Jerry York and Apple
Jerome B. York became part of Apple’s board of directors in August of 1997 and remained in this role for almost thirteen years until his death, in March of 2010.
York’s addition to the board was briefly introduced at Macworld Boston ‘97 by Steve Jobs with the following words:
Jerry did a lot of the turnaround work at Chrysler and IBM and is extremely well-known and respected in the financial community for his work.
For the occasion there was a video put together with sound bytes from all of the new members, among which were also Gareth Chang from Hughes International, Bill Campbell from Intuit, Larry Ellison from Oracle and Ed Woolard from DuPont.
This is what Jerry York said about Apple and about the concepts of Reality, Experience, Focus and Passion:
- Companies have to look at everything they’re doing and determine [...] what are core componencies, what are the core parts of the business.
- At Chrysler we had to take nearly 4 billion dollars out of the cost (?) structure to get Chrysler fully competitive, particularly with the japanese.
- Apple has very strong positions in two market segments: first education and secondly creative content.
- Whenever you have a strong position in a market segment you can capitalize on that.
- And companies can spend billions of dollars to build their brand. Apple does not have to do that: it’s already been done.
There’s more to Apple than that
At the end of February Pete Warden tweeted about Apple letting go forty people from the Final Cut Pro teams in LA and Austin.
Although the news was actually followed by an encomiable plea to help some of those people find good jobs elsewhere, it was widely reported with the effect of putting Apple in a bad light and casting dark clouds on Final Cut Pro’s future.
Laying off so many people had to mean that the product wasn’t doing particulary well, right?
Well, not necessarily. AE Portal news remarked that the FC teams seemed to have been cut confidently before the NAB, which is a major Pro media event, and also reminded us that Adobe had laid off much more people: “about 600 workers in 2008 and another 680 in 2009 (about 9% of its workforce each time)”.
It’s also important to take into account how big the developer teams at Apple really are and then try to put the numbers in perspective. Some interesting hints come from Mike Evangelist who was a director of product marketing at Infinite Loop from April 2000 to July 2002.
In 2006, in a comment section of his blog, Evangelist answered that the Final Cut team “was above a hundred” when he was there and that he was wstrong>”sure it’s much larger now”. So, no need to fear.
Image from www.roughlydrafted.com
Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce
If you click on the About menu item under System 6, on the right you can see a list of names: Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce. These are the names of the developers of this version of the Finder, the interface of the Macintosh
At the time Apple still used to give credit to developers by allowing them to appear in the info boxes of the software they had created. Usually their names appeared in full, sometimes even with pictures, but here all we have are the first names. Let’s see who these four are.
The last two, are the easiest to guess: they are of course Steve Capps and Bruce Horn.
Horn is the creator of the original Finder, a task in which he had the crucial assistance of Capps, who later had a key role in the Newton.
Larry is Larry Kenyon, longtime Apple and Mac developer. Kenyon, among other things, worked on Multifinder, the version of the Finder that starting from System 5 allowed Macintosh users to keep open many applications and switch between them bringing their windows to the front.
John is John Meier, who also worked on the Newton project and would keep on being a developer of subsequent versions of the Finder, the only one of the four names to do so.
It’s just OS X
At the World Wide Developer Conference of 2008 Apple made a small but significant move in the naming of its operating systems, removing the “Mac” prefix from Mac OS X. In its promotional material at the annual developers’ gathering Apple referred to the iPhone’s OS as “OS X iPhone” and to Mac OS X 10.5 as “OS X Leopard”.
The change was pretty much evident if one took a look at pictures of WWDC banners from 2006 and 2007
and compared them to the new 2008 ones featuring both the Mac and iPhone operating systems
This was clearly done to unify the branding since the OS was now running on a wide gamut of devices that included not only desktops and portables but also mobiles and the Apple TV set-top.
The change was also evident in a press release in May referring to the Developers’ Conference.
Altough the title “Apple Executives to Showcase Mac OS X Leopard and OS X iPhone Development Platforms at WWDC 2008 Keynote” still featured a distinction in the following text one could read
This year’s WWDC will showcase two revolutionary development platforms, the ground-breaking innovations of OS X Leopard® and OS X iPhone™, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.
and also
WWDC 2008 will offer over 150 information-rich sessions and labs where Apple engineers will go in-depth on the innovative technologies that power OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard.
On the other hand the footer stating that:
Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications.
had been already Mac-less at least since the 7th July of 2004.
Braeburn Capital, Apple’s fruitful reserve
The braeburncapital.com url redirects to Apple’s main website, apple.com
How come?
Who is this Braeburn Capital and what relationship does it have with Apple?
Some of the answers come from a simple enquiry to the WhoIs database.
There we can see that the domain was registered in the October of 2005 and, more to the point, read that the “Registrant” is:
Apple Inc. 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA 95014 US
Also, under “Technical Contact” the address is:
c/o Apple Computer Treasury Braeburn Capital, Inc. 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA 95014 US
From this and a series of other searches it comes out that in the autumn of 2005 Apple created and incorporated a firm to manage its cash and short-term investments.
Between 2003 and 2005 Apple’s cash reserve almost doubled, growing from 4.6 to $8.7 billion, mostly thanks to the enormous success of the iPod. To manage these assets in the best possible way Braeburn Capital has been set up in Reno, Nevada.
Nevada was chosen because -unlike California- the state has no corporate income tax, no capital-gains tax, and the state doesn’t share information with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
And the name? This also looks to be a very conscious choice from Apple. Like the McIntosh, the Braeburn is a type of apple, known for a unique combination of sweet and tart flavour and its ability to store well.
Image taken from Wikipedia.