Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997 | Hacker News Reader

Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997

world.hey.com

43 pointstapanjk12 comments

Steve Jobs founded Apple, and was running a workstation computer company in the interim. He was in a way better position to be making sweeping changes. The 4,100 was a 30 percent workforce cut at the time. Apple had already cut 2800 jobs over the previous year so a total of about 44 percent out of their 15,800 high. They cut product lines, and decided to focus on new OS development. In 1998 they released iMac as one of the first new lines. Rhapsody didn't become a commercial OS until 2001 when they also broke into a new category with the iPod.

Elon's familiarity with Twitter is he uses it to market, manipulate markets, and shitpost. Everything else he's learned in the past year or so. He dumped 50% of staff after a week. He's saddled Twitter with even more debt, and the only revenue plan I've seen is Blue+Verified subscription with a price increase. Musk has complained about losing advertising revenue as well.

Both were/are being widely panned as being on the verge of failure. So maybe Twitter isn't doomed, but we're probably a year away from knowing.

Ok, I’m ion board with the idea that musk has to act authoritatively, fine. Maybe he had to lay off the staff and there was no way to “do it well”(disagree he couldn’t have made it at least someone more humane but I digress):

> But I am saying that the call to urgency, the focus on the customer, and the willingness to start making decisions knowing some of them will be wrong is uncannily similar.

Where is the focus on the customer???

AFAIK one of the first things Musk did was remove the "you need to sign up to see this"-screen that blocked reading tweets without an account. That's at least one thing.

Really? You mean this one?

> See what’s happening > Join Twitter to get the full story with all the live commentary.

I’m still seeing it.

Apples and oranges.

Not in any way that matters to the comparison.

Yeah. Apple sold hardware and software to its end users/customers. Twitter sold its end-users. Not really the same kind of market.

Tim Cook did an excellent job pivoting towards Twitter's business model, in fairness.

It’s harder to turn a company around that doesn’t actually make anything. And it’s communication mechanism isn’t controlled. Thus, keeping the mojo for twitters existence might be difficult

I like how you ended your comment with “in fairness” to make it seem fair to allege that Apple has “pivoted” their business model by placing some ads for apps in the App Store.

The core concept behind the analogy is not about the business model, the same way it's not important if Apple has an apple for a logo and Twitter a bird, or whether one is based in Cupertino and the other in San Francisco, or whether one is about hardware and the other about social media.

The intended takeway is that a flailing company that needs to turn itself around can and often will make big lay offs, and that those are not some unique signal of impeding doom (and TFA doesn't imply that it's some signal of guaranteed success either).

Twitter might very well crash, but not because of doing lay offs.

That's the message behind the analogy, and only things pertaining to that are relevant to refute the analogy.

It wasn't Jobs' call. He wasn't ceo yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com