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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."

4 of 42 comments (clear)

  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!

  2. 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
  3. 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.