Infinite loop
The inside story of how one of America's most beloved companies - Apple Computer - took off like a high-tech rocket-only to come crashing to Earth twenty years later. How did Apple lose its way? Why did the world still care so deeply about a company that had lost its leadership position? Michael S. Malone, from the unique vantage point of having grown up with the company's founders, and having covered Apple and Silicon Valley for years, sets out to tell the gripping behind-the-scenes story - a story that is even zanier than the business world thought. In essence, Malone claims, with only a couple of incredible inventions (the Apple II and Macintosh), and backed by an arrogance matched only by its corporate ineptitude, Apple managed to create a multibillion-dollar house of cards. And, like a faulty program repeating itself in an infinite loop, Apple could never learn from its mistakes. The miracle was not that Apple went into free fall, but that it held up for so long. Within the pages of Infinite Loop, we discover a bruising portrait of the megalomaniacal Steve Jobs and an incompetent John Sculley, as well as the kind of political backstabbings, stupid mistakes, and overweening egos more typical of a soap opera than a corporate history.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2011–2024years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Oh I loved Infinite Loop by Malone. Bill and Dave sounds like an insta-checkout for me.
- The short version is that Siracusa recommends "Infinite Loop" by Michael Malone as the best single source for Apple history prior to the return of Jobs, and he says that the post-return material in the Isaacson book (ie, everything unique that it offers) is poor and/or limited.
- Steve Jobs’ Message To Internet Startups
Luck- Jobs believed that the longer time you spend developing a product or company, the luckier you become. Asked by Fortune Magazine (in 2000) what he thought of the younger generation of internet startups, Jobs’ response was
Steal great ideas - "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," said Jobs in a 1996 PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds. In fact, in Michael Malone’s, Infinite Loop: How Apple, The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane, it was after a visit to Xerox in the summer of 1973, when a programmer from Apple laid the foundation for the Macintosh.It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: if they don’t really build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up. There were times in the first two years when we could have given up and sold Apple, and it probably would’ve died.In a 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he said this about change-
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown of your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
