Rock in a hard place
By Alex Lash
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

No personal questions.

That's the stipulation for an interview with Ellen Hancock. The Apple Computer executive vice president wants to talk business. She also wants to be a CEO, but not badly enough to walk away from Apple, at least not yet. But that's not the business at hand.The former IBM exec casts a wary eye on personal profiles and intimate questions, distractions that won't bring Apple back into the black.

Hancock joined the company last July with the mission of lining up the company's software strategy. She immediately served notice that a new sheriff was in town by canceling the Copland operating system project and looking for outside technology help. By some estimates, Copland had chewed up four years and half a billion dollars; the just-completed merger with Steve Jobs's Next Software will ultimately cost Apple well over $400 million. That's almost a billion dollars of decision-making in less than six months. That's serious business.

Hancock put plenty of experience behind those decisions. In her 28 years at IBM, she worked her way from programmer to lead the networking hardware, networking software, and software solutions divisions, ultimately becoming senior vice president in 1992. In the world she came from, experience plus loyalty equaled rewards. She had paid her dues.

When the top spot opened in 1993, however, Big Blue brought in Lou Gerstner from RJR Nabisco, not exactly a high-tech choice. Hancock resigned soon after. The same scenario played itself out early in 1996 after Gil Amelio left National Semiconductor. Thought to be Amelio's hand-picked successor, Hancock was again passed over and again left the company.

Now at Apple, she's part of one the highest profile high-tech stories of the year, a story that she feels is obscured by journalists' fixation on personality and in-house politics. She's also immersed in an environment that flies in the face of her values. "The Silicon Valley model," as Hancock calls it, is one where job-jumping is encouraged and where brash young CEOs are the flavor of the day.

By most accounts, the new Apple OS strategy is a smart, judicious blueprint, and the cross-platform Next technology at the heart of the next-generation Rhapsody operating system gives Apple intriguing opportunities to sell its software on a variety of platforms besides its own. The Copland experience has developers and customers alike wary about timetables and delivery dates, but the OS team passed its first test in January by delivering on time a minor update of the current System 7 software.

Ironically, Hancock's move to bring in outside help in the form of Steve Jobs has brought the contrasts between the new Amelio-Hancock team and the old Apple guard into sharp focus. Under Jobs, the Apple of old was iconoclastic, if not downright anticorporate. Hancock strives to bring what she calls "professionalism" to the ranks. (Others have called it "adult supervision.") Hancock is waging a war against what she calls the entrenched "not-invented-here" snobbery that has made Apple turn up its collective nose at outside technologies. And the greatest irony of all? Jobs, initially brought back as a part-time consultant, has his Next people in charge of hardware and software.

The recent round of shakeups at Apple have knocked "chief technology officer" from Hancock's title. She still runs the technology office but is now simply "executive vice president," a move that some reports have labeled a demotion and sparked rumors late last week of her imminent departure, rumors Hancock and Apple decisively dismissed. Hancock explains the shift with careful words. Hardware, now under the auspices of Jon Rubinstein, was never Hancock's domain in the first place. Avie Tevanian, who ran Next's software efforts as chief engineer, was an obvious choice to take over the software development. Those two departments now report directly to CEO Amelio.

Both men also worked for Steve Jobs, which kickstarts whispers of a "palace coup." But this is not what Ellen Hancock wants to discuss. This is journalistic horsetrading.

She also does not want to discuss religion or family, although the photo in her office of her presenting the Pope with an IBM ThinkPad makes one wonder aloud if she'll give John Paul II a discount on a PowerBook. She laughs politely and looks anxious to get back to what matters. Back to work.

NEWS.COM discussed business, life at Apple, and a women's place in the corporate world with Hancock in Apple's Cupertino, California, offices.

NEWS.COM: You left IBM and National Semiconductor after being considered and not chosen for the top spot. Will you be a CEO one day?
Hancock: I would like to think so. It is certainly something I've aspired to. On the other hand I have to say that I certainly have done more than I ever expected. I don't wake up every morning worrying about becoming a CEO--if it happens, it happens; if it doesn't, I think I've still had a very nice career.

One Apple employee said that Apple executives have to realize that they are akin to movie stars. That's not something you feel comfortable with. How much have you had to compromise?
I'd say we've all compromised a little bit. It's not like we were unfamiliar with dealing with the press or unfamiliar with giving keynote speeches. Several of us have had years of doing that. I would say that most of us have tried to go along a little bit with the flow and spend more time externally. There are more interviews like this than perhaps other places. So I think we've compromised a little bit.

But we are also attempting to make this much more of a business and deal with it as a business. We are trying to establish more professional management here at Apple. I mean that in every sense: better information systems, better data, we need to make decisions with facts vs. pure instinct. There's a whole underlying nature here at Apple that some of us feel that we need to improve.

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