The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter Culture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World by Luke Dormehl

The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the Counter Culture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World Reviews

• 
  Herve

  I have not read (yet) Isaacson’ authorized biography of Steve Jobs but found (by pure accident) another recent, funny an really great book, The Apple Revolution. Interesting too and somewhat related to a previous blog I published on Robert Noyce and the culture of Silicon Valley. As important is the subtitle: Steve Jobs, the Counterculture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World. Dormehl, the author, is convincing when he explains that Silicon Valley is the result of the counter-culture as much as the Midwest engineers coming to SV. Noyce might have agreed! “This ideological divide is not uncommon. Silicon Valley has long been defined by the innate tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit. […] There were aspects of the counterculture that were staunchly anti-capitalists in their views. […] One of them was definitely Marxist and the other was largely apolitical.[..] “Do you own thing” easily translated into “Start your own business”. [Pages 61-63] “Only in Silicon Valley could starting a business be read as an act of rebellion.” [Page 169]
  There are so many (unknown-to-me) anecdotes that I will only mention a few. For example, I did not know about Ron English, the guerrilla street artist who circumvented Apple’s billboards using murderer Charles Manson.
  “The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers.” Jobs told wired in 1996. “They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans – if they worked hard with other creative, smart people,- could solve most of the humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.” [Pages 7-8]
  At the same time, the counter-culture, the hacker culture has been critical [page 17]:
  - Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total;
  - All information should be free;
  - Mistrust authority – promote decentralization;
  - Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position;
  - You can create art and beauty on a computer;
  - Computers can change your life for the better.
  A funny anecdote is a woman going to the Homebrew Computer Club because nearly all the attendees were male. Her verdict: “the odds were good, but the goods were odd” (Page 25). You will learn about the history of the Apple logo [pages 85-90] and the first killer apps (word processing and spreadsheets). I did not know Paul Lutus and John Draper. And what about Apple first ad campaigns!
  You will obviously read about the mouse, about interactions with Xeroc PARC and also learn about the early days of the MacIntosh concept and its father, Jef Raskin who yanked sharply in the arm of a young developer when he saw his face and guessed his thinking, labeling as “wet-behind-the-ears marketing puke, dressed in a ridiculous chalk-pinstripe, complete with banker’s vest, shoes off, stinky feet up […] an abrasive punk in need of a slap” a Steve Jobs he had not recognized! [Page 189]
  “The Macintosh project represented the first time – outside the Garage in which the Apple II had been built – that Apple would put together the kind of small, dedicated team that would produce some of the company’s greatest products in later years. Jobs referred to this company-within-a-company approach as returning to the “metaphorical garage”. The Macintosh team still had all the piss and vinegar of a start-up. “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have” Jobs said. “When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” [Page 202]
  You will also read about the legal issued Apple faced in the music field and the funny origin of the Sosumi. It’s not only about Apple, you will read about Next early team, Dan’l Lewin, Rich Page, George Crow, Bud Tribble Susan Barnes an Susan Care as well as Pixar’s founding team, Alvy Ray Smith, Edwin Earl Catmull and John Lasseter ; “Pundits even came up with a tongue-in-cheek name for the unlikely convergence of Silicon Valley technology and Hollywood moviemaking. They called it Sillywood.“ [Page 303] So you can comment my tentative cap. table of NeXT (see below) when acquired by Apple.
  Another piece of video is Pixar first work, The adventures of Andre and Wally B. If Jobs did OK with Next, what about with Pixar. He got 70% for $10M then Smith and Catmull each had 4%. But jobs got 100% after putting $50M. [Pages 335-336] There is also the funny anecdote that the iMac could have been called the MacMan, sounding “like a cross between the video game Pac-Man and Sony’s handheld music player, the Walkman.” [Page 413]. There is also an analysis of intellectual property [Pages 430-431] “Whether or not a breakdown i traditional copyright laws odes, in fact, lead to a similar decline in creativity and innovation remains a hotly contested debate” adding that “Gates, typically referred as imaginative”, and having “never invented anything” is wrong. “Gates had invented the notion that Software (be it entire operating systems or simple files) could be sold. Jobs merely reframed the idea as a necessary protective measure for creativity.” Apparently Dormehl advises to read Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas.
  In the final chapters, Dormehl addresses the Apple paradox of the counterculture becoming mainstream. He quotes Norman Mailer [Page 384] “One is Hip or one is Square” and he adds [Page 408] that “no one better summarized the new ruling creative class of boomer bobos (that’s bourgeois bohemians) than Steve Jobs. [...] They are prosperous without seeming greedy; they pleased their elders without seeming conformist; they have risen towards the top without too obviously looking down on those below; thy have achieved success without committing certain socially sanctioned affronts to the ideal of social equality; they have constructed a prosperous lifestyle while avoiding the old clichés of conspicuous consumption.” Then [Page 456] Paul Lutus describes the App Store as a “classic marketer’s dream, with too many programmers with too many programs chasing too few buyer dollars, and the marketer in the middle the only really cashing in.” (Perfect capitalism, long if ever lost counterculture…) “Apple turning its back on its founding libertarian ideals.” [...] “With the suggestion made that high-tech libertarianism apparently leans heavily towards the puritanical.” Still Jobs did not forget some elements of the start-up culture. “Jobs wanted the department to have only one hundred people, since that was the number of names he could remember.” “Apple was able to avoid unnecessary levels of bureaucracy. We’re the biggest start-up ion the planet Jobs proudly noted in 2010.” [Pages 462-463.] About innovation, “Gladwell’s suggestion (via economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr) is that it is history’s tweakers – more so even than its inventors – who truly define the age: The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. that is not a lesser task. [Page 474] And as a near final quote from Norman Mailer again “One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” ”It is for this reason that musicians like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix who passed away at the age of twenty-seven, will forever be seen as young, idealistic rebels.” “The sheer scale of the current Apple makes it difficult to consider it any kind of rebel.” [Page 502] ”Despite being declared moribund 59 times since 1995” [Page 495] , Apple is a formidable capitalist story.
  As a conclusion, let me quote Jobs again, and I discovered this on the Wikipedia page for Think Different:
  “When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
  That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
  The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
  I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
• 
  Ikmal Fitri (iikmalreads)

  Pheww finally habis jugak. Aku start baca buku ni bulan 4 haritu tapi stop sekejap pastu tahu2 sampai bulan 9 aku stop.
  
  Buku ni bagi aku detail gila - terlampau detail sebenarnya sampai nak muntah aku baca dan banyak benda yang aku lupa dah. Expectation aku dia akan cerita pasal steve jobs ja tapi bapak la semua nama yang dimention dalam ni semua dapat background story. Mana tak tepu otak aku.
  
  Writing dia okay je la tapi sebab tulisan dia kecik so bila hg baca buku ni hg akan rasa ya allah bila nak habis ni. hah gitewhh.
• 
  VaultOfBooks

  By Luke Dormehl. Grade: A+
  
  In the beginning (of the Information Age) was the void. And the void was digital. But lo, there came upon the land, the shadow of Steven Jobs (and Stephen Wozniak). And Steven (Stephen) said, ‘Let there be Apple.’ And there was Apple. And Steven (Stephen) beheld Apple. And it was good. And Apple begat Macintosh. And it was good. And soon upon the land there began to appear, The Cult of Macintosh. For they had tasted of Apple. And it was good.
  Russell W. Belk and Gulnur Tumbat,
  September 2005
  After reading Walter Isaacson’s excellent – if a little hagiographic – authorized biography of Steve Jobs, I wasn’t interested in exploring another book along the same lines. But beware! The Apple Revolution by Luke Dormehl tells the same story, but follows a different path altogether. It takes a hard look at how a business empire such as Apple, known through the world for it’s unsurpassed innovation and creativity (yes, we know, Samsung tried), could emerge from the bearded-and-sandals-loving hippies of the 1970s California.
  This is the story of how the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation changed the world for ever. Meet the Crazy Ones who created Silicon Valley – the hippies who started the Homebrew Computer Club; the young ad executive who first sketched out Apple’s iconic logo; the engineers who met lying down in a cardboard geodesic dome at Stanford University. From Steve Wozniak, who built the first breakthrough Apple computers, to Jony Ive, the young Brit who imagined the iPod – the designers and programmers, the geeks, creatives and dreamers, they are all here.
  And at the centre of it all, a bearded and barefoot Steve Jobs, whose singular vision would will Apple Inc. into a future that it would come to own …
  
  Steve Jobs is an interesting person to read about. He is brilliant, charismatic, incredibly photogenic, and the dressing on top: highly cranky. He is a legend, the college dropout who became a supercool billionnaire and single-handedly led a digital revolution that transformed billions of lives across hundreds of nations. And the technology writer and filmmaker makes full use of that. Luke Dormehl gives a broader take on that legendary man’s life by including his time at Reed College, at Atari, NeXt and Pixar, topics that have never been looked at from that angle before. The author argues that the 60s counterculture – which took in anti-war protests, the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution – was a formative experience for Apple’s bearded and barefoot founders, Steves Jobs and Wozniak, and paved the way for the digital revolution we’re enjoying today.
  The writing is smooth, and rich with anecdotes that even the most devoted fans would not have heard. However, it does drag on at times, with the author discussing people and topics that have little connection to the big picture for pages and pages (the author of Apple Writer Paul Lutus gets as much as footage as two Apple CEOs).
  Some may argue that Apple is cashing upon it’s “snob factor” marketing strategy: we make amazing products because you are amazing and you wouldn’t have chosen us otherwise. Some may also argue exactly what Apple is countering today? It is the counterculture. Towards the end, even the author admits that “today it’s difficult to think of Apple as a countercultural entity”.
  To sum up, this is a story about how a garage business started by two long haired college dropouts rose to become the tech giant that Apple, Inc. is today. The author also narrates in an engaging and often hilarious manner the story of the rise of the all-conquering Apple ideology; the revolution it came from, the one it helped start and the one it left behind.
  
  
  Originally reviewed at
  www.vaultofbooks.com
• 
  Alexander

  The book was just terrific. Well-researched and thought-provoking. The thing author goes super-deep on is whether or not Apple has been "true with it's roots", the 60s counter culture. The answer is, as usual, yes and no. YES as the company has been successful because of "thinking different(ly)". NO because some of what's said about alikes of GULAGs on production plants of China is certainly true. There's also that Apple can't really be countering anything - IT IS CULTURE.
  Interesting for me was yet another collection of proof for Steve Jobs' genius status. Though I haven't read the authorised biography by Isaacson yet (which is probably good as it puts the bio in the context of culture in general) - there might be nothing new.
  There's also an interesting perspective on what's underlying Apple's success. The company is making de facto mass-market products seem like they're kind of for a narrow circuit of the dissidents, the crazy ones, the ones that see things differently. Obviously being a self-serving exaggeration and a smart marketing move, this holds some truth anyway, which, for me, outweighs all the dark side. The cover of the book is a variation of the famous "gonzo" symbol - used by Hunter S. Thompson for his sheriff campaign. Apple-made products take the effect of what was done by Thomson, Kesey, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy and others and multiply it by thousands. The materialism of beautiful artifacts that you can use for just about anything with the idealism of "turning on, tuning in and dropping out" sing in the unison to create this wonderful anthem for "masses" to enjoy and sing along to. Some may see this negatively. I, like the author, do not.
  Good job, Mr Dormehl.
• 
  Ben

  A lot of the info is the same as in the Steve Jobs bio but its the additional info that makes this book worth the read.
  
• 
  Janine

  The Apple Revolution by Luke Dormehl is an insightful look at how sociopolitical factors shaped our relationship with technology throughout the last century, focusing mainly on Apple and those tied closely with the company. Dormehl starts with talking about the early history of computers and how they were seen as a bad thing back in the first half of the 20th century due to their centralized structure and tied closely to war. He then moves onto how the 1960’s liberal counterculture society of the West Coast of the USA shaped the direction of technology and computers. The book goes in depth with the big players of the past half century, many of them tied with Apple, especially with co-founder Steve Jobs, who’s considered to be a very polarizing figure and Dormehl goes through the good and the bad in an unbiased manner. It also goes into Jobs’ start into computing and counterculture, his first rise and fall at Apple, his involvement in Pixar and NeXT and how things weren’t rosy at first and how he made Apple a powerhouse. The book was very insightful, well-researched, and for the most part engaging, crafted in a way that showed me that 1960’s counterculture plays a part in our daily, tech-dependent, lives, even if our individual worldview says otherwise. It took me almost three weeks to finish because of how much information there was and the fact that my edition is over 500 pages. It’s also a bit dense.
  
  Dormehl is from the UK (thus why this book is written in British English), which helped in viewing a lot of this history with an objectivity that a US-based author might have not been able to achieve.
  
  I wouldn’t recommend this as an introduction to Apple and computer history, as there’s a lot of technical terms and information that might get lost to those not versed in those subjects. But for those that are interested in technology, computers, Apple and it’s role and influences in society, it’s something to pick up.
• 
  Paul

  As with all books about Apple, the focus can tend to be on Steve Jobs, CEO and founder of the company, and this book has lots about Jobs. But Dormehl has managed to also take in details about Apple computers, Microsoft, Xerox and the wider social and technological changes that took place in the late sixties and early seventies that gave us the products that enable me to write this and for you to read it.
  
  There is a lot of detail in the book and it is written in an engaging and interesting way; but there is not so much detail that it is unwieldy. It does not criticise Jobs for some of the decisions that he made, nor does it look at him with rose tinted spectacles. There is a little on Pixar, and a chapter on NeXT, but the primary focus remain on Apple.
  
  I thought that it was a good read overall, and perhaps should be read alongside with Walter Issacson's book on Steve Jobs.
• 
  Steve

  I enjoyed this book, but much of what was really interesting in it, I already knew. But then I do know the entire history quite a bit, just as one who has paid attention. This book is most enjoyable about the early days of Apple, when it was small groups of people creating Apple products. I'd like to know more about various design and software decisions in making the iPod and iPhone. Lots of other potentially fascinating stuff is left out; the Newton only gets a few pages, HyperCard none, and OS X, which has certainly been a huge part of the success of Apple over the last decade, is also not mentioned. Maybe I was hoping for a different book, but the subtitle doesn't really describe the book he wrote, especially in the last few chapters. Still, more fun, especially the first half, than many Apple histories.
• 
  Jonathan

  A fun read compared to the altogether more serious (and in-depth) read of the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. My first book on the subject, this took me on a journey through the history of Apple, dipping into the lives of key people along the journey and keeping a close eye on important relationships that developed.
  
  Reading the biography now, and glad that this book caught my attention first.
• 
  Richard

  
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  I left this book with an experience of knowing everything about Apple's history…all the nooks and crannies. Well-written and entertaining, the book also presents to the reader the scents and tastes of Silicon Valley…what it's like to dance and play there. Read this book if you've ever held and appreciated an iWhatever…
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• 
  Nikhil

  I wanted to give it 3.5. Some parts of it were too vague and boring. Goes off the track sometimes. However i loved the notes at the bottom. Very good insights. Also like the fact that the book is farely updated with references to walter isaacson's biography.
• 
  David Highton

  A bit of a corporate biography with avenues about Pixar and NeXT on the side. The countercultural profile does not hold water after 1985 for me, and there is a lot of really pretentious stuff in here. The writing style can also get irritating
• 
  Chris Paschalidis

  The best book ever!
  So underrated
• 
  Sophy Kohler

  Thorough, well written and entertaining.
• 
  Alex

  I love this book! It's certainly an eye opener about Apple & Steve Jobs!
• 
  Trisha

  AWESOME! love the writing style of the author, keeps one glued to the book all day!
• 
  Maithili Mukherjee

  It was awesome. Well researched and an impossibly awesome piece of work.
• 
  Kwang Wei Long

  History of Apple and Steve.