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.

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.

Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so special about them? Has that functionality found its way into Excel at this point?

"Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated from each other."

This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does.

You have the underlying data structure that is independent of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by definition, and can store far more data than any spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined relationships between the different kinds of data.

You have the calculations, that are stored with the data structure, but are functionally independent from it. They can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just about any way you like. They can store their results, increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on demand.

You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is defined separately -- you can have as many different presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands.

And you have actual code that can run on the data and validate it, modify it, organize it etc.

I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM from eating spreadsheets' lunch.

Quantrix is still popular today for large financial modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to maintain that discipline.

IIRC Improv natively had what later became known as "pivot tables" in Excel. Improv didn't call it anything special, it was just an inherent part of using it.

Long time ago and my memory could be iffy.

It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today, where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron apps.

https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260

And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.

I read that one differently. His presentation style was not as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that situation. He knew that the current product line was very poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing, supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve them.

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an Electron app.

That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.

I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience.

Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app.

Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.

A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive).

And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.

They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time, CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing everyone's using.

They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).

Also, consumer hardware isn't the same as the API offered to developers, but an example where Apple dropped the thing everyone's using: The 2016 MacBook Pro forced a cutover to USB-C when it was at about 0% adoption, and it was a mess.

I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making.

Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works.

On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development.

For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.

The reality is that many devs don't regularly maintain their software.

Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. Apple even kneecapped their own OpenGL support trying to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).

If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft has shown that it's possible, and they did it with third-party hardware! If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs.

No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple.

(a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it.

(b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to survive.

Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its life with every hardware release until the iPod.

Thanks for the insight. As you can maybe tell, this was happening soon after I was born. I got into computers at an early age, and it was 90s hand-me-down stuff, so I got vague exposure to the old state of things.

My memory of OpenDoc (and Microsoft's OLE) is that it was an effort to containerize software 'applets' and make them interoperable. Office software was huge at the time, and most of the demos were like "look how easy it is to add a spreadsheet to your word processing document." Live updates were big--make a change in your table and viola. That kind of stuff, and drag and drop, were cutting edge.

Microsoft and Apple had an arms race going where if one invested heavily in a technology, the other would follow to achieve some kind of parity. Video, productivity software, etc. I remember Apple leading a lot of these, and Microsoft occasionally embarrassing itself, like Quicktime/Video for Windows scandal, or when Apple released At Ease and Microsoft followed with Bob.

The long-term vision for Apple with OpenDoc probably involved commoditizing productivity software somehow to undermine Microsoft's market position. But it was technology with no proven consumer demand. And immature. Every demo I tried felt clunky, halfassed and confusing. But it was probably an attempt at recreating something from PARC (didn't Lisa have an Alto inspired document-centric model? I'm out of my depth when it comes to Xerox)

Somewhere there is a video of me presenting at a WWDC keynote related to OpenDoc, and I was young and unprepared and spoke too fast. I’m glad that not everything is easily accessible online.

I think so, at ~50:22.

Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people have that many of us can’t grasp. This talk is a great victory for amazing product management.