Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
I would submit that Rob Mee (founder of Pivotal Labs, former CEO of Pivotal) is one of the greatest unsung heroes of Silicon Valley. So many of the biggest success stories in tech today were either advised by him or worked with Pivotal Labs in their early stages.
Both Twitter and Square are notable examples, but it is a very, very long list. Google also worked with Pivotal Labs in their early days.
Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
Tim Cook arguably made Apple what it is today. Without him, Apple might've had great products but failed miserably in the supply chain management side of the business. It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive. Tech aficionados (myself included) might have qualms about their product strategy, but overall the business continues to be wildly successful with regula…
How much of that is staying power because of the ecosystem and just enough incremental improvements to keep consumers happy? I agree that Tim Cook made all of the logistics work to turn the dream into reality but now that Jobs is gone it just feels like the dream stopped evolving and lots of blemishes and complexity are slipping into the operating systems that Jobs wouldn't have allowed.
I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from…
Definitely. Steve was unique, and his fanatical devotion to simplicity and quality established Apple as a force to be reckoned with.
Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
Why VMWare/Patrick?
(The rest make sense to me because of all the hullabaloo around the company comebacks...)
I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from…
Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.
Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO. A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of startup OPs pain under his belt.
Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
Tim Cook arguably made Apple what it is today. Without him, Apple might've had great products but failed miserably in the supply chain management side of the business. It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive. Tech aficionados (myself included) might have qualms about their product strategy, but overall the business continues to be wildly successful with regula…
"It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive."
Tim Cook is clearly incredibly important to the success of Apple, but from a product perspective it is a refinement of all the products Steve Jobs launched that still carry the company. Those products are faster and slicker and have better cameras -- the innovations afforded to a hyper-profitable company -- but it isn't like Apple has done a 90 degree turn or anything. They aren't a smartphone/pad/computer company that turned into a smartcar/massage chair company.
Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
Nadella has been amazing and Huang underrated. Bezos should be on that list?
Grove vs. Jobs is interesting (for discussion; not that we can't just put them both in the same very small group at the top). For example, difficult to envision anyone being a better CEO for Apple than Jobs was. On other hand, if you take any_random_company, and put either Grove or Jobs at the helm, then Grove is likely the better fit for a much higher percentage?
Slightly Off Topic. I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two ) Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell. Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Ap…
Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.
Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround sto…
Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)
Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.
Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround sto…
I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.