[m_mueller]

I encourage anyone who wants to know how to manage software transitions to watch Apple's presentations about Next, Rhapsody and OSX between 1997 and 2000. This was IMO a textbook example of how to move over a whole ecosystem to a more modern underpinning, even under very difficult circumstances (where Apple's leadership first had to think about how they can survive another year even).

[liamzebedee]

Sounds intriguing, could you offer up a more detailed insight or a link? :-)

[m_mueller]

Basically, you get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations:

Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch basically everyone asleep at the wheel except Jobs, the man with a plan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrX047-v-s

WWDC Q&A - 'the art of saying no' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM

Jobs' hostile takeover in July by doing a (probably illegal?) stock dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer

Announcing a Deal with Microsoft as de facto CEO in August, booed by the crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOs6hnTI4lw

Internal meeting in September 1997 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMQhOm-Dqo

iMac introduction 1998 - Apple is back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwmF0OJ0vg

Macworld 1998 - Apple is essentially saved as a company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYiqVzPjAc

OSX Strategy reveal (if you only have time for one presentation, watch this one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5dWDg6f9eo

1999 - OSX Server launch https://youtu.be/NuCYHrSig94?t=48m40s

2000 - OSX launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII

[adrianN]

I find it interesting to hear how important developers were in the 1997 video. I feel like the first Intel Macs were indeed machines build for developers. But since, like, Snow Leopard, the developer experience has either stagnated or regressed. The command line tools are ancient, managing packages has been left for Homebrew and the like, etc. Macs more and more become pure Facebook consumption machines.

[m_mueller]

Basically they had to attack the problem from the chicken side. Nowadays there are so many eggs (users) that the chickens (devs) come free. At some point not catering to them will likely backfire however.

[mrpippy]

Note that in the 1997 video, everyone in that room was Mac application/hardware developers, and the Mac ecosystem at the time didn't intersect much with the Unix/Linux world at all.

It wasn't until OS X that Unix/Linux developers started coming to the Mac. (see this 2002 Mac magazine ad: "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null." http://xaharts.org/funny/Apple_Mac_OS_X_Unix_ad.html)