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."

Comments

nice article

[sam_paris]

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!

interesting to see

[toQDuj]

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.

Re:interesting to see

[Ohreally_factor]

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."

Re:interesting to see

[IntlHarvester]

> 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.

I used Copland

[Xyde]

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)...

Re:I used Copland

[Halfbaked Plan]

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.

Re:I used Copland

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:I used Copland

[argent]

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.

Re:I used Copland

[argent]

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.

Alternate suggestion.

[gklinger]

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.

Comment about the jet

[Miros]

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...

Google for QuickTime source code lawsuit

[metamatic]

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?