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Gil Amelio's 500 Days at Apple

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the looking-back dept.

Sabah Arif writes "Apple Computer was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy on January 31, 1996, when Gil Amelio succeeded Michael Spindler as CEO. The first thing he did was turn down an acquisition offer from Sun Microsystems, then he moved to secure Apple's short term financial future by having a huge bond sale. As he restructured the company (and cut 3,000 jobs), Amelio realized that the Copland project would never finish, and decided to buy NeXT Software, paving the way for Steve Jobs' triumphant return in 1997. Read the whole story of Amelio's 500 days with Apple."

42 comments

  1. nice article by sam_paris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is a really nice insight into Gil's time at Apple. I always assumed he had been a total waste of time but he did in fact do quite a lot of good.

    At the time of Amelios reign I had a IIcx and a performa 5200 and was pretty un-happy with the direction the mac os was going in. I remember the copland project getting pushed further and further back and in fact I remember modding system 7 to make it look like copland using a resedit hack I downloaded.

    Also, the funniest thing is I went to Apple expo in london during Amelios reign and actually got a free mac t shirt from Power Computing which was advertising their 225 mhz mac clone. The slogan was "Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess of 225Mhz!!!" and on the back "My mac is faster than your mac". Classic!

    1. Re:nice article by falcon5768 · · Score: 1

      God I remember power computing. First mac I ever personally owned infact and it blew the lid off my fathers Apple Mac. I miss all the fun propaganda they had out cause you knew they where die hard Apple fans.

      --

      "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

    2. Re:nice article by R2.0 · · Score: 1

      I'm reminded of a comment a biker friend of mine made about his Harley. It was made during the AMF days, which are generally viewed by the Harley types as a very dark period. But Skip pointed out that, although the bikes actually produced during that time may have been substandard, without the money AMF invested in a money-losing operation, there wouldn't be ANY Harley's in production today. Harley would have folded like every other American motorcycle manufacturer.

      --
      "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
    3. Re:nice article by jcr · · Score: 1

      Amelio was before my time at Apple, but he's pretty uniformly disliked by the people I know who were there when he was in charge.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  2. Jobs is God... by __aambat2633 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    This just proves it, Steve Jobs is God.

  3. interesting to see by toQDuj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It appears Amelio already did much of the reorganisation needed for keeping the company afloat, thus paving the way to success for Jobs.
    However, the information on the discussions with Gates shows that Amelio wasn't as charismatic as Jobs was, and that may have been the killing blow.
    It also shows the disastrous effects a ruined presentation can have. Equipment failures and bad planning forced the CEO to ad lib his presentation and it turned into a badly cue'd 3 hour "drone-athon" instead of the 1.5 hour show it was supposed to be. Heed this warning all ye gentlemen.
    All in all an interesting read that also shows the Jobs already forcing things to his hand in the few months he got back. Apparently he also had Jobs afficionado's in place since the early days in various positions at Apple.

    Cool.

    B.

    --
    Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
    1. Re:interesting to see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Jobs should have threatened Gates that he could develop his own Office if Microsoft ceased their support for the Mac, or acquire WordPerfect. Gates knew Jobs could outdo them.

      Imagine if Amelio could also negotiate the same way.

      Now say whether it is better for a techie to chair an IT company.

    2. Re:interesting to see by Halfbaked+Plan · · Score: 1

      Jobs couldn't have developed his own office, though. They could have warmed up the Claris Works codebase, which might have sufficed for the 'productivity suite' a 3rd grade school teacher needs to administer her classroom, but that's about it.

      Buying WordPerfect outright is not 'developing an Office suite.' Jobs is smarter to make that sort of ridiculous claim. And, uh, Jobs is not a techie. He's the kind of guy who hangs around the techies and knows how to trick them into producing something he can shill to the marks.

      --
      resigned
    3. Re:interesting to see by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not sure what you're talking about. MS did agree to develop Office for OS X, once Steve was the "interim" CEO (aka iCEO). Not only that, but MS also agreed to invest $300 Million in non-voting shares of Apple stock. All in exchange for Apple shipping Macs with IE pre-installed.

      Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.

      Rather, MS was feeling anti-trust pressure from other quarters. Pointing to this deal, they could say, "See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."

      --
      It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
    4. Re:interesting to see by IntlHarvester · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.

      Actually, yes. The deal was part of a broader settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit, started by Amelio I believe. Anyway, Apple was quite explicit about using the lawsuit as leverage to get MS to support their next generation OS.

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    5. Re:interesting to see by allanc · · Score: 1

      Grandparent wasn't saying Jobs was a techie, he was saying Amelio (co-inventor of the CCD, among other credentials) was.

    6. Re:interesting to see by MCSEBear · · Score: 1

      You might also recall that at the next 'Stevenote' Steve and most of the other people involved had to throw in the statement, "IE is my browser of choice on Mac." One of the developers who hit the stage even said "I think this is where I'm supposed to say IE is my browser of choice on Mac." You have to remember back to when the browser wars were the most important thing in Microsoft's worldview.

    7. Re:interesting to see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It appears Amelio already did much of the reorganisation needed for keeping the company afloat, thus paving the way to success for Jobs. However, the information on the discussions with Gates shows that Amelio wasn't as charismatic as Jobs was, and that may have been the killing blow.

      I'm wondering if that was the first recorded incident of Jobs' Reality Distortion Field: Somehow getting Microsoft to agree to an even less-favorable deal.

    8. Re:interesting to see by jcr · · Score: 1

      It appears Amelio already did much of the reorganisation needed for keeping the company afloat, thus paving the way to success for Jobs.

      Well, yes and no. He did the necessary write-offs and shut down the Copland debacle, but there was still a hellacious amount of work to do when Steve took over.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    9. Re:interesting to see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, yes. The deal was part of a broader settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit, started by Amelio I believe.

      Why are you people making these bad guesses? The settlement was for the old case where Apple accused Microsoft of stealing their GUI ideas. There were no patents involved, but copyrights.

    10. Re:interesting to see by Sabah+Arif · · Score: 1

      You're wrong. Microsoft hired a company to write Video for Windows, but that company used Quicktime for Windows code, so Apple considered suing Microsoft.

  4. Gateway 2000?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whoa! They were considering Gateway as a potential buyer.. Can you imagine what the adverts would be like?

  5. I used Copland by Xyde · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and it was a piece of shit. I installed it on a 7100/80 a couple of years ago and if it managed to start up at all, it would crash within a few minutes. Half the menu items were missing, and the HFS driver was buggy so it would eventually render itself totally unbootable anyway, requiring a reformat/reinstall. Yes i'm sure NuKernel was going to be revolutionary but they were right to axe it.

    Or maybe i just had a really old build (D11E4 IIRC)...

    1. Re:I used Copland by Halfbaked+Plan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Apple had to look outside the company for their next-Gen OS. By that point in the company's history, the rank and file employees had taken over, and the most important 'initiative' for them was making sure they had the right to keep their dogs in their cubicles. The history of Copeland puts a kabosh on the notion of 'something magic at Apple.' There was something 'magic' earlier, but it had dissipated by then.

      --
      resigned
    2. Re:I used Copland by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative
      If you used a copy, you used the developer-only pre-release because a finished version of Copland was never actually released to the public. It was cancelled largely because:

      1. In terms of design, it was never the next generation operating system. It was supposed to be a stepping-stone to a future OS (codenamed Gershwin, which allegedly never had a single line of code written for it.)

        Aside from anything else, memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking was only provided for applications that weren't visible to the user (ie all interactive apps had to sit in the same memory space and they had to cooperatively multitask.) You could, obviously, structure your app with an interactive stub that communicated with a protected program that contained the meat of your application, but that's convoluted, and still puts the user at risk of one bad piece of code upsetting the rest of the operating system.

        It's questionable that this "design" even constituted a stepping stone, and if it does, it's only to an OS/2-like "Next generation OS" - pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection for processes only, not the multiuser-style security that we see in NT and Unix. Copland would have been a stepping stone to an operating system competitive with Windows 95, with everyone at Apple aware that Windows NT was already on sale and being touted as the eventual successor to anything Microsoft did with the original DOS/Windows codebase. In October of 1995, after Windows 95 had been released, the target date for Copland (not Gershwin) was moved to "some time in 1997". You can imagine the panic that must have occurred at Apple at this point - this meant Apple wouldn't have something "as good as" Windows 95 until sometime well after 1997.

      2. The requirements list was changing daily, and the OS was taking longer and longer to produce. One infamous legend has it that Amelio did a presentation on the OS and was immediately slapped down by developers who wanted to know why it didn't support multi-threading. Amelio, who possibly had no idea what any of this actually meant, promptly announced that it was going to support multi=threading. Copland's spec was so crude that adding multithreading was seen as essentially something that could only be done if that part of the OS hadn't been written yet - eg it necessitated a rewrite.
      3. As you yourself saw, it was extremely unstable in '95. Allegedly, cleaning the code base up so it just worked was taking too long by itself.

      The fact that Copland just plain wasn't the next generation OS it was being presented as is the unwritten reason why, I suspect, it was eventually cancelled. Users who got it would have ended up with an environment just as unstable in practice as Mac OS 7. Rogue apps would have still crashed the entire system, as developers would have almost certainly ignored the requests to break up their application into back-end and front-end code, because there was no real incentive for them to do so. It would take real signs that Gershwin was a real OS before anything moved forward.

      I reread the specs recently, and I have to admit, I wondered what the hell Apple had thought it was doing. Gershwin should have been Apple's focus from the start. I assume they thought they were under pressure to release something that showed progress, but I doubt Copland would have done anything to help Apple's credibility, and as it was, it did a lot to harm it, as part of a pattern that lasted until, perhaps, the last three or four years, where developers were told one thing, and then promptly told to ignore it.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    3. Re:I used Copland by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1

      Very informative post -- I recall the furor on Usenet when it was revealed that Copland was not going be a "modern OS" , but I don't think the details were widely known.

      One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM. Which necessitated some sort of Win95ish approach.

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    4. Re:I used Copland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was an early build all right; Copland never really got out of alpha stage.

      One shouldn't have expected it to actually be usable.

    5. Re:I used Copland by argent · · Score: 3, Informative

      One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM.

      Apple was running a classic virtual machine under System V UNIX in the *early* nineties. But classic Mac OS was born doomed, the API guaranteed that nobody would ever be able to do multitasking under Mac OS without using fixed partitions... which was a performance killer for low-memory systems even with demand paging. They should have replaced the API by 1990 with one that used opaque handles like UNIX, or required explicit locking of handles during use. That would have allowed a single classic application alongside multiple New API applications, which would have been good enough for a transition if it had been started early enough.

      Given that the classic environment in A/UX was System 6, they were actually on the way there. But System 7 incorporated The Grand Maltitasking Charade by default and they couldn't really go back after that.

    6. Re:I used Copland by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1

      True, but I ran AU/X on a 20MB machine in the early-90s, and it was horribly swappy compared to native MacOS.

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
    7. Re:I used Copland by argent · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A/UX made no attempt to provide a transitional environment to a new API. It ran multiple System 6 environments, for the Finder, for the Terminal, for whatever graphical applications you were running. I'm also not sure how much of the virtual memory capabilities of System V were made available to manage partitions... some of the System V releases of that period were still swappers rather than pagers, and swapping would have been MUCH easier to implement for classic partitions. Anyway, it wasn't the "new OS" that I was talking about, it wasn't trying to be one. It was just a "proof by existence" that they had the technology to build a classic virtual machine in the early '90s.

      I've got a NeXTstation and an SE/30 running A/UX sitting next to each other. The NeXTstation has the same amount of RAM as the SE/30, but doesn't carry the horrid legacy of "partitions" around. It's also got modern demand-paged virtual memory from its 4.3 BSD roots. It's definitely more efficient... but it also runs applications as large as a complete System 6 system and application partition together without bogging down, and it was by no means the most efficient base they could have used.

      BeOS is often brought up at this point, and I used to be moderately enthusiastic about the design (though the way they brought things together and the way they based internal APIs on C++ objects meant they were pretty much doomed from the start, unless they found someone like Apple to take them over) until I ran both BeOS and Rhapsody on the same computer... and BeOS was horribly swappy on a box that Rhapsody was quite happy with.

  6. Sad exit for a someone who saved Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I could not help but feel sorry for this guy; for what its worth he saved the company from being sold to Sun then brought in Jobs. At the time of Amelios reign I had a IIcx and a performa 5200 and was pretty un-happy with the direction the mac os was going in. I remember the copland project getting pushed further and further back and in fact I remember modding system 7 to make it look like copland using a resedit hack I downloaded. I remember the copland project getting pushed further and further back and in fact I remember modding system 7 to make it look like copland using a resedit hack I downloaded. At the time of Amelios reign I had a IIcx and a performa 5200 and was pretty un-happy with the direction the mac os was going in.

  7. Alternate suggestion. by gklinger · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If you're really interested in this particular phase of Apple's history you can get the story directly from the horse's mouth (so to speak) by reading Gil, pardon me, Dr. Gil Amelio's book On the Firing Line which details his 500 days at Apple. I've read just about every book out there on Apple's history and On the Firing Line along with John Sculley's Odyssey are two of the more interesting ones as they were written by former CEOs. You'll get the story directly from an insider (you can't get much more inside than the guy running the company) but sadly, there is quite a bit of historical revision going on.

    My conclusions? Sculley was star-struck and too button-down to run a 'geek' company and Gil Amelio was overrated and near to the most arrogant person on Earth. Of course, BIG personalities like theirs fit right into Apple's history along with guys like Mark Markkula, Mike Scott and Mr. Reality Distortion himself.

    The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple. If there was ever a subject for a movie, this is it.

    1. Re:Alternate suggestion. by Mattintosh · · Score: 1

      The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple.

      Which is why we have As the Apple Turns. Of course, they could do with a few more frequent updates. Very funny, but not as fresh as it used to be. Having kids kinda put a crimp in the website's pace.

  8. Apple Turnovers by Ashley+Bowers · · Score: 0

    Really great read it is always great hearing it from the horses mouth then from someone who over heard it. I am so glad he was able to turn Apple around and stop it from being Gobbeled up Sun, think about all those poeple this Christmas that are getting Ipods and Imacs for presents. Now thats alot of smiles and happiness!!

  9. Comment about the jet by Miros · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I diddnt like the way the writter wrote this paragraph

    "Amelio had long been an avid amateur pilot, and he owned his own private jet that Apple used. Instead of allowing the struggling Apple to use the jet free of charge, Amelio created an independent company, Aero, to manage it and charge Apple for any fuel and maintenance the plane might need during company flights."

    It makes it sound like he should have let the company use his jet for free, meaning that he would pick up the tab for fuel and maintenance, which, for a jet, has to be horrifically expensive. How is it unreasonable to have the company pay for the fuel and maintenance on something like a jet? It's not like he was charging a rent or anything...

    1. Re:Comment about the jet by Daniel+Jansen · · Score: 1

      What the writer missed is that Aero was charging Apple something like $125,000 per hour to use the jet.

      Other than that, a very good read and a nice perspective on Amelio's crucial role in keeping Apple independent and solvent.

  10. Google for QuickTime source code lawsuit by metamatic · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apple had discovered that Microsoft had stolen QuickTime source code and used it in Video for Windows. The trial was going very well for Apple. Yet it was suddenly dropped when Microsoft agreed to make the "investment" in Apple.

    Ask yourself this: if the "investment" wasn't under threat, why do you think the full terms were kept so secret?

    --
    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
    1. Re:Google for QuickTime source code lawsuit by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 1

      Yes, you are correct. I forgot about the settlement.

      However, what I was responding to was the assertion that Jobs threatened Gates that Apple would develop its own Office suite, and that Gates folded because "Gates knew Jobs could outdo them."

      --
      It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
  11. Let's not forget IE! by Inoshiro · · Score: 1

    "See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."

    And, ""See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Internet Explorer for a competing OS."

    Although this fought against their assertation that IE was a part of the OS, it did allow them to say, "only support IE, it's on everything anyone can pay to run!"

    Jobs was smart enough to start his own browser development so that the MacOS could stand on its own. A browser is one of the most important applications an OS can have in this day and age -- even as early as 1997/1998, what OS I ran was determined by the browsers available (which is why OS/2 with its crippled NS 2.x was switched away from at the time).

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  12. 500 days? by Geoffreyerffoeg · · Score: 1

    Well, that's 5 times as much as Napoleon got before Waterloo....

    Please tell me Steve Jobs' middle name isn't "Louis".

  13. 20th Anniversary Macintosh by Warlock7 · · Score: 1

    The single greatest failure of Gil Amelio was approving the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, codename Spartacus. The design was inspired when compared to the standard "pizza boxes" of the time, but the machine was completely overpriced at around $7500 and completely underpowered when compared with the other Macintosh machines which were available at the time. The "TAM" ran at 250MHz while Apple had PowerMac 9600s available earlier that same year running dual processors at 200MHz.

    If you expect people to pay premium prices for a "special" machine then it sure as hell better have the fastest processor and the latest hardware available at the time.

    1. Re:20th Anniversary Macintosh by dan_bethe · · Score: 1

      It wasn't a failure at all. It was a proof of concept and an homage to Macintosh. It was the kind of technology that was written about in Playboy magazine, because it was a nod to the future where a computer would become a standard lifestyle component. They expected people to fawn over it, write about it, and spend decades trying to find one -- not to buy it.

    2. Re:20th Anniversary Macintosh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd still rather have a NeXT cube.

    3. Re:20th Anniversary Macintosh by IntlHarvester · · Score: 1

      Well, it might have been successful as an image machine, but Apple had to heavily discount the things to get rid of them, and they had numerous recalls.

      --
      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
  14. Excuses, excuses by d0n+quix0te · · Score: 1

    Gil is right up there as one of the worst managers of Apple. The article, is quite naive in looking at all the events from Amelio's point of view. The guy was practically milking the company to death, $2000 a day to lease his private jet to apple? A $5M loan. And always blaming others for his failures. Case in point, Macworld presentations: Jobs practices his speech several times to make sure everything goes without a hitch, and here you have a guy blaming his speech writer and a failed teleprompter for his drone-athon. Utterly shameful.

    This guy brazenly tried to take credit for the iMac and Apple's turnaround under Jobs.

    Amelio made one good decision for Apple: getting Steve Jobs back. Jobs did the right thing, kicking out bozos like Ellen Hancock and Amelio.