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…
Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.
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 where the documentation is.
I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.
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…
You guys were creating Java?
> ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year.
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 anything written much later. I didn't care for Walter Isaacson's book much, he injects too much of his own opinion into things and besides being obnoxious I don't think his calibration on the business is very good.
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 an Electron app. Maybe the guy in the audience was right.
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 where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.
We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of documentations but they are not exactly organized or all up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of them I would guess.
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…
You guys were creating Java? > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell
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…
Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people have that many of us can’t grasp. This talk is a great victory for amazing product management.
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…
It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, ev…
I read that one differently. His presentation style was not as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that situation. He knew that the current product line was very poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing, supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve them.