Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

Rating:
Summary: A tale of passion properly channeled
Review: To many, Steve Jobs is a hero and to others he is the computer equivalent of Simon Legree. Amazingly, there are many people who view him both ways. Without question, his greatest achievement was the relentless, passionate pursuit of the development of the Macintosh. At a time when command line interaction was the norm, it took a tremendous act of courage and foresight to create a computer with a GUI interface. Many computer users were dubious about the value of running a computer by points and clicks. I was a college professor at the time it came out and one of the members of the combined math and computer science departments questioned the value of a GUI interface, wondering why anyone would want to use it.
Of course, the new paradigm of pointing and clicking opened up the computer to many users that otherwise would not have gotten involved. This is the story of the tyrannical, yet effective manner in which Jobs drove his team to build a revolutionary product. While it is sometimes a bit soapy in the praise for Apple as a darling of a company, the author does stay on target and delivers a fascinating tale. Hopefully, managers will not take his actions as a blueprint for their management style, as there are few people who could pull off what Jobs did without destroying everything else. Furthermore, let us not forget that he was ousted from Apple, an event that was not without justification.
This is more a tale of the relentless pursuit of an ideal than a story of how a computer was created. It is another demonstration of the adage that the difference between genius and insanity is measured more by the end result than it is by the actions in getting there.

Rating:
Summary: No hero worship here.
Review: What I find most satisfying about Levy's style is that he resisted the urge to indulge in hero worship. It's really difficult when dealing with the sort of people he's talking about.After all, this is the computer that's always been "better", stands to reason the people behind it would be interesting. So it's a real relief for me that Levy didn't focus on any one of the people involved (it wouldn't have been easy anyway since the Macintosh project involved so many people who left their mark).The book is quite entertaining, and attains just the right level of concentration required to mimic the frenzied work that went into the mac. When you come out of 'insanely great' you get the feeling that you know a lot of these people, and that you understand what they did. This is only true because Levy speaks of their faults as well as their amazing abilities. The book isn't a blow by blow account of the development of the mac. I got the sense that numerous little details had been kept out of my view so that the bigger picture could present itself. This was probably a good decision to make, since the book could have gone on endlessly. If you want to know how the germ of an interface that felt like home was born, how it took a group of people who believed it would change the world to make it a reality, to get some idea of what went on while the great texts of the Macintosh religion were being discovered and written, and if you want to hear some of the greatest corporate/computer metaphors you'd ever encounter, you need this book. Maybe, just maybe you'll come out of this with a real understanding of why 'real artists ship' and what it means to make a dent in the universe. If you've ever used a Mac and wondered why it felt so good, you should read Levy's book.

Rating:
Summary: Don't preach to the converted..
Review: Yes of course this book is a must read for all Apple Mac fans, but what is most important is that it SHOULD be compulsory reading for anyone even thinking of buying a cheap and boring PC clone. Don't buy a PC, buy a Mac - this book tells you why....

I'm waiting for the sequel, which judging by the moves Apple has made since then should be titled Greatly Insane...