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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?

#71

Post by hot_gril »

kypro wrote: post #63
hot_gril wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, it's not a good comparison. > it will never happen I can see it happening. They have just one cash cow in advertising, and it's not terribly secure. TikTok is already a serious threat to YouTube. If this became a crisis, it wouldn't sink the company, but it'd certainly shake it up.

The "TikTok threat" is so overblown. It's not activity competing with any existing social or video platform. It's competing for time, but that's about it. No one is using TikTok to stay in touch with their Grandmother or watching 2 hour Podcasts on it. They invented a new type of video entertainment which has a social element, that's it - it's neither a YouTube or a social network competitor. I'd argue Snapchat is pr…

It directly competes for some use cases, for time, and for ads. One person's total time spent watching videos doesn't grow just because there's a new platform on the block. Kids even use TikTok as an alternative to Google searches for knowledge. I'm not saying TikTok alone can wreck Google, but YouTube at least felt threatened enough to make something similar called Shorts.

IDK about the social network side. Google doesn't really have one, so it's whatever.

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

#72

Post by hot_gril »

pvg wrote: post #56
hot_gril wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends how it's losing. Could be like Yahoo! who just accepted its fate and sank as gracefully as possible, or could be like Apple who fought back.

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

#73

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Obligatory story how someone tailgated to apple’s office long after being fired to finish his project around ‘94 I think: https://youtu.be/Dl643JFJWig

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

#74

Post by bombcar »

hot_gril wrote: post #61
sillysaurusx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People h…

A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive).

And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.

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

#75

Post by ComputerGuru »

Communitivity wrote: post #68
StevePerkins wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console o…

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…

Java has long been crippled beyond the regular GC limitations by lack of value types, but that’s finally, finally going away.

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

#76

Post by purpleblue »

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.

Amelio was going to drive Apple straight off a cliff with his vision of opening up MacOS and basically destroying the brand. SGI did that and the company no longer exists now.

Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and all its products is beyond comparison to Android.

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

#77

Post by hot_gril »

bombcar wrote: post #74
hot_gril wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People h…

A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.

They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time, CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing everyone's using.

They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).

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

#78

Post by mypalmike »

Aperocky wrote: post #47
origin_path wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many classes do you think it should have, ballpark, given the same feature set? GUI toolkits alone can produce thousands of classes because there are thousands of concepts that make sense to model, then add on security, collections, many utilities, XML handling, multiple RPC systems and so on. It's hard to over-state how large the Java standard library is. And it's not like other ecosystems do better. The standar…

If it is necessary to have that many classes, then there should be so many classes. but in Java everything is a class, main function? in a class. a library of static functions? in a class.

Sure, classes act as namespaces in that case. What pain point does it cause?

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

#79

Post by StevePerkins »

Communitivity wrote: post #68
StevePerkins wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console o…

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 and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap.

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

#80

Post by jimt1234 »

baby wrote: post #19
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?

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.
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