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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?

#51

Post by temende »

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…

Do you have a link to the book? Googling "Jim Carleton apple book" doesn't turn up anything (although your comment is already now ranked #3 for that search query!)

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

#52

Post by hot_gril »

pvg wrote: post #49
hot_gril wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.

It's very much apples to goggles - google is gigantic, mature company with some problems and one that makes occasional missteps. It still makes many things people like, including truckfuls of money. 1997 Apple had a very enthusiastic userbase, small and dwindling market share, mostly terrible products and was teetering on the edge of extinction.

It's more how I feel about the SWE culture, not the company's fate. You're right that they're very different scenarios, including the fact that it's not 1997 anymore.

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

#53

Post by sillysaurusx »

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…

That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.

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

#54

Post by duskwuff »

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…

> So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs.

Not just making the same tradeoffs, but making a lot of the same software -- early PalmOS was effectively a handheld remake of Mac OS. Same CPU architecture, very similar OS design. Some of the A-traps even had similar or identical names.

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

#55

Post by aasasd »

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…

> A lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling.

Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?

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

#56

Post by pvg »

hot_gril wrote: post #52
pvg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very much apples to goggles - google is gigantic, mature company with some problems and one that makes occasional missteps. It still makes many things people like, including truckfuls of money. 1997 Apple had a very enthusiastic userbase, small and dwindling market share, mostly terrible products and was teetering on the edge of extinction.

It's more how I feel about the SWE culture, not the company's fate. You're right that they're very different scenarios, including the fact that it's not 1997 anymore.

It's just a fundamentally different thing to be working for a company that is not a burning shipwreck. It influences culture and everything else much more strongly than some of the organizational parallels (although I think these are pretty weak as well). Imagine what working at Google would be like if Google was a losing search engine company.

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

#57

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #31
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…

Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.

[deleted]

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

#58

Post by akamaka »

temende wrote: post #51
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…

Do you have a link to the book? Googling "Jim Carleton apple book" doesn't turn up anything (although your comment is already now ranked #3 for that search query!)

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Jim-Carlton/dp/0887309658

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

#59

Post by kroger »

temende wrote: post #51
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…

Do you have a link to the book? Googling "Jim Carleton apple book" doesn't turn up anything (although your comment is already now ranked #3 for that search query!)

Maybe that's the book? (by Jim Carlton):

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Jim-Carlton/dp/0887309658

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

#60

Post by marcusverus »

temende wrote: post #51
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…

Do you have a link to the book? Googling "Jim Carleton apple book" doesn't turn up anything (although your comment is already now ranked #3 for that search query!)

Try "Jim Carlton", sans the 'e'.
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