From this terrific Kottke post, a link to a Wired article from June, 1997, just before Apple CEO Gil Amelio was ousted and Steve Jobs became de facto CEO. Dark days, about to emerge into brilliance.
The list of 101 ways to save Apple is brilliant, funny, and sometimes strangely prescient. And absolutely worth the read. So, so good.
Boy – they really took #19 to heart…
I still have that issue, with the Apple logo wrapped in barbed wire on the cover, with the number one way listed at the bottom: pray.
boy, some terrible ideas here. Many seem preoccupied with adopting Windows NT. What an awful idea that would have been…
Kinda partial to #89
89. Create a chemical that cleans the Mac’s pale gray plastic
It’s funny because they actually did some of these. They went wireless on everything, they gave the Mac a distinct look (that everyone has copied) they gave Steve a ton of control.
A lot of these were dumb suggestions, and in retrospect some seem super laughable. Though 101 suggestions was always going to be laughable. I’m glad Steve knew what he was doing though.
35. Get MkLinux and BeOS to run on PowerBooks.
LOL I ran MkLinux on a PPC Power Mac 8100/110. It was a good experiment in preparation for OS X and very stable, but also as a usable general computing platform it was horrible as was pretty much all Linux back then.. and maybe even still today.
Apple always wants to own their infrastructure, even software built as an open source BSD variant that they created. Apple already had experience with A/UX so it was logical to go with BSD and NextStep.
Some ridiculous (in hindsight) but some, like the Apple Store, are brilliant!
But … This is the year of Linux on the desktop!
“Make Java work on your OS.”
“Partner with Oracle.”
How adorable.