Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs was an asshole. He was brutally honest, took credit for other people's work, and believed ordinary rules didn't apply to him. (My "favorite" example of this last attribute is that he never put a license plate on his car and always parked it in a handicap spot.) For someone that is renowned as an artist and visionary, he ironically saw the world in black and white: everything was either "genius" or "bullshit." Despite all this, he changed the world in a profound way that hasn't been seen since Thomas Edison.

Isaacson does an excellent job of describing this mercurial and complicated person. Jobs comes across as temperamental and unsympathetic, but his passion for his work shined through allowing his friends and employees to forgive a lot of his behavior. He had the uncanny knack of seeing to the heart of a problem, but still allowed himself to be swayed by psychics, herbal therapies and natural healers, and bizarre diets and cleanses. He raged against Microsoft and Google, often accusing them of stealing his work, when in reality he himself stole virtually everything unique about the Macintosh from Xerox. Isaacson takes the difficult task of describing an unlikable man and achieves something amazing: at the end I found myself admiring Steve Jobs.

First Sentence:

When Paul Jobs mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates.

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

I loved this book as a kid, and liked several of the sequels as well. With a movie on the way and my sons interested in it, I dug up my old copy from 1986 and we all read it. It holds up surprisingly well, and both boys liked it as much as I did. The plot is in four loose sections: Ender on Earth, Ender at Battle School, Ender on Eros, and after the war. The bulk of the story takes place at the Battle School and is easily the best part of the book. The idea of training child prodigies as military commanders in zero gravity is both farfetched and fascinating at the same time, and the descriptions of the various games are unique and memorable enough that they largely matched what I remembered from nearly 30 years ago. Of course, after seeing previews for the movie I kept picturing Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham—neither of which matched my previous images. Ender's Game is a great sci-fi book, and if my family is any indication it holds up well through the generations, too.

First Sentence:

"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."

Empire, by Orson Scott Card

While entertaining at times, Seven Days In May this is not. Set in our near future, this book tells the tale of a modern American civil war. Parts of the plot are intriguing, such as the idea that extreme political polarization enables the revolt. Other were fairly silly, like the Gundam-style mechanized infantry that took over NYC or the secret base hidden under a mountain lake. I will admit that as one-dimensional as the story is (it was created as a backdrop for a computer game) I was surprised a couple of times by twists. Unfortunately they weren’t of the “I never saw it coming!” style, but more of deus ex machina “You’ve got to be kidding!” sort. I found the political characterizations to be the most interesting aspect; unless we as a country stop electing polarizing politicians that pledge allegiance to their parties instead of the people then parts of this novel could sadly be seen as prophetic rather than a plaything.

First Sentence:

The team of four Americans had been in the village for three months.

Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringley

Accidental Empires tells of the rise of software and the downfall of hardware. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Aldus, and Adobe as well as products such as Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and IBM’s PC family all have their histories told in varying degrees of detail. Those sections are both engrossing and informative. However, when Cringley talks about the individuals involved (especially Gates and Jobs) he comes off as a bit angry; for instance, Gates’ poor personal hygiene and Jobs’ megalomania are often ridiculed—I suspect the intent was humorous but instead it seemed snarky. The book really goes off the rails, though, in the sections where the narcissistic tendencies of the author are in full force. We get Cringley’s opinions on what makes a company succeed or fail and advice for entrepreneurs. We hear many times of the greatness of InfoWorld (Cringley’s employer at the time) and which software luminaries ask Cringley for advice. We even learn his draft number for Vietnam and the fact that he wears cotton briefs instead of boxers. While I’m sure the author’s family was impressed, I wasn’t.

Last updated in 1996, this book is badly dated. NeXT is presented a viable platform, Novell “absolutely controls the PC networking business,” open computing is equated with client-server architectures, and Y2K is predicted to utterly destroy the mainframe industry. Hmmm. (The most unfortunate quote has to be, “Think of Bill Gates as the emir of Kuwait and Steve Jobs as Saddam Hussein.” Considering today’s common perception today that Microsoft is evil and Apple is visionary, this is particularly ironic.) To be fair, I imagine a book written today about current events will appear to be out-of-date in ten years so it is hard to complain too much, but it was a bit distracting.

I picked this up because I liked the subtitle: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. The style implied by the cover doesn’t disappoint; I found the tone to be funny, informal, and irreverent. If you are interested in a broad overview of the history of the modern software industry, this is an excellent read. If you don’t like smug commentary, though, you might want to look elsewhere.

First Sentence:

Years ago, when you were a kid and I was a kid, something changed in America.

Revolution in the Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld

Andy Hertzfeld was one of the early Apple employees, and part of the team that gave birth to the Macintosh. Here Hertzfeld recounts the story of how that computer was developed in a series of vignettes. Interspersed with the stories are many, many pictures of both the development team (not the most attractive bunch you’ve ever seen) and Macintosh internals. The anecdotes run the gamut from deeply personal to highly technical, but all are fairly interesting.

Like Just a Geek, this is a reworking of text first found online. Unlike Just a Geek, the vignettes here weren’t reworked into a normal narrative but remain pretty much in their original form. This leads to a fair amount of redundancy, with bits of the same story told multiple times in different anecdotes. There are also a lot of see also links that refer to other stories—I found it disconcerting to find what screams for a hyperlink in a normal book. A bit odd, but overall it worked.

First Sentence:

Toward the end of my first week as an Apple employee in August 1979, I noticed that someone had left a black binder on my desk, with a handwritten title that read, Apple II: Principles of Operation.

Only the Paranoid Survive, by Andrew S. Grove

Unfortunately, I’m continuing my series of mediocre books. This one discusses strategic inflection points, those times for a business when its fundamentals are about to change. For instance, with Intel the point where they decided to phase out its memory chip business for microprocessors was strategic. While I found this fairly interesting, I was disappointed that it was so focused on looking backwards: a lot of stuff about how to look back and tell when an inflection point occurred but very little about how to determine when one is happening or how to react to one.

I think my current company is in the midst of an inflection point right now. Not a market-driven one as discussed in the book, but an internal one. Our main product wasn’t designed to be scalable, but we are now trying to sell it into enterprise sites. Needless to say, it isn’t going as smoothly as you’d hope. There has been a lot of talk around the choices: do we rewrite or rearchitect? Clearly the resulting decision will dramatically affect the future of the company, but which way to go?

First Sentence:

I’m often credited with the motto, “Only the paranoid survive.”

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross

I picked this up because I wanted something light to read on the plane. It had been a while since I’d read any hard science-fiction, and this looked interesting. About a quarter of the way in it became clear this wasn’t the first book in this universe (something not noted on the book jacket) but it was written well enough it didn’t matter.

While set in the far future, it had a noir feeling to me — instead of being set on a spaceship cruising between stars I could easily invoke the image of a train traveling in the dead of night, and the bad guys were thinly-disguised copies of Nazis. Even the names invoke images of the past: Frank the Nose, Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour, and U. Franz Bergman.

A great speech comes towards the end by the lead rogue: “Everybody thinks they are doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It is about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is. Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess.” I recently was in a discussion on the definition of evil; this sums it up well!

All-in-all, not a bad read.

First Sentence:

Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.

Cube Farm, by Bill Blunden

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It does a fantastic job of humorously describing the world of software development at a large(ish) company. I can’t count the number of times that the author described something that I’ve seen at my company! His depiction of the Web Group versus the Illuminati (code names for two groups within the author’s firm) is a scary parallel to BMC’s PATROL Express versus PATROL battles over the past few years. In addition to telling a very entertaining story, he calls out lessons in each chapter that we should take away from his tales of woe; again, BMC could learn from many of these: “Physical separation can facilitate rivalry;” or “Managers will often ignore a problem to make it go away;” or “If your boss substitutes consensus building for leadership, be afraid;” or “It sucks to live in Minnesota, unless you enjoy ice sports.” Well, maybe not that last one so much. If you are a fan of Office Space or Dilbert, then you’ll enjoy Cube Farm.

First Sentence:

In December 1992, after four years of intense study, I completed an undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell University.