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Gil Amelio's 500 Days at Apple
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."
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.
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...
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.