Widely reported around the place this morning is the fact that Steve Sakoman (part of my management chain when I was at Be) has now rejoined Apple. He’s not alone at Apple, there are at least three other former Be employees (or former close associates) who’ve been at Apple for between 1-2 years.
Of course now we’ll have lots more wild speculation about what Apple’s up to, mostly I predict it’ll be centered around handhelds since Steve most recently worked at Palm, and during his last tenure was part of the original Newton team. However we should not forget that Steve’s time at Palm was after the initial development of Palms current crop of handhelds and we’ve yet to see what product will be directly developed from the technology Be developed, furthermore Steve’s original vision of the Newton was not the Newton that eventually shipped. He also spent some time at Zenith, and SGI working on the N64 project.
It’ll be interesting to see if other former Be employees who moved to Palm now feel it’s not the place for them either and also leave (either to join Steve or simply to do something else new).
Posted under Work
This post was written by awk on March 5, 2003
My understanding is that once Steve’s golden handcuffs came off and he left PalmSource, Apple scrambled to hire him, with the job description of secondary importance. As far as I know, nothing handheld related — just good system software engineering management.