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Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

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Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#11

Post by ProllyInfamous »

I was a T.Rbbt back in the SF Bay Area, over a decade ago, in the early wild west days of the "gig economy;" one of my first gigs was to "throw away a bunch of old electronics." As a diehard Apple fanboy, since 1991, I was excited for even the opportunity to throw away old history (knowing nothing more than "old electronics").

Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I knew immediately that these would be nicer "old electronics" — turns out it was a BUNCH of PROTOTYPE Apple Computers (no "LISA," but plenty of history and unique items, given their hacked-together nature); 'WOZ literally had his hands on at least ONE of these,' I remember thinking; 'CERTAINLY!'

I mistakenly told the disposer of this "old electronics" just how cool all this HISTORY was, to which he immediately realized that I wasn't going to be throwing any of it away. Needless to say, he accompanied me to the junkyard as we both watched Apple History get run over by a skidsteer.

Just tragic. PS T.R. sucks - gfkt Leah!

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#13

Post by aaronbrethorst »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #11

I was a T.Rbbt back in the SF Bay Area, over a decade ago, in the early wild west days of the "gig economy;" one of my first gigs was to "throw away a bunch of old electronics." As a diehard Apple fanboy, since 1991, I was excited for even the opportunity to throw away old history (knowing nothing more than "old electronics"). Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I knew immediately that these…

T.Rbbt

Task Rabbit?

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#14

Post by beefman »

I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared.

[1] roughly 1/3 of the company https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#15

Post by hsm3 »

Aloha wrote: post #5
simonh wrote: post #3

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball questions from the audience. https://www.youtube…

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go. Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo).

I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#16

Post by w10-1 »

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally.

Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bugs. Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.

I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out code that would last forever. Swing was built in a year. Signs on the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. One main engineering manager hired a bunch of kids out of college. The JDK tech lead, Mark Reinhold, is still at the helm today.

Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the U.S.

When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#17

Post by Aloha »

hsm3 wrote: post #15
Aloha wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go. Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion…

I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#18

Post by hsm3 »

I feel like the Isaacson bio is fairly accurate factually on that time, from what I knew as a senior SW Eng at NeXT/Apple. It was a huge course change, eventually pushed through the entire software org by Steve, the NeXT leadership and a set of Apple folks that chose to embrace the new direction.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#19

Post by baby »

w10-1 wrote: post #16

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…

What do you look at in engineering culture?

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#20

Post by AlanYx »

tejohnso wrote: post #6
simonh wrote: post #3

If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball questions from the audience. https://www.youtube…

Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?

Quantrix is still popular today for large financial modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to maintain that discipline.
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