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.