Safe As Milk

A friend gave me Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires years ago. Finally got around to it.

Cringely is a gossip columnist for the tech industry, and even he realizes how ridiculous that sounds. It’s important context for Accidental Empires, a smart and interesting read. It’s a history of the microcomputer industry, roughly 1978-1996. It’s fascinating. It’s also more about the personalities than technology. He’s unafraid to call Steve Jobs “a sociopath” and Bill Gates a “megalomaniac”. And it’s not just about them, either, examining the wondrous golden age of Xerox PARC, and the revelation that “All IBM Stories Are True”, and more.

If there are two themes that carry throughout the book, they are that:

• There are only 14 people in the tech industry, because it’s always the same 14 people that pop up everywhere.
• That you can be a good technologist, or a good businessman, but not both.

There are two weaknesses to the book. First, it stops in 1996. Steve Jobs is still at NeXT and has not yet returned to Apple. In 1996, the future of Apple was pretty bleak. Times have changed, obviously. But this weakness in the book opens new opportunities for reflection. After reading this book (and it’s wildly unflattering view of Jobs’ management acumen) I have more respect for Jobs. If what Cringely writes is true, Jobs has returned to Apple and corrected every strategic and technological misstep from his first tenure. I have more respect for him now.

Second, (and you may have guessed this!) Cringely has opinions, his feathers get ruffled, and he appears to hold a grudge. He clearly does not like Jobs. But he seems to consistently point out failings in all of the players. Fair warning if that sort of writing will put you off.

Nonetheless, this book is recommended, as is his weekly column over at pbs.org. He doesn’t know everything, but he can spin what he knows and what he suspects into an interesting stew. Next uip for me is a book about PARC, if I can find a good one. Those guys invented the GUI, the mouse, Ethernet, the word processor, and more and never bothered to make a dime.