Steve Jobs's Miracle Year | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs's Miracle Year

blog.awais.io

22 pointsahussain8 comments

I am fascinated by the following info:

- 12–16 May 1997 - Jobs at WWDC pitches the “network computer” idea (at the San Jose Convention Center)

- June 1997 - Steve Jobs anonymously sells 1.5 million of his Apple shares for $22.5m.

    This causes the stock to tank to a 12-year low.
    This triggers the board to formally re-evaluate Gil Amelio’s position as CEO.

In that same WWDC video, Steve literally tells the audience:

"When you get up in the morning and you see the press is selling apple short, go ahead and buy some shares, y'know. That's what I would do. That's what I have done!"

https://youtu.be/_LsvdlaF5_k?t=553

But now we know, only a month later he dumped it, and presumably a man as cunning as Steve did it with the purpose of rattling the board a little bit, just to get them amenable to the idea of a change of leadership? Or maybe cashing out while he could in the scenario that apple couldn't be saved? in any case, he literally just told everyone to buy!

Yeah it's not clear to me how many of his shares he sold but it seemed to be a substantial chunk.

The board seemed to be pretty anti-Amelio already so it wasn't clear to my why Steve _needed_ to sell these shares.

Ironic now given Amelio’s decision was possibly the greatest single decision in the history of American business.

Which decision?

To buy NeXT and get replaced by Steve.

Hmm the Macintosh was a fairly successful computer particularly in graphic design where it was revolutionary. Much later it also grew into a phenomenally successful computer i.e. the “Mac” part of the word “MacBook” or “iMac”.

The NeXT boxes were very expensive commercial unix workstations which led to the birth of the web due to their development environment - no idea how the author can write “failed to release a single successful computer to market” in relation to NeXT.

Hmm, the Lisa only sold 10000 units.

I worked with a manager who had the company buy him one but I don't think he used it for very long. I don't know why not.

When Bob Pariseau was the head of software development at Amiga, he had a Lisa as his daily driver. I was especially impressed by the enormous 5MB ProFile hard drive it had on top. The drive sold for US$3,499 when it was introduced in 1981, which works out to more than US$12,000 in today's dollars.

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