The famous story is that Apple was nosediving under the current CEO and that Apple's acquisition of NeXT (and bringing Steve Jobs back as CEO) revitalised the company.<p>I read about drastic staff / product cuts and re-focusing on the company, however that was always told from the outside.<p>Was someone working at Apple during that transition and has any interesting stories / can share their experience?
I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)…<p>So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.<p>Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange.
Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.<p>Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable.
More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.<p>Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).<p>It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.<p>Edit: fixing a few typos
I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)!<p>I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work. And no, I'm not a datacenter employee, everyone on the team did everything, there were just very few of us.<p>We had to work from about 10am to about 3 or 4 am every day to make the deadline, we sometimes got Sundays off. There was a lot of rage and anger at many management levels.<p>Steve would get a question about a two button mouse at every company meeting, he was super pissed every time about the question. We enjoyed trolling him.<p>Steve's attention to detail was unbelievable. I once witnessed him make a team work overnight just to move an icon 10 pixels to the left.<p>The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. He was able to figure out the concept of "cloud" well before its time, and make a shift towards that.<p>Of course, he was an supernatural presenter. I witnessed him present through some really messed up errors in live demos and no one I asked in the audience afterwards even noticed the errors.<p>It was an insane work environment, never seen anything like it.
I'm really thankful I had a chance to work at 1 Infinite Loop during that time. I worked with other Developer Relations folks in IL3, with near-daily trips to IL2 to either meet with folks on the QuickTime team or just hang out. Occasionally I'd get early glimpses at things like QTi and HyperCard 3.<p>I vividly recall the day Steve introduced the iMac in the Infinite Loop quad. If I had to pick a day that telegraphed Apple's future fortunes, it would be that day. Rhapsody's potential was compelling, but as Macintosh OS it was still pretty Crapsody at the time. The iMac was a Real Thing — as friendly as computers get, that only Apple could've created and sold.
I was a T.Rbbt back in the SF Bay Area, over a decade ago, in the early wild west days of the "gig economy;" one of my first gigs was to "throw away a bunch of old electronics." As a diehard Apple fanboy, since 1991, I was excited for even the opportunity to throw away old history (knowing nothing more than "old electronics").<p>Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I knew immediately that these would be nicer "old electronics" — turns out it was a BUNCH of PROTOTYPE Apple Computers (no "LISA," but plenty of history and unique items, given their hacked-together nature); 'WOZ literally had his hands on at least ONE of these,' I remember thinking; 'CERTAINLY!'<p>I mistakenly told the disposer of this "old electronics" <i>just how cool all this HISTORY was</i>, to which he immediately realized that I wasn't going to be throwing any of it away. Needless to say, he accompanied me to the junkyard as we both watched Apple History get run over by a skidsteer.<p>Just tragic. PS T.R. sucks - gfkt Leah!
Yes. One of the more memorable things that happened went on when I moved my office to Infinite Loop. Steve Jobs was curious about everything, so he would walk the halls, knock on doors, introduce himself "Hi. I'm Steve Jobs." And then ask about what people were working on. I was jealous as I would have loved to point out the biggest challenges we were dealing with in the hope of getting more resources. To my astonishment essentialy every Apple employee in this position objected "You can't ask me that!" And then quit the next day. It was genuinely bizarre to witness this.
I was at Claris (subsidiary of Apple at the time, my paychecks were from Apple) up in Portland right before then.<p>Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. It was such a pretty UI.<p>The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on HN here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139</a><p>I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and try to release the software.<p>Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.<p>Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.<p>It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at the time.<p>I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k. After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.
I didn't work there, but for all you old-timers, I attended the Brass Ring job fair at the Santa Clara convention center, early 1997 before Jobs rejoined.<p>I distinctly remember the Apple recruitment booth was empty, vs all of the high-activity booths around them. I remember it vividly because it was sad seeing how far they had fallen, people weren't interested in even talking to the recruiter.<p>Imagine getting a job at Apple in 1997 and never selling a share. I know some people that have been at Apple for 12+ years and are planning on retiring next year, they are multi-multi-millionaires just from regular stock grants.
Some stories I’ve heard over the years when I was at Apple Retail. I cannot confirm or deny any of these are true and maybe someone here can corroborate them.<p>- employees used to steal Steve’s license plates as a joke so that’s why he was always leasing cars. The maximum grace period for getting plates was six months so he’d change Mercedes every six months.<p>- Steve used to park in the handicap spot up front at IL1.<p>- there was gourmet chocolate milk for Steve stashed in the back of refrigerators at Cafe Macs. Yes I know he was vegan but I questioned the story as well. Apparently it was a secret indulgence only a few knew about.<p>- he had his own connection from PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange) to his house.<p>- he had his own mail server at Apple.<p>- an employee with the corporate email steve@ before Steve’s return was asked to give up his email address for Steve.<p>- Steve had his own personal IS&T person to go to his house or work on things for him. On average they lasted a few months before Steve asked that tech be fired (for whatever reason), and HR just shuffled them somewhere else in the company.<p>- if you were in an elevator with Steve after coming back from a smoke break, you were likely in deep shit and probably out of a job.<p>I remember using an old company directory tool app for employees and looking up Steve. It said he report to Woz. When you looked up Woz, it said he reported to Steve.
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 anything written much later. I didn't care for Walter Isaacson's book much, he injects too much of his own opinion into things and besides being obnoxious I don't think his calibration on the business is very good.
I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared.<p>[1] roughly 1/3 of the company <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-bullet-cuts-4100-jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...</a>
I feel like the Isaacson bio is fairly accurate factually on that time, from what I knew as a senior SW Eng at NeXT/Apple. It was a huge course change, eventually pushed through the entire software org by Steve, the NeXT leadership and a set of Apple folks that chose to embrace the new direction.
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.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s</a>
I wasn’t working there but when Jobs came back, Gil Amelio was at the helm, not Sculley. Sculley was long gone by that time. Also worth noting is that Amelio had also cancelled a bunch of projects to cut down costs but Jobs’ was more drastic.
I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less than eighteen months.<p>I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.<p>The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private office and there was a lot of commotion.<p>The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company. Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.<p>Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end gear to help make FCP a commercial success.<p>I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me down.<p>The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found; DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.<p>It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil, Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John Sullivan) at Eazel.<p>Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually ended up at Apple anyway.<p>The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there. It would take several more years before I felt that things felt healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2 and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far cry from the bleak days of 1997!
At that time, Apple made bids for two operating systems. One was Next, represented by Steve Jobs and the other was BeOS, represented by Jean Louis Gasee.<p>I still believe Apple did a bad choice because, in my opinion BeOS was the far superior OS paradigm. Next was a Nix clone with some GUI over it, but BeOS was different, was smarter and the world is poorer after its demise.
One weird story I heard was some people who were there when Steve left and still there when he returned were called into his office to be berated for...lack of loyalty to his vision?<p>I've only heard it twice, and only once in any detail. It strikes me as both far fetched rationally but also weirdly possible with Jobs.
I was not there, but two things from that summer have stuck with me.<p>First, Steve killed Cyberdog. You'd have thought the world was coming to an end. Second, he came in with his Openstep Thinkpad, and that was it for months. I thought they'd turn that OS around, leverage MAE, and have Openstep 5 running by mid-98.
I would imagine not everyone on HN knows that Microsoft saved Apple from going bankrupt in 1997 [0].<p>Jobs made a deal with Gates for a $150MM investment that would effectively save Apple. Of course, both companies got something out of it. Nobody gives you that kind of money for free.<p>It a great business lesson. Your competitor doesn't have to lose for you to win.<p>It is also important to remain humble. You never know when you'll need help. I am going through an interesting moment right now while starting a new tech business.<p>While I have funded 100% of it myself so far, my best customer is someone who was in direct and intense competition with my other business 15 years ago. We are now talking about him coming-in as an investor and taking-over CEO responsibilities so I can focus on technology. Had we been nasty to each other over a decade ago, these conversations would have been impossible today.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-what-happened-when-microsoft-saved-apple.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...</a>
It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally.<p>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 bugs. Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.<p>I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out code that would last forever. Swing was built in a year. Signs on the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. One main engineering manager hired a bunch of kids out of college. The JDK tech lead, Mark Reinhold, is still at the helm today.<p>Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the U.S.<p>When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.
One of the most famous examples was Jony Ive. Jony was recruited to Apple in 1992 after Steve left.<p>Jony did not come from NeXT, as many seem to believe.
I did not work there, but I had a copy of this iconic June 1997 issue of Wired Magazine and managed to lose it somehow:<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/2008/03/bz-apple-ourbad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2008/03/bz-apple-ourbad/</a>