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| From Contract Professional, May 1999 Not Dead Yet . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan Infinite Loop: How the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane, by Michael S. Malone (Currency Doubleday, $25). LIKE A CHARACTER in a Monty Python skit, Apple Computer keeps conking itself on the head, keeling over, then scrambling back to its feet to proclaim that it is still alive. This spectacle would be comical were it not for the exalted position Apple occupies in the American psyche. Apple is more than a computer company, more than a brand. It is a symbol of several cherished American institutions: It represents the underdog, struggling to survive in a severely lopsided market; the rags-to-riches story, wherein a couple of unprepossessing geeks emerge from their component-strewn garage to transform an industry; the flawed, arrogant genius (a rich tradition that encompassed Edison, Ford, Shockley, and countless others before Steve Jobs); and that peculiar American virtue—celebrated equally in curly-topped tapdancers, androgynous cartoon rodents, and smiley faced operating systems—cuteness. In view of this powerful symbolic dimension, it is no wonder that so many people are, figuratively, wearing green-and-rainbow-colored ribbons for beleaguered Apple. I suspect that Michael Malone is among them. A technology journalist from Silicon Valley, he tells the Apple story with the same combination of delight and bemusement that sports writers use when reporting on their local plucky but disappointing team. Like everyone who writes about Steve Jobs, Malone paints an unflattering portrait. Infinite Loop depicts the Apple co-founder stealing credit for inventions, cheating his more technically gifted partner, Steve Wozniak, lying to associates, demeaning underlings, and parking in a handicapped space. Yet throughout the book, and especially in the concluding chapter, you get the feeling that Malone is rooting for Jobs. And, strangely, I found myself doing the same. Jobs evidently has a way of sucking people into his schemes through sheer enthusiasm, a talent that works its magic even across the tempering medium of a journalistic history such as Infinite Loop. He used this skill—some have called it a "reality distortion field"—to coax the young Wozniak to pour superhuman energy into designing the first Apple computer. He used it to persuade a computer store owner to underwrite the manufacture of the then-nonexistent machine. Two decades later, now that Jobs is Apple's interim (and perhaps permanent) CEO, the old magic is still there. His new head of manufacturing, recently interviewed by Red Herring Online, said that "when you meet with Steve and you talk about Apple, you can see the passion in his eyes and the passion in his speech. He painted a very compelling image of where he wanted to take the company." Sale made. EVERYTHING JOBS DOES must be of epic proportions. When he gives a presentation, his face must appear on a giant projection screen. When he throws a product release party, he must bus 20,000 people to Disneyland. When he takes over development of a new system (specifically, Macintosh), he must fly a pirate flag over the building and park a grand piano and a racing motorcycle in the lobby. This blend of intensity and showmanship, which recurs throughout Infinite Loop, is probably common to all entrepreneurs. It is what endears the P.T. Barnums, Ross Perots, and Bill Gateses to their constituencies. So it should come as no surprise that innocent bystanders—the readers of Malone's book—are drawn into this improbable world as well. Another Apple lure is the relative absence of idiocy in the company's failures. Apple's darkest hours mostly stem from poor marketing and poor timing rather than technological ineptitude. Take the Xerox PARC-inspired Lisa, introduced in 1983. The first commercial machine to offer windows, icons, and a mouse, it was by all accounts a magnificent system. Trouble is, it was a high-powered workstation before its time; as Jobs would soon learn, few companies in 1983 were willing to pay $12,000 for such a machine. But that is not to say that Apple designed a product nobody wanted, which would have been infinitely more humiliating, and out of character to boot. Even systems developed during Jobs's decade-long absence—the wilderness years under John Sculley and Gil Amelio—suggest an underlying product-development intelligence. For example, the Newton, a well-designed personal digital assistant, failed because Apple—thanks partly to a bizarre media campaign that flogged a fictional, futuristic notepad computer called the Knowledge Navigator—raised expectations unreasonably high. Now that he's back as interim chief, or iCEO as he's joshingly called, Jobs has begun to think different. Departing from his mercurial and often disastrous decision style of the past, he has made some hard but understandable choices in an effort to turn the company around. He has scaled back and re-absorbed the Claris software subsidiary (now FileMaker, Inc.). He has switched from primarily retail to on-line distribution. And he has narrowed Apple's products to just a few lines, including the G3 professional desktop and notebook systems, and the five-flavored, cute-as-a-VW-Bug iMac. Those products, of course, have been doing phenomenally well. In fact, Jobs's watch has brought both the highest profits and the lowest inventories in years. But anyone who reads Malone's exhaustive account of the company's rise and fall and rise and fall appreciates that Apple will eventually conk itself on the head again. For example, unless Jobs can jump-start Macintosh software development, those iMacs that are flying off the shelves will turn out to be as useful as another colorful Monty Python character: the dead parrot. db |