Krazy Ken: In 1997, Apple was nearing insolvency, and their share price was below 20 cents. It's crazy to think about now, their valuation is over $2 trillion. But at this time, their share prices were below 20 cents. They needed a huge rescue, not just any kind of rescue, a Steve Jobs rescue. Apple Keynote Chronicles is made possible thanks to our awesome friends at Linode. You can simplify your infrastructure and cut your cloud bills in half with Linode's Linux virtual machines. To keep it simple, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. Krazy Ken: Hey guys, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken, and welcome back to Apple Keynote Chronicles, our new podcast. Our mission here is to chronicle every Steve Jobs Apple keynote and some extra things along the way. Sometimes we call them Steve notes, just because we like portmanteaus. We like combining words together. But we're not just talking about the physical events that take place on stage, we're also going to dive into the backstories, the products, and our own personal experiences too. Today, as always, I'm joined by my helpless test subject I've dragged into this project, Brad. Hi, Brad. Brad: Hi, Ken. You know what, I might've been helplessly dragged into it, but happy to be here. Krazy Ken: Yeah. We left off in the last episode with Steve Jobs introducing the original Macintosh. Macs are pretty much everywhere. You see them all over the place, it's kind of hard to think there used to be a time where they weren't around. There was a first version. There was sale number one, and that was this. He revealed it at the Flint Center, January 24th, 1984, officially publicly, the first Mac. But it had a rocky start, and Steve soon after left Apple. He founded his, well, some people like to call his revenge company, NeXT. Krazy Ken: He took some people from Apple, founded this company NeXT. Apple was still going. They were still releasing stuff: the PowerBook, the Newton, but at the same time, Steve Jobs was working on this NeXT hardware, and more importantly, this NeXT software. Eventually, Apple needs help, so they acquire NeXT and Steve Jobs. They bring them back for over $400 million. Just a quick little catch-up of what's going on, this is the Mac world San Francisco 1997 presentation. It's at this big Marriott ballroom. There's probably a couple thousand people in there. Krazy Ken: I actually can't find the whole recording anywhere, but this is the part where you see Steve. The whole thing was actually incredibly long. I heard the whole thing was two and a half hours long. What we're seeing is the last 47 minutes. The first two hours, I don't know where that is. I could not find it anywhere. Every little news piece I read about it, every biography I read about it talks about how painfully long this presentation was. It wasn't just Steve Jobs. Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, just droned on and on and on [crosstalk 00:02:56]. Brad: Yeah, there's definitely some droning. There's not just drone. This is a very interesting watch, from fashion choices to just awkward. There are definitely moments of cringe in this- Krazy Ken: Massive cringe, to use a [crosstalk 00:03:13] word. Brad: ... that you would [crosstalk 00:03:13] just is something that is not found. The cringe is like that you see in an Apple event now is maybe like dad jokey, but this is cringing just like, oh my, we'll get into it. Krazy Ken: Totally. Brad: It is there. Krazy Ken: Again, I put the links to these events in the show notes. I encourage you to watch them later, because I want you to listen to me right now. But you can go ahead and click on those after the podcast. We're in this ballroom. Gil Amelio, again, Apple CEO at the time, he was not rehearsed at all. He had some sort of issue with his speech writer. He was on vacation while the speech was being worked on. There's some crazy stupid backstory here. Ultimately, he was not rehearsed, and you see that because he drones. He verbal pauses out the wazoo. If someone wants to make a super cut of him saying, "Uh, um, um, uh," it would be amazing. He's leaning on the podium. Brad: There's a lot of leaning going on. Gil is [crosstalk 00:04:04]. Krazy Ken: He's a leaner. Brad: I got to say, I didn't know anything about Gil before watching this. At the end of the day, I don't dislike Gil. Krazy Ken: Oh, sure. Brad: I like some of the... But it is... There's some awkward posturing. Krazy Ken: Yeah. I think Steve actually called him a bozo. He is bumbling at times, but he was still a CEO. He still made important decisions, so he wasn't a bad person Brad: There were elements of his intro doing some example before he brings Steve out where he's talking about how they got to where they are. He's basically doing a visual of a phrase we both love of, what is it? Building- Krazy Ken: Building the airplane while we're flying it. Brad: ... the airplane while we're flying it. Krazy Ken: It never ends up good for the passengers, people. Brad: Yeah, but I did think that the way that he presented that even of showing the goofy comic drawings of it was actually very Apple. Krazy Ken: Yeah. No, I liked that a lot. Yeah. Brad: This would be helpful to me and maybe any of the listeners who don't quite know. Could you tell me what the perception of Apple was going into this before they acquired NeXT? What happened with the company from the time Steve Jobs left to where they got to? How would people look at Apple? Krazy Ken: There were a lot of jokes going around too. I remember there was one particular news article that showed an Apple logo and it said pray across it, pray for them. I think it even had a crown of thorns on it, like Jesus's crucifixion or something. I don't remember the artwork, but they were not being perceived as a really strong brand anymore. Now, there were those people that were still faithful. I would say one of the most popular evangelists, to say good things about Apple, one of the most popular evangelists was Guy Kawasaki. He was in charge of quote-unquote saying the good news about Apple, about the good things that are going on. Krazy Ken: But there were a lot of people that were just saying, "Oh, Apple is going to die. Apple's not making any money." In real life, they were losing a lot of money. Again, their share price was under 20 cents. They were close to insolvency, probably about, I don't know, a fiscal quarter away from insolvency. Something that Steve talks about, I think in the third episode we're going to discuss, is PR. PR with Apple wasn't super good either. Not like they were doing anything scandalous. It's just, they were focusing so much on all the wrong things and Steve talks about there. Brad: What would it have been? What did an Apple computer in 1994, '95, what was that? Was it expensive and underpowered? Or where did it sit in the landscape of, why were they doing so poorly? Krazy Ken: That's a really good question. I think it has to do with what Steve Jobs talks about later in the presentation is how competition caught up, like Windows caught up. We were talking about how Windows didn't even exist in the last episode in 1984. Well, it caught up, and it got better because they knew how to innovate, and Apple was focusing on all the wrong things. Not everything wrong, but they weren't innovating as much as they used to, and other competitive options were out there that people could buy into, and Windows grew like crazy. Krazy Ken: That's why the main focus of this keynote is, well, there's a lot of philosophical and principle things that have to be done about Apple's mission and stuff like that. But from a technical perspective, the focus was, we need a new operating system, guys. What we're talking about right now is the genesis of the modern macOS, which was the genesis of every modern Mac that ran after that, every Intel Mac, which was the genesis of the iPhone, the iPad, the modern Apple TV. All that software was built on that software, which was built on what we're talking about today. It was a huge move. On a technical level, their software was falling behind, and they needed a new operating system to compete. Brad: And they have clunky graphs to show how they're going to build it. Krazy Ken: They have awesome squares, lots of squares guys. All right. Or boxes, they call them boxes actually. Back to the Gil Amelio thing, he was not well rehearsed. According to the Isaacson biography, there was a lot of chaos backstage.