Joining Apple 40 Years Ago - Monday Note

My new boss, Tom Lawrence — nicknamed Lawrence of Europe for his grand generous gestures — liked my previous management work at HP and Data General and, to this day, I’m grateful for the freedom he gave me to build what was to become Apple France.My first visit to the mother ship in Cupertino was inspiring…and a culture shock. Things went well; Apple France became the company’s most prosperous business unit outside of the US.After a well-publicized management crisis that ended with Jobs leaving the company in May 1985, I was appointed VP of Product Development. Although the project never panned out, it wasn’t entirely a failure: The idea that the Mac could be vertically integrated all the way down to the silicon manifested itself in the 2008 acquisition of Palo Alto Semiconductor, which led to the development of a line of best-in-class iPhone processors, and now MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops running on Apple Silicon M1 SoCs. True to form (and as discussed in the past two Monday Notes, here and here), critics, whether independent or otherwise financially connected, claimed that M1-powered Macs aren’t all that revolutionary.And just before we go to press, two Microsoft items pop up.