“Sony’s new software czar, Tim Schaaff, knows a little something about handling companies in turmoil,” John Borland reports for CNET News. “In early 1997, Schaaff headed Apple Computer’s QuickTime engineering team. The computer maker was in internal upheaval, as the newly returned Steve Jobs cleaned house, jettisoning people and products he felt had contributed to the company’s fall from grace.”
“The QuickTime group, which had grown used to almost complete independence, appeared on the surface to be one of the worst suited to Jobs’ newly centralized regime. But former employees say that Shaaff’s ‘zen-like’ influence managed to mollify Jobs and keep the group intact to an extent rare across the company at large,” Borland reports. ‘The engineers who ran QuickTime were used to making their own decisions when Steve came in with his people,’ said former QuickTime evangelist Charles Wiltgen, now a Qualcomm product manager. ‘They were also very intelligent and very headstrong. Tim was one of the few people who could have made a love connection between those groups.’ Fast-forward to the present. The 46-year-old Schaaff has now become one of Sony’s brightest hopes, plucked from Apple late last year to fill the newly created role of senior vice president of software development, coordinating software efforts across the company’s sprawling corporate divisions for the first time.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “Madhatter” for the link.]
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am i first:)
last time this appeared I wanted to know if they would give him a Mac to work on or would he have to suffer some windows brand
No doubt this guy will get caught up in the politics of Sony and will not likely have much of an impact
Uh… don’t you think he would be stuck using a Viao?
For the last several years Sony seems to have become a big blind lumbering giant. It would be great if they got their groove back and focused on innovating rather than copying.
MacWrath: “Uh… don’t you think he would be stuck using a Viao?”
No, but I think that he may be forced to use a Vaio.
I wonder if he is going as a bridge, a beachhead, or a discarded amputation?
Apple lost one of the good ones.
QuickTme? I miss the i.