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WEST OF EDEN: The End of Innocence at Apple ComputerA national best-seller when it was first published
Named one of the ten best business books of 1989 by Business Week Updated with a new introduction and postscript by the author Paperback or Kindle edition available now from Amazon It seems unthinkable today—but more than two decades ago, when personal computers were still new and everybody listened to music on a Walkman, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the world of computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, appeared to be foundering. And Jobs, the guiding force at Apple from the beginning, seemed not just expendable but a threat to the company he’d built.
Apple was the archetype of a New Age in American business, a company started in a garage by two California whiz kids who took as their emblem the "perfect fruit," the symbol of knowledge since the Garden of Eden. Yet it was quickly evolving into the Fortune 500 corporation that would drive out its founders and replace them with a pin-striped East Coast marketing executive. What was behind such a move? West of Eden—first published in 1989, now updated with a new introduction that links these events to the present—tells how Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to lead Apple into the future, only to find himself pushed into exile. High-level power struggles, executive paranoia, corporate intrigue—these were far from the entrepreneurial innocence of Apple’s early years. But this is more than a tale of corporate upheaval. The story of Apple is a story of America in the ’80s, when computers seemed threatening, when conformity ruled in the corporate suites, when a desire to change the world was almost automatically suspect. It is the story of a visionary's fall. “The saga of Apple in its early years is a case study of the California style of creativity smashing headlong into the realities of Wall Street. Once again, Californians came up with a revolutionary idea which the Northeast seized control of and institutionalized.... Frank Rose has written the book on Apple Computer and the entire Silicon Valley phenomenon.” — Kevin Starr, author of the six-volume history Americans and the California Dream |
Praise for WEST OF EDEN:
“No other book has done a better job of presenting the bitter breakup between Sculley and Jobs.” — Newsweek “As recorded by journalist Frank Rose in this corporate Bildungsroman, the impending showdown between the two executives had mythic reverberations. In one corner was the larger-than-life Jobs, a combination of P.T. Barnum and Peter Pan, a former hippie who could cajole otherwise sober technicians and managers into his Never-Never Land.... In the other corner was Sculley, educated in staid Eastern private schools, modest in stature and averse to grand gestures.... As the underlying financial problems became more clear, Sculley awoke from what seemed a rapture in which he had almost merged with his putative student. Someone had to take the reins of Apple...and if it meant firing Steve Jobs, Sculley was ready to do it.” — Steven Levy, New York Post “The definitive account of the convulsive period that saw Apple grow up.” — Katie Hafner, Business Week "Best book on the Sculley era." — John Markoff, New York Times “Readers don’t need to worry that Mr. Rose was chewed up by Apple’s public relations machine.... He provides convincing proof that life at young California companies was anything but laid back.” — Michael Moritz, The Wall Street Journal “Zesty, highly readable...West of Eden delivers a bracing keyhole view of a swarm of rich, talented people frequently at each others’ throats.” — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Top quality.” — Ars Technica “The Steven Jobs that West of Eden describes would be a magnificent fictional character, an apprentice sorcerer with powers beyond his ken.... This is a gem." — Chicago Tribune |
