alt Hacker NewsLet'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.
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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.
>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.
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.
> 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.