Jason Snell, at Macworld:
My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to
going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had
returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as
CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of
products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think
Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to
trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill
Gates–Bill Gates, of all people!–to help him instill belief in the
world that Apple would find a way to survive.The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what
job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The
magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had
folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival,
Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up
the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of
our respective publishing companies.1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld
started.
