5 ms·

Jobs probably thinks he was responsible for being acquired.

simondotau 5y ago
You say that sarcastically, but wasn’t he though? He clearly convinced Apple he was their best option. Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him? Compare that to Steve Jobs who unquestionably had the business and technical solution to fix Apple.
- pavlov 5y ago
  > "Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him?" Hindsight is always 20-20. At the time, the Apple-NeXT deal certainly didn't seem like a no-brainer. The collective industry response was more like: "Huh. Amelio sure is paying a lot for a company that has failed three times already and is run by a has-been egomaniac." Why shouldn't Amelio get credit for the decision he made? Granted, there were other important decision makers like Apple's CTO Ellen Hancock, who probably is the one who really picked NeXT. Also, Amelio didn't "bring Apple to dire straits." He became CEO only ten months before the NeXT acquisition.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Even Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his development tools and OS platform teams over technology and tools strategy, the benchmark he measured them against was NeXT because he recognised they were best in class, regardless of their market share. This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a position to know as he was one of the people taking the beatings. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      Microsoft has been unable to leverage their desktop monopoly into a mobile market share. They lost from iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), after playing quite or double with Nokia. All of this happened under Ballmer's flag.
      - simondotau 5y ago
        I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees. Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick. By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.
        simonh 5y ago
        The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them. The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.
m0llusk 5y ago
Actually, SJ gave great credit to the minor employee who reached out to Apple from NeXT on their own and started the whole thing going. Then at first he acted primarily as a kind of advisor and gadfly and appeared to embrace that role.

You say that sarcastically, but wasn’t he though? He clearly convinced Apple he was their best option. Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him? Compare that to Steve Jobs who unquestionably had the business and technical solution to fix Apple.

pavlov 5y ago
> "Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him?" Hindsight is always 20-20. At the time, the Apple-NeXT deal certainly didn't seem like a no-brainer. The collective industry response was more like: "Huh. Amelio sure is paying a lot for a company that has failed three times already and is run by a has-been egomaniac." Why shouldn't Amelio get credit for the decision he made? Granted, there were other important decision makers like Apple's CTO Ellen Hancock, who probably is the one who really picked NeXT. Also, Amelio didn't "bring Apple to dire straits." He became CEO only ten months before the NeXT acquisition.
- simonh 5y ago
  Even Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his development tools and OS platform teams over technology and tools strategy, the benchmark he measured them against was NeXT because he recognised they were best in class, regardless of their market share. This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a position to know as he was one of the people taking the beatings. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Microsoft has been unable to leverage their desktop monopoly into a mobile market share. They lost from iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), after playing quite or double with Nokia. All of this happened under Ballmer's flag.
    - simondotau 5y ago
      I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees. Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick. By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.
      - simonh 5y ago
        The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them. The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.

m0llusk 5y ago

Actually, SJ gave great credit to the minor employee who reached out to Apple from NeXT on their own and started the whole thing going. Then at first he acted primarily as a kind of advisor and gadfly and appeared to embrace that role.