Commodore without Mehdi Ali

[commodorejohn]

Ooh, eight-year thread-necromancy burn!

[commodorejohn]

Any particular reason why Ali was even hired?

In the 1980's there were loads of people with money and influence but no computer clue. Not even a small one.

*cough*johnsculley*cough*

[commodorejohn]

Here is why hohn Sculley ever got hired

Wow, that's...almost as illuminating as to why Apple went to **** in the '90s as the one where he was babbling about why using Motorola chips was a bad idea.

When I first saw the Macintosh — it was in the process of being created — it was basically just a series of components over what is called a bread board. It wasn’t anything

Because yeah, all that junky hardware stuff, who cares about that? It only makes the machine work, that's all.

Steve would say: “The organization can become bigger but not the Mac team. The Macintosh was set up as a product development division — and so Apple had a central sales organization, a central back office for all the administration, legal. It had a centralized manufacturing of that sort but the actual team that was building the product, and this is true for high tech products, it doesn’t take a lot of people to build a great product.

Except that according to Andy Hertzfeld's account, that's exactly what happened...oy.