For instance, Stross spends an entire chapter devoted to a glowing review of Sun Microsystems. This is arguably in order to have some sort of contrast with NeXT. No small part of the chapter is devoted to a description of the new low-cost SparcStation, which he describes in order to provide a counterexample to Job's overpriced machines. He re-iterates this point on several other occasions thoughout the book.

Missing fact #1: the SparcStation cost MORE than the NeXTcube. This vitally important point is not mentioned even once.

Want another example? He continually talks about how NeXT was non-standard and thus doomed, whereas Sun's standards-based machines were much better off that NeXT, or even other non-standard machines like the Apollo. It's so OBVIOUS that you have to be standards based, it's not even worth talking about! I mean duh, who would question that?!

Missing fact #2: all three were originally based on the same hardware (680x0 CPUs) and similar software (Unix versions). If anything it was Sun that went "non-standard" when they switched their CPU and OS.

The whole book is like this. I don't mean in a small way, I mean it in the largest possible way. I disagreed with almost every point he made, whether it be the "realities" of the computer market as he saw it, or practically any technical detail he attempted to describe. Stross seemed to be incapable of understanding any issue, no matter how large, small, technical or non-technical. It left me gasping.

Ignore the technical innaccuracies though, because they appear to be a side-story to the book's "real point". The "real point" seems to be that Jobs is incompetant at everything, egotistical, and mean. The book is filled with little anecdotes and Steve doing this (something stupid) or that (something mean), painting a very nasty picture of a man Stross implies has only a single quality: being in the right place at the right time.

Hey, he might be right, but I'll never know. I was so turned off by the continual negative vibe of this book that after a few chapters in I basically didn't trust a word he said. This isn't a history, or even a "cautionary tale". It's character assasination.

1. Don't invest in someone just because they're cool, or at least cooler than you. Alpha-Nerd Perot sees a TV special on Steve Jobs, and exclaims how Jobs is "Mr. Excitement" or some such superlative. He promptly plunks down huge money to invest in the "Next" computer, which is portrayed as revolutionary hardware. But no one really knows up front what they're investing in. So what, it makes Ross feel like he can transform some of that hard-scrabble, uptight crew-cutness of his into hip, long hair, do-drugs California investing.

2. Watch the press releases. The big bomb that's hidden in a press release discloses that Next has dropped it's hardware business, and will now be developing innovative software. Which bombed. So Ross went in investing in one thing, and came out investing in something else.

3. Cool people scream a lot when things get uncool. The rest of the book is the typical tantrum about Jobs acting hard-to-manage.

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 NeXTs for years and have never used the Unix command prompt.

Stross praises Sun for its strategy of pushing the speed envelope, and parceling out manufacturing, but SunOS and Solaris still have to attain the elegance of NeXT, and there were certainly far fewer software based advances at Sun than at NeXT. Stross has a reasonably firm grasp on the technology, there are no glaring problems with his analysis of some of the more complex pieces of NeXTStep and the NeXT computers, but at times one notices him stepping gingerly around something that is very involved, which is as it should be because the book isn't really about NeXT or technology, it's about Steve Jobs. Still, one wishes Stross would give more credit to NeXT's technology, after all NeXTStep continues to be miles ahead of all other Unix based operating systems in terms of a Desktop/Development platform. One big mistake is Stross' claim that NeXTStep is "closed", that NeXTs were not meant to work with other computers in a networked environment. This really cann! ot be substantiated.

After reading the book, one cringes at the thought of what melodramas Jobs is currently creating at Apple, and one hopes the port of NeXTStep to the PowerPC (Rhapsody) will not be bogged down with the sort of problems that NeXT had. The future for Apple/NeXT seems bright, though there's a lot of catching up to do before Apple can seriously challenge WinTel again. True, the PowerPC architecture is way ahead of Intel, and NeXTStep is far further along the development path than NT, but it's still frightening when one sees Jobs closing the doors to hardware competitors again. One hopes Jobs has learned from his mistakes and that Apple will concentrate on software development (Rhapsody can become a serious challenge to Windows 95/98 if priced appropriately). There's hope for Apple yet, NeXTStep/OpenStep is a great Operating System, it's certainly much better at internetworking than anything Microsoft has to offer (after all the Web was created on a NeXT). All the same, Jobs can still make or break Apple.