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Jobs may have saved Apple, but this is heartbreaking and seems very short-sighted. Did he really want to discourage Apple staff from learning new things that mi
by musicale 4y ago
Jobs may have saved Apple, but this is heartbreaking and seems very short-sighted. Did he really want to discourage Apple staff from learning new things that might help them in their work? It also looks like it was a nice work and study space.
I'm pretty sure Woz would have understood the benefits of having a library as well as company historical archives.
Certainly with the zillions of dollars that Apple currently has, it should be able to afford a library.
A sad aftereffect is that Apple's modern history is probably not particularly well-documented or curated.
- brianpan 4y agoIn 1997, the company was at its lowest point. 70% of the products were cancelled, 3000 jobs were cut. Running a library was certainly an untenable luxury. If Jobs was short-sighted it was because Apple was literally weeks away from bankruptcy.
- musicale 4y agoJobs and Apple were certainly in severe cost cutting mode (and cutting in general - even profitable parts that Jobs thought diluted Apple's focus) but closing the library probably wasn't needed to save Apple. Librarians were a drop in Apple's cost bucket (vs. useless middle managers who survived Jobs, hundreds of millions in restructuring costs, the $75M repurchase of Power Computing's macOS license, etc.) and the productivity and morale benefit from the library was likely greater than its cost. A glib Jobsian "they should know all that already" was also simply wrong. In any case, a few years later Apple could easily afford it, but it was gone forever.