I just finished reading "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Jim Carlton. As I mentioned earlier, Amelio's book about his time at Apple is very interesting to me. As well as anything that covers the turnaround that happened between 1997 and now. It's not that Apple's doing extremely well, but considering their problems in the mid-1990's, the new Apple's a champ - one that can suffer minor debacles like the Power Mac Cube and come out relatively unscathed. One that finally delivered (still extremely late) a viable new Macintosh operating system that kept a high degree of backward compatibility while (hopefully) paving the way for some exciting new developments. One that returns to the hopes of the Object Oriented Operating System concepts that were all the rage in the early to mid 1990's, but with a degree more maturity and humility (well, as humble as Aqua can be). It's amusing to read the epilogue of Carlton's book, which covers the time between Amelio's exit and Jobs' taking on the mantle of "interim CEO". The future seemed so grim that few believed Apple could stand on its own at that point. Carlton did make some great calls for what the next CEO, whomever that would be, would have to do. The one that stands out the most is his saying that the R and D budget would have to be significantly curtailed. In fact - just all out cut down. I remember the day that Apple Research Labs went away, and all the cool things within it scattered (Squeak, MCF (later to become RDF), Dylan, etc). I knew even back then that it was a good idea - as cool as Squeak was, it was never going to deliver financial results for Apple.
I've also just become a fan of Amazon's zShops and other such sellers, as I'm trying to get my hands on the one actually published book about Copland, published in August 1996 (the same month that Copland was cancelled in favor of a piecemeal plan that delivered the every-six-month strategy that kept Mac OS 7.6 - 9.x development alive). There are some other OpenDoc books that I'm curious to pick up for the right price (ie: around $5) to see how compound document component development was taught at that time. I had always been leery of Amazon's "Used and New From ..." links, but they're proving to be quite useful.