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I, WOZ
By Steve Wozniak with Gina
Smith
Headline Review
Pp: 313
Price: Rs 359 |
The names
Apple and Steve Jobs are so synonymous that few know there was
another Steve without whom there would have been no Apple. Steve
Wozniak was the shy super-nerd whose brilliance created the first
Apple computer (and the next) and put the two 20-somethings into
business. Yet, while reams and reams of newsprint have been spent
writing about Jobs and how he created the Apple magic, not enough
has been said about the 'inventor' of Apple. Martha Kendall's
Steve Wozniak, Inventor of the Apple Computer was the first comprehensive
authorised biography of his, but I, Woz is a far more interesting
book simply because it comes from the horse's mouth. Why did Wozniak
wait for so many years to pen his memoir? "I was busy-too
busy," he says, but finally got around to doing it because
"so much of the information out there about me is wrong".
He did not drop out of college as commonly believed, it wasn't
Steve and him who engineered Apple's first computers, but "I
did them alone", and he didn't leave Apple because he was
unhappy, but because he wanted to launch his own company.
Read the book and one can't help but feel surprised that the
two Steves partnered at all. As far as personalities go, they
couldn't be more different. Wozniak is the archetypical geek who's
got the binary numbers flowing in his veins, and while Jobs is
a technology enthusiast, he's an entrepreneur first. He is the
brilliant marketer who can bag a $50,000 order (double of Wozniak's
annual salary then at hp) against just a promise. Here's a scene,
as Wozniak describes it, from one of their early pitches to corporate
investors: "I'll never forget how, in that conference room,
Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement.
He said, "You might just want to buy this product for a few
hundred thousand dollars." I was almost embarrassed. I mean,
there we were, we had no money, we had yet to prove to anybody
there was going to be any money in this. Steve added, "A
few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working
on this project."
Despite their brash genius, the Steves weren't the first to
see how big Apple II could become. It was a retired, 30-year-old
engineer from Intel called Mike Markkula who foresaw the potential.
"We are going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This
is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade," Wozniak
recalls Markkula telling them prophetically while agreeing to
put cash behind Apple. The iconic company today, with its iPods
and iPhones, is vastly different from the one founded 30 years
ago (it has even dropped the word Computer from its name), and
Wozniak hasn't been a full-time employee of Apple since 1985,
although he continues to work part time. But there's no doubt
that it was Wozniak's computers that built Apple.
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UNDERSTANDING REFORMS
By Suresh D. tendulkar
& T.A. Bhavani
Oxford University Press
Pp: 206
Price: Rs 395 |
Putting out a balanced fare on the
reform process in the country over the last 15 years is a tough
task, as it requires a deep understanding of the political economy.
Suresh Tendulkar and T.A. Bhavani in their book Understanding
Reforms have weaved in this aspect lucidly. How could the Narasimha
Rao government in 1991, with a modest majority in Parliament,
undertake reforms while the Rajiv Gandhi government, with a thumping
majority on the floor of the House, a few years earlier, do little
on this count? Such trends are captured by the authors as they
journey in time from 1991 to the present. And, there are lessons
from this analysis.
This, however, does not happen at the cost of missing out the
large body of economic factors that precipitated reforms in 1991.
The authors have elaborately documented the reasons that led to
the balance of payments crisis in 1991 that triggered large-scale
reforms in the country. The book has also dwelled on the varying
pace of reforms over the last 15 years, including comparisons
with China. Surely, a fine read on the economic reforms history
of the country over the last 15 years.
-Balaji Chandramouli
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