September 9, 1996

Inside the beleaguered Apple Computer Inc., a comment is often heard about the appointment earlier this year of Gilbert Amelio as chairman and president: “Thank God there’s finally some adult supervision around here.”

But seven months after Amelio’s rise to power at the troubled computer maker, it is clear that simply putting a grown-up in charge is not enough to provide the tectonic shift that Apple now needs.

Such a shift may first require Amelio and his team to acquire a sense of humor and a sense of irony, because the company’s deliverance could conceivably be propelled by Jean-Louis Gassee, who was Apple’s president for product development and research before falling from grace and leaving the company six years ago.

Gassee, forced out because of differences with John Sculley, then Apple’s chief executive, said he founded his current company, Be Inc., “the day after I left Apple” in 1990. Now, Silicon Valley is buzzing with rumors that Gassee may soon be reunited with his former employer — either as a business partner or through an outright acquisition of Be by Apple.

Gassee founded Be to develop an inexpensive, totally modern computer system, one that would use the most up-to-date software and hardware available, without concern for what the computer industry calls legacy systems.

Legacy systems are the Brownie cameras of the industry — the millions of older computer systems used in offices and homes today that employ outdated, yet still functional technology.

Though legacy systems like Windows software or Motorola 68000 chip Macintoshes give companies like Microsoft and Apple their market power, they have also become impediments to progress, because any new software must usually be compatible with older technology as well.

Gassee’s Be operating system, introduced as part of his Be Box computer last year, was not so constrained. To begin with, it was designed to work with the Power PC processor chip — itself a break from legacy systems because the chip, jointly developed by Apple, Motorola and IBM, was intended to cut into Intel’s dominance of PC hardware.

And the Be software was the first operating system to be designed from scratch with a technique called object-oriented programming, which allows key modules of the software code to be used and reused as the basic building blocks of the system.

One result of this approach is a much faster and more reliable computer. Not incidentally, such an object-based system is also a boon to software developers, who can use the basic modules to build application programs much more quickly.

The approach also results in smaller applications, which are faster and take up less space on a user’s hard disk than comparable Windows or Macintosh applications.

Other Be innovations allow a computer to do many tasks at once that require a lot of horsepower, such as video editing or displaying multiple windows of digital video.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft-based machines come close to Be’s capabilities. But Gassee concedes that Microsoft’s dominance of the office-productivity software market and conventional retail-sales channels means that “it is simply not possible to compete” with Microsoft in that area.

Yet there is growing demand for a new generation of high-performance software tools to ease the creation of digital media and World Wide Web sites. And the developers of these tools want to distribute their products over the Internet rather than through retail channels that favor large, existing software vendors like Microsoft.

If Be is to move beyond legacy systems, Gassee said, shifting its focus to this new generation will be the means. More than 700 companies have signed on to write Be software, he said, many of them small operations with innovative ideas for digital-media applications.

By January he expects to see at least 100 programs completed for the Be Box. Perhaps 10 of these will actually reach the market, he figures. And ideally, Gassee says, one of them will catch on as the “tractor app” — the application that pulls the Be platform into full public view.

A wonderful outcome in theory. And no doubt highly appealing to Amelio, who is trying to pull Apple out of its funk. But still, why would Apple risk alienating its remaining installed base — 10 million Macintosh computers, compared with more than 100 million Microsoft machines — with an unproved operating system with no applications?

The most practical reason is that Apple’s long-promised Copland operating system, now known as MacOS 8, won’t be ready until at least the middle of 1997, if ever. And even if Apple does manage to shove Copland out the door in 12 months, which most industry analysts doubt, it will still be dragging its legacy behind it.

Apple needs to move fast and decisively into the markets that Be is aiming for. Gassee could offer Apple a relatively risk-free bridge between its tarnished past and this potentially brighter future.

At the Macworld Expo in August, Gassee demonstrated the Be operating system running on a Power PC-based Macintosh clone from Power Computing — a machine that of course can also run conventional Macintosh software applications.
Apple’s engineers worked hard to help Gassee’s fledgling company move the Be software to the Power Macintosh. And many people, both in and outside Apple, say the company must scrap Copland and adopt the Be operating system as its new software platform.

Gassee declined to directly address the rumors about a Be acquisition or licensing deal. So did Heidi Roizen, vice president in charge of Apple’s relations with outside software developers.

“Apple will only be successful if we pick the winners,” Ms. Roizen said, “and I don’t have a religious attachment to our own internal products. That said, these are much more complex decisions than who’s got the coolest demo, or the issue of performance alone.”

Even those who compete with Apple say that some kind of deal between Be and Apple would be the right move.

“Be is an amazing product,” said Mike Rosenfelt, vice president for marketing of Power Computing, the fast-growing new Macintosh clone company. “And Apple needs to make a transition to a modern architecture. Everyone loses if they don’t do that quickly and relatively easily.”

Some recent news reports indicate that Amelio is considering ways that his company might work more closely with Microsoft. That may be fine for milking the last few years of profit out of both companies’ legacy systems. But Apple’s best hope for the future is to break from its past and renew itself as a technology innovator for the next generation of personal computers.

As Gassee is fond of saying, “Shift happens.” With Be, Apple may have the opportunity — for the first time since it announced the Macintosh in 1984 — to make shift happen. What is Amelio waiting for?

Denise Caruso