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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go.

Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

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I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo).

I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.

I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.

No, Copland could have shipped. It would have taken some actual management skill to get it there. Gil's contribution was to buy his way out of the problem.

And it wasn’t BeOS as people expected at the time.

I remember watching that video, the one where he gives Steve the 20th Anniversary Mac! It was shockingly bad, but hilarious in its own way.

Amelio was going to drive Apple straight off a cliff with his vision of opening up MacOS and basically destroying the brand. SGI did that and the company no longer exists now.

Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and all its products is beyond comparison to Android.

No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff.

It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix.

What they ended up getting was adult management, which was not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple needed.

How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly? The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.

The lack of protected memory was pretty insidious—essentially the kernel relied on application memory for its own internals in MacOS, and reentrancy was a problem for, oh, everything. Copland was to fix that first problem though (but only for new apps).

BeOS was the other option being considered. It was arguably more advanced and powerful than NeXTStep. But Jean Louis Gassée played hardball thinking he had Apple on the ropes, and they went with NeXT instead.

To be fair Gassée has said since they probably made the right choice.

The big advantage of NeXT was the development tooling, it was streets ahead of almost anything else. As a unix it was nothing to write home about, but as a desktop OS it didn't need to be. Just being a Unix at all with decent networking was a huge advantage compared to all the misconceived desktop OS projects at MS, IBM and Apple at the time.

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