The Lauchlan angle

Apple chairman Gil Amelio was always going to use the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco to welcome a former executive back into the Macintosh fold. It was part of his bid to revive the company's moribund operating systems strategy.

We all thought it was going to be Jean Louis Gassee, Apple's former head of research and development and now chairman of the precocious - and apparently overpriced - Be Software. Who would have predicted that it would be Steve Jobs, the mercurial company founder whom Apple bosses decided they could do without some 11 years ago?

I have to make a confession - I'm a bit of a Jobs fan. I have been ever since I watched him ritually humiliate a senior Microsoft executive at an Object World conference a few years ago, all the time looking and sounding like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Jobs is the stuff of which Silicon Valley legends are made. Upstart programmer sets up radical computer company in his parents' garage, gets canned by 'the suits' he brings in to run it, fails to repeat his success with his next venture, spends 11 years telling everyone where they went wrong and ends up returning to his first-born as deus ex machina.

But much as I like him, I can't help wondering whether the enthusiasm which greeted his return is a tad premature. The fact that Jobs starts promoting rather than damning Apple in public is not going to solve the company's problems, like falling market share and faltering customer confidence.

People reminisce fondly about Apple's early rebellious culture, which was largely a reflection of Jobs' maverick personality. But I find it hard to see how that will co-exist with the stiff-collared management style of Amelio and his chief technology officer Ellen Hancock. Both are products of the old-style IBM corporate culture which Jobs used to mock so mercilessly. Has he changed so much in the last 11 years that this will not be a problem now?

It would help if there was more detail about the exact nature of Jobs' new role as part-time, special advisor to Amelio. But what does he actually do? He's not technology officer; he's not on the board; he's not head of the software division; he's not even full time. As chief speech maker and general whipper-up of enthusiasm, he'll be ideal, as long as he believes things are going the way he thinks they ought to.

The party line is that everyone's getting along fine and, for the time being, we all feel a lot happier about Apple's prospects, even if we can't rationalise why. But I noted one carefully worded comment from Amelio about the future of the Apple/NeXT merger. 'When you get to be a $10bn company, a certain amount of discipline is required,' he mused. Point taken, Steve?