July 6, 1997: On this day, after Apple’s major quarterly losses, board member Edgar S. Woolard, Jr. called CEO Gil Amelio and advised him to resign.
After taking over at Apple, Amelio took drastic action, cutting a third of his staff to cut costs, began licensing Mac OS to clone makers, and taking the critical step of buying NeXT, a company founded by Jobs after he left Apple, in December 1996 to gain the next generation operating system that eventually became OS X.
Steve Jobs has always denied involvement in Amelio’s resignation, however, thanks to her, he became the CEO of Apple for the first time to make a real turn!
Amelio and Jobs
Amelio came to Apple with a reputation for being a strong manager who could have pulled the company out of a bad period in the mid-1990s.
Since joining Apple in February 1996, he has faced five major challenges:
- lack of money;
- poor quality products;
- a narrow range of tasks on which research and development were focused;
- unsuccessful strategy of the Mac OS operating system;
- unhealthy corporate culture.
The disastrous quarter that occurred under his leadership at the end of June 1997 contributed to an overall deficit of $1.6 billion during Amelio’s tenure.
As a result, Apple’s board perceived Jobs as a more reliable candidate to run the company. Later, Jobs followed many of Amelio’s strategies—simplifying product lines, accumulating money, launching interesting products.
After leaving Cupertino with a seven-figure payout and 130,960 AAPL shares, Amelio became a venture capitalist and co-founder of Acquicor Technology with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former Apple CTO Ellen Hancock.
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