Apple in the press

Is Apple treated unfairly by the press?
Apple certainly at the moment is generating some negative press, and I would say the burden is on Apple to improve its own performance. But I think it would be better if the press dealt with the performance issues and a little bit less with the politics issues.

What is Apple, as it stands right now?
Apple is a platform company. It's a systems company, so it's a company that has hardware, software, and service. And it is a company that responds to their customers' needs relative to computing.

Your title now is executive vice president. Can you run through what you're in charge of?
Sure. I'm responsible for the group that does quality and assurance for the company, for the group that does research and interface design for Apple, and for the chief scientist area in AppleNet. As part of that, I'm responsible for assessing and working on the technical strategies across both our hardware and software.

Could you clarify "technical strategies?"
It means the technologies that we're going to work on, what are the OpenStep APIs, how we are doing with Java, what are the technologies that our hardware should be offering, how we relate to things like DVD. Also, what are the advancements that we need to make in multimedia, what are the advancements that we need to make in networking--those kinds of issues.

The press viewed this reorg in your case as a demotion.
There are various mixtures of accuracy in some of those reports. One said I gave up all the hardware, which is interesting because I never had the hardware!

How do you view this shift?
I think that the company is going through a dramatic restructure. There were some very difficult tasks for all of us. I think many of us have had our jobs changed one way or another because of the restructure, of flattening the company, and having the CEO more involved in the different aspects of the firm. And so it's important for all of us to work as a team, to continue to contribute. And I did have several discussions with Gil. I basically said that if there's still a role for me, I want to help out, that's why I came here.

People applauded you for your decision to stop Copland and to look for outside help.
Right. I got an award for stopping Copland!

Internally?
No, externally, at Macworld.

So you came in and you played the heavy.
I'd prefer another word besides "heavy," but go ahead.

It's not necessarily a bad thing. Do you like playing that role?
I don't think you enjoy making that decision; I think you face making that decision. When I came here, I thought my job was to bring that product to market faster, until I discovered some of the design flaws in the product itself. And then it wasn't true--it wasn't worth bringing it in faster because it had the wrong design point. I also felt that a year and a half with no technology in your operating system is a mistake. And Gil had already started to work on that. So hopefully we made some positive decisions about improving the Mac OS. We've already shipped the first release in January. I think the reaction of the team has been very positive that some of the technologies were getting out of our laboratory and into customers' hands in 1997, where that was not the plan when I came here.

In a systems company, which is essentially a single-product family, it is an awesome decision. But even the engineers working on Copland were beginning to get uncomfortable that what they were delivering was not compelling. If they looked to see whether it was competitive at the time frame they were going to ship it, I think there was general concern among our developers that it was not compelling. And so I think I got buy-in from the team: "Yes this was the right thing to do. Let's go back."

What's the hardest decision you've ever had to make in your 30 years in this business?
I think that stopping products is about the hardest. When you realize that quite a few good people have spent time working on a product and it's clearly not going to be successful. So stopping products was difficult.

Maybe I should have listed this first: Any time you have to deal with moving people out of a company, it becomes a very personal matter, both for you and for them. Sometimes it's hard to figure out who is hurt more in the process, but I would say moving people out of a company is probably the hardest.

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