11 ms·

Microsoft exec: “Summary of meeting with Steve Jobs"

242 points by ent101 5y ago

xeromal 5y ago
I love this! It's cool seeing a boots on the ground perspective of Apple in '98. I think that thing that surprises me the most in this is that in only 10 years, apple unveils the iphone. 2010 - 2020 feels like a lot less of a jump than 1998 t0 2008.
- cyberge99 5y ago
  It was.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    It was a HUGE decade for everyone in the West anyways. 2008 still feels like today and it mostly is. 1998 felt like, well the 90s, we hadn't even hit 2000 yet, and had all this end of the world, next millennium zeitgeist in the air.
    - dtech 5y ago
      for the west, I feel like the pre- and post-9/11 world also was very different
      - jeswin 5y ago
        I've not lived in the west, so I could be wrong. My take as a teenager in the 90s is that the world changed post internet. The second half of the 90s is when the web became mainstream (in the west). 9/11 caused untold suffering and divided the world, but the internet was the line between the 80's world and the present.
        Tarsul 5y ago
        my mental model puts the years 2000 to 2019 basically as a single decade. With Corona and maybe accelerating climate desasters I don't think this will happen for the decade 2020 to 2039. But that's just me.
        fogihujy 5y ago
        9/11 has had -- and continiue to have -- far-reaching consequences that have an impact many people's lives. It pales in comparison to the impact that constant internet access and mobile computing have had, though.
      - jsbdk 5y ago
        You mean for the US maybe. In Europe I don't think people cared that much.
        hulitu 5y ago
        People not, the press however is very happy to comemorate such events.
        hyperman1 5y ago
        People here in Europe cared a lot. Not really for the terrorist attacks, except in an 'it happens over there too now' kind of sense. No, general reaction was: The biggest military/nuclear power in the world is going to be very pissed, lets hope the results don't end up here. And it did end up here. The US lost all moral high ground. All kinds of nasty military and spy industries smelled an opening, making the world a worse place.
        lkramer 5y ago
        It might not have had the psychological impact that it did in the US, but the world became a drastically different place afterwards with the "war" on terrorism. In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades. 9/11 was a rude awakening, and we have been living in its shadow for the last 20 years.
        dnh44 5y ago
        >In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades. This viewpoint was well described (and I think influenced) by Fukuyama's book "The End of History and the Last Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
      - cpach 5y ago
        In what regards? Asking as someone living in Europe. (We had lots of terrorism way before 9/11.)
        OJFord 5y ago
        My initial reaction was similar, but to be fair (commercial) air travel is pretty different globally post vs ante.
        Clubber 5y ago
        It wasn't so much the terrorist act that had long consequences, but the governments' reactions to the act. The USA PATRIOT Act is probably the largest. The 20 year war machine is another. A full 20-25% of the US population under 20 has never lived in a time before our current involvement in Afghanistan. There are families where both parents and children have fought in that war. Note that both parties support this with their constant renewal. It was supposed to expire in 2005. Then there was the torture and Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which is still open and housing prisoners. "We tortured some folks." War in Iraq (totally unrelated BTW), Abu Ghraib, countless civilian casualties, mass surveillance, militarization of police, it's really some horrific shit that came out of 9/11. News media lost a lot (all?) of their credibility during all this as well. For people coming of age after, all this is normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
      - simonh 5y ago
        I watched some 9/11 live news broadcasts with my kids last year, because they knew of it but wanted to understand what it was like at the time. Even the clothes and hair styles of the presenters look very 80s to me. I think cultural cycles really go roughly in double-decades. The early 60s look just like the 50s. The late 60s and 70s merge into each other. The 80s and 90s were another phase that petered out in the early 2000s. We're now in the post-2000 millennial era, so maybe another cultural phase is coming along soon.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        Teens here wear jeans with holes in them. This was a trend during the punk and trash metal haydays, but I doubt the current trend is in any other way related to the punk or metal subculture. Lifestyle trends get rehashed.
        simonh 5y ago
        With luck shoulder pads and big hair won't come back until long after I'm gone.
    - DrBazza 5y ago
      Old world: desktops + 56kps modem + IE 5/6 + HTML/WAP + Windows 95/98/Me + x86 Mhz 32bit processors + dozens of ports + MS Office + VB/C++ New world: desktop/laptop/mobile + 100Mbps+ cable + W3C 'compliant' browser + HTTPS/WS + Win10/Linux/MacOS + GHz 64bit x64/ARM64 + USB-esque port + MS Office/Google Docs/Open Office + js/Java/C#/C++/etc.
      - ampdepolymerase 5y ago
        You forgot the tablet, arguably the biggest change aside from mobile.
meepmorp 5y ago
"Most of the value of Office is in Word"
- krallja 5y ago
  I wonder if the rest of it is in Excel or Powerpoint?
  - nchase 5y ago
    Excel. There are many good Powerpoint replacements, and few competent Excel ones.
    - db48x 5y ago
      I’d argue that Powerpoint has negative value overall. But I suppose technically Microsoft still gets positive money for it.
      - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
        Slide presentation software in general - or PowerPoint specifically? I think PowerPoint has simultaneously been the best - and the worst - thing to happen to academia in the past 100+ years, and PP has only been out with good MM projectors for only the past 20 years - it has tremendous value. It’s only a bad thing when people aren’t using it correctly - though I appreciate that good software should be difficult to use incorrectly. (okay, next worst thing after Blackboard).
        db48x 5y ago
        Slide presentation software in general. It is perhaps OK to present simple subjects to a crowd with the aid of visuals such as slides, but the more complex the subject is the more the slides will impede understanding. Think of the slides used to present technical data about foam hitting the Space Shuttle to managers at NASA just after the launch of Columbia. They were garbage in several ways, but chiefly because they had only nested bulleted lists rather than just paragraphs and sentences. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... It is possible to lie using ordinary sentences and paragraphs, but slides pile on even more ways to deceive. They encourage you to break up the flow of information into optimistic headlines and soundbites followed by fine print that is easily ignored. Slide decks are humanity’s most dangerous invention. We should teach our enemies about slide decks. When we meet aggressive aliens, we can sell them Powerpoint to slow them down. Too bad our own military already uses it; I’ve read that all of our high–level military planning is done by Powerpoint presentations.
kalleboo 5y ago
> After that, we briefly discussed Amelio, and his book, and Steve said that Amelio "has fucked up everything he did, except hire Fred Anderson as CFO." He said that if you looked at all of this year's California graduating high school classes, anyone in th top 10% could have run Apple better than Amelio. Poor old Gil...
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I am not familiar with the story behind this. Is that a fair assessment or is it just unfounded critique from a person who was known to be harsh at times?
  - kindall 5y ago
    Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.
    - codemusings 5y ago
      Well sure, but he also pushed for the 20th Anniversary Mac. So it's not an entirely unfair assessment.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    After reading a bunch of books (including Amelio's own), this is my take: Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own. This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together). The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back. The reign of the previous CEO, Spindler (best known for launching the MacOS clone program) was even more disastrous https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-... Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people. Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple) That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.
rconti 5y ago
Under attendees: > Ken Bereskin, Dir., Mac OS Technologies product marketing -- (a fool) yikes.
- supernova87a 5y ago
  Yeah, what an embarrassing thing to have known about you even 20 years later. For that to be sent in an email to Bill Gates, must've been blatant.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    All that is "known" is that he rubbed his opposite number at Microsoft the wrong way. It looks like what the author of the memo wanted was a commitment from Apple not to bundle ClarisWorks, and Bereskin was the one who said no (possibly even the one who had the JOB to say no, because Steve at the time needed to be the good cop).
    - supernova87a 5y ago
      Well, I wouldn't think that someone doing his job and taking a contrary business position would be worth calling out as "a fool" in the introduction of the minutes of the meeting. It seems like a personal observation to rise to the level of attaching it to someone's name. Besides, anything policy/business-outcome related was kept to the rest of the memo.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I think it says more about the person that wrote the email than the target of their ire.
- koyote 5y ago
  Does anyone have the story behind that? Seems like a weird comment to make in the context of the rest of the e-mail.
- audiometry 5y ago
  Seems he survived twenty years at Apple (till 2009) https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbereskin/?originalSubdomain=ca https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbereskin/?originalSubdomain=c...
rconti 5y ago
This is really cool. I like that the author clearly sees a lot of things from Apple's side, particularly with regard to ClarisWorks, and its market positioning vs Office and MS Works. It makes sense that a ClarisWorks user would be less likely to upgrade to MS Office anyway, vs an MS Works user, since you're now buying from a different vendor. But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway. I don't remember how things went down in the browser wars. The author of the email seems to think Apple might not be willing to ship a non-OS X-native [Netscape] Navigator with new machines. I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.
- alsetmusic 5y ago
  > I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING. From Wikipedia: > As a result of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, it was the default browser on the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 until it was superseded by Apple's own Safari web browser in 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS_X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway. Keeping MS Works bad may have been deliberate on their part, to avoid cannibalizing Office sales.
  - mkl 5y ago
    I'm sure it was. MS Works had tonnes of limitations that you hit pretty easily.
- blihp 5y ago
  I believe IE was bundled starting with OS 8 or 9. (definitely 9, but might have started with 8) The document explains a lot of the 'gushing' Steve Jobs was doing about IE around that time. Sounds like there was at least a handshake agreement to push IE hard on Apple's side which they definitely did. (i.e. this goes beyond the previously published agreements re: bundling it etc as Steve in particular was really doing a hard sell on IE to Mac users at the time at a couple of events) The document is also interesting as it helps explain why ClarisWorks died on the vine the way it did. I remember filing a bug report on a years old problem around that time for a family member which Apple never did fix, or anything else, in ClarisWorks until they eventually abandoned it completely years later. Too bad, it was a nice user-friendly, entry-level productivity suite.
pimlottc 5y ago
Is there a direct link to the images? Twitter’s mobile site makes it impossible to zoom adequately in landscape mode.
- wyattpeak 5y ago
  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGs2nX0As7BSC?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGs2nX0As7BSC?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGte-X0A8KMjl?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGte-X0A8KMjl?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGuKZXwAkYWxT?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGuKZXwAkYWxT?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGu-5XIAUAlWI?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGu-5XIAUAlWI?format=png&name=...
microtherion 5y ago
The characterization of Rhapsody being "cancelled" and Mac OS X just being MacOS on a Mach Kernel is rather odd. In my recollection, the original Rhapsody plan was essentially Cocoa apps (with a NeXTStep-like look) + the Classic emulator. What the change of plans to Mac OS X did was add "Carbon" to the equation (i.e. native MacOS APIs in the unix environment), and give the whole thing a facelift. From the point of a developer, it could be considered a major departure in that instead of a complete rewrite, apps could also become native with more modest changes. But that does not mean that the Rhapsody path was abolished — far from it.
- Lammy 5y ago
  http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...
  - microtherion 5y ago
    As far as PowerPC hardware is concerned, this is not all that different from my characterization (though I was omitting the Display Postscript to Quartz transition, which was indeed quite significant). I had not paid attention to the cross platform promises of the Rhapsody strategy, so it's possible I was missing just how much of that was publicly promised and then abolished. I was never a NeXTStep developer, but having seen quite a bit of Cocoa code, my impression was that the compatibility hurdle for existing NeXTStep apps to becoming Cocoa apps was smaller than the one for Mac apps to becoming Carbon apps. Maybe developers with actual experience of having done such ports can comment?
    - lunaticlabs 5y ago
      I can concur with this. I am actually the youngest NeRD (NeXTStep Registered Developer) ever. I also programmed Mac applications professionally from just before OS X until after its release. I remember first seeing the API docs for it and being flooded with memories of code from a decade earlier. It was a bit weird. Keep in mind that besides the API, I also already was well versed in Objective C, so it was also not a new programming language. My peers had different experiences.
29athrowaway 5y ago
When Corel launched Corel Linux and bundled it with WordPerfect for Linux, Microsoft immediately bought 24 million shares of Corel and then Corel killed its Linux line of products. It was good while it lasted. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.p... Today I use FreeOffice from SoftMaker. A really nice product.
- iorrus 5y ago
  I haven't heard of FreeOffice before, it looks like an interesting product. How do they support devlopment? It is closed source and doesn't appear to have a pricing model. EDIT: Investigating a bit more there appears to be a paid version called SoftMaker Office, so I guess the free version acts as a funnel.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Too bad the anti-trust office was on vacation that day?
Areading314 5y ago
Good reminder of how ephemeral things are in the software industry -- much of the software we use today will be obsolete in 15 years.
- admiral33 5y ago
  "All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years. This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."
  - oblio 5y ago
    Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down. See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable. Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same. Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    For perspective: The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old. [1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
jsbdk 5y ago
What I think is interesting is that Jobs made all these decisions and cared so much about the software experience. If you told me Satya Nadella doesn't use Windows I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.
exikyut 5y ago
Wha... halfway down the second page (second bullet point) there's the note that > *It's MacOS, but certain APIs are no longer supported. [...] They are also dropping support for stupid things like publish and subscribe." I'm extremely curious to know how this worked in Classic - and how different it is from how things are done today.
- masswerk 5y ago
  This was an OS-wide API. On the surface, it worked somewhat like Smart Objects in Photoshop, but rather than converting a file on embedding, you first "published" it and then the content could be embedded by any "subscriber" that supported/made use of the API. (Editing the file on the publisher side would consequently update any embedded content. Like in PS, any attempt to edit a subscription would open it in the publishing application.) However, I have no idea about any implementation details.
- alphabetter 5y ago
  As a classic MacOS developer back in the day, "publish and subscribe" doesn't mean what you probably think it does. It isn't like "publish and subscribe" in Javascript or similar. In classic MacOs "publish and subscribe" was a kind of real-time clipboard which allowed you to paste contents from one application in to another and have it updated in real-time if you edited the source file. The idea was interesting, but it created odd interactions and corner cases that weren't nice. It was also very slow and buggy in practice. Not many applications supported it, and those that did didn't support it well in my opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_and_Subscribe_(Mac_OS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_and_Subscribe_(Mac_OS)
nipponese 5y ago
It’s fascinating that Balmer was not CCed
dccoolgai 5y ago
Seems kinda monopolistic... You're not supposed to make "agreements" with your competitors regarding what you will and won't compete on, right? That's what they always said in those corporate training videos, anyway. How was this legal?
- huijzer 5y ago
  But who is gonna fine Google or Microsoft? The US certainly benefits from these huge corporations, so there isn’t much incentive to hinder them with legislation and fines.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The problem is politicians have realised that these corporations, particularly the ones with significant social media presence, have enormous influence on political discourse, and thus the fate of politicians themselves. There is no way they are going to leave that to chance, or what to them probably seem like arbitrary platform policies and algorithms.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Everyone knows that daily reality isn't in sync with corporate training videos, regardless of the company. They are only used for public image and putting the legal department on the safe side when things go wrong.
  - dccoolgai 5y ago
    But there's like "doesn't follow their mottos like 'don't be evil'" and then there's "flagrant violations of federal law". No matter how disingenuous the company is, there's got to be some consequences for the latter... Or you would at least expect them to try and be circumspect about it... This just says on paper "we agreed not to compete".
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Agreed, yet if most companies business practices were actually investigated properly, in every single location across the globe where they operate, it is quite clear certain locations would have already closed doors if the videos were followed to the letter.
cyberlurker 5y ago
This is really fascinating to read. I’m glad Apple wasn’t enthusiastic about IE.

242 points by ent101 5y ago

I love this! It's cool seeing a boots on the ground perspective of Apple in '98. I think that thing that surprises me the most in this is that in only 10 years, apple unveils the iphone. 2010 - 2020 feels like a lot less of a jump than 1998 t0 2008.

cyberge99 5y ago
It was.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  It was a HUGE decade for everyone in the West anyways. 2008 still feels like today and it mostly is. 1998 felt like, well the 90s, we hadn't even hit 2000 yet, and had all this end of the world, next millennium zeitgeist in the air.
  - dtech 5y ago
    for the west, I feel like the pre- and post-9/11 world also was very different
    - jeswin 5y ago
      I've not lived in the west, so I could be wrong. My take as a teenager in the 90s is that the world changed post internet. The second half of the 90s is when the web became mainstream (in the west). 9/11 caused untold suffering and divided the world, but the internet was the line between the 80's world and the present.
      - Tarsul 5y ago
        my mental model puts the years 2000 to 2019 basically as a single decade. With Corona and maybe accelerating climate desasters I don't think this will happen for the decade 2020 to 2039. But that's just me.
      - fogihujy 5y ago
        9/11 has had -- and continiue to have -- far-reaching consequences that have an impact many people's lives. It pales in comparison to the impact that constant internet access and mobile computing have had, though.
    - jsbdk 5y ago
      You mean for the US maybe. In Europe I don't think people cared that much.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        People not, the press however is very happy to comemorate such events.
      - hyperman1 5y ago
        People here in Europe cared a lot. Not really for the terrorist attacks, except in an 'it happens over there too now' kind of sense. No, general reaction was: The biggest military/nuclear power in the world is going to be very pissed, lets hope the results don't end up here. And it did end up here. The US lost all moral high ground. All kinds of nasty military and spy industries smelled an opening, making the world a worse place.
      - lkramer 5y ago
        It might not have had the psychological impact that it did in the US, but the world became a drastically different place afterwards with the "war" on terrorism. In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades. 9/11 was a rude awakening, and we have been living in its shadow for the last 20 years.
        dnh44 5y ago
        >In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades. This viewpoint was well described (and I think influenced) by Fukuyama's book "The End of History and the Last Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
    - cpach 5y ago
      In what regards? Asking as someone living in Europe. (We had lots of terrorism way before 9/11.)
      - OJFord 5y ago
        My initial reaction was similar, but to be fair (commercial) air travel is pretty different globally post vs ante.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        It wasn't so much the terrorist act that had long consequences, but the governments' reactions to the act. The USA PATRIOT Act is probably the largest. The 20 year war machine is another. A full 20-25% of the US population under 20 has never lived in a time before our current involvement in Afghanistan. There are families where both parents and children have fought in that war. Note that both parties support this with their constant renewal. It was supposed to expire in 2005. Then there was the torture and Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which is still open and housing prisoners. "We tortured some folks." War in Iraq (totally unrelated BTW), Abu Ghraib, countless civilian casualties, mass surveillance, militarization of police, it's really some horrific shit that came out of 9/11. News media lost a lot (all?) of their credibility during all this as well. For people coming of age after, all this is normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
    - simonh 5y ago
      I watched some 9/11 live news broadcasts with my kids last year, because they knew of it but wanted to understand what it was like at the time. Even the clothes and hair styles of the presenters look very 80s to me. I think cultural cycles really go roughly in double-decades. The early 60s look just like the 50s. The late 60s and 70s merge into each other. The 80s and 90s were another phase that petered out in the early 2000s. We're now in the post-2000 millennial era, so maybe another cultural phase is coming along soon.
      - Fnoord 5y ago
        Teens here wear jeans with holes in them. This was a trend during the punk and trash metal haydays, but I doubt the current trend is in any other way related to the punk or metal subculture. Lifestyle trends get rehashed.
        simonh 5y ago
        With luck shoulder pads and big hair won't come back until long after I'm gone.
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    Old world: desktops + 56kps modem + IE 5/6 + HTML/WAP + Windows 95/98/Me + x86 Mhz 32bit processors + dozens of ports + MS Office + VB/C++ New world: desktop/laptop/mobile + 100Mbps+ cable + W3C 'compliant' browser + HTTPS/WS + Win10/Linux/MacOS + GHz 64bit x64/ARM64 + USB-esque port + MS Office/Google Docs/Open Office + js/Java/C#/C++/etc.
    - ampdepolymerase 5y ago
      You forgot the tablet, arguably the biggest change aside from mobile.

meepmorp 5y ago

"Most of the value of Office is in Word"

krallja 5y ago
I wonder if the rest of it is in Excel or Powerpoint?
- nchase 5y ago
  Excel. There are many good Powerpoint replacements, and few competent Excel ones.
  - db48x 5y ago
    I’d argue that Powerpoint has negative value overall. But I suppose technically Microsoft still gets positive money for it.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Slide presentation software in general - or PowerPoint specifically? I think PowerPoint has simultaneously been the best - and the worst - thing to happen to academia in the past 100+ years, and PP has only been out with good MM projectors for only the past 20 years - it has tremendous value. It’s only a bad thing when people aren’t using it correctly - though I appreciate that good software should be difficult to use incorrectly. (okay, next worst thing after Blackboard).
      - db48x 5y ago
        Slide presentation software in general. It is perhaps OK to present simple subjects to a crowd with the aid of visuals such as slides, but the more complex the subject is the more the slides will impede understanding. Think of the slides used to present technical data about foam hitting the Space Shuttle to managers at NASA just after the launch of Columbia. They were garbage in several ways, but chiefly because they had only nested bulleted lists rather than just paragraphs and sentences. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... It is possible to lie using ordinary sentences and paragraphs, but slides pile on even more ways to deceive. They encourage you to break up the flow of information into optimistic headlines and soundbites followed by fine print that is easily ignored. Slide decks are humanity’s most dangerous invention. We should teach our enemies about slide decks. When we meet aggressive aliens, we can sell them Powerpoint to slow them down. Too bad our own military already uses it; I’ve read that all of our high–level military planning is done by Powerpoint presentations.

kalleboo 5y ago

> After that, we briefly discussed Amelio, and his book, and Steve said that Amelio "has fucked up everything he did, except hire Fred Anderson as CFO." He said that if you looked at all of this year's California graduating high school classes, anyone in th top 10% could have run Apple better than Amelio. Poor old Gil...

throwawaysea 5y ago
I am not familiar with the story behind this. Is that a fair assessment or is it just unfounded critique from a person who was known to be harsh at times?
- kindall 5y ago
  Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.
  - codemusings 5y ago
    Well sure, but he also pushed for the 20th Anniversary Mac. So it's not an entirely unfair assessment.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  After reading a bunch of books (including Amelio's own), this is my take: Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own. This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together). The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back. The reign of the previous CEO, Spindler (best known for launching the MacOS clone program) was even more disastrous https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-... Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people. Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple) That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.

rconti 5y ago

Under attendees: > Ken Bereskin, Dir., Mac OS Technologies product marketing -- (a fool) yikes.

supernova87a 5y ago
Yeah, what an embarrassing thing to have known about you even 20 years later. For that to be sent in an email to Bill Gates, must've been blatant.
- microtherion 5y ago
  All that is "known" is that he rubbed his opposite number at Microsoft the wrong way. It looks like what the author of the memo wanted was a commitment from Apple not to bundle ClarisWorks, and Bereskin was the one who said no (possibly even the one who had the JOB to say no, because Steve at the time needed to be the good cop).
  - supernova87a 5y ago
    Well, I wouldn't think that someone doing his job and taking a contrary business position would be worth calling out as "a fool" in the introduction of the minutes of the meeting. It seems like a personal observation to rise to the level of attaching it to someone's name. Besides, anything policy/business-outcome related was kept to the rest of the memo.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I think it says more about the person that wrote the email than the target of their ire.
koyote 5y ago
Does anyone have the story behind that? Seems like a weird comment to make in the context of the rest of the e-mail.
audiometry 5y ago
Seems he survived twenty years at Apple (till 2009) https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbereskin/?originalSubdomain=ca https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbereskin/?originalSubdomain=c...

rconti 5y ago

This is really cool. I like that the author clearly sees a lot of things from Apple's side, particularly with regard to ClarisWorks, and its market positioning vs Office and MS Works. It makes sense that a ClarisWorks user would be less likely to upgrade to MS Office anyway, vs an MS Works user, since you're now buying from a different vendor. But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway. I don't remember how things went down in the browser wars. The author of the email seems to think Apple might not be willing to ship a non-OS X-native [Netscape] Navigator with new machines. I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.

alsetmusic 5y ago
> I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING. From Wikipedia: > As a result of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, it was the default browser on the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 until it was superseded by Apple's own Safari web browser in 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS_X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
tablespoon 5y ago
> But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway. Keeping MS Works bad may have been deliberate on their part, to avoid cannibalizing Office sales.
- mkl 5y ago
  I'm sure it was. MS Works had tonnes of limitations that you hit pretty easily.
blihp 5y ago
I believe IE was bundled starting with OS 8 or 9. (definitely 9, but might have started with 8) The document explains a lot of the 'gushing' Steve Jobs was doing about IE around that time. Sounds like there was at least a handshake agreement to push IE hard on Apple's side which they definitely did. (i.e. this goes beyond the previously published agreements re: bundling it etc as Steve in particular was really doing a hard sell on IE to Mac users at the time at a couple of events) The document is also interesting as it helps explain why ClarisWorks died on the vine the way it did. I remember filing a bug report on a years old problem around that time for a family member which Apple never did fix, or anything else, in ClarisWorks until they eventually abandoned it completely years later. Too bad, it was a nice user-friendly, entry-level productivity suite.

pimlottc 5y ago

Is there a direct link to the images? Twitter’s mobile site makes it impossible to zoom adequately in landscape mode.

wyattpeak 5y ago
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGs2nX0As7BSC?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGs2nX0As7BSC?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGte-X0A8KMjl?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGte-X0A8KMjl?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGuKZXwAkYWxT?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGuKZXwAkYWxT?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGu-5XIAUAlWI?format=png&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGu-5XIAUAlWI?format=png&name=...

microtherion 5y ago

The characterization of Rhapsody being "cancelled" and Mac OS X just being MacOS on a Mach Kernel is rather odd. In my recollection, the original Rhapsody plan was essentially Cocoa apps (with a NeXTStep-like look) + the Classic emulator. What the change of plans to Mac OS X did was add "Carbon" to the equation (i.e. native MacOS APIs in the unix environment), and give the whole thing a facelift. From the point of a developer, it could be considered a major departure in that instead of a complete rewrite, apps could also become native with more modest changes. But that does not mean that the Rhapsody path was abolished — far from it.

Lammy 5y ago
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...
- microtherion 5y ago
  As far as PowerPC hardware is concerned, this is not all that different from my characterization (though I was omitting the Display Postscript to Quartz transition, which was indeed quite significant). I had not paid attention to the cross platform promises of the Rhapsody strategy, so it's possible I was missing just how much of that was publicly promised and then abolished. I was never a NeXTStep developer, but having seen quite a bit of Cocoa code, my impression was that the compatibility hurdle for existing NeXTStep apps to becoming Cocoa apps was smaller than the one for Mac apps to becoming Carbon apps. Maybe developers with actual experience of having done such ports can comment?
  - lunaticlabs 5y ago
    I can concur with this. I am actually the youngest NeRD (NeXTStep Registered Developer) ever. I also programmed Mac applications professionally from just before OS X until after its release. I remember first seeing the API docs for it and being flooded with memories of code from a decade earlier. It was a bit weird. Keep in mind that besides the API, I also already was well versed in Objective C, so it was also not a new programming language. My peers had different experiences.

29athrowaway 5y ago

When Corel launched Corel Linux and bundled it with WordPerfect for Linux, Microsoft immediately bought 24 million shares of Corel and then Corel killed its Linux line of products. It was good while it lasted. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.p... Today I use FreeOffice from SoftMaker. A really nice product.

iorrus 5y ago
I haven't heard of FreeOffice before, it looks like an interesting product. How do they support devlopment? It is closed source and doesn't appear to have a pricing model. EDIT: Investigating a bit more there appears to be a paid version called SoftMaker Office, so I guess the free version acts as a funnel.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Too bad the anti-trust office was on vacation that day?

Areading314 5y ago

Good reminder of how ephemeral things are in the software industry -- much of the software we use today will be obsolete in 15 years.

admiral33 5y ago
"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years. This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."
- oblio 5y ago
  Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down. See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable. Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same. Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  For perspective: The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old. [1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...

jsbdk 5y ago

What I think is interesting is that Jobs made all these decisions and cared so much about the software experience. If you told me Satya Nadella doesn't use Windows I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.

exikyut 5y ago

Wha... halfway down the second page (second bullet point) there's the note that > *It's MacOS, but certain APIs are no longer supported. [...] They are also dropping support for stupid things like publish and subscribe." I'm extremely curious to know how this worked in Classic - and how different it is from how things are done today.

masswerk 5y ago
This was an OS-wide API. On the surface, it worked somewhat like Smart Objects in Photoshop, but rather than converting a file on embedding, you first "published" it and then the content could be embedded by any "subscriber" that supported/made use of the API. (Editing the file on the publisher side would consequently update any embedded content. Like in PS, any attempt to edit a subscription would open it in the publishing application.) However, I have no idea about any implementation details.
alphabetter 5y ago
As a classic MacOS developer back in the day, "publish and subscribe" doesn't mean what you probably think it does. It isn't like "publish and subscribe" in Javascript or similar. In classic MacOs "publish and subscribe" was a kind of real-time clipboard which allowed you to paste contents from one application in to another and have it updated in real-time if you edited the source file. The idea was interesting, but it created odd interactions and corner cases that weren't nice. It was also very slow and buggy in practice. Not many applications supported it, and those that did didn't support it well in my opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_and_Subscribe_(Mac_OS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_and_Subscribe_(Mac_OS)

nipponese 5y ago

It’s fascinating that Balmer was not CCed

dccoolgai 5y ago

Seems kinda monopolistic... You're not supposed to make "agreements" with your competitors regarding what you will and won't compete on, right? That's what they always said in those corporate training videos, anyway. How was this legal?

huijzer 5y ago
But who is gonna fine Google or Microsoft? The US certainly benefits from these huge corporations, so there isn’t much incentive to hinder them with legislation and fines.
- simonh 5y ago
  The problem is politicians have realised that these corporations, particularly the ones with significant social media presence, have enormous influence on political discourse, and thus the fate of politicians themselves. There is no way they are going to leave that to chance, or what to them probably seem like arbitrary platform policies and algorithms.
pjmlp 5y ago
Everyone knows that daily reality isn't in sync with corporate training videos, regardless of the company. They are only used for public image and putting the legal department on the safe side when things go wrong.
- dccoolgai 5y ago
  But there's like "doesn't follow their mottos like 'don't be evil'" and then there's "flagrant violations of federal law". No matter how disingenuous the company is, there's got to be some consequences for the latter... Or you would at least expect them to try and be circumspect about it... This just says on paper "we agreed not to compete".
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Agreed, yet if most companies business practices were actually investigated properly, in every single location across the globe where they operate, it is quite clear certain locations would have already closed doors if the videos were followed to the letter.

cyberlurker 5y ago

This is really fascinating to read. I’m glad Apple wasn’t enthusiastic about IE.