For the first time in a long time, I'm actually reading a book. It's not that I watch too much television instead, but I usually have a hard enough time keeping up with The New Yorker and Harper's. I'm not sure now if I'll even keep my subscription to The New Yorker, but maybe I'll augment Harper's with another monthly and try to get back to books. There are many on my list to read. Right now, it's "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Jim Carlton that's sitting next to me, waiting for me to put down the iBook (funnily enough) and get back into it. The writing is very jumpy, but maybe I've just gotten too used to magazine articles and essays. The story, however, is a great one. I hadn't realized how strong (and strange) of a figure Gasseé was in his own right. I'm hurrying to get through this one so I can get on to Amelio's book, "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple". I remember reading an interview with Amelio a few years ago, after he was ousted, in which he described Apple as being like a high school or college. He said that there was no real respect for authority among the engineers - they all had their cool projects and would basically do what they wanted. Carlton's book, at the point I'm at now, seems to be stating the same thing. What's interesting is how they were able to get away with it for so long because of, well, the Apple mentality that was often taken by the upper executives. It's like their line was "We'll cleverly invent our way through this!", hoping that the extravagent R and D budgets would yield the next big breakthrough like the original Mac OS. A lot of cool things came out of Apple Research Labs, such as Squeak, Dylan, and MCF (which would eventually become RDF). Contrast these projects though with Jobs' line "We'll innovate our way through this", and the Apple of today which tries to keep on tight deadlines (they don't always stick, and Mac OS X took a long time to get here, but by showing up it beats out all previous Apple attempts) and release software and hardware that actually does things for people. The old feeling of academia is gone. The new Apple doesn't always deliver greatness, but they do deliver. And they have given us a great platform to build and work on (finally). Going back to Classic on the rare occasions that I do makes me wonder if I'd still be putting up with all of its issues today. In any case, Apple's history is a fun read. And I'm now going to get back to it.
I had completely forgotten about its existence, but Apple's developer site still has back issues of Develop, Apple's technical/developer journal. There are lots of cool articles about OpenDoc and other things. Hmmm. I wonder if there's anything about Pink?