6 ms·

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acq

by simonh 4y ago

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball questions from the audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s

Aloha 4y ago
Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go. Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.
- hsm3 4y ago
  I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo). I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago
      No, Copland could have shipped. It would have taken some actual management skill to get it there. Gil's contribution was to buy his way out of the problem.
      - sroussey 4y ago
        And it wasn’t BeOS as people expected at the time.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    I remember watching that video, the one where he gives Steve the 20th Anniversary Mac! It was shockingly bad, but hilarious in its own way.
- purpleblue 4y ago
  Amelio was going to drive Apple straight off a cliff with his vision of opening up MacOS and basically destroying the brand. SGI did that and the company no longer exists now. Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and all its products is beyond comparison to Android.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff. It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix. What they ended up getting was adult management, which was not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple needed.
  - ribs 4y ago
    How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly? The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.
    - sroussey 4y ago
      The lack of protected memory was pretty insidious—essentially the kernel relied on application memory for its own internals in MacOS, and reentrancy was a problem for, oh, everything. Copland was to fix that first problem though (but only for new apps).
    - sgerenser 4y ago
      BeOS was the other option being considered. It was arguably more advanced and powerful than NeXTStep. But Jean Louis Gassée played hardball thinking he had Apple on the ropes, and they went with NeXT instead.
      - simonh 4y ago
        To be fair Gassée has said since they probably made the right choice.
  - simonh 4y ago
    The big advantage of NeXT was the development tooling, it was streets ahead of almost anything else. As a unix it was nothing to write home about, but as a desktop OS it didn't need to be. Just being a Unix at all with decent networking was a huge advantage compared to all the misconceived desktop OS projects at MS, IBM and Apple at the time.
tejohnso 4y ago
Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?
- antidnan 4y ago
  https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadsheets-done-right-1991/ https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv...
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    "Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated from each other." This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does. You have the underlying data structure that is independent of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by definition, and can store far more data than any spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined relationships between the different kinds of data. You have the calculations, that are stored with the data structure, but are functionally independent from it. They can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just about any way you like. They can store their results, increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on demand. You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is defined separately -- you can have as many different presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands. And you have actual code that can run on the data and validate it, modify it, organize it etc. I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM from eating spreadsheets' lunch.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  Quantrix is still popular today for large financial modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to maintain that discipline.
bmitc 4y ago
It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron apps. https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260 https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260 And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.
- hedgehog 4y ago
  I read that one differently. His presentation style was not as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that situation. He knew that the current product line was very poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing, supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve them.
hot_gril 4y ago
Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an Electron app. Maybe the guy in the audience was right.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app. Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.
      - 4y ago
bergenty 4y ago
Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people have that many of us can’t grasp. This talk is a great victory for amazing product management.

by simonh 4y ago

Aloha 4y ago

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go. Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

hsm3 4y ago
I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo). I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.
- Aloha 4y ago
  I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    No, Copland could have shipped. It would have taken some actual management skill to get it there. Gil's contribution was to buy his way out of the problem.
    - sroussey 4y ago
      And it wasn’t BeOS as people expected at the time.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I remember watching that video, the one where he gives Steve the 20th Anniversary Mac! It was shockingly bad, but hilarious in its own way.
purpleblue 4y ago
Amelio was going to drive Apple straight off a cliff with his vision of opening up MacOS and basically destroying the brand. SGI did that and the company no longer exists now. Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and all its products is beyond comparison to Android.
KerrAvon 4y ago
No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff. It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix. What they ended up getting was adult management, which was not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple needed.
- ribs 4y ago
  How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly? The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    The lack of protected memory was pretty insidious—essentially the kernel relied on application memory for its own internals in MacOS, and reentrancy was a problem for, oh, everything. Copland was to fix that first problem though (but only for new apps).
  - sgerenser 4y ago
    BeOS was the other option being considered. It was arguably more advanced and powerful than NeXTStep. But Jean Louis Gassée played hardball thinking he had Apple on the ropes, and they went with NeXT instead.
    - simonh 4y ago
      To be fair Gassée has said since they probably made the right choice.
- simonh 4y ago
  The big advantage of NeXT was the development tooling, it was streets ahead of almost anything else. As a unix it was nothing to write home about, but as a desktop OS it didn't need to be. Just being a Unix at all with decent networking was a huge advantage compared to all the misconceived desktop OS projects at MS, IBM and Apple at the time.

tejohnso 4y ago

Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?

antidnan 4y ago
https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv-spreadsheets-done-right-1991/ https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-improv...
- gcanyon 4y ago
  "Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated from each other." This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does. You have the underlying data structure that is independent of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by definition, and can store far more data than any spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined relationships between the different kinds of data. You have the calculations, that are stored with the data structure, but are functionally independent from it. They can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just about any way you like. They can store their results, increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on demand. You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is defined separately -- you can have as many different presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands. And you have actual code that can run on the data and validate it, modify it, organize it etc. I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM from eating spreadsheets' lunch.
AlanYx 4y ago
Quantrix is still popular today for large financial modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to maintain that discipline.

bmitc 4y ago

It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron apps. https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260 https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260 And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.

hedgehog 4y ago
I read that one differently. His presentation style was not as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that situation. He knew that the current product line was very poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing, supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve them.

hot_gril 4y ago

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an Electron app. Maybe the guy in the audience was right.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app. Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.
    - 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people have that many of us can’t grasp. This talk is a great victory for amazing product management.