No Surprise [Editorial]

Apple announced yesterday that Steve Jobs was appointed Interim CEO by Apple's new Board of Directors until the end of the year or thereabouts. Here's Apple's press release. Hasn't he been exactly that for the past 2 months? So, what does this mean anyway? To some, I am sure, it means that the executive search firm is having a real difficult time finding someone who agrees with Steve's opinion on where to take Apple and can work "for" him. I am not so sure--let's have some fun reviewing relatively recent events with current hindsight. After all, without understanding history, it's prone to be repeated:

• Gil Amelio was hired to bring efficient management to Apple. He did but generally the Mac media (or almost any media) didn't like him--not wild and crazy or charming enough to run Apple. Remember the idiotic reviews of Amelio's public addresses? They wanted entertainment and excitement, not good management!
• Amelio brought in Jobs to fill that gap and bought NeXT to fill the OS gap thereby creating a huge loss and a club to bash Jobs with later. Amelio pursued a better Mac OS licensing deal but was continually beat up for persistant red Apple ink and for not being a wild and crazy guy.
• Amelio was canned. At first I thought it was because Apple was ready to take off and the Board wanted charisma and flamboyance in their CEO to hype the recovery--Amelio's subsequent comments seemed to confirm this--and the Board wanted Amelio as a cathartic scapegoat for Apple's economically icky immediate past. However, a couple of months later I am not so sure. There's been no perceptible takeoff. I think his canning could have been over something as mundane, but far more important, as the immediate economic cost of licensing the clones and the future expected returns, if any.
• Jobs refused the Apple CEO and Chairman jobs but did them anyway without official Board anointment. Instead of exuding charisma and flamboyance, Jobs implemented an even tougher economic policy than Amelio which resulted in the two major clonemakers giving up and reports of friction with several corporate partners. In return, current and future sources (significant ones ignoring the NeXT purchase cost and but not future projections of the Mac market share) of red ink are ended and a great engineering group and direct marketing outfit are brought aboard The Good Ship Apple. Most of the Mac media villified Jobs--they wanted Apple to be profitable but not THAT way! Some used the NeXT cost club on him to "prove" that the clones were insignificant economic gnats. Are we talking economics or religion? Methinks it has depended on the situation.
• Jobs may be trying to recapture the Apple Macintosh's raison d'etre, i.e. simple computing "...for the rest of us...," as a principal future focus (I'd love that.) plus concentrating more on making advances from positions of strength like education and creative computing. Jobs much as told us so but it's hard to tell for sure. I don't yet see any low end desktop consumer moves from Apple (UMAX's license?) or business enterprise moves (where are the 7300 Mach 5's and 750's?), so maybe so. Or maybe Jobs confidentially shared his consumer/business plans in his now famous telephone call to MacInTouch's Ric Ford to calm his ardor and we, the unwashed, have to wait to behold it. Like I've stated, I'm going with the facts at hand ... and Ric's turnabout!
• Jobs is officially appointed Interim CEO until the end of the year, or so. So what does this mean? There's still more economic dirty work ("dirty" because it appears to clash with religion) to be done. The recovery launch has been delayed until early 1998. Following history, that is when Apple will need a charismatic and flamboyant CEO to hype the recovery and another cathartic scapegoat for much of the media to chew on.

...well, at least it was interesting to ponder on an otherwise relatively slow Mac news day.