Old-school Apple polisher
By Margie Wylie and Richard Hart
Staff Writers, CNET NEWS.COM

Dr. Gilbert Amelio is the kind of guy who reminds you of your father's older brother: stable, reasonable, seasoned, an old-school, no b.s. kind of guy.

He's also the kind of guy investors find very comforting. A 25-year management veteran charged with cleaning house at Apple, he has shown that he knows how to use a broom. Since his appointment to CEO eight months ago, Amelio has reorganized the once near-moribund Apple, trimming costs and tidying up product lines, enough so that the company expects a profit by the end of the second quarter of next year.

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What Amelio isn't, is everything that Apple has been: charismatic, wild, and artistic. His weekly coffee klatches with ordinary employees and a personal Web page that sports the contents of his refrigerator seem like calculated attempts to counter a cold fish image. While Amelio rescued chip-maker National Semiconductor from financial ruin, his critics say he cut out the heart of the corporation in the process, leaving it without the creative energy for future growth and change. Amelio says he's visionary enough to lead Apple to the Next Big Thing, but if that's so, it's not been apparent so far. The Apple CEO has appeared in public rarely, and then only to take cautious baby steps forward like introducing small product enhancements or bundling. Meanwhile, the industry, and Mac addicts everywhere are holding their breaths waiting for a bang among the whimpers emanating from Apple's big turnaround.

CNET Central host Richard Hart interviewed Amelio for NEWS.COM in Apple's Cupertino offices, where the CEO talked about Apple's troubles, Amelio's fixes, and the impact of the Internet.

NEWS.COM: How has the Internet affected Apple?
Amelio: In fairly profound ways, I think. We don't normally think about it, but if you and I are communicating over the Internet, I don't know if you are using a Macintosh or an IBM clone. [The Internet] signals the beginning of what will be many more such environments over time, where the lower part of the computer architecture is sort of invisible. We've decided that the operating systems wars of the '80s are behind us; the browser wars of the '90s are going on now between Netscape and Microsoft. What we want is to go on to the next thing beyond the browser wars, because after you finish browsing, it gets kind of boring.

When computers first came out, they were fun to play with, but it was really a negative productivity, because you really spent more time playing and less time getting things done. Then after about ten years, people really figured out how to get productive. What's happening with the Internet today is it has a negative productivity factor. You can browse, it's lots of fun, but in terms of getting your employees or you as an individual contributor more productive, it's not there. So what we've decided to do is move from browsing to knowledge management. We'd like to be the company that you say, "Well, you know Netscape and Microsoft did the browser thing, but Apple dealt with knowledge management."

Is that primarily a software or a hardware issue? It's mostly software, frankly. On the Internet, you have essentially an infinite source of information. That's both its strength as well as its problem. How do you get access to what you really need, quickly, easily, digestively? That's the problem we're taking on.

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