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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?

#201

Post by mbesto »

MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work…

> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled.

Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means?

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

#202

Post by JKCalhoun »

diskzero wrote: post #147
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…

When I came back to Apple in 2000, I remember walking to visit a friend from Eazel (John Harper) who was working on CoreAnimation and seeing your office. I was totally star struck, way more than having to deal with Steve every week. I mean, you are the guy who wrote Glider!

Ha ha, and Harper is a fucking rock star. He's a quiet guy but I recall chatting with him once about music — I thought it was awesome that he was into Elliott Smith.

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

#203

Post by rasz »

robomartin wrote: post #194

I would imagine not everyone on HN knows that Microsoft saved Apple from going bankrupt in 1997 [0]. Jobs made a deal with Gates for a $150MM investment that would effectively save Apple. Of course, both companies got something out of it. Nobody gives you that kind of money for free. It a great business lesson. Your competitor doesn't have to lose for you to win. It is also important to remain humble. You never know…

Looks like not everyone knows his is all a lie, in reality $150m was a settlement in a lawsuit going after Microsoft, Intel and third party contractor. Microsoft got caught conspiring with Intel, paying third party contractor to steal QuickTime code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

>David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million.

>It a great business lesson.

that stealing is bad?

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

#204

Post by m0llusk »

ghostly_s wrote: post #168
m0llusk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly I only saw Steve doing this like two or three times. The group that was next to mine was not large and was gone in about a week. Heard similar stories from others who observed Steve Jobs randomly talking to people who then left and also heard some of these people talking about these events. Morale was very low in many groups at that time and a lot of people working there had quite remarkable egos.

Doesn't it seem more likely that the CEO (or proto-CEO, you didn't clarify what time period this was) fired these people after they were uncooperative in these informal talks?

On at least one occasion an employee posted on an internal discussion board that they were offended and quit out of what they considered basic defense of dignity and protocol. In terms of the whole group being gone in a week? Sure, at least one of those people were probably fired. I was really busy at this time so this is a highly subjective recollection based on my point of view and my interactions with others in person and on the highly active employee message boards.

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

#205

Post by JKCalhoun »

diskzero wrote: post #146

I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months. I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia. The FCP team l…

> and the political shenanigans began

And a lot of coat-tail riding. Kind of the beginning of the end of the good times as an engineer (as far as I was concerned).

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

#206

Post by JKCalhoun »

diskzero wrote: post #159
scroot wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full retrospective of that group!

I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language. Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2] There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear…

> There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down.

I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple?

IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could play with. My manager let us know one day we might pop over to the library and "check out a few books" - a little bird had told him that we might not have to return them as the library was going bye bye.

And so it did. Eventually I think I donated my Foley and Van-Dam to a library for their book sale.

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

#207

Post by Rury »

dmix wrote: post #118
bhawks wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iron law of bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the fo…

I've always wondered what the Iron Solution to Bureaucracy looks like. Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled off from the middle managers of the larger company, was pushed by Cla…

Some degree of bureaucracy is necessary and inevitable in any organization, as it's basically the glue that makes a group of people an organization. Imagine how difficult it'd be to collaborate on a project with even just one other person, if you didn't meet / pass notes / info on what each you were doing on the project, at least once. That process of passing info, is what constitutes bureaucracy, and bureaucrats act as the gatekeepers of such processes.

So unfortunately, there isn't really an "Iron" solution to bureaucracy (depending on what you mean by "Iron"). The best you can do is work to minimize the amount of it (akin to optimizing an algorithm so that it's more efficient), but some level or amount will always remain, and that amount is largely related to how large the organization is.

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

#208

Post by CyberDildonics »

m0llusk wrote: post #204
ghostly_s wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it seem more likely that the CEO (or proto-CEO, you didn't clarify what time period this was) fired these people after they were uncooperative in these informal talks?

On at least one occasion an employee posted on an internal discussion board that they were offended and quit out of what they considered basic defense of dignity and protocol. In terms of the whole group being gone in a week? Sure, at least one of those people were probably fired. I was really busy at this time so this is a highly subjective recollection based on my point of view and my interactions with others in pe…

To be clear then, it wasn't "essentialy every Apple employee in this position", it was one person who posted on a message board.

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

#209

Post by FpUser »

jimt1234 wrote: post #80
baby wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you look at in engineering culture?

I had a friend interview at "Big Nameless Corp" a few years ago. He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture. I always thought that was funny.

>"He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an engineer-friendly culture."

"Friend" should have his head examined. This kind of snobbery attitude does not do any good

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

#210

Post by microtherion »

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…

Part of that may also have been the greenfield development nature of JavaSoft; it's often easier to make rapid progress if you don't have to be backward compatible with preexisting APIs etc.

And from what I heard, Sun as a whole was a highly dysfunctional company as well, even during the time in question. The dot com boom just papered over a lot of the dysfunction for a few years.

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