Steve Jobs and Sony

Nobuyuki Hayashi, from an interview with Kunitake Ando, former president of Sony:

Most of Sony’s executives spend their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, “Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS” recalls Ando; 2001 is the year, Mac OS X shipped and I am speculating this is Intel-version of Mac OS X, they hid for four and half years since then. […]

Ando liked Apple. He always felt Mac and VAIO were so close in philosophy. He especially admired the original iMac introduced in 1998. But the timing was bad for Sony, it is just about the time, Sony’s VAIO gained popularity and it is just about the time that VAIO team had finished optimizing both VAIO’s hardware and software specifically for Windows platform. Because of this, most of the VAIO team opposed asking ‘if it is worth it.’ And that was the end of story for this Mac-compatible VAIO.

Talk about ways the last decade could have been different.

(As Hayashi notes in a postscript, the Apple side of this story was told two years ago, by Kim Scheinberg in this amazing story on Quora.)

★ Wednesday, 5 February 2014