In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.
Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was worried about which direction we were pointing."
The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.
> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...
This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.
Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.
Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.
The Microsoft deal was originally negotiated by Gil Amelio, and while the monetary investment is what got the headlines and is what people remember, the most important part of the negotiations to Apple was that Microsoft committed to keep developing Microsoft Office for the Mac, which they had been threatening to cancel due to the platforms insignificance. Without Office, the Mac had no future.
Yeah that was a big part of it, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it more important than preventing immediate bankruptcy.
"We'll give you a wodge of cash and we'll keep supplying Office for Mac, so you can continue to supply the market with a rival to our OS at a volume that's insignificant to us, but just significant enough to prevent Windows from falling under the DoJ's definition of a monopoly".
Not sure what point exactly you are making. But the Wall Street Journal had a bunch of stuff about Apple engaging what was later known as 'Enron-style accounting'. They were a big company, and they did have a serious cashflow problem. So they needed a bailout from someone. (which happened to be Microsoft rather than wall street)
Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.
What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS
NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.
At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.
All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.
WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.
Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.
But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.
Three decades ago, they would relentlessly snailmail spam us with these weekly industry tabloids like 'ComputerWorld' and 'PCWeek'. These were always fun to read at lunch, even if they were all obvious advertisements, but certainly better info than vaguely remembering something from your stoner phase and then sticking your junk out.
Yeah, I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS demonstration when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS did not have print drivers).
I agree. While it's definitely technically possible for Apple to transform BeOS into a more Mac-like experience much like how OPENSTEP was transformed, what saved Apple wasn't Mac OS X alone (which wasn't available for consumers until 2001), but Apple's cleaning up house and then gradually launching a revitalized product line, which brought in many new customers (especially the iMac). These things encouraged software developers to keep targeting the Mac and also bought time as people waited for Mac OS X. Apple also did a good job with Mac OS 8 and 9.
I don't think Apple under Jean-Louis Gassee would have successfully made these steps. Apple probably would have ended up getting purchased by some larger tech company by the end of 1999; Apple almost got purchased by IBM sometime around 1992-1993, and in early 1996 Sun made a serious proposal to buy Apple.
>> They just had very bad supply chain management.
The crazy thing is Joe O' Sullivan had set out a two month training for Tim Cook to learn the supply side of the company. Cook mastered it in two weeks and O' Sullivan was forced to step down a lot sooner then he anticipated.
You could easily say it was Cook, not Jobs that saved the company.
With the utmost respect to Tim Cook, Apple was saved by the
iMac, which was designed and built in the year leading up to his hire. Everything after that, though, he certainly deserves more credit for than he gets.
>Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then.
So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ...
Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.
Nokia is hardly a footnote, they even own UNIX birthplace nowadays.
People only know Nokia Mobiles, however Nokia Neteworks never went away and is more than healthy, owning plenty of key telecommunications infrastructure world wide.
>Nokia is hardly a footnote, they even own UNIX birthplace nowadays.
It's not exactly the pinnacle of corporate achievement owning a non-relevant for decades labs. Might as well own the birthplace of ENIAC too.
But also not very relevant to the discussion: Nokia had the infrastructure busines to rely on, while it's consumer side tanked. Apple only had the tanking consumer side. That side of Nokia is what we're comparing it with.
I must have missed the bit where Steve Jobs was trying to create “legion” of his offspring, supported far-right parties in Europe and tried to foment civil war in the UK.
Even then, Musk didn't cut fat and then produce multiple revolutionary products. He tanked Twitter's ad revenue and wound up with a much smaller business that had to get bailed out by SpaceX, otherwise it doesn't pay for the acquisition costs.
Keep in mind Apple was dispersed across a multitude of confusing and overlapping products, from computers, to PDAs, cameras, scanners, printers (laser and inkjet), application software, servers, things made by Apple, and things that only got Apple's label, and so on. A common complaint was that not even Apple employees could figure out which Mac was more powerful just from the model number.
Jobs simplified the lineup - two sets of laptops, two sets of desktops, one professional, one personal. This shut down a significant part of the operations across the board.
I am no fan of Jobs, but ... his goal when he returned was to "right the ship" which is his mind translated into "create cool products". You might think that he & Apple succeeded at that, or you might not, but I don't think that you can dispute that this was the goal.
Musk had no similar goal for Twitter other than to turn it into a platform for his techno-fascist creed. The only complaints about Twitter that he wanted to act on were that too many people were mean to techno-fascists.
You are implying that firing a lot of people is a bad thing, or at least that firing a lot of Apple or Twitter employees is a bad thing.
I don’t think I’m really that qualified to stand in judgment of the Twitter employees, but after the massive house cleaning, the only major negative changes to the company’s fortunes that I know about is that a lot of liberals decided to flee the platform. But that doesn’t seem connected to the layoffs - that would’ve still happened because of either their policy changes or his overall unpopularity with that crowd. We didn’t see any more notable stability problems with the platform than it had at any point in its long existence. And new features kept being shipped.
In the case of Apple, given that the company was so close to insolvency, I don’t see how anybody could seriously argue that most of management was in severe need of replacement. And when you’ve built an organization to do what turned out to be a lot of the wrong things, it’s likely that a lot of roles really do need to be replaced with different job descriptions.
The only way you can argue mass layoffs are always categorically bad is if we are viewing companies as jobs programs rather than pursuing any other mission (and I’d argue that this holds true even if that mission isn’t to make money).
That's how chapter 11 type bankruptcy works. The business continues to run but the debtors are now the owners. There's also chapter 7 where the business shuts down and stripped for parts to pay the debts.
Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.
Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.
It's batshit that people still talk like apple is lost technically when apple silicon has absolutely crushed, airpods are the default headphone of the world, and macbooks are the best overall package available at all price points. And why? because they arent interested in VR and the glass aesthetic is kind of janky? Absolutely minor issues.
The software isn't so good these days, even while the hardware has been the best in the world. Now that the guy responsible for the hardware will be CEO, maybe quality will come back to software too.
If you dont think apple silicon and rosetta rollout was a massively successful and high difficulty technical accomplishment I dont really know what to tell you. Just look at the windows ecosystems attempts to roll out arm devices. I can still use my 900 dollar m1 macbook air for almost anything and I have a desktop computer with 128gigs of memory and a 5090. And the battery lasts for days to the point I barely think of charging it. And my m5pro work laptop is just basically a perfect device. I think I use enough platforms to be a fair judge. I also detect the sloppiness in some of the software, im just saying in comparison its a pretty minor issue and theyre still executing way above the alternatives.
Apple detractors also live in a bubble. Apple was always after profit share not market share. They have 20% market share for mobile devices globally, which is still the highest among all the brands. But their profit share is an estimated 80%. How’s that not crushing it? Btw they don’t have to be in every product market under the sun. It’s a bizarre observation. Getting out of the businesses where they don’t have margins perfectly makes sense.
True but people also forget Microsoft invested a lot of $ into Apple to keep it going. M/S did that so they could point to Apple as a competitor during their anti-trust trials.
That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.
