Good inside baseball story of business side of NeXT but needed an editor
3 stars
This book has a very niche target market. You have to love and care about computer history that surrounds the workstation market of the 1980/1990ss and the rise and fall of NeXT in that milieu. Not only that but you have to care specifically about the minutia around the sales and business side of that world rather than the tech side of that world. I'm in that target demographic. So the contents of the book work for me a lot. However by the author's own admission this book is largely compiled from contemporaneous notes he took at the time. It therefore feels like, and essentially is, a personal journal that got turned into a series of blog posts, that then got compiled into a one book volume. It reads and flows exactly like that, especially the first part. This could have used a good editor to polish it up quite …
This book has a very niche target market. You have to love and care about computer history that surrounds the workstation market of the 1980/1990ss and the rise and fall of NeXT in that milieu. Not only that but you have to care specifically about the minutia around the sales and business side of that world rather than the tech side of that world. I'm in that target demographic. So the contents of the book work for me a lot. However by the author's own admission this book is largely compiled from contemporaneous notes he took at the time. It therefore feels like, and essentially is, a personal journal that got turned into a series of blog posts, that then got compiled into a one book volume. It reads and flows exactly like that, especially the first part. This could have used a good editor to polish it up quite a bit.
Since the author was high up in the sales organization and was sucked in by Steve Jobs there is more than a good bit of apologia about those subjects. It is ironic because the stories he tells about Jobs in action are not flattering but it never gets him over the hump of hero worship around him. His diagnosis of the failure at NeXT isn't wrong as much as incomplete. The way NeXT could have potentially saved himself I think is staring right in his face but he doesn't see it even in hindsight. I could/should write a blog post on that since it is out of scope for a book review.
On content if you are interested in this niche I'd give it five stars. But you really have to care about the business/sales side of NeXT and selling in the workstation market of the 1980s/1990s. The lack of good editing dings it a couple stars but it isn't so bad as to be insurmountable to power through.