent market share when it was competing against PC clones running DOS (DOS, for heaven's sake!), could any licensing effort possibly have prevailed against Windows 3.0 and its successors?
THE END...?
Impressively, Carlton's book covers everything up through Steve Jobs's Macworld Expo keynote address in August of this year. The coverage of the Amelio era seems scantier than the earlier part of the book, but since it's of more recent vintage, Carlton has neither the luxury of reflection nor an abundance of ex-employees to debrief.
The book closes with a downbeat, but not completely bleak, assessment of Apple's future prospects. Carlton believes that Apple's best bet is a merger with some deep-pocketed sponsor who can give Apple the money to regain its technological lead over the Wintel platform; I suspect he's watching the current rumors of an Apple-Oracle merger with hopeful expectation. Otherwise, he makes a convincing case that Apple is almost out of time, bleeding red ink and with a market share so pitifully small that developers can't justify patronizing the platform.
As a diehard Mac devotee, I can't help but be more optimistic. Knowing now how atrociously bad Apple's management has been for the last decade, hope springs eternal that a company that could survive Spindler might thrive under Jobs. But whether you accept Carlton's analysis in its entirety, or pick and choose from the wealth of inside information and executive reminiscences and form your own conclusions, his book is absolutely required reading for the Apple fanatic. I hope that, in another ten years, the company is still around for Carlton to write a sequel.
Mark Simmons, Online Editor
msimmons@macaddict.com
