Steve Jobs in Exile - Geoffrey Cain *****

Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power workstations.

Taking a handful of top people with him, Jobs faced a legal onslaught for a few months from Apple - but given they had no product, not even a design, he was able to continue with the production of one of the most remarkably brilliant failures in IT history. The NeXT box solidified what was great and awful about Jobs - his far sighted ideas and his obsession with detail that led, for instance, to spending $100,000 on the logo design alone, something no startup could afford.

Although the final product was brilliant, it was too expensive and too different from everything else to succeed. Geoffrey Cain gives us excellent chapter and verse on the whole episode that is often brushed over in Jobs' history. It's a reminder, apart from anything else, of how young he was - only just in his thirties when this happened. There are some excellent stories of just scraping through over everything from technical challenges to the difficulties caused by Jobs' personality. I was hooked. 

What comes across strongly is that the disaster of NeXT was what was needed to help Jobs grow up to become the more effective force he was when he returned to Apple. This was after the effective collapse of NeXT, though ironically Jobs had just become a billionaire thanks to Toy Story, a triumph for his other company, Pixar. Revivifying Apple, which ends the book, is just as interesting as the NeXT story - I hadn't realised what a dire state Apple was in at this point, and how NeXT's operating system expertise - the one part of the venture that was truly successful - was folded into Apple, making the brilliant new Mac operating system possible.

This is a double blast for the past for me. When I worked in IT in the 1980s and early 90s I lapped up the popular biographies of the likes of Jobs and Gates - or even biographies of the technology, such as Steven Levy's Insanely Great on the Mac. Steve Jobs in Exile is very much in this classic style of the tech bio. But I also attended Jobs' launch of the NeXT computer in London in 1990 and saw his reality distortion field in action. As soon as they were commercially available, I had a NeXT box on my desk (actually at home on the dining table for a few weeks, as we were moving offices).

It was a thing of beauty - just as Jobs wanted it to be - and though monochrome, the graphics were astounding when compared with anything we'd experienced on PCs or Macs. You could see in principle the potential of the object oriented programming features that were central to the NeXT's existence. But despite the enthusiasm of tech geeks, most people don't want to do their own programming - they want off-the-shelf tools to do a job and those were sadly lacking. The hardware was a beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.

There is sometimes too much detail here that we don't really need - especially as for several years developments were a constant, slow motion car crash, veering from one disaster to the next - but still it's a fascinating portrayal of a key step in both the career of Jobs and, when he rejoined Apple, in taking the steps resulting in the amazing Macs we see today.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here