Slices of Apple episode 5: Core Values
Slices of Apple is a documentary series exploring the success of Apple as a company. It seeks to educate business leaders, entrepreneurs and laypeople about how Apple keeps delivering consistently great products.
In this episode we're talking to Brian Wilson, CTO of Backblaze, one of the easiest backup solutions for your data.
Brian was at Apple in-between the first and second Steve Jobs eras, so you might be wondering what relevance his experience would have. In fact, not everything Apple did in the 1990's was bad. The company still strove to deliver quality products, and in Brian's case there were a number of "skunkwork" projects that kept people like him employed. Brian worked on the A/UX team at Apple. It was an effort to make a memory-protected OS for Apple servers, like UNIX or NeXTStep. Of course, in the end Apple scrapped A/UX and just bought NeXT for its OS.
Brian discusses some important concepts, like shipping great products even as a company is in decline, working on projects that ultimately pay off even when management questions their viability in the present and he tells us about the Mac emulator that was built on vacation but would become massively important when Apple moved to Intel chips.
