Gil Amelio's 500 Days at Apple

Sabah Arif writes "Apple Computer was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy on January 31, 1996, when Gil Amelio succeeded Michael Spindler as CEO. The first thing he did was turn down an acquisition offer from Sun Microsystems, then he moved to secure Apple's short term financial future by having a huge bond sale. As he restructured the company (and cut 3,000 jobs), Amelio realized that the Copland project would never finish, and decided to buy NeXT Software, paving the way for Steve Jobs' triumphant return in 1997. Read the whole story of Amelio's 500 days with Apple."

nice article

[sam_paris]

That is a really nice insight into Gil's time at Apple. I always assumed he had been a total waste of time but he did in fact do quite a lot of good.

At the time of Amelios reign I had a IIcx and a performa 5200 and was pretty un-happy with the direction the mac os was going in. I remember the copland project getting pushed further and further back and in fact I remember modding system 7 to make it look like copland using a resedit hack I downloaded.

Also, the funniest thing is I went to Apple expo in london during Amelios reign and actually got a free mac t shirt from Power Computing which was advertising their 225 mhz mac clone. The slogan was "Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess of 225Mhz!!!" and on the back "My mac is faster than your mac". Classic!

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[account_deleted]

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Re:nice article

[R2.0]

I'm reminded of a comment a biker friend of mine made about his Harley. It was made during the AMF days, which are generally viewed by the Harley types as a very dark period. But Skip pointed out that, although the bikes actually produced during that time may have been substandard, without the money AMF invested in a money-losing operation, there wouldn't be ANY Harley's in production today. Harley would have folded like every other American motorcycle manufacturer.

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[account_deleted]

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interesting to see

[toQDuj]

It appears Amelio already did much of the reorganisation needed for keeping the company afloat, thus paving the way to success for Jobs.
However, the information on the discussions with Gates shows that Amelio wasn't as charismatic as Jobs was, and that may have been the killing blow.
It also shows the disastrous effects a ruined presentation can have. Equipment failures and bad planning forced the CEO to ad lib his presentation and it turned into a badly cue'd 3 hour "drone-athon" instead of the 1.5 hour show it was supposed to be. Heed this warning all ye gentlemen.
All in all an interesting read that also shows the Jobs already forcing things to his hand in the few months he got back. Apparently he also had Jobs afficionado's in place since the early days in various positions at Apple.

Cool.

B.

Re:interesting to see

[Halfbaked Plan]

Jobs couldn't have developed his own office, though. They could have warmed up the Claris Works codebase, which might have sufficed for the 'productivity suite' a 3rd grade school teacher needs to administer her classroom, but that's about it.

Buying WordPerfect outright is not 'developing an Office suite.' Jobs is smarter to make that sort of ridiculous claim. And, uh, Jobs is not a techie. He's the kind of guy who hangs around the techies and knows how to trick them into producing something he can shil

Re:interesting to see

[allanc]

Grandparent wasn't saying Jobs was a techie, he was saying Amelio (co-inventor of the CCD, among other credentials) was.

Re:interesting to see

[Ohreally_factor]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. MS did agree to develop Office for OS X, once Steve was the "interim" CEO (aka iCEO). Not only that, but MS also agreed to invest $300 Million in non-voting shares of Apple stock. All in exchange for Apple shipping Macs with IE pre-installed.

Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.

Rather, MS was feeling anti-trust pressure from other quarters. Pointing to this deal, they could say, "See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."

Re:interesting to see

[IntlHarvester]

> Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.

Actually, yes. The deal was part of a broader settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit, started by Amelio I believe. Anyway, Apple was quite explicit about using the lawsuit as leverage to get MS to support their next generation OS.

Re:interesting to see

[Sabah Arif]

You're wrong. Microsoft hired a company to write Video for Windows, but that company used Quicktime for Windows code, so Apple considered suing Microsoft.

Google for QuickTime source code lawsuit

[metamatic]

Apple had discovered that Microsoft had stolen QuickTime source code and used it in Video for Windows. The trial was going very well for Apple. Yet it was suddenly dropped when Microsoft agreed to make the "investment" in Apple.

Ask yourself this: if the "investment" wasn't under threat, why do you think the full terms were kept so secret?

Re:Google for QuickTime source code lawsuit

[Ohreally_factor]

Yes, you are correct. I forgot about the settlement.

However, what I was responding to was the assertion that Jobs threatened Gates that Apple would develop its own Office suite, and that Gates folded because "Gates knew Jobs could outdo them."

Let's not forget IE!

[Inoshiro]

"See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Office for a competing OS."

And, ""See? We're not engaging in anti-copetitive behavior. We're developing Internet Explorer for a competing OS."

Although this fought against their assertation that IE was a part of the OS, it did allow them to say, "only support IE, it's on everything anyone can pay to run!"

Jobs was smart enough to start his own browser development so that the MacOS could stand on its own. A browser is one of the most impor

Re:interesting to see

[MCSEBear]

You might also recall that at the next 'Stevenote' Steve and most of the other people involved had to throw in the statement, "IE is my browser of choice on Mac." One of the developers who hit the stage even said "I think this is where I'm supposed to say IE is my browser of choice on Mac." You have to remember back to when the browser wars were the most important thing in Microsoft's worldview.

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[account_deleted]

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I used Copland

[Xyde]

and it was a piece of shit. I installed it on a 7100/80 a couple of years ago and if it managed to start up at all, it would crash within a few minutes. Half the menu items were missing, and the HFS driver was buggy so it would eventually render itself totally unbootable anyway, requiring a reformat/reinstall. Yes i'm sure NuKernel was going to be revolutionary but they were right to axe it.

Or maybe i just had a really old build (D11E4 IIRC)...

Re:I used Copland

[Halfbaked Plan]

Apple had to look outside the company for their next-Gen OS. By that point in the company's history, the rank and file employees had taken over, and the most important 'initiative' for them was making sure they had the right to keep their dogs in their cubicles. The history of Copeland puts a kabosh on the notion of 'something magic at Apple.' There was something 'magic' earlier, but it had dissipated by then.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:I used Copland

[IntlHarvester]

Very informative post -- I recall the furor on Usenet when it was revealed that Copland was not going be a "modern OS" , but I don't think the details were widely known.

One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM. Which necessitated some sort of Win95ish approach.

Re:I used Copland

[argent]

One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM.

Apple was running a classic virtual machine under System V UNIX in the *early* nineties. But classic Mac OS was born doomed, the API guaranteed that nobody would ever be able to do multitasking under Mac OS without using fixed partitions... which was a performance killer for low-memory systems even with demand paging. They should have replaced the API by 1990 with one that used opaque handles like UNIX, or required explicit locking of handles during use. That would have allowed a single classic application alongside multiple New API applications, which would have been good enough for a transition if it had been started early enough.

Given that the classic environment in A/UX was System 6, they were actually on the way there. But System 7 incorporated The Grand Maltitasking Charade by default and they couldn't really go back after that.

Re:I used Copland

[IntlHarvester]

True, but I ran AU/X on a 20MB machine in the early-90s, and it was horribly swappy compared to native MacOS.

Re:I used Copland

[argent]

A/UX made no attempt to provide a transitional environment to a new API. It ran multiple System 6 environments, for the Finder, for the Terminal, for whatever graphical applications you were running. I'm also not sure how much of the virtual memory capabilities of System V were made available to manage partitions... some of the System V releases of that period were still swappers rather than pagers, and swapping would have been MUCH easier to implement for classic partitions. Anyway, it wasn't the "new OS"

Alternate suggestion.

[gklinger]

If you're really interested in this particular phase of Apple's history you can get the story directly from the horse's mouth (so to speak) by reading Gil, pardon me, Dr. Gil Amelio's book On the Firing Line [amazon.com] which details his 500 days at Apple. I've read just about every book out there on Apple's history and On the Firing Line along with John Sculley's Odyssey [amazon.com] are two of the more interesting ones as they were written by former CEOs. You'll get the story directly from an insider (you can't get much more inside than the guy running the company) but sadly, there is quite a bit of historical revision going on.

My conclusions? Sculley was star-struck and too button-down to run a 'geek' company and Gil Amelio was overrated and near to the most arrogant person on Earth. Of course, BIG personalities like theirs fit right into Apple's history along with guys like Mark Markkula, Mike Scott and Mr. Reality Distortion himself.

The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple. If there was ever a subject for a movie, this is it.

Re:Alternate suggestion.

[Mattintosh]

The hacks writing As the World Turns could never come with anything half as interesting or dramatic as the history of Apple.

Which is why we have As the Apple Turns [appleturns.com]. Of course, they could do with a few more frequent updates. Very funny, but not as fresh as it used to be. Having kids kinda put a crimp in the website's pace.

Comment about the jet

[Miros]

I diddnt like the way the writter wrote this paragraph

"Amelio had long been an avid amateur pilot, and he owned his own private jet that Apple used. Instead of allowing the struggling Apple to use the jet free of charge, Amelio created an independent company, Aero, to manage it and charge Apple for any fuel and maintenance the plane might need during company flights."

It makes it sound like he should have let the company use his jet for free, meaning that he would pick up the tab for fuel and maintenance, which, for a jet, has to be horrifically expensive. How is it unreasonable to have the company pay for the fuel and maintenance on something like a jet? It's not like he was charging a rent or anything...

Re:Comment about the jet

[Daniel Jansen]

What the writer missed is that Aero was charging Apple something like $125,000 per hour to use the jet.

Other than that, a very good read and a nice perspective on Amelio's crucial role in keeping Apple independent and solvent.

500 days?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Well, that's 5 times as much as Napoleon got before Waterloo....

Please tell me Steve Jobs' middle name isn't "Louis".

20th Anniversary Macintosh

[Warlock7]

The single greatest failure of Gil Amelio was approving the 20th Anniversary Macintosh [everymac.com], codename Spartacus [bott.org]. The design was inspired when compared to the standard "pizza boxes" of the time, but the machine was completely overpriced at around $7500 and completely underpowered when compared with the other Macintosh machines which were available at the time. The "TAM" ran at 250MHz while Apple had PowerMac 9600s available earlier that same year running dual processors at 200MHz.

If you expect people to pay pr

Re:20th Anniversary Macintosh

[dan_bethe]

It wasn't a failure at all. It was a proof of concept and an homage to Macintosh. It was the kind of technology that was written about in Playboy magazine, because it was a nod to the future where a computer would become a standard lifestyle component. They expected people to fawn over it, write about it, and spend decades trying to find one -- not to buy it.

Re:20th Anniversary Macintosh

[IntlHarvester]

Well, it might have been successful as an image machine, but Apple had to heavily discount the things to get rid of them, and they had numerous recalls.

Excuses, excuses

[d0n quix0te]

Gil is right up there as one of the worst managers of Apple. The article, is quite naive in looking at all the events from Amelio's point of view. The guy was practically milking the company to death, $2000 a day to lease his private jet to apple? A $5M loan. And always blaming others for his failures. Case in point, Macworld presentations: Jobs practices his speech several times to make sure everything goes without a hitch, and here you have a guy blaming his speech writer and a failed teleprompter for his