Comment by cmiles8
19 hours ago
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.
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.
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Their stock price was less than the estimated liquidation value of the company when I bought in ~2000 as dot-com was dot-bombing.
I bet if they had went the BeOS route instead, wouldn't be talking about Apple today.
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).
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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.
>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.
So that's Intel few years later too. Looks good on the book, looks bad on the bone
>> 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.
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It's funny how many people Jobs had to fire during this period, but is still seen as a good guy to many in the tech community.
Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
It’s not the same at all. The only equivalence is firing people.
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.
Guess I’ll have to buy the book
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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.
Another difference worth pointing, Jobs wasn't seen as a pedo or nazi. And we haven't seen him begging already convicted Epstein to go to his island to enjoy the wildest parties. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/28/elon-mu...
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).
If Apple went bankrupt, Everyone would be without a job.
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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.
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According to his Wikipedia, Craig Federighi left Apple in 1999 for Ariba, and then returned to Apple in 2009, after Snow Leopard.
We all know that Snow Leopard is considered by many to be the peak of OS X, and Craig returned afterwards. Coincidence?
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.