Jean-Louis Gassée Early Apple

A French engineer turned business executive, Jean-Louis Gassée joined Apple in 1981 to start its French division. Apple France was a great success, and Gassée became increasingly influential at Apple. He took over the Macintosh project after Steve Jobs left in 1985, not in small part due to pressure from Gassée himself. Gassée remained at Apple until 1990, and started a software company soon afterwards, Be Inc. When Apple had to acquire an OS in 1996, they first picked BeOS, before switching to Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP. When asked of his opinion of Gassée by Brent Schlender in 1997, Steve Jobs retorted: "Jean-Louis Gassée is evil. I don’t say that about many people, but he is evil." (Becoming Steve Jobs, 2015). "JLG" is now an acute industry observer (and very fun to read), he writes a column at Monday Note.