Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing

You might plan to read Randall E. Stross's Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York) thinking that it was an expose of why NeXT wasn't the next Apple. And it is. Plain speaking, unvarnished, unauthorized, and sometimes downright nasty, that is, if Steve Jobs represents to you, as he does to many of us, a genuine American hero, who helped to invent a whole new industry, and whose accomplishments in doing that will be written about in the history books, hundreds of years from now, regardless of what other mistakes he makes along the way.

But Randall Stross has attempted something much more ambitious (and largely achieved it). He has used the sorry history of NeXT for examining a period in the growth of the computer industry and using it to tell the story of Apple and Sun as well as the story of NeXT, so we'd have something to use for comparison, and a better way of understanding what was really going on.

Because NeXT was never really very important, a few words of recollection may be in order to refresh your memory. Steve Jobs started NeXT when he resigned from Apple in 1985, after having been relegated to a tiny corner of the personal computer empire he founded and once ruled. He wanted to prove that he could do it all over again and, from the first, he tried to make NeXT seem an important player. It never was, except in the minds of Steve and the men and women he gathered about him to help carry about his plan. But so powerful was his ability to get others to see things as he wanted them to be that this reality distortion carried the day for eight years, even as $250 million in Jobs' and others' capital was spent. But only about 50,000 NeXT machines were ever sold and eventually there were no more tricks to be played. The hardware manufacturing ended, Jobs tried to establish NeXT as a supplier of object oriented operating systems, for the Intel -486 platform, but with Sun (Solaris), Novell (Univel), IBM (OS/2 2.1), and Microsoft (NT) all competing, this attempt seemed futile.

The book ends here, but NeXT's story has not quite ended. Since then, Scott McNealy of Sun (once NeXT’s biggest competitor and sworn enemy) bought an interest in the company for $10 million, together with the right to port the NeXTStep Tools to Sun's Operating Systems. There is a quote in Stross's book that seems fitting. "You either eat someone for lunch, or you can be lunch," said Scott McNealy of Sun, boiling down the Darwinian metaphor for a group of Stanford MBA students in 1992. In the computer industry, you either have to win or die, unless you're willing to live in a little niche. Steve Jobs couldn't make that choice.

If you'd like to read an inside Apple view of the Newton story, told in a "You are there" style, complete with great candid pictures, there's a coffee table book you might like to shop for with what's left of your Christmas bonus.

Defying Gravity, The Making of Newton by Markos Kounalakis (text) and Doug Menues (photography) (Beyond Words Publishing, Hillsboro, OR) is a kind of print documentary, rather like a public TV program in your lap.

It's full of juicy inside stories and insights into what it's like to work at Apple, building a product on the edge of the possible, where guts, vision, and luck may count as much as brains, money, and technical competence.

The book is based on having the Newsweek/NBC Correspondent and photojournalist spend two years documenting the creation of the Newton, being permitted unprecedented access to Apple's laboratories and people.

The publisher calls Defying Gravity a technological adventure story. That's a good term for it. Within the boundaries of the book, we know the outcome before we start (like any historic documentary, the results of the battle are already history). Newton is already an announced product, so we know that the political negotiations didn't fail and the technological bandaids worked (sort of).

But on another level, of course, the battle is still raging, so one reads the story looking for clues in the past that will help us predict the future. Will Newton succeed? Can Apple still innovate? That, of course, is what reading history books is all about: understanding the past to give us an insight into what will be. On that level, Defying Gravity is even better. The portraits of the Apple yuppies, struggling hard to make their mark and pull it off, even as the rules of the game get reinvented in mid-air is dazzling, but it also tells us exactly what it's like to be in that place, just a little while ago, and what is likely to happen next.

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Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, click here
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