AppleSoft executive steps down

By Clifford Colby
MacWeek

November 18, 1996

Another executive is leaving Apple: Ike Nassi, senior vice president for AppleSoft, turned in his resignation Friday.

"Ike is leaving to pursue opportunities outside Apple Computer," company spokesman Russell Brady said.

Nassi joined Apple in 1989 and most recently oversaw the company's OS and system software efforts.

"I've given Apple my best ideas on the operating system and system software," Nassi said. "It is up to the current management team going forward to decide what they want to do with those ideas."

As head of AppleSoft, Nassi took much of the heat for Apple's delays in delivering a modern Mac OS.

"Apple has to modernize the OS and retain compatibility, and everyone agrees with that," Nassi said. "The way we chose to do that was more difficult than we expected."

"The biggest problem with Copland [the code name of Mac OS 8] is we should have started it several years earlier," he said. "We really started putting Copland together two years ago, and some of the goals we set forth at the start of the project we were not achieving.

"The fundamental question was: Were we on the right track? And we weren't," Nassi said. "We weren't far from it - the microkernel was there, the [Mac] Toolbox was moving in a modern direction - but we didn't quite do what we wanted in compatibility."

Nassi said Apple has worked through the fall to address that shortcoming.

"Apple is changing the technical approach it is making to compatibility," he said.

Nassi said, however, that the glitches with Mac OS 8 do not overshadow Apple's recent system software successes.

"I'm pleased with the progress we've made with Open Transport, OpenDoc and System 7," Nassi said, pointing to Apple plans to ship Mac OS 7 reference releases every six months, with system updates in between.