Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 322 posts

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

#131

Post by KerrAvon »

hot_gril wrote: post #35
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…

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into…

No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple.

(a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it.

(b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to survive.

Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its life with every hardware release until the iPod.

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

#132

Post by KerrAvon »

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.

No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff.

It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix.

What they ended up getting was adult management, which was not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple needed.

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

#133

Post by spfzero »

hinkley wrote: post #26
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…

Right before that era I worked on Mosaic for Windows, and the Mac developers sat across the stairwell from us. The Mac guys had a very love hate relationship with Macs. On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to duck and…

> "Your printah is out of paypah."

Oh man that brings back memories!

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

#134

Post by xrd »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #121
xrd wrote: post #98

I was at Claris (subsidiary of Apple at the time, my paychecks were from Apple) up in Portland right before then. Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. I…

> Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (Steve Jobs' new company before he returned to Apple). Are you sure it wasn't NeXT that you're thinking of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History

Doh, you are right. BeOS was from different former Apple employees. Thanks!

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

#135

Post by spc476 »

Aperocky wrote: post #25
TremendousJudge wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask interviewers and they will always tell you that they have great culture, teamwork, etc

Easy, Ask where the documentation is. Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on. Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.

Ask if I find a bug in the code, what's the process to getting it fixed? And about how long is that?

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

#136

Post by cutenewt »

KerrAvon wrote: post #123
JKCalhoun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that sticks with me was the demo to the engineering team of "Aqua". A small team had been developing the new "lickable" user interface that was called Aqua. Before the release of OS X with the new UI, Jobs assembled the engineers that worked on the OS that would be tasked with carrying the UI throughout with their frameworks/apps. In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a k…

I heard about that meeting from someone who was also there -- supposedly Steve also said in response to the booing something to the effect that "what the hell has Apple done in the last ten years?"

Sounds like a Jobsian version of Musk's "what have you done this week"

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

KerrAvon wrote: post #131
hot_gril wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into…

No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple. (a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by deltree7 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #79
Communitivity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes, factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional support). I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC…

I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee a…

You can make a very good case for any organization to replace

Java => Go

C++ => Rust

The Database and System software that was created in 2000s very much was based on Java. But modern, performant Database and System software is written in Go/C++.

https://landscape.cncf.io/

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

#139

Post by KerrAvon »

hedgehog wrote: post #34

The best reading on that period I'm aware of is the Jim Carleton book "Apple". He's a WSJ reporter who was covering the company at the time and the book covers the period ending around when Jobs returned but before he stepped in as CEO. The thing I find most interesting about that book is it was written without being tainted by knowledge of the company's later resurgence. It provides a really different take than anyt…

I have the Carlton book; beware that it is chock full of inaccuracies -- I don't recommend it. Gil Amelio's book ("On the Firing Line"?) is better.

Isaacson's book is like the notes one takes before writing the actual book -- a starting point, but very incomplete and there's no center to it. If you want to read a Jobs biography that is good -- but does not pull punches -- "Becoming Steve Jobs" is the one to get.

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

#140

Post by nr2x »

par wrote: post #84
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…

> Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. Sounds a lot like a lot of FAANG companies today.

Can confirm.
Post reply on HN