I love this! It's cool seeing a boots on the ground perspective of Apple in '98. I think that thing that surprises me the most in this is that in only 10 years, apple unveils the iphone. 2010 - 2020 feels like a lot less of a jump than 1998 t0 2008.
It was a HUGE decade for everyone in the West anyways. 2008 still feels like today and it mostly is. 1998 felt like, well the 90s, we hadn't even hit 2000 yet, and had all this end of the world, next millennium zeitgeist in the air.
> After that, we briefly discussed Amelio, and his book, and Steve said that Amelio "has fucked up everything he did, except hire Fred Anderson as CFO." He said that if you looked at all of this year's California graduating high school classes, anyone in th top 10% could have run Apple better than Amelio.
As Apple CEO, Amelio decided to acquire NeXT which both saved Jobs’s company from imminent bankruptcy and gave Apple the OS it needed to become a consumer tech juggernaut. But I guess that doesn’t count for Steve…
Didn't that act (plus a timely infusion of cash from none other than Microsoft themselves) more or less save Apple from (not quite as imminent) bankruptcy as well?
I am not familiar with the story behind this. Is that a fair assessment or is it just unfounded critique from a person who was known to be harsh at times?
Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.
After reading a bunch of books (including Amelio's own), this is my take:
Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own.
This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together).
The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back.
Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people.
Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple)
That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.
The characterization of Rhapsody being "cancelled" and Mac OS X just being MacOS on a Mach Kernel is rather odd. In my recollection, the original Rhapsody plan was essentially Cocoa apps (with a NeXTStep-like look) + the Classic emulator. What the change of plans to Mac OS X did was add "Carbon" to the equation (i.e. native MacOS APIs in the unix environment), and give the whole thing a facelift.
From the point of a developer, it could be considered a major departure in that instead of a complete rewrite, apps could also become native with more modest changes. But that does not mean that the Rhapsody path was abolished — far from it.
As far as PowerPC hardware is concerned, this is not all that different from my characterization (though I was omitting the Display Postscript to Quartz transition, which was indeed quite significant).
I had not paid attention to the cross platform promises of the Rhapsody strategy, so it's possible I was missing just how much of that was publicly promised and then abolished.
I was never a NeXTStep developer, but having seen quite a bit of Cocoa code, my impression was that the compatibility hurdle for existing NeXTStep apps to becoming Cocoa apps was smaller than the one for Mac apps to becoming Carbon apps. Maybe developers with actual experience of having done such ports can comment?
When Apple talked about this strategy externally they spoke as though it was a new product. That's how they would have pitched it to Microsoft. They wanted everyone to think of it as a modernised Mac OS, not as the NeXT OS with a Classic Mac app emulation layer.
When Corel launched Corel Linux and bundled it with WordPerfect for Linux, Microsoft immediately bought 24 million shares of Corel and then Corel killed its Linux line of products.
I haven't heard of FreeOffice before, it looks like an interesting product. How do they support devlopment? It is closed source and doesn't appear to have a pricing model.
EDIT: Investigating a bit more there appears to be a paid version called SoftMaker Office, so I guess the free version acts as a funnel.
Seems kinda monopolistic... You're not supposed to make "agreements" with your competitors regarding what you will and won't compete on, right? That's what they always said in those corporate training videos, anyway. How was this legal?
I didn’t see anything in the email that suggested they were agreeing to partition the market. Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. Office. Who would? Office is awesome and it’s not Apple’s wheelhouse. ClarisWorks would need massive resources to compete. They were just being transparent that they weren’t in the business of serious Office-suite-like development. The rest of the points seemed like they were quid-pro-quo decisions that could potentially give customers a lot of value: QuickTime support on MS machines, Microsoft developing IE for Apple (and Office)... in this context, Apple is talking to Microsoft as a software package provider, Apple needs partnerships with these companies so their OS can get traction.
"Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. "
... That's what market partitioning _is_ though, right?
The two parties could independently come to the conclusion that Apple shouldn't compete with Office, but actually discussing it (and documenting the discussion!) is a flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws.
From the US Department of Justice Federal Trade Commission, An Antitrust Primer:
'Market division or allocation schemes
are agreements in which competitors
divide markets among themselves. In such
schemes, competing firms allocate
specific customers or types of customers,
products, or territories among themselves.'
'This primer briefly describes the most common antitrust violations and
outlines those conditions and events that indicate anticompetitive collusion.'
When I was querying Windstream and AT&T for internet service, one refused to build new service, even if we paid for the construction cost, because the other was already in the area.
But there's like "doesn't follow their mottos like 'don't be evil'" and then there's "flagrant violations of federal law". No matter how disingenuous the company is, there's got to be some consequences for the latter... Or you would at least expect them to try and be circumspect about it... This just says on paper "we agreed not to compete".
I got the same feel, but there were collaborating on somethings so those discussions were legit. But yeah, the minutes don’t read like two competing companies trying to steal each other business.
The fact that they were also collaborating legitimately in some parts of the deal doesn't justify the fact that they were also colluding blatantly in other parts of the deal.
But who is gonna fine Google or Microsoft? The US certainly benefits from these huge corporations, so there isn’t much incentive to hinder them with legislation and fines.
The problem is politicians have realised that these corporations, particularly the ones with significant social media presence, have enormous influence on political discourse, and thus the fate of politicians themselves. There is no way they are going to leave that to chance, or what to them probably seem like arbitrary platform policies and algorithms.
This is really cool. I like that the author clearly sees a lot of things from Apple's side, particularly with regard to ClarisWorks, and its market positioning vs Office and MS Works. It makes sense that a ClarisWorks user would be less likely to upgrade to MS Office anyway, vs an MS Works user, since you're now buying from a different vendor. But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway.
I don't remember how things went down in the browser wars. The author of the email seems to think Apple might not be willing to ship a non-OS X-native [Netscape] Navigator with new machines. I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.
Mac OS 8.x and 9.x shipped with both Netscape and IE4, 4.5, then 5, but IE was the default for the "Browse the Web" alias on the Desktop of new installations. Mac OS X 10.0 shipped with a very early Carbonized IE 5.0 that was unstable enough to earn a "prerelease" label on the startup screen. At the time I remember a lot of people did actually prefer to use the Classic OS version of IE 5.0 over the IE beta, at least until OmniWeb 4.0 came out around the same time as OS X 10.1 https://www.macworld.com/article/151892/omniweb.html
> I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.
From Wikipedia:
> As a result of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, it was the default browser on the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 until it was superseded by Apple's own Safari web browser in 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther".
I believe IE was bundled starting with OS 8 or 9. (definitely 9, but might have started with 8) The document explains a lot of the 'gushing' Steve Jobs was doing about IE around that time. Sounds like there was at least a handshake agreement to push IE hard on Apple's side which they definitely did. (i.e. this goes beyond the previously published agreements re: bundling it etc as Steve in particular was really doing a hard sell on IE to Mac users at the time at a couple of events)
The document is also interesting as it helps explain why ClarisWorks died on the vine the way it did. I remember filing a bug report on a years old problem around that time for a family member which Apple never did fix, or anything else, in ClarisWorks until they eventually abandoned it completely years later. Too bad, it was a nice user-friendly, entry-level productivity suite.
It's hard to search for this kind of thing to back me up, but I vaguely remember IE 5 on Mac not only being better than Netscape, but also being the best implementation of IE across all platforms. It had a ton of unique features and its rendering engine was superior to the Trident engine used by IE on Windows.
IE was great on OS 8 and OS 9. It’s shortcomings were becoming annoying and embarrassing by Jaguar (OS X 10.2), at which point Safari brought huge quality of life changes.
IE for Mac was better than IE for Windows at that time as well.
"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years.
This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."
The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old.
Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down.
See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable.
Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same.
Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.
All that is "known" is that he rubbed his opposite number at Microsoft the wrong way. It looks like what the author of the memo wanted was a commitment from Apple not to bundle ClarisWorks, and Bereskin was the one who said no (possibly even the one who had the JOB to say no, because Steve at the time needed to be the good cop).
Readit News
Poor old Gil...
Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own.
This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together).
The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back.
The reign of the previous CEO, Spindler (best known for launching the MacOS clone program) was even more disastrous https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-...
Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people.
Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple)
That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.
From the point of a developer, it could be considered a major departure in that instead of a complete rewrite, apps could also become native with more modest changes. But that does not mean that the Rhapsody path was abolished — far from it.
I had not paid attention to the cross platform promises of the Rhapsody strategy, so it's possible I was missing just how much of that was publicly promised and then abolished.
I was never a NeXTStep developer, but having seen quite a bit of Cocoa code, my impression was that the compatibility hurdle for existing NeXTStep apps to becoming Cocoa apps was smaller than the one for Mac apps to becoming Carbon apps. Maybe developers with actual experience of having done such ports can comment?
It was good while it lasted. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.p...
Today I use FreeOffice from SoftMaker. A really nice product.
EDIT: Investigating a bit more there appears to be a paid version called SoftMaker Office, so I guess the free version acts as a funnel.
... That's what market partitioning _is_ though, right?
The two parties could independently come to the conclusion that Apple shouldn't compete with Office, but actually discussing it (and documenting the discussion!) is a flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws.
'Market division or allocation schemes are agreements in which competitors divide markets among themselves. In such schemes, competing firms allocate specific customers or types of customers, products, or territories among themselves.'
'This primer briefly describes the most common antitrust violations and outlines those conditions and events that indicate anticompetitive collusion.'
They are only used for public image and putting the legal department on the safe side when things go wrong.
I don't remember how things went down in the browser wars. The author of the email seems to think Apple might not be willing to ship a non-OS X-native [Netscape] Navigator with new machines. I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.
Announcing the browser deal is the only time I heard an entire crowd boo Stebe https://youtu.be/WxOp5mBY9IY?t=154
It's also amusing how Steve was still obviously using Concurrence instead of a Mac to do these early iCEO-era presentations http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...
From Wikipedia:
> As a result of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, it was the default browser on the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 until it was superseded by Apple's own Safari web browser in 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
Keeping MS Works bad may have been deliberate on their part, to avoid cannibalizing Office sales.
The document is also interesting as it helps explain why ClarisWorks died on the vine the way it did. I remember filing a bug report on a years old problem around that time for a family member which Apple never did fix, or anything else, in ClarisWorks until they eventually abandoned it completely years later. Too bad, it was a nice user-friendly, entry-level productivity suite.
Tasman (layout engine) - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)
IE for Mac was better than IE for Windows at that time as well.
This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."
The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old.
[1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux
[2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...
See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable.
Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same.
Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.
> Ken Bereskin, Dir., Mac OS Technologies product marketing -- (a fool)
yikes.
Seems like a weird comment to make in the context of the rest of the e-mail.
Dead Comment