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.

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.

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.

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?